I’ve been working with my local Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (CVB) in Round Rock, Texas to create some fun videos that give a personality to the city.
As I discussed in my post Look before you leap into HD video, it’s been a bit of a learning curve to “up my game,” but we’re just about there and today I uploaded the first three videos in a series that we’ll be producing for the foreseeable future.
The video below (here’s the direct link) is an interview with our Mayor. It has a few glitches that my perfectionist self wrestled with, but I’m reasonably happy with it and wanted to share it with you.
As part of US National Travel and Tourism Week (May 8 – 16, 2010) towns and cities across the United States are planning a variety of festivities to recognize and celebrate the importance of visitors and travel.
In Texas alone in 2008, travel spending directly supported over 500,000 jobs and people traveling in the state spent an estimated $60.6 billion.
Helping to kick off the festivities is a new folk art exhibit….Art Matters: Works by Self-Taught Artists….at the Wynne Home Arts Center.
The town decided to use Travel and Tourism Week to draw attention to all of the interesting cultural and arts activities in the area, and the Wynne House folk art event was the jump-start.
I saw lots of wonderfully colorful and imaginative pieces and spoke with several artists at the opening (will post more here later and some pics are going up on Flickr, TwitPic and Facebook as well) but here are three tourism-related thoughts from a few conversations I’ve had today:
Sometimes it is hard for local people to appreciate their own town. I’m not seeing this in Huntsville, but at the exhibit opening we discussed this problem. The best wake-up call is visitors who ooh and aah over the things you take for granted.
Revitalizing a tired downtown is a team effort between “the arty types,” the city government, the Chamber of Commerce, the CVB and all of the people who own businesses in the district. Everyone has to be on board, and for the long haul, because it can take years to get any traction.
It is often one or two “crazies” who see the possibilities better than anyone else, and bravely move into the run-down sections of town and open little galleries, restaurants, etc. For gosh sakes, support them! Support The Crazies!
(Disclosure: my Huntsville trip has been paid for in part by the Texas Commission on the Arts)
While checking Twitter the other day I saw a tweet from the Beaumont (TX) CVB that they were live on a local AM radio station in town, and they invited their Twitter followers to listen in.
Since I went to high school in Beaumont, I clicked the link in their tweet out of curiosity. I’m not a big talk radio person (don’t have a commute and prefer music while working at home) and like many people today I rarely listen to AM radio.
But this was AM radio for geeks, because AM 1300 KSET also live-streams shows to the Web.
That means that not only can people in Beaumont and a few surrounding southeast Texas towns like Lumberton, Orange, Nederland and Silsbee listen in, but the entire planet can get involved! The station also keeps an active Facebook page and they’re on Twitter.
Appearing on a live-streaming radio show means that you can remind your locals of what you offer (get those folks to visit more in their own backyards – the Beaumont CVB did a great job of plugging their online events calendar on the KSET show) but you can also reach out to your “expats.”
These are people who perhaps grew up in your town but moved away, or maybe they visit regularly (years ago as children, now as snowbirds, to visit relatives for the holidays, etc.) and they already feel an affinity for you. Our latest Tourism Currents lesson calls them part of your “online champions network” if you can get them talking about you, so reach out and bring them closer to home, through the Web. A “wired” local radio show is one way to do that.
I know that when when I travel and find crummy music options in my hotel room, I tune my laptop into my local Austin classical radio station, FM 89.5 KMFA, which also livestreams to the Web. Ahh, the familiar morning DJs and a taste of home.
Another way to share online is through embeddable widgets like the one below from the radio station (if you click the Play button, you’ll hear the current live-stream from KSET.) Widgets can be customized any number of ways and are another method of putting your latest information on other people’s sites. ”Embeddable” means that you find the embed/sharing code where it says Get Widget, copy it, and paste it anywhere that allows HTML code.
Smart radio station, eh?
(Update: look at this wonderfully-crafted post by Justin McCullough called The Social Web Ties Us Together….it’s about how he as a southeast Texas guy stumbled across this post about Beaumont while he was traveling in Oregon. It is a dynamite explanation of how information spreads across the Web in ways that we might not expect. Thanks, Justin!)
