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First you need content to RSS, so start blogging. It does not have to be all time consuming to blog about your business and destination. Say you have a Bed & Breakfast. Launch your blog and anywhere from one to five times a week (as much as you can but at least once a week) post an entry on your blog. You can use platforms like Blogger or Wordpress that are very easy to use. Add pictures or videos if you want. What do you blog about? It does not have to be about your specific offering all the time. Be creative, perhaps a brief story about the goings on in your town or a comment on something you read in the paper related to your business. It does not always need to be a "selling" proposition. I always like to use Terri's Bay of Fundy's blog as a good example. Terri always has little bits of interesting or fun information. Visit her blog for ideas as to what to do with yours. Another blog that you may look at as an example is the Romany Rest B&B blog from PEI. Once you have a blog make sure to have RSS links. Visit Feedburner to learn about adding the RSS links to your blog.
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IMPORTANT: If you cannot maintain the blog with fresh content at least once a week or once every ten days, in my opinion, you should not have a blog. Once people find your blog, if they like it, they will return to it and/or subscribe via an RSS feed. If content is not fresh and current you will lose your potential customer because your blog will reflect on your offline business or attraction in some measure.
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DMO's in Canada are still behind in the area of Blogs and Web 2.0 initiatives. There may be many reasons for this, but it is better not to have blogs if the content is not looked after and the blog is not maintained. For example, Niagara Falls Tourism launched a great redesign of their site a few months ago that includes video and a blog. However as of this writing the last entry on that blog is from August 29, 2007! It would be better to take down the blog until they have someone adding content on a regular basis. Perhaps the DMO's should consider creating a new position, that of resident blogger, who could be in-house or off-site, full-time or part-time /freelance bloggers.
Even though most destination marketing organizations do not have blogs, there are two DMOs Canada that are doing a great job in the area of Web 2.0 such as blogs and podcasts. Hello BC has implemented a blog area where travellers themselves can blog. Tourism BC's Hello BC website makes sure that the blog has content continuously by also having members of their staff contribute to the blog. There may not necessarily be new content every day, but there is enough continuity that one may want to check it out every now and then. It of course allows people to subsribe to an RSS feed making it easier to know when new content has been added. Hello BC's blog is more of a compendium where many people may add an entry as a Traveller's tip as oppose to what you see in most blogs where the point of view is usually from one of a few persons, but it works (similar to posts or comments one might see on TripAdvisor).
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The other DMO making good use of Web 2.0 tools is Tourism Montreal with its Play-Montreal Podcasts blog to which one can subscribe via RSS. The podcasts are audio pieces that complement the written blog entries. A visitor may choose to read or listen or both. It's quite informative. My only comment is that the tone of the blog and the podcasts is a bit to serious (and institutional). But nonetheless, it is a great step by the folks of Tourism Montreal to get closer to potential visitors to that fabulous city.
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The next step in your Bloggin, RSS Feed, Web 2.0 marketing path would be to participate in social networks. But that's a topic for a future post. Stay tuned (subscribe to this blog's RSS feed to stay in touch).
Cheers, Jaime
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