Week after week this column espouses the importance and value of marketing your tourism business on-line: web sites, email, search engines, social media, on-line travel agencies (OTAs), etc., etc. For sure, the Internet does provide the most cost effective way to reach and influence would-be clients of your property or business. It’s high tech, but it’s also ‘low touch’ from a service perspective.

Caution remains the watchword for most tourism related businesses as we get ready to close the books on the first quarter of 2010. In general, it seems like the first three months of 2010 have treated us all better than the same period in 2009. Occupancy rates climbed back to closer what we should expect this time of year, and more tourists have been out and about in Provo and beyond. That’s the good news.

Last week we talked about the importance of search engines as a way for more people to find your web site. Search engines have become so prevalent that we now use the term “google it” for just about any bit of information we want.

Having a presence on the Internet is pretty a ‘must have’ these days in any kind of business. But building a nice looking web site that explains all about your business and even lets you sell things to customers is just the tip of the iceberg. As the saying goes, “If you build it, will they come?”

Dwight Schrute, the quirky character played by Rainn Wilson in the US version of the popular TV sitcom “The Office” often talks about the rural beet farm where he lives and shares with his eccentric cousin Mose. Schrute Farm is his part-time business where he runs an ‘agro-tourism B&B.’ He proudly bills it as "the number one beet-related agro-tourism destination in Northeastern Pennsylvania."

Twitter is another one of those “Web 2.0” phenomena that is re-shaping how people use the Internet to communicate and build relationships. With more than 105 million users and growing by about 10 million users per month, it’s not to be ignored, even if you don’t completely understand how it works or how people use it.

Everyone knows that the Internet and World Wide Web have changed the way we communicate with each other on both a personal and business level. Email, web sites, search engines, text messaging, instant messaging, blogs, file sharing sites, and social media - to name just a few - are all communications tools that continue to transform the speed and efficiency in which we can deliver messages to people we care about.

Google has established itself as the dominant leader in search engine technology, commanding about 65% of the market in that area (ahead of both Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing by a considerable margin). Traditionally, Google has focused on general or universal search, meaning you can type in any term, phrase or keyword into Google and it will quickly find you relevant links and websites.

Facebook, that ever present social networking site, just turned a whopping six years old. Hard to believe such a phenomenon has only been around for such a short period of time. As I type this, my spell checker in Microsoft Word doesn’t even recognize it as a real word (and Microsoft is an investor in Facebook!)!

Everyone knows that if you are in the hotel or tourism business, a good web site is important. And that the internet in general can be a valuable part of how you generate revenue. But you may not realize just how important until you take a step back and get some data from the industry as a whole, particularly during challenging economic times.

Would you trust the opinion of a complete stranger, and often an anonymous one, to help you plan an important purchase? Apparently, when it comes to vacations, a lot of people do, if the continued rise in popularity and usage of web sites that offer user-generated content (UGC – an important acronym in the Web 2.0 world), especially reviews, ratings and recommendations, is any indication.

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