Marketing Begins At Home

Annie Heckenberger, Philly’s own blogging queen, has been doing the good work at the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC). She’s also known as the organizer of the upcoming Blog Philadelphia event in July.

When Annie left the rough and tumble world of NYC Public Relations to go flack for her fair hometown, it seemed (and seems) like a natural extension of the work she was doing at Marina Maher - using the tools of social media to make connections with her clients’ communities. Tourism is a natural for social media. It’s all about the experience, and it can be expressed in a picture, a video blog or a podcast more easily than in a static brochure you would pick up in a hotel lobby.

So with that, enjoy the first episode of UWISHUNU’S Cheap Date’s video blog.

UWISHUNU (just try and pronounce it and you’ll get it) is the official GPTMC blog for the footloose and fancy-free of Philly.

Written by a diverse group of in-the-know Philadelphians, uwishunu is your online source for an insider’s look at the Philadelphia scene. Whether it’s eating, drinking, music, culture, fashion, the outdoors, shopping, design or any other Philly secret, uwishunu is the place to get the real deal from real Philadelphians. Our mission is to enable visitors to hang like locals and locals to hang like insiders.

This is something any city can do - let those who know the unique neighborhoods and hidden treasures tell their stories and sell their hometowns. Kudos to GPTMC and Annie for such a terrific job.

The final (and for my money the best) panel at Web 2.0 Expo was the Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Thomas Hawk, Jeremiah Owyang “who can live blog / videoblog / twitter / upload these photos to ZooomerFlickr faster-athon” in the closing moments of Wednesday afternoon.

Sure all that live video and twittering can seem silly if you are still stuck on thinking about content. A bunch of technology geeks wearing cams on their hats can seem pretty silly until you realize that thousands of people are watching. And then you realize that someday soon someone is going to use that technology to document an atrocity or a natural disaster and do it quicker and better than CNNBCFOX.

At least that’s how I see it.

More thoughts from Jeremiah himself.

BlogTalkRadio’s Alan Levy (disclosure, I’m working with BTR) had this insight:

The most ironic thing to me was seeing Robert Scoble with a camera connected to his head. The reason I used the word ironic, is because when I launched Blogtalkradio early last fall, I went to the Podexpo in Ontario Ca. Everyone was focused on digital mixed podcasts, and pristine audio quality. Blogtalkradio is a live platform using a phone or voip connection to host these conversations. Podshow, Podango, Podtech, and tons of others in the space considered live conversations to be inconsistent with the key elements of podcasting. I disagreed with this thesis then and I guess, that given Scoble’s interest in interviewing people using a camera affixed to his head, he agrees that a few umms and ahh’s can’t hurt anyone.

In short, you don’t have to be pristine to be compelling.