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Metz, The Social Concept

Destination Marketing Organizations Emerge Onto The Social WebYesterday

Even a lot of marketers outside of the travel industry think of drug companies or health insurance when they hear the phrase DMO. Don’t be confused: DMO is just an acronym for destination marketing organization, and in the last few months, they’ve been steadily emerging onto the social web, en masse. Maybe you’ve even been to a DMO’s website, without knowing it.

Mommy, What’s a DMO?

Most American cities with populations of greater than ten or twenty thousand people have some sort of DMO, in the form of either a Convention & Visitors Bureau or a Marketing & Tourism Organization. Some of the bigger DMO web properties include New York’s NYCGO , Chicago’s ChooseChicago and San Francisco’s, OnlyInSanFrancisco . [Disclosure: my client.]

As individual sites, most large DMOs would rank as Top 5000 Internet sites, but when you look at even the top five DMOs, combined, they collectively represent a Top 800 site, roughly the size of an Etsy , a McDonalds, a Mahalo or Pizza Hut.

No single one of these properties have begun to make huge strides on the social web yet, but many of the large

MeetingsFocus InterviewDecember 3

As I’ve been doing a lot more work in the travel space lately, I’ve been doing more interviews with cool travel publications like Meetings Focus , one of the bigger publications in the meetings and event-planning industry.

In this piece, Savvy Intelligence Gathering , I discuss how meeting planners can look beyond conventional travel sites to gather business intelligence. The article is the sidebar to a larger piece Mining Meetings Intelligence about meetings intelligence web sites (B2B social/vendor networks) created to facilitate the needs of meeting planners.

To get a weekly digest of travel and event-planning-related social web strategy topics, either subscribe to MetzMash’s travel feed or leave a comment below, and we’ll add you to the travel-only email list. It comes out a couple of times per month.

Freshbooks Newsletter Posts "Secret Sauce" eBookDecember 2

I just got a heads-up from the team at Freshbooks – they just posted a link to my book, There Is No Secret Sauce , in their newsletter, Freshbooks Supperclub.

To download a digital copy of the book, click here , or to order a half-off printed copy (under $11, post-paid), click here .

November 2008: The Month In Social Media [1]December 1

Writing Digest-style posts is pretty difficult and time-consuming, but I’ve got to say that the readers get what they want: these are the most popular posts on MetzMash, bar none.

No matter what I write, these posts always come out on top.

I don’t think it’s about the depth of the analysis, either. I think that my readers, busy marketing professionals, just want a quick snapshot of what has happened in the last few weeks, minus a lot of the B2B and enterprise focus that’s given by most of the top analysts in the space. And I’m not pooh-poohing the work of Owyang, Bernoff, Li or Frank. Their work is kick-ass, but my clients are chiefly sustainable consumer brands in the CPG and travel space, and they have different customers and different needs. Without further ado, here’s my quick-and-dirty breakdown of what’s gone down on the social web in November 2008.

Social Network Services

• Facebook-Twitter Deal Falls Through – Solid play-by-play on how the deal unwound and why.
• KenRadio

Facebook Connect Launch Continues: Policies & Predictions [2]November 29

After months of anticipation from the developer and social web community, Facebook Connect is slated to enter its heaviest launch phase in the next few weeks. This is the largest social graph integration ever launched, in terms of total users engaged.

The larger content properties that are participating include Digg, Netflix, and Citysearch, as well as applications and blog platforms like Six Apart and Xobni. (As a sidenote, this could be the move that brings Citysearch back to Yelp-like prominence). Current partners already on board include CBS’ The Insider# and and CNN’s The Forum.

Developers are very excited about the move for two BIG reasons:

• No more email verification Users no longer need to check their email to allow sites to get access to their Facebook profile, newsfeed or friends.
• No more complex registration or authentication Users don’t need to connect sites that they use frequently with Facebook; this all takes place on the back end.

The platf