Last Friday, I spoke about “Social Media in the Travel Industry” at the Governor’s 2009 Colorado Tourism Conference in Pueblo, Colo. And I found myself scheduled a day after the crowd saw a great session by Eric Elkins of Widefoc.us, who covered many of the same topics I usually touch on.

So in the interest of mixing it up, I indulged in the time-honored tradition of Top Ten lists and created my own – specifically on the 10 topics the travel industry should be paying attention to as they plan for 2010 budgets and strategy. I’m including a link to the full presentation at the bottom of the post, but in short, my pick of hot topics:

1. Online brand management: claiming your brand name everywhere possible, even if you can’t or won’t use it in the short term.
2. Setting up (and budgeting for) a monitoring service. Although I touched on both paid and unpaid options, I feel this is one area where it makes sense to budget for rather than trying to cobble together “free” services that ultimately demand many, many employee hours to manage.
3. Building tracking into social media campaigns, from URL tracking to channel-specific offers.
4. Systematically handling online reviews, on par with all of the customer feedback channels the travel industry has been so diligent about creating over the last decade. For example, the check-stuffer report cards, the post-stay emails, the phone surveys….those are great, but can’t be done at the expense of ignoring more public reviews on TripAdvisor and other third-party sites.
5. Managing online business listings, such as Yelp and Google Maps, with current content, images and links
6. Integration of social media into email and websites
7. A growing use of multimedia content. Travel blogs are great, and I read a lot of them, but I’m looking forward to seeing more integrated audio/video/map content.
8. The impact of mobile usage in all forms of digital communication
9. Geo-tagged content, which is increasingly being combined with mobile devices
10. The use of technology partnerships to expand budgets and reach

Looking for the whole presentation? You can find it here