Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

We did it.

Our Tourism Currents online learning community launched on September 9 – Becky McCray and I couldn’t be more excited about it.

We’re offering a newsletter, monthly training lessons, exclusive video interviews with experts in the social media and tourism fields, a member’s Forum plus live hour-long video Q&A sessions.

These are the organizations and people that we think would find our membership site particularly helpful:

• Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus (CVBs)
• Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs)
• State and city governments who do marketing and outreach related to tourism
• Main Street, historic preservation, heritage trail and historic highway organizations
• Parks, nature preserves, botanical gardens and other nature/outdoors-related attractions, including scenic byways
• Public Relations professionals who do tourism work
• Chambers of Commerce
• Those with niche focus like agritourism, culinary tourism, arts/culture, sports/adventure and educational travel
• Festival and event planners
• Attractions, museums, lodging etc. that depend upon tourist traffic

If you’d like to know more, go here to see if Tourism Currents is right for you.

Thanks for your support!

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet from Berlin Tourism that said they’d mail small pieces of the Berlin Wall to 15 people who sent them a US mailing address via DM (Direct Message – private communication not seen by the Twitter public stream.)

As a student of history, I jumped all over that offer.

Now I have the lovely but sobering little bit of history that you see in the photo in this post.

What a great way for a tourism organization to use Twitter, wouldn’t you say?

It is difficult to believe that it has been 20 years since the Wall fell, but Berlin is commemorating the event in a big way (don’t miss this list from the Guardian of top 10 books about the Berlin Wall.)

I’d love to visit myself some day – there’s been a lot of buzz about the city around the Web lately.

WorldHum mentioned Berlin as a possible expat writer refuge, there’s a new currywurst museum, nice parks, a film festival in the subway, cutting edge fashion,  geeky startups , scenery and architecture (and here’s a detailed transportation update from EuroCheapo.)

But, if I can’t see all that in person, I still have a wonderful souvenir.

Thanks, Berlin Tourism.

After a quick Tourism Currents pre-launch meeting with my business partner Becky McCray….

….and did I mention that she’s a BusinessWeek Top 20 Entrepreneur to follow on Twitter? Well, she is!

….and don’t you know it makes her crazy when I do this kind of “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” off-topic diversion….

Anyway, we arranged a one-night planning session in Dallas, meeting roughly halfway between our homes in Oklahoma and Texas (because you can only do so much organizing even with regular video Skype calls.)  On the drive back to my house, I was so pumped up about the great learning material that we’re developing to combine tourism marketing and social Web tools, I just HAD to talk about it.

I used Utterli and my cell phone to call in an audio post (that I can embed in a blog post, as I’ve done here) from the parking lot of a Taco Bell in Waco, Texas.

Because I know how to live it up!

(If you can’t see the audio player box below, here’s the URL directly to the recording.)