Every year we go through the same thing – resolutions and the hope of a fresh start. It’s the same every year for some of us, am I right? This year, however, I started my quest for ULTIMATE ORGANIZATION (go back and re-read that with a sports announcer’s voice – it’s cool, trust me)

ULTIMATE ORGANIZATION

For me, it meant managing a growing business, opportunities, and new media in ways I hadn’t needed to before. It meant being on the road a little more, using my tools a little better and not letting the tools or tech take so much time that I wasn’t getting productive things done.

I started my quest by looking at the things that I do really well, and do right. Email. I’m an email genius. I purge. I delete. I save things for later and group them so I can reply. And then… I don’t reply and I end up with 100 emails that need attention – but there’s no junk in there! What? Wait. That doesn’t seem efficient now does it?

Resolution #1 – Reply and get it out of my box. Check my email 3 times a day.
I’ve turned off my email notification so I don’t get the sound or popup when email comes in. If someone needs me sooner than 3 hours then they can call or text. I will reply to every mail and only “touch” things once.

Resolution #2 – Check my Blackberry Email, but don’t delete.
I get almost 200 emails per day, and all of them come into my Blackberry, so I changed the setting on my Blackberry to purge them every 14 days – that’s the minimum number of days. I now have to control my urge to keep that box clean; I only read the messages and reply if I need to. So far, it’s working well and saving me at least 30 minutes a day.

Resolution #3 – Sync or Swim
I decided a long time ago to use Gmail for my email management. I have more than 30 email addreses, but Gmail keep them all straight and no one needs to know I’m using Gmail – I reply with whatever business address (chelle@travelwebmarketing.com, for example) that they were sent to.  All of them are in one place for archiving, searching and management – but they also go to my Blackberry seamlessly, with no overlap. I also sync my Google Calendar, Contacts and Tasks (more on those later this week).

Resolution #4 – Keep Track of Social Media
I’ve got an entire post dedicated to HootSuite coming later this week, but with this week’s updates – being able to post to a Facebook Fan Page and connections with more than one account – it’s changed my life. I can keep an eye on things in a non-intrusive way with very little time loss.

So – touching things less,  using simplified technology and ignoring most of the noise. I think that’s a good start. What about you? What tips do you have to share this year?

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For years I’ve been hollering at conferences, training sessions, teleclasses and even once in a movie theater at a CEO to never, never, never, ever, never use webmail programs like Hotmail or AOL for your business address. Domain names are cheap and hosting is cheap and it’s…

YOUR BRAND

… and you don’t want to build up someone else’s brand. No one is going to remember chellesawesometravel@yahoo.com when they want to book with you. You aren’t ‘in all your clients’ contact lists” and shouldn’t change it.  Trust me on this,  it looks like you share an email address with a 15 year old kid on MySpace 22 hours a day.

So, I’ll say this ONE LAST TIME.

Get a real email address that matches your domain name and use it. You’re a professional. This is a Big Deal.

Are we clear? Now. Once you’ve done that, go get a Gmail account. Yes, I’m serious.

Gmail and your own email address with your own domain name play together nicely. More than nicely, in fact. It’s a marriage made in tech-heaven.

Here are ten reasons why:

1. Web Based Goodness – meaning you’re not tied to one computer. You can get your mail on your desktop, laptop, iphone, ipod touch, Windows Mobile phone – or any other internet enabled device. There’s even special small applications for on-the-go users.
   
2. Offline Access – If you’re not connected to the Internet, the “offline” capability allows you to still work on your email and it will sync the next time you are connected.
3. Labels – Gmail calls them labels, but really, they’re tags. Tags are “IT” – they allow you to simply and easily add keywords to describe what something is about, and then archive it for retrieval later.
4. Powerful search capabilities – no more scrolling through folders. Even if you don’t label something (which you should) the search capabilities are what you’d expect from Google.
5. The Archive – This took me a little while to get used to when converting from Outlook. Instead of putting an email into a folder (which is, in essence a single label, right?) – I can add multiple labels and then archive an email. I don’t have to remember the one place where I put an email and struggle to remember what the heck I was thinking that day (taxes or receipts?) – It’s labeled with a many labels as I think are appropriate and a quick click on any one of them gets me all the emails tagged with that label. I can then refine the search further.
6. Same features I have come to know and love – Vacation Auto Responders, Signatures, Attachments, Rules (called filters)… PLUS features on steroids: Youtube, Flickr, Create Documents, Text Messaging, Maps and Calendars, to name a few.  All integrated and at my fingertips. And, there are more every day!
7. STORAGE – Any web hosting company will tell you that storage for email can get out of control. Some companies leave a feature turned on in Outlook to leave a copy of every message on the server in case… just in case… in case of what? I don’t know. It adds up and crashes the whole company’s email account when the allocation is gone. Gmail solves that. Most hosting company defaults allow 200MB of disk space per mailbox.  Gmail currently allows a whopping 7356 MB. Even after three years of heavy usage I still have only 22% of that used.

8. Account Management – I said before: Gmail and your own email address play nicely together. With Gmail account management NO ONE need ever know that you even have a Gmail address. You’re not changing your address. Let me repeat that – you’re not changing your address to Gmail. Simply configure Gmail to pull the mail from your web hosts server. Here’s the cool part: when you reply to the mail it will show the account it was sent to – Gmail remains transparent! You can have 5 POP accounts (pulling from a server) or you can have unlimited accounts if the mail is forwarded from your host and not stored there until Gmail picks it up. Either way is fine, but I set it up so that the mail would stay on my server and I could use my web host’s webmail program in case Gmail went down. Which, it hasn’t in 3 years.

9. SPAM Filtering – Despite the never-ending battle, Spam continues. Fortunately, I’m not fighting the battle – I’m back sipping mai-tai’s while Gmail does all the heavy lifting. Occasionally – maybe 10 times in 3 years – it tags something as Spam and it’s not, but I found it in the Spam folder and pushed it back to my Inbox. Only 4 times has something slipped though that wasn’t nice. I got to click the “SPAM” button to report it and move on. That’s the beauty of a shared web-program. Speed. If 5,000 people click the Spam button (I’m making that number up, of course) then it’s got to be Spam and it’s stopped for everyone else. No waiting for a patch or download. Oh, and here’s a bonus: I stopped spending money on virus programs years ago. Since they don’t come through Gmail, and I don’t click on them, I don’t get them.
   
   
10. It plays nicely with other things, too. I love a couple of Customer Relationship Managment programs like Highrise and BatchBlue. Gmail’s advanced website programming languages are common to other programs, so it syncs up nicely. If I change a contact phone number in Gmail, it’s changed in my CRM – and – my Mobile Phone. No, I did not need a Master’s Degree from MIT to set that up.

Gmail is by definition a web-based email application. By design, however, it’s a business relationship manager. Every smart business consultant will tell you that keeping all your information simple and accessible is one key to success. Gmail gives you an entire set of keys.

Here’s an overview of the plugin from the author:

Twitter Tools integrates with Twitter by giving you the following functionality:

* Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes)

* Create a blog post from each of your tweets

* Create a daily or weekly digest post of your tweets

* Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post

* Post a tweet from your sidebar

* Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens

* Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

The integration is fairly simple and straightforward. If you need assistance you can contact WP-TravelDesign for assistance.

After installation If you’re comfortable with making a quick replacement of code, a couple of hacks that improve the quality of your posts==>tweets.

First, set your twitter tools settings to automatically create a tweet from a blog post. Then edit the /wp-content/plugins/twitter-toools.php file starting at line 171 as follows:

Change
$this->tweet_prefix = ‘New Blog Post’;

to

$this->tweet_prefix = ‘CruiseDeal’;

Or something else that more accurately reflects an intro.

and change

$this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.’: %s %s’;

to

$this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.’: %s %s #cruise #travel’;

to include the “Hash Tags” that can be searched in Twitter. Upload and test.

Here’s the complete list of WordPress plugins recommended for every travel website with links to download.

My answer is, “It depends.”

Fuzzy? You bet. Sorry about that. The bottom line is that it depends on what you’re marketing. Recently I launched a campaign for a travel agency client wanting to increase cruise bookings.

Starting with a gemtravelsite base website, built on the Wordpress 2.6 platform, we determined how to integrate the content they received from their consortium for cruises.

The biggest issue all agencies & home based agents face is making sure they aren’t getting buried in search engine ranking by using canned content – it’s duplicate content as far as the search engines are concerned, period.

Next, we built pages for the cruise lines they wanted to sell, featuring the fact that they’re a specialist for a specific cruise line – but ALSO adding content for the features of the cruise line that consumers are probably searching for.  Think: dining options, wedding options & kids programs.

Building the pages allowed us to utilize the built-in marketing features of a GemTravelSite, including tags, categories and search engine friendly pages.

Within a couple weeks, not only were they ranked as the #1 travel agency for the cruise line, the leads were coming in, without having spent a dime on Pay-Per-Click, which would have certainly generated immediate requests, but also immediate spending.

The most popular service is Twitter, which has come under fire in the past for instability and network issues. Since about early August 2008 it seems to have mostly ironed their issues out.

Twitter accepts messages, or “tweets” via the web page, Text (SMS) message and also through a variety of third-party services and downloads such as Twhirl.

Some of the larger news organizations are using twitter, including the New York Times, CNN, and NPR and several businesses. There’s even a famous story of a disgruntled client of Comcast Cable being contacted after tweeting about her dissatisfaction.

Personally, I think this is a huge opportunity for the travel industry. Imagine posting a special with 1500 or more followers. It’s free, easy – by design – to use, and has huge potential.

The methods are varied. MySpace is popular, but I find it fairly useless for business. Personally, I prefer Facebook. I also use Twitter, which is a microblogging program that’s gaining every day in use and popularity. Getting started is the hardest part, but well worth it.

The main thing is this: the real purpose of the Internet was to connect. Websites were fairly impersonal and one-sided. The new era is more of a conversation. In that spirit, I ask you… what programs do you use and how?