Research Sparked by Fednor Tourism Keys Seminar

The Tourism Keys Seminar in Thunder Bay last week resulted in an explosion of research, here at Quetico Internet Marketing.

The comprehensive view of utilizing all the various forms of media opened a full set of doors, all at once. Producing your content in the form of Video, photos, audio, pdf and text can provide your visitors with your information in the form they prefer. This strategy is literally Super-Powered by using RSS feeds in both directions!

But other forms of media exist where data and information are pooled and accessed by millions.

The Marketing Keys Tourism Marketing Seminar also explained the astonishing leverage that the connectivity in social networks can provide to help get your message out. For example, if your business has a Business Page Listing in Facebook, people can join as a ‘Fan’ of your business. If they comment on your Wall, all of their friends are notified about this comment - and your word can spread far and wide, very quickly.

(profilactic.com provides a central service collecting over 120 social networking websites.)

After some research, I found a Wordpress plugin that will update your Facebook account via RSS feed whenever you post to your blog… excellent… that saves me one step of updating my content in to many places. After I set this up, I’ll test and see if my Facebook Notification RSS Feed includes these updates - so I can pull the Facebook RSS feed and link to myself three levels deep, automatically.

Then Marketing Keys introduced yet another bombshell. A form of media that takes the entire world into scope, in every detail. Maps. Particularly Google Maps.

Todd Lucier, the creator and presenter of the Tourism Keys Seminars, introduced us to the simple, but detailed, process of adding your business data to the Google Maps database. But further, Todd demonstrated how travel providers can utilize these maps to create detailed trip guides, such as canoe routes. Travel routes can be mapped and points of interest can be flagged. Each map entry can be tagged with descriptions, images, audio, video, podcasts, links to further resources… you name it!

Todd showed us an amazing virtual canoe trip in Algonquin Park using Google Maps RIGHT ON HIS OWN WEBSITE! Using a simple embed code, Todd demonstrated how you can add your own custom Google Map to your blog or website - in a few simple steps.

Follow-up Research into Google Maps resulted in some completely unexpected discoveries.

By following the Google Maps embed code backwards, searching for RSS related information, I uncovered a deeper layer to the internet. I have found myself another step closer to accessing the ROOT of the largest databases in the world. I feel like I’ve exposed a part of “the machine” where only Heavy Mechanics work - it’s called GOOGLE DEVELOPERS API’s.

If an RSS feed lets me pull the last 20 posts from a news source, the Developers API’s will let me write a query that lets me pull every post that was ever made… If my picasa RSS feed pulls the last 20 images, the API feed query can pull ALL the images, all the YouTube Videos and on and on.

I figure that, if I’m just learning about it, someone else already knows AND they already have applications built around it… and yes, after some searching I’ve found some powerful examples of how people have pulled API’s from several sources to create very useful Niche services!

Next - I’ll share the list of WordPress Plugins that I have collected to pull images from picasa, videos from youtube, niche-specific social bookmarking activity, news from Google, weather from environment Canada, events from Google Calendar, podcasts from iTunes, and Social Feeds from multiple sources - all this content comes to your site automatically!

Everything you need to provide amazing content FROM everything Web 2.0 and become interconnected INTO everything Web 2.0 - and at the same time, utilizing every one of the various sources of Media and connection between people.

Thank you Fednor, for bringing Todd to us.