Here at Midwest Meetings, we’ve been hearing all about how anybody who’s anybody in tourism should be at SoMeT - that is, the Social Media Tourism Symposium, which took place in Tunica, MS in November.

What’s SoMeT? Just another conference about social media marketing in the tourism industry? Not even close - it’s way cooler than that. For starters, SoMeT is an actual product of social media marketing in the tourism industry. In fact, the whole thing is practically planned on Facebook.

Once we got a grasp of just how all-encompassing this event experience is for tourism, hospitality, and destination marketing professionals in the social media space, we started wondering… from a planning and logistics perspective, how on earth do they pull this thing off? So we got founder Dave Serino on the phone to tell us all about the vision, process, and community behind SoMeT, and why this is probably the conference model of the future.

Midwest Meetings: Why don’t you start us off by telling us... what is SoMeT?

Dave Serino: I would refer to it as the Woodstock of social media tourism geeks. It’s a group of people who are extremely passionate about tourism and social media. We get together for a few days, and we learn a lot, and we exchange a lot of information, and we have a good time with each other. The people who attend communicate a lot online, and this is a great opportunity for everybody to get together in real life.

MM: Who are the main audience members for this event? We’ve heard a lot about it from destination marketing professionals so far.

DS: Right, probably about 80%. It’s open to everybody in the tourism industry space - anybody in travel, tourism, or hospitality.

MM: This was the second year for SoMeT. How did the concept originally come about?

DS: We’ve done some education work in the past, and one of the things I found was a need for this group of people to get together in a forum where they could really just be them. The idea was to kind of accelerate the geek factor. When we started, it was just a little idea, and the idea blossomed. The more I thought about it, the more structure and tentacles it began to grow.

I went out to some industry people I thought would attend and asked them, “Would you be interested in attending this type of event?” And they said, “Yup, that sounds pretty interesting.” So I said, “Well, how long should the event be? What type of education are you looking for? Where would you like to have it? What type of registration fee would there be? And what type of hotel fee?” I did sort of an informal survey in terms of cost analysis, and everybody said for a first-time event, if you can get us in and out for two and a half or three days for under $1,500, I think we could sell it. So we priced it accordingly. We went bare bones on a lot of the conference setup to get everything within that range where we were able to put on the event and not go totally into the red.

The idea was, even for the first event - with the momentum it got - we weren’t really concerned about making money but just breaking even and letting people get together. The value of the information exchange is really what made this event shine.

MM: A lot of the planning and logistics of SoMeT actually occur via social media. Now, throughout the history of the Web, there have been plenty of great ideas out there online somewhere that never made it anywhere. How did you get out the word to create such a meaningful, successful social media movement?

DS: We went to a core group of people who were 1) passionate about tourism, 2) well respected and dialed in with their peers, and 3) people who really converse well online. We started with a group of influencers. We had a great group of advocates and evangelists who promoted the event within their peer groups, within our industry, and within the realm of destination marketing.

MM: Destinations actually compete to be eligible as host destinations for SoMeT, correct? How does that work?

DS: It was kind of tough for us to pick where it should be, and I said, “Well, why don’t we use crowdsourcing and social media to decide where we want the location?” We came up with the idea for a contest and a voting process. We sort of streamlined the RFP process. We felt the proposal had to have some sort of creative design, so we asked for a one-page proposal, and all our questions had to be answered in that one-page proposal. Then we took that one-page proposal, and we posted it as a file on the Facebook page. The Facebook page is at facebook.com/sometourism, and you can go back to the photo albums there and see some of the proposals from 2010-2011. Then we did a vote.

In 2010, we just did a straight vote for five days, and the organization with the most votes won. This year, we did a two-tier voting system where we voted on the top ten, and after the top ten, we voted it down to the top three. We wanted to prevent being pigeonholed if the destination wasn’t going to work out; we wanted some options, just in case. Both years, the destination with the highest vote total was the winner because they were able to meet all our specifications, and it just turned out extremely well in both cases.

MM: From that planning and logistics perspective, what are some of the risks and rewards involved in letting potential attendees pick your location for you?

DS: The risk is you just never know where you’re going to be. The reward is really having people buy in. Everybody gets ownership. That’s the neat thing about this event. This is the future, I think, in meetings and conventions: people are more apt to participate throughout the event, prior to the event, and post-event if they have some sort of ownership in it. When I say ownership, I mean they have the ability to help make decisions.

We ask people what type of content they would like, what type of speakers they would like. Sheila Scarborough, one of our presenters, had four topics to present, and we couldn’t decide what topic. So we laid it out in a Facebook question, and we passed the question around and had a few hundred people chime in to vote. They voted for her to speak on social media and special events.

Again, if you’re an attendee, and you’re participating in this entire process, you’re contributing throughout and you have some ownership - you’re part of the experience. We’re anthropologists; we’ve started to study what's happening in our society. Nobody wants to ride on the bus… everybody wants to drive it. This event gives everybody the opportunity to start to drive the bus.

MM: So this is kind of the epitome of the crowdsourcing concept right here. Why aren’t all event planners sourcing their conferences like this?

DS: That’s a great question. I do not know why they aren’t doing it! I did some focus groups a while back with event planners, and a lot of the planners talked about how their attendees still haven’t embraced social media. Fortunately for us, the people we’re working with have embraced the online world. In the future, which is going to be sooner rather than later, I think everybody is going to embrace this.

MM: What are some of the insights or observations you’ve gained this year based on the types of content that resonated most with your attendees?

DS: Everybody knows now that they have to do this. A lot of the how-to content resonates the most now. We’re also moving into conversion studies. This year, we had a heavy concentration on presentations that were very ROI-driven. A lot of the questions asked were “Well, how do we start to measure social media?” The biggest challenge right now is strategic application. How are you going to apply it? How are you going to put together a strategic and tactful plan to be effective in social media? That is the biggest question out there right now.

MM: Clearly, following a conference geared toward “social media types,” you probably get all sorts of feedback after everything is said and done. Based on this year’s event, what are some of the lessons learned heading into next year?

DS: One, we try to get as many presenters in as possible, and on a couple of days, we had multiple breakouts. Some of the feedback we got [suggested] people would rather be in a general session because they didn’t want to choose. Maybe it means better content and a little less content. That was one lesson we learned this year.

Two, in the middle of the event, we asked people for topics they’d like to talk about in breakout sessions. I think the idea-sharing session is very important, but we need to execute that a little better on our end. We set up these little forums and we put people in rooms, but because they're last-minute in terms of content, we didn’t have enough facilitators to cover those. So we have some ideas for next year, and we’ve made some adjustments in our post-conference wrap-up.

MM: For the planners who might want to implement some of these strategies, what are some of the challenges behind the scenes of SoMeT? Based on what you’ve said already, it sounds pretty clear that flexibility is key.

DS: If you’re running a conference like this that’s rooted in social media, you have to be prepared for quick turns in the road. You have to be prepared for general randomness. Just like social media itself, it doesn’t always follow the path you’d expect. The whole thing needs to be a little fluid and flexible.

MM: As the visionary behind the event, you see both the big picture and the little details. What is it about SoMeT that makes it “work”?

DS: It’s the community of people. It’s not about me; it’s not about the Social Media Tourism Symposium name or brand. This event is not the traditional top-down event. It’s a bottom-up event, and when you come from the bottom up, it’s literally grassroots. Without all those roots, there’d be no green grass. We owe all our success to the attendees - not just for showing up, but for taking ownership in the event. That’s what makes it so dynamic: the personalities it brings in, the value, the speakers, the content, the ideas… it’s all important, but it all has to gel together, and it gels because of the people.