Portland Spoke – The Official Blog of Travel Portland

Our friends at TriMet, the region’s transit provider, have launched a cool new website: On What Makes This Place Great, locals share their stories — and list some of their favorite restaurants, attractions and experiences, all of which are accessible by public transportation.

The site features features Portlanders like Emily (pictured), whose favorite neighborhood hangouts include Mississippi Studios, Uchu Sushi and Fried Chicken and Albina Press Coffee Shop.

Check out the stories — or submit your own.

For the last few months, we’ve been quietly busy at work on some major revisions to our primary website — www.travelportland.com. While our brand and design remain largely intact, the changes we’ve made are deeper and farther reaching than anything we’ve done in several years.

The focus for this work was three-fold:

• Improve site navigation and search. We implemented the recommendations of an extensive usability study to make it much easier for you, our users and customers, to find key information and content. As you will see when you visit the site, the main navigation, as well as sectional navigation throughout the site, has been revamped to really bring all the great content to the surface. Further, the site search has been significantly improved to bring you more relevant and deeper results (for example, partner business listings, PDF documents and more are now indexed and retrievable from the main search).
• Update all content. We didn’t just take the content we had and re-organize it to make it easier to find — we undertook a major effort to update all of our content to bring you the freshest information about our favorite city: Portland, Oregon.
• Implement new site management tools. While this is the least visible part of the undertaking, it will allow us to much more nimbly and continuously keep the site updated and to add more cool functionality to the site going forward.

As with any major site launch, there are still some corners to smooth out and some kinks to work on, but we hope you’ll take a moment to visit the site and let us know what you think. We’re pretty proud of the results of the effort, but in the end, we did this for you, our users. Stay tuned for more cool developments on www.travelportland.com now that we have the infrastructure in place to really push the envelope.

Online marketing guru Kent Lewis (right) discusses the finer points of Travel Portland's pay-per-click strategy with MTV reality-show personality Mike "The Situation." (No word yet if Kent will recommend that we start purchasing the following keywords: "gym," "tan" and "laundry.")

Just a few updates from some of Travel Portland’s partners in crime:

• On a recent trip to Miami, our pal Kent Lewis of Anvil Media — Travel Portland’s search-engine marketing firm — bumped into Mike “The Situation” from MTV’s Jersey Shore (see photo at right). A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in this case, a single one will suffice: yikes.
• Hats off to our friends at Sockeye Creative. An international panel of judges selected our Sockeye-designed Portland Perks logo for inclusion in the forthcoming sixth volume of LogoLounge.
• Speaking of Portland Perks: Sockeye has swept the cutting-room floor to compile a blooper reel for Cheryl VanClacken, the deals-loving, over-caffeinated character brought to exquisite life by Live Wire! Radio host Courtenay Hameister. We hope you’ll enjoy this fitting bookend to a  fun series.

Burnside Skatepark (photo courtesy of XLR8R)

The hipsters at XLR8R — an online magazine “Accelerating Music and Culture” — sure seem to love Portland. They’ve done individual profiles of Portland artists and musicians in the past, and now they’ve added Portland to the short list of cities they’ve produced guides for.

XLR8R’s City Guides are consumable in eleventeen (well, at least four) ways:

• On the main XLR8R website (Note: The online guide is not compatible with Internet Explorer — use Firefox or Safari.)
• As downloadable video podcasts (Note: There’s some strong language in the video City Guide to Portland.)
• As an iPhone app
• As an Android app

The video City Guide to Portland has a lot of focus on one of our favorite topics — the local food cart scene.

Check out the XLR8R City Guide if you are looking for an alternative take on Portland from what traditional travel writers offer up. Since one of my many disguises is “alternative scenester,” I think the rough-around-the-edges approach to a regular guide to our city is pretty cool.

Have you visited the official Portland fan page on Facebook? That’s where we share local tips and talk with 6,000 or so of our closest friends.

If you’re not yet among Portland’s fans, now is the perfect time to join the party. This month, we’re sharing more than great insider info about the city: We’re offering a $50 gift card for shopping — sans sales tax — at downtown Portland’s Pioneer Place. Just book your spring getaway (minimum two-night stay) by Feb. 21 for travel by April 30.

To get your gift card, plus complimentary overnight parking, continental breakfast for two and the discount-packed Portland Perks coupon book, visit the Portland fan page on Facebook.

While I usually post about my hobbies around Portland, my life, like many of yours, is increasingly steeped in all kinds of online interactions – particularly social media. Here’s an update on Travel Portland’s activities with this blog; our own social network, GoSeePortland.com; our presence on Twitter; and Travel Portland on Facebook.

The fact that you’re reading this means you’ve already discovered one social outgrowth of our main online presence. This blog gives us the opportunity to not only share the wealth of Portland experiences that we collectively experience both personally and in our work, but also to discuss Portland with you — we love your comments and encourage you to keep them coming! (more…)

A couple of weeks ago, a pretty astonishing testament to social media went down here in Portland.

There had been occasional Twitter posts about sightings of Dave Chappelle in town — jogging, at a coffee shop, etc. It’s not unusual to see celebrities here in Portland, or to read unconfirmed reports of such sightings on services like Facebook or Twitter.

Thousands of people gathering in response to a social media rumor

But this was different. On the afternoon of Tuesday, July 15, I saw a post using our Twisitor Center’s hashtag (#inpdx) that claimed Dave Chappelle was going to do an impromptu stand-up set at Pioneer Courthouse Square, fondly referred to as “Portland’s Living Room,” at midnight that day. Then I started to see more “tweets” about it, from people claiming they had it on absolute authority that it was true, and from would-be debunkers saying there was no way. Local blogs and websites started tracking and aggregating the rumor.

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Hello, and welcome to the Portland Spoke — the official blog of Travel Portland and its staff.

I’m Bryan White, the director of online strategy here at Travel Portland, and I am happy to welcome you to the newest addition to the growing spectrum of online content, applications and media we use to promote greater Portland as the premier destination for leisure and business travel.

On this blog, Travel Portland’s staff, and occasionally our partners, will bring you the best of experiences, travel tips, things to do and more in Portland and the surrounding region. We also hope to provide insight into our mission, what it is that we do and the myriad ways we strive to bring value to both visitors and the region itself. After the jump, I’ll briefly introduce the other places we exist online as well as upcoming items we’re working on. (more…)