And now a word from SVP and social media whiz Mark O'Toole on our support for client and partner company, TravMedia, a media company that provides tools and services for travel companies and travel journalists:
 
With TravMedia's limited marketing budget and a need to reach media and PR pros in the travel industry to encourage subscriptions to client and partner organization TravMedia, we turned to Twitter as a marketing tool.
 
The appeal of a low barrier to participation made Twitter an appealing, if experimental, marketing platform.
 
We started by following key industry influencers and those we wanted as subscribers: tourism boards, travel media and other Twitter travel big shots. The inclination of people to "follow back" helped build an initial solid base of followers to the feed.
 
For content, we started by merely posting headlines of client news posted on TravMedia. Next, we began to add in links from other travel news sources that announced industry jobs, events and initiatives. And of course, we used the valuable "re-Tweet" to share interesting news posted by TravMedia followers.
 
In about 30 days, the feed had caught on. We quickly attracted several hundred followers. From there, it was viral social media at its best. Soon, others were recommending following @TravMediaUSA through the "#FollowFriday" feature, and people were regularly re-Tweeting our posts.
 
Since mid-December when we launched the feed, we've grown to 3,200 followers today, with new followers each day.
 
Can we call this a success? Absolutely. The rapid growth in followers aside, we've seen about a 150 percent increase in trials on the TravMedia service this year, and the company has doubled its projected budget through May. Beyond that, we are regularly engaged through the DM (direct message) tool on Twitter and regularly asked for information and opinion. The posts are widely read and shared, and the follower growth pace has increased, not decreased. Twellow, the so-called "Yellow Pages" of Twitter, lists @TravMediaUSA among the top 400 travel feeds in the world (out of nearly 20,000). Twinfluence, which analyzes Twitter reach, ranks TravMedia among the top 15,000 of all worldwide Twitter feeds (among 10 million or so), reaching more than five million people.   
 
Finally, we hosted our first "Tweetup" in New York City in May, and since this was our first time promoting an event via Twitter, our expectations for attendance were modest. However, we were pleased to see an impressive turnout of about quadruple the anticipated number of participants. The "Tweetup" started as an interesting experiment and showed a level of engagement among followers that pleasantly surprised us.