Technology Tag Archive

Practical social media strategy for tourism based industries

A few days back I was asked by Bukidnon Provincial Tourism Office to talk on blogging and social media as an engagement tool for their provincial tourism office. Bukidnon provincial tourism office is composed of 20 strong municipal tourism offices each with their own set of staff. This office is also of staging the famous Kaamulan Festival, one of the truly ethic festivals I’ve seen in recent memory. If there’s a few take home points I want them to study and implement, these should it be.

“All right, stop, collaborate and listen!”- A Vanilla Ice-Ice Baby social media strategy.

Whatever you’re doing on social media now,

Stop:

Formulate a social media strategy

Whatever you campaign are- information drives, engagements, networking, promotions, feedbacks, the success of such activities depend heavily on a well planned social media strategy. This should be the first step. What constitute your social media strategy? The succeeding steps will tell you

Identify and roll out  measurable objectives

Are you going for an info drive? a promotional campaign? Tourism branding? Site feedback? Write it out clearly and make sure everybody in your team knows this by heart. Remember you can only measure what you’ve set out to do in the first place.

Identify your target audience

It’s pretty obvious who will be your target audience when you’re using social media as your channel of communication and feedback. While its true social media cut across age, gender, society or political boundaries, some are more accessible than others.  Digital natives are a lot easier to convince than technophobics.

Choose your social media channel and set up accordingly.

The social media channels is usually dependent on your objectives and target audience. Start with the 3 basic Social media accounts, Facebook, Twitter. Instagram then expand to other platforms once your are comfortable with it. I would also recommend a blog where to pour your content in. This should be your main platform where your audience will go to when they need more information on the campaigns you are staging.

Set up your metrics

If you are dipping yourself into social media engagements, you better be prepared to set up metrics for listening, monitoring and or measuring your campaigns.  These are all part of an efficient social media strategy. Would you monitor your brand? listen what your audience have to say about your campaigns?

Collaborate:

Publish and share useful content!

Whatever your social media platform is, content is king.  A well thought out and targeted content beats the crappy haphazardly posted content. Remember social media is about engagement not just promotion. The good thing about social media is that it can be your feedback channel too, and hence a very powerful tool to shape campaigns or revise a campaign plan.

Network with other like minded ambassadors

I cannot overemphasize collaboration and networking on social media. Aim for engagement. Brand your content, comment on various other platforms and introduce yourself if you are not yet known. There’s no shortcut to doing this.  Build the habit of engaging other like minded social media advocates whenever possible. It builds credibility and identity for your brand.
Measure using social media metrics

Listen:

While listening is part of the social media engagements metrics, it’s a good first step to amplifying social media strategy. Listening implies monitoring and monitoring means, your looking for telltale signals to improve your social media activities. It may be on feedbacks, what other people say about your campaigns, brands or site. When continuously done, it gives you an efficient and valuable tool to fine tune strategy, revise social media activities, or launch entirely a new one.

All this listening and monitoring is aimed at achieving and or sustaining engagement, the “holy grail” of social media activities. Wether it be brand loyalty, attention retention and so forth. Again the kind of listening and monitoring methods you should employ depends on your social media strategy’s objectives, the target audience or market, social media activities.  On facebook page for example, link likes, or posting comments mean more as a listening tool. On your blog a comment maybe a better way to monitor loyalty.

Measuring up success in social media is something a bit more of the end game. Knowing you’ve achieve (or not) something based on your predefined objectives is a bit new to social media activities but it definitely signifies a well thought out and efficient social media strategy!

van

(Vanilla Ice’s photo courtesy of AOLTV)

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Don’t you just love the tech start up scene?

What’s an orthopedic surgeon doing in a tech startup camp? Ask me.

I don’t know.

In fact, I found myself the odd man out in the hordes of hopeful youngster ready to change the world for the better. Anyhow, there are things I liked about tech community that draws me into a startup scene.  The craziest bunch of tech people have the fresh-iest ideas in my opinion.  The startup tech community is exactly made of such crazy people:

Open-ness

No matter how naive and crazy their ideas may sound, it is shared. Every person inside this room is crazy enough, bold enough to think they will change how we live our lives. In fact the craziest ideas are usually the one that flourishes under the hood. This environment of open-ness emboldens innovators to go beyond boring repetitions and hack useful ideas. Each seem to be excited to share and listen what others have in mind. Here, openness and sharing leapfrogs an idea from the incubators to the field.

Techies doing all the discussion under the watchful Steve Jobs...

Techies doing all the discussion under the watchful Steve Jobs…

Collaboration

If there’s a word to describe a tech startup community, it is collaboration. This is how brilliant ideas become useful tech. Of how a simple hack makes our boring lives exciting. One guy posted a problem, another piecemeal-ed it into workable algorithm, and another totally tosses an idea out into the open.

Craziness

If theres one way to measure how an idea could change our world, it is the degree of craziness that idea may sound. Tell a tech guy how crazy he is and he will get back to you with a crazy idea that works. Most of the guys here would love to tell mainstream guys (yup, that’s me), “You are crazy. How were you able to survive your life when you can simplify it with this, hack?” . Note the reversal of perspectives?

Amazement

Everyone hoots and wow with every idea presented. A candy bar moment every time. The sense of wonder and thirst for knowing is unlimited. “How’d you do that?” or “Let’s do something like..” is such a norm, I ran out of brain cells to store ideas.

Serendipity/Connectedness

“Oh you are working with this idea? I was kind of working too with part of the same idea!” Every person in the room is working with something that touches, connects or ends with an idea that someone else is working. The connectedness is infinite, and serendipity is just a natural consequence.

 

My last tech moment of ideas was a gazillion years ago when the norm was still tin can radios. Just joking. But I love this tech community. It’s out to change the world. Like or not or call me crazy. 🙂

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Solid state drive (SSD) upgrade for your unibody Macbook Pro

Next to a memory upgrade, an SSD drive is probably the next bang-for-the-buck upgrade you have to make on your hackintosh. I’ve upgraded my hackintoshes recently and frankly, I’ve never been as happy.

The 50% less boot up time and loading of apps is remarkable. I encountered a few hiccups during the upgrade but I manage to run the hackintosh after a few trials. Occasionally I get freeze ups and sudden reboots, but I pretty damn understand my hardware isn’t the best there is for a mac.  Still, the markedly reduced boot up time and noticeably faster loading of apps is fantastic.

A do it yourself  SSD upgrade for Macbooks, especially the retina ready later models, is not for the faint hearted. Generally, If you’re not ready to waste your Macbook, don’t do it. Have the professionals do it for you. Repairing Macbooks are a tad difficult, not to mention expensive. It does require some technical skills mind you.

It can be done though. It will present some unique challenges and it will require a ton of patience, luck and willingness to learn! I will share how I did my upgrades in my future posts!

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10 Things you should NOT DO when installing OSX Maverick on an Intel PC

Note: If you’re looking for a guide or how to install OSX on intel PC hardware, sorry you’re on the wrong page. The net is overflowing with information on this topic, there’s no point adding one more.

This post will lessen your sleepless nights over kernel panics and will make installing Maverick on your Intel PC a bit more enjoyable than frustrating.

You should NOT:

  1. Forget to check OSX hardware compatibility list (HCL). OSX is quite unforgiving with hardware – processor, motherboard, video cards, sound cards, WIFI cards and recently with bluetooth dongles. Sometimes, buying a “compatible” but a bit expensive peripheral pays off better than hacking kexts. Unless you’re into hacking kexts and not installing OSX primarily.
  2. Jump at an installation method just because it is popular. Unibeast-Multibeast installation method by Tony Mac is a lot easy and popular, it’s a shame though it didn’t work for my rig. I got the boot:0 error. Myhack method fixed that and a few more kinks (like trashing off some useless kexts off the vanilla maverick installation app).
  3. Cheap out on your USB installation drive. Choose a Hi speed 8G (or more) USB drive  to install OSX on your rig. Faster USB drive means faster installation and will save your hours off the waiting! The usual 15 minutes on a high speed quality USB is equivalent to an hour or more in a cheapo USB.
  4. Snub the Solid State Drive! Of all the investments you will make on your PC parts,SSD (as a primary OSX drive) will do wonders on your boot up time and app run time!
  5. Stick those WIFI cards, Bluetooth dongles and sound card into your rig’s slots just because it works flawlessly with windoze. Apple has this habit of nipping out hardware unceremoniously off its HCL . Read, read and read some more. If you still chose to put them inside your rig, make sure you have the right kexts (drivers) and the right method to install it.
  6. Complicate your installation by adding all those hard drives while installing a Maverick. Plug in your primary OSX drive only and install first on that drive. Add you’re other drives later. On the other hand, do not install OSX Maverick using a bluetooth keyboard, trackpad or mouse. If your bluetooth won’t work, I don’t know how will you can proceed with your OSX installation.
  7. Push your luck! find a compatible video card and don’t complain to apple your VC is not supported.
  8. Forgot the UEFI, or bios boot program settings. Set your IDE/drive state to “AHCI” or “enhanced” and OS to “plug and play”. If you have virtualization, turn it off!
  9. Shun off the boot flags or the boot commands. Some peripherals will work with addition of boot flags. If you’re stuck with kernel panics, the boot flags will help you troubleshoot and identify the culprit, which is usually an incompatible hardware.
  10. Forget installing your bootloader during Multibeast post installation. Sounds really crazy but yes I made this mistake many times before. The boot error on restart is just awful to say at least. So make sure you have a bootloader installed on your target disk!

I know this is neither exhaustive nor a finished list of don’ts. It will never be. However, taking these warnings saves you half of the installation frustrations than when you don’t heed it. Of course thats just approximate, but if you want to risk precious time, go ahead try your luck. 🙂

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