I love it with a tourism board or small travel outfit comes out with a great online marketing ideas.  Here’s one I’d like to highlight:  California Fives

The premise is simple – users submit “top five” lists of various categorised topics about pretty much anything California-related.  So think “Top 5 Beaches in Carmel”  or “5 Favourite Food Restaurants in San Diego” type thing.

What’s So Good about It?

Simple.  It took two sentences above to explain it.  But if you clicked through on the link to check it out, likely it didn’t take you very long to get the concept.  You’re no doubt aware of all the “noise” in the air.  This keeps good ideas from spreading – it’s like friction.  Complicated things carry more fiction.  Simple idea spread more easily.  So any good online marketing strategy should have simple ideas for people to interact with.

Catchy.  It has a great name, some great photos, and it’s a concept that is pretty easy to grasp.  It’s conversation worthy: “I was just reading a top five list about that restaurant over there – shall we check it out?”

Search Engine Friendly.  I would say it’s hard to come up with a marketing idea that by nature is search engine friendly, but this one seems to do it.  Phrases like “top ten things to do in xxx” do really well in search.  This site is peppered with great search-friendly phrases.  I don’t know if it was by intention or just an added benefit from a great branding job, but nonetheless it works.

A Word about User Generated Content

I just want to briefly touch on this subject as a sticking point for many businesses.  This marketing idea is based on user generated content (UGC), a controversial topic in many circles.  This kind of content is great because it helps you come up with ideas you might not have on your own, and it shifts the work off of you.

However, it does add on the the need to moderate.  You can’t let folk signup, submit, and hope it’s ok.  That is a road to ruin you don’t want to go down.  So monitor any content that users submit – for example, when I checked the site the first time, the first list I saw was called “Must Do” and it was a list of five hotels.  I think – it was only their names.  No websites or details.

Sure, there’s a link on the page to “Report This List” but most folk will just hit the big X button on their browser window. Nobody has the time to help out a lazy company clean up their content.  Hopefully this was just a list that slipped through the cracks, but it’s a word of warning for those of you hoping to offload your content work to your customers.

How Could It Be Better?

Be Integrated. I left the California Fives page and went to the homepage, and tried to see if I could find my way back into the California Fives page.  I managed to eventually find it (in small font) in the menu bar, but I did notice an image in the sidebar that said “California Fives…Find and Share your Top California Fives… ADVERTISEMENT.”

The first problem is that many, many (most) users never look in the sidebar.  Think tunnel vision.  The second problem is the the obvious confusion with something loudly labeled ADVERTISEMENT.  I’m on a California Tourism Board site and now I’m asked to click an advert to give someone else (after all, it must be someone else if it’s an advertisement, right?) and give this person some content?  No thanks.  This is a missed opportunity as there are so many great ways to include these lists in the other landing pages of the site, which are organised into similar categories as the fives.

Bonus Points: Why not Tweet about some of the best lists?  Unfortunately the California Tourism Twitter Account has only had four tweets in the past month.  Seems it has been abandoned.

Add Photos.  Everyone LOVES good photography especially in this market.  Some of the lists that have been submitted are pretty ’simple’ – e.g. “Top Five San Luis Obispo Hikes” and there’s just lots of text.  If there were five photos here, that the user could have found on Flickr for example, instantly you’ve got a snazzy looking piece of content.  Plus in many cases, the pictures could help folk chooses which thing on the list they want to do. (Beaches, for example?)

Your Homework:

What parts of this idea could you steal and make work for your small travel business?  How could you make it better?

To Learn More…

Want some help coming up with crazy and creative ideas for your online marketing strategy?  Check out our Create Your (Social Media) Community Consulting Package.  We don’t just focus on ‘en vogue’ sites like Twitter or dream about flashy widgets and gadgets. We look at realistic and holistic ways to make your online presence pack a punch.   With this package, you’ll aim for the TOP and never look back.