NYC Baby!

My fabulous hubby and I got to spend 5 days in NYC last week thanks to my work (Spokane Regional CVB) sending me to the E-Tourism Summit and thanks to our friends and family who helped care for the twins.

It was our first trip to the Big Apple and we had an absolute BLAST!

If you'd like to read about our trip, check out the blog I posted about it on our Hutson Family blog.

Twitter Takes Me Places

It's official:  I'm heading to New York City to be a part of two social media panels at the E-Tourism Summit!  It's all thanks to the support I've received from the Spokane Regional CVB management team to make Twitter & Facebook work for our destination.

The Summit is October 13 & 14 at the Marriott New York Marquis right in the heart of Manhattan near Times Square.

I'm included in the list of speakers, complete with photo and speaker bio. Woo hoo! Fancy!

Chad and I have never been to NYC, so if everything works out as we hope it will he'll be coming with me.  He can investigate the city while I'm in session, then in the evenings we'll explore together.  And we're hoping to stay an extra day if we can make it work so we'll have a whole day together in the city.

Thank God for my parents' willingness to hang with the twins for 5 days & 4 nights. (Chad's parents will be out of town that week.)

We are so very excited! If you have any ideas as to where we should go/see/do/try, please let me know!

The Power of the Tweet!

So after years on MySpace and Facebook, I have a new love (read: addiction): TWITTER.

I thought the idea was ridiculous at first. Who in the hell would want to read my random thoughts in 140 characters or less? And if they did want to, did I really WANT them to? But then I heard some case studies from other MarCom peeps in Spokane and I thought it might be worth a second look. Organizations were using it successfully to build their brands. Maybe it would work for VisitSpokane.

I started with a personal account (@Bethany_Kate) and used it rarely, but then I got a wild hair to search for other CVBs. There were tons of them! They were using Twitter for contests, to promote events and local establishments, to draw people to their destination's websites. So I embarked on a Twitter journey with @VisitSpokane.

As I built our Twitter brand, I also started using my personal account more. I started following a bunch of different celebrities, including @DrDrew (Dr. Drew Pinskey of Loveline & VH1's Celebrity Rehab fame, who I happen to have a massive crush on) and @firstladyoflove (Dr. Drew's wife Susan Pinskey) who are both figure skating fans (their 16-year-old daughter is a skater) and avid Tweeters/bloggers.

Susan Pinskey tweeted a couple times about the fact that she was at Worlds in L.A. Just so happens that my boss and a co-worker were working the Spokane 2010 booth on thr concourse selling tickets and booking hotel rooms for the 2010 US Figure Skating Championships in Spokane. So using our @VisitSpokane account on Twitter, I invited Susan to visit the Spokane booth, which started a series of @replies (Twitter's version of publicly replying to people) between Susan and @VisitSpokane.

The result? Susan and Dr. Drew visited the Spokane booth on the last day of Worlds and spent some time talking with my boss and co-worker. Both Susan and Drew had been to Spokane before, for the 2007 US Figure Skating Championships and a speaking engagement at Gonzaga University respectively. Now we know they plan to come back in January 2010. And they want to be shown around town - I hope I get to be the one to give the tour!

Additionally, Susan started to follow @VisitSpokane. Since she @replied us and started to follow our account on Friday we've had about 30 new followers. It's now Sunday.

Ah yes, don't ever doubt the power of a single tweet. : )