Is there an industry better suited for success in social media than the travel industry? Social sites are almost always geared toward, or naturally gravitate toward recommendations and referrals. The most popular form of social content is normally pictures and videos. What do you do when you go on vacation? You take pictures and videos and then post them to your social channels to share. It’s like one big “duh” isn’t it?

My friends Sheila Scarborough and Becky McCray are both expert-level social media and marketing thinkers who have a fantastic learning program for travel industry professionals around social media called Tourism Currents. The course has been implemented once already and then vetted and redone with travel industry professional’s feedback to make it even better.

They’ve opened enrollment again for the four pieces of their lessons, which include:

• Introduction Workshop: Social Media For Tourism
• Short Course 1: All The Basics
• Short Course 2: The Results Mulipliers
• Full Course: All-in-one price

You can take one or all of them and pricing ranges from $99 for the Introduction workshop to $490 for the full deal. And because Sheila and Becky are good people, they do offer a money back guarantee, but stipulate it’s not a “no questions asked” one. They’ll ask you tons of questions about why you want your money back, not to harass you, but to find out what they can do better. That’s the kind of peeps they are.

They’ve asked me to be an affiliate for their courses and I’m proud to do so. (All the links here are affiliate links. If you’d prefer I not receive a portion of your sign up fee for the point, click on this link to go straight there with no credit for me.) If you’re in the tourism or travel industries and you want to cut through the generalist information available out there to get to the core of what YOU do, go sign up now. It will be well worth your investment.

And as you may know, I’ve been working on a new online learning community around social media. It might sound like Tourism Currents is similar. While there certainly are some lessons you could learn there that I’ll also have at Exploring Social Media, the content is built around the travel industry, so it’s more relevant to that type of user. I’ll also be working with Sheila and Becky to share some content on both sides so our respective audiences can find more learning if they want it.

Do give Tourism Currents a look see. You’ll be glad you did.

You do not need coffee in the morning if you run into Candace Klein first. She's the force of energy behind Bad Girl Ventures a microfinance organization that is designed to literally invest in woman's dreams.

"Bad Girl Ventures believes that women should have the chance to build a business. Our role is to help women realize their dreams and build sustainability and growth into their own business models."

Candace just launched Bad Girl Ventures and is already getting national attention. She is in the running to get her own show on Oprah's OWN network. But Candace needs your help. I could give you ten reasons to vote for her**, but I'll let her video do the talking.

If you decide to vote for her? Pay it forward and share her story with someone else.

**Candace met two of her first Bad Girl Ventures applicants by attending a Cincinnati Social Media event. It’s #CincySM’s mission to help shine a light on the vibrant social media/business scene in Cincinnati. So I'm twice as excited for her success.

My friend Arik Hanson started compiling a reader’s choice awards for public relations blogs last year. Arik is a smart guy and a hell of a blogger in his own right and the program was both a kind way of elevating good PR bloggers in several different categories but also a smart way to drive traffic, interest and links for his own blog, which deserves to be nominated in a few of the categories, too.

The 2010 PR Reader’s Choice Awards voting is now open on Arik’s blog. If you’re a PR person who reads some blogs, go vote. You should also go subscribe to all the ones listed for the various awards. They’re good.

This year, the people who have participated in nominating candidates have chosen Social Media Explorer as a finalist for Public Relations Reader’s Choice Blog of the Year for 2010. I’m honored to be recognized, though I’ve always shrugged off awards for blogs. Blogging is not a competition. The winners are the readers who get to learn from smart people.

But I am appreciative that a few folks threw my name into the hat. The finalists for Blog of the Year include Todd Defren’s PR Squared (which won last year, I think); Danny Brown’s blog; my buddy Mark Schaeffer’s {grow} and Gini Dietrich’s F.A.D.S. (The Fight Against Distructive Spin) blog. I read each of them regularly and am friends with three of the authors, kindred spirits with the other.

The other categories, which include some awesome blogs, too, include best Up-And-Coming Blog, Most Educational Blog and Most Thought-Provoking. You can vote for the various categories on the PR Reader’s Choice Awards post on Arik’s blog.

Please vote for the most deserving candidate. Not me.

Using LinkedIn Answers is probably one of the most effective, yet under-used ways to build credibility and generate qualified leads using social media. I’m even guilty of focusing my efforts on other social networks, despite the fact that what I do, by definition, is B2B. I work with companies, not consumers. And LinkedIn is a more natural environment for B2B lead generation.

Why? LinkedIn is business in the front and back. No party here. Sorry, Billy Ray.

I recently sat down and created a simple mechanism to ensure building leads and credibility on LinkedIn was baked in to my daily routine. Since I start my day with my feed reader, I went to LinkedIn and subscribed to the RSS feeds of five or six categories of questions. When I start my day, I read content, share the good stuff and now take a moment to answer one or two questions on LinkedIn. It adds about five minutes to my morning routine.

There’s no rocket surgery here, kids. But I figured I’d share some visuals to help you figure it out if you need it. Follow these steps and get past the noise to start building a strong signal on a social network that can connect you with people in need of your services:

Step One

Find a category of LinkedIn Answers you have a degree of expertise in. A screen shot of the Answers page for Internet Marketing is below. At the bottom of the right column of the page you should see the orange RSS feed button. Click that to subscribe to the feed via email or  your favorite feed reader. Repeat the process for any number of other topics that make sense for your business.

Step Two

Now go to your feed reader and put all those new feeds into a folder. Mine is called LinkedIn Answers. It contains all five or six feeds and I check it now as part of my morning reading. As I browse through the various feeds, I find a question or two I have a reasonable opinion or perspective on, click through to the post on LinkedIn and offer my answer. (I guess that’s Step Three.)

Here’s the cool thing: I’ve been doing this for about a week now and already have one qualified lead from a person who reached out to me based on one of my answers. Your traction may vary, but offering up a smart opinion and being helpful will at least build your credibility on LinkedIn if not deliver potential customers right to you.

I’m sure there are folks with more LinkedIn-specific expertise out there who can give you more advice on other activities on LinkedIn to help. I’m also sure proactive follow-up with those answering the questions can lead to some potential business relationships, too. But for now, I’m happy to just participate and see what happens. For five minutes a day, it can’t hurt.

What do you think? Have you been interacting on LinkedIn for a while? Let us know how your experience has been. The comments are yours.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 5 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog with LinkedIn (johnchow.com)
• Developing Leads for Your Sales Pipeline (bettercloser.com)
• Use LinkedIn For Public Relations (ricksrss.com)
• How To Use LinkedIn For Marketing (ricksrss.com)
• 8 Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile (kylelacy.com)

Today I have learned a lesson about missed opportunity.  You see for years I have been telling friends and family members that I wanted to write a coffee table book about the wonderful oddities located in the immediate vicinity of the Monroe, Ohio exit on I-75.  I thought it would be fun to tell the stories of the people who live, work, and visit this very eclectic place in Southwestern Ohio.  After all, the exit was a tiny microcosm of Americana featuring the likes of a Hustler Store, Prisons,  a ranch with Bison, Horses, and Longhorns, Flea Markets, a Steel Mill, an Outlet Mall, a Rest Area, truck stops, White Castle, and best of all a 62 foot statue of Jesus in front of a massive church.

Without question the cover of the book would have featured none other than the famous statue known as Big Butter Jesus (also referred to as Touchdown Jesus.)  Sadly, my dream may have gone up in smoke last night, as Big Butter Jesus went up in flames after being struck by lightning.  No big statue = no book.

I must admit that I am a little saddened by the news of the statues demise, and not just because it puts my little project in jeopardy.  The statue, though strange, was something I grew to enjoy over time.  While it was not fine art, it was fun.  My kids have grown up using it as a reference point for how far we are from home.  It was also a great way to describe where I live to people from other parts of the country – “I’m just a little north of the Big Giant Jesus Statue on I-75.”  This often cued up an immediate recognition of where I was describing, and usually led to a fun discussion of the statue.  I suppose if the measure of art is it’s ability to start conversations, than this statue was about as good as art gets.

I offer my condolences to the congregation of the church who lost their beloved statue and to the people of Southwestern Ohio who have lost one of our most interesting and entertaining landmarks.  Meanwhile I pray for an eventual resurrection of both the statue as well as my fun little book project.  Amen!

One of the best “business” books I have read in recent months has to be Jason Fried’s Rework.   Founder of 37 Signals, Fried writes a book filled with straight-forward, practical advice for success in the business world.  While I highly suggest reading the full book, the below presentation gives a high level “cheat sheet” on the lessons from Rework.