It is the last day of 2011 and I want to add an exclamation point of gratitude on each of my blogs – most of which suffer from neglect from me. It was my friend and Maui blogger Liza Pierce’s idea: let’s all write a blog post for January 1st! So, I’ve set this to post just one minute in to the new year. Happy New Year!

I am starting on this blog, as this is the easy one! (I have at least three more I am aiming for.) This past year, I was hired by the Lānaʻi Visitors Bureau (LVB) to run a social media marketing campaign for them, based on a very original concept created in discussion with Mr. Keliʻi Brown, who is the PR director for the Maui Visitors Bureau (MVB). For those of you outside of Hawaiʻi, Maui Nui, as we call it, or Maui County, encompasses not just the island of Maui but also the islands of Lānaʻi and Molokai. So the MVB provides support to the LVB.

Lānaʻi is was the least known of the Hawaiian Islands. There are only three hotels! So we wanted a program that would shine the best light on this beautiful place, something that would go deep and not just be about “one more trip to Hawaii.”

First, though, watch the video! It is a quick one minute. Then keep reading for more on this program.

New Media Artist-in-Residence Program from Roxanne Darling on Vimeo.

You can read more about the setup of the New Media Artist-in-Residence program here, but in short, it involved the hand selection of seven well-known bloggers who each spent a week on Lānaʻi and who also agreed to collaborate in supporting the other team members throughout a six month period in 2011. Of course there is more to all this than meets the eye, but for now, in this post, I have two goals.

First I want to thank my clients at Maui Visitors Bureau and Lānaʻi Visitors Bureau for taking a chance with me on this innovative program! This is the second time I have worked for MVB and they are so willing to get out there and do what it takes to keep Maui Nui a top travel destination! Plus, they are willing to tolerate my at times demanding ways. Thank you so much, Terryl, Lynn, Keliʻi, Charity and all of the board members.

Second, I wanted to share the results – with you. Luckily, I had already prepared this video for our local Hawaii chapter of the Social Media Club’s year end party, which featured our social media accomplishments of 2011. The preso’s were played throughout the night on the big screen, so I made this without a sound track. I also want to thank my colleague and SMCHI president, Tara Coomans, who assisted me with the interpretation of the results and the ROI formulas.

We also received great coverage online. Be sure to read this summary over at Media Post and listen to my interview on the This Week in Travel.

Bottom line? Visitor spending was up nearly 28% on Lānaʻi, far more than on either Maui or Molokai.

Plus, I have been hired to run this program again for LVB in 2012! Lots more ideas are percolating of course, but for now, I share my gratitude for a wonderful year in 2011 – in so many respects, and am very excited about the big possibilities in 2012 – the year of the Dragon!

UPDATE: Please help me also thank the wonderful team of bloggers we had on this inaugural run! Visit their blogs and search for “lanai” to read all about their trips. Here they are, in order of their visit to Lānaʻi:
Shannon Hurst Lane of The Traveling Mamas
Chris Gray Faust of Chris Around the World
Matt Long of Landlopers
Gary Arndt of Everything Everywhere
Kara Williams of The Vacation Gals
Sheila Beal of Go Visit Hawaii
Melanie Waldman of Travels with Two

Aloha,

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We are graciously featured in several articles in today’s PBN as we call it locally. Social Media is really getting a lot of coverage these days and deservedly so. I want to thank them for all the interviews and quotes and I want to welcome YOU to our Bare Feet Blog! Lots of their content is for subscribers however you can get started with these:
Hiring Managers Buck Trends When it Comes to Klout, Pacific Business News, August 19, 2011
Businesses dive into social media then learn to swim, Pacific Business News, August 19, 2011
Yacht broker sails into social media waters, Pacific Business News, August 19, 2011

I’ve made a short video (less than 3 minutes), for you, to point out a few things not to be missed while you’re here and to give you as personal a welcome as possible. Please keep reading below the video for several links and shortcuts that I don’t think you’ll want to miss!

STEP ONE
Look around our site! There are over six years’ worth of howto articles, case studies, and testimonials for you to check out. Click the link to your right called “Explore Our Topics” to see the full list, or use the Search box, or click on any of the tag links in each article to find more of the same. You can also explore by year – just click on “Explore the Archives” to your right and see what we were doing back in 2005, 2006… Here are some of the hottest topics right now:
Social Media
Strategy
Howto

STEP TWO
Be sure to join our free email list here for KnowHow Cafe. The signup form is in the right sidebar of every page here on our website. You’ll be sent a link for a free eBook once you sign up; it is guaranteed to give you information you don’t have about classic social media case studies and the all-important tips for creating and managing your “profile” on various social networks. KnowHow Cafe is our educational division. We offer live classes in Honolulu and on Maui and will be launching our online learning community one of these days. Use coupon code “rox” if you like – but everyone gets the same free ebook! The codes simply help us find out how people learned about us.

STEP THREE
Please visit our Hawaii Chapter of the Social Media Club. SMC is a global nonprofit educational association dedicated to developing and sharing best practices in social media. Our Hawaii chapter started in 2008 (courtesy of yours truly) and we welcome you to attend our free events. The next one is in October. Be sure to join our free SMCHI email list to hear all about local events. While you are there, please meet the local Professional Members – they and their websites and Twitter links are all listed in the right column of the SMCHI website. Contact any of them for assistance in developing your social media skills and strategies!

Please do use the Share links immediately below and/or leave a comment about what topics you would like me to cover in our next series of KnowHow Cafe classes!

Aloha,

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Last week I collaborated with two of my Social Media Club colleagues, Philippe Tassin and Tara Coomans in a three-hour consultation with the very cool folks at Montgomery Motors. If you don’t know them, they are a sixty-plus year old, family-owned, and Hawaii-born and bred company that sells motorcycles and related cool gear.

There are a number of things about this meeting that really rocked the house:

• Ross and Ann and their marketing consultant Clint really know their brand, their customers, and their business and want to keep growing it stronger and larger. (Seriously, lots of small businesses can be too close to what it is they do well, and this makes it hard to work on marketingplans – social media or traditional.)


• I got to do this with two awesome colleagues! Who, on any other day, could be classified as competitors. Being able to work together though is a particularly strong feature of social media. We pros recognize that the space is huge, and no one person knows it all, much as we try.


• We worked in the truly functional and creative-juice-hub known as the ING DIrect Cafe in downtown Waikiki. Part of their business model is to share their space with outside groups, knowing that we will tweet and blog about them in a most flattering light. Please follow the local peeps @INGdirectHawaii on Twitter.


• The bonus gift for me was that I asked Ross and Ann at the very last minute , as we were all leaving, for a short video testimonial. They said yes! Then they rocked it as one take wonders. See for yourself below!

I shot and edited this video on my iPhone 4 using iMovie on my short flight home from HNL to OGG, aka Honolulu to Kahului, Maui.

Aloha,

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If you are in a hurry, watch the one-minute video!

If you have a minute or two, I’ll give you some more info. Shane and I are founding members of the Social Media Club, a nonprofit educational organization celebrating its fifth year in existence. It was started by Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells in San Francisco, with the motto of “If you get it, share it.”

Unlike so many other professional associations, that aim to keep much of their professional intelligence inside the circle of practitioners, SMC always envisioned a very open tent where everyone was welcome to come and share, learn, and improve on the practice of social media. To date, there are over 90 chapters worldwide, from Boston to Bahrain, from Honolulu to Utrecht. You will find tremendous diversity throughout our member ranks yet we all share a love of social media and its ability to help us communicate and create community unlike anything ever before.

The funny thing here is that I have been doing video for over 5 years at our Beachwalks.tv show, have taught countless seminars and conference presentations on how to use video, and yet! It has taken me until today to sit down and make a simple video for our local Hawaii chapter! I started the chapter back in 2008 at the time of Podcamp Hawaii in hopes that it would give us a connection to the larger world of social media peeps and to have a framework to grow awareness here at home. Indeed it has, as we are now one of the top 15 chapters in the world based on professional members. You can see all of our local members in the sidebar of the SMCHI website.

Tomorrow we have our quarterly event, with the topic “How To Buy Social Media Services.” I guess the time has come as we have nearly 100 people pre-registered! Note we have only used social media platforms to promote this event, as the local traditional business press won’t return our emails. It goes to show how we can become the media and support each other directly.

I always say, it is never too late to get started, and today, I am taking my own advice! And congratulating our official Social Media Club community of over 100,000 members worldwide! I hope you will join us soon and be sure to get on our email list now.

Aloha,

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I interviewed Charlene Kauhane (of Kauhane Inc.) and Keliʻi Brown of the Maui Visitors Bureau over at the Ulupalakua Ranch on Maui. I had been hired to create, staff, and execute a Social Media Campaign for the Bureau, all in the span of less than six weeks. There are many discussion points in here:

• How speed is affecting business and marketing
• The power of collaboration between new media and old media
• Using trust and gut instincts to choose the right partners
• Know how to choose the right mix of skills & reach for media team
• Giving your partners free reign to do what you hired them to do
• Social media has a lot of requirements behind the scene to be successful
• Add training for destination partners as part of the marketing plan

Download iPod Version | Duration: 6:55

Mahalo to our new media team:

Please stay tuned for a followup post where I will share some data with you and the four-pronged approach that helped make this campaign so successful!

Aloha,

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Here is the next installment in my web cam conversations with you. I am experimenting with the new uStream Producer “desktop application.” It allows me to record and live stream at the same time, while mixing in graphics, etc. You’ll see a small attempt at that at the end. Over time you will see many different forms and iterations of these web cam chats as I am using them to explore both my interactions with you, the visitor, but also the technology available to us. I am not seeing my voice in sync with my lips – do you see that glitch too?

More links and questions…
The big question for you: How much lead time does it take for you to be comfortable planning a business trip to Hawaii? Please leave me a comment. We’d love to host more conferences here and it’s vital we know what it takes on your side of the pond to get here!

Links Mentioned:
Aliza Sherman – “Social Media Talent Exchange” (I love that idea!)
Connie Reece
Hawai Convention Center
Kelly Mitchell
NextLevel Hawaii
Facebook Chat not so private – It’s ugly but these problems are not going away any time soon. (IMO)

Aloha,

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I am launching web cam conversations with you this week. It’s the one form of video I have not done very much though the idea of it appeals to me a lot.

It’s short, just under 6 minutes, and here’s what you’ll find inside:
Rox makes a confession
Shout out to NYTimes.com
Opinion: Pre-roll ads are rude
Edison Research on Podcast Ads
Next Level Hawaii Conference in April 2010
(Links after the jump!)

Rox makes a confession
I conduct a lot of trainings on how to use internet video fro business, and the one form I advocate but don’t use very often is the web cam reporting. So today I launch what I hope will be regular personal messages from me to you.

Shout out to NYTimes.com
They recently added a TimesCast video feature to the home page.

Opinion: Pre-roll ads are rude
Yes, people think they are effective because “they get viewed” but I don’t like being held hostage for what I really bothered to come to your page to see, and, I am betting that people are not really watching, even though their computer forces them to play it. I think advertisers would be better served to run ads at the end. At least for high value, internet savvy consumers like me.

Edison Research on Podcast Ads
One of these days I will get around to interviewing Tom Webster, the man behind this research. There are so many compelling things to discuss!

Next Level Hawaii Conference in April 2010
This is a social media conference coming up soon at the end of April, being organized by Kelly Mitchell, aka @HawaiiRealty on Twitter. It’s being held right here in Hawaii and I am speaking along with Chris Pirillo, Geoff Livingston, Micah Baldwin, Aaron Brazell, and Jesse Stay. It’s going to be intimate (one single track!), focused, and is being paired with extensive opportunities to network and have quality conversations with the speakers. I hope you’ll join us.

Aloha,

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I had an opportunity to speak with the “c”s at a leading Hawaii company today. That’s shorthand for the CEO, the CFO, the CTO, the CLO, etc. As is standard practice, I do not disclose our consulting clients unless the client wishes to do so. They shall remain anonymous for now.

I love doing this type of session – one and half hours of touring the social web and discussing the implications for marketing, customer service, new lines of business, technology, and of course the ever-present legal and HR concerns. Plus I enjoy working with smart people whose questions help me dig into my own background and experience.

I am the personality type that actually gets smarter and energized by interacting with others, so you can see why I am drawn to this type of work. In today’s case, the team member who has been implementing the social web assets was also present, adding very relevant information that I did not have regarding the company’s current status. The only thing I forgot was to take my easy button!

I like to share my presentations; today I created a small Quicktime movie that can be viewed on iPhones and video-enabled devices. I didn’t want to clog the client’s network with a large attachment so I chose to create this post and make the file available for download here, in case any of you readers find it useful. It includes a copy of Eric Qualman’s awesome YouTube video, the Social Media Revolution, which we used to open the meeting.

Download my presentation, Social Media: Hidden Pearls or Time Waster? as a Quicktime movie. (28 MB; slides without audio plus the embedded movie)

FYI the feedback was awesome. If your company or a company you know if would like to have the business message of social media delivered to your executives, please contact me. I have an ability to converse with strategic thinkers who may not be technical but who desire to be innovators in their organizations and industries.

Aloha,

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Here is a brief late night interview with Public Affairs Officer Jason Salata (who manages the @USS_Nimitz twitter account) talking about how the U.S. Navy has jumped into social media in the past several months. Shane and I filmed this while on board the USS Nimitz, over “Mid Rats” aka midnight rations. The scrambled egg sandwiches were ono-licious!

You can see more videos of our embark at BeachWalks.tv.
Read Melissa Chang’s 5 part series on the Honolulu Advertiser.
Check out our photos on Flickr.
You can download the movie here.

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LIVE today, May 19, 2009, at 1pm Hawaii time. That’s
4pm in California and 7pm in New York.

Leave a comment (on the right side of the video window) and they
might read your comments live during the show.

Rox’s appearance broke all previous viewership records! You can watch the archived episode here.

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