When I checked into the Crystal Mountain Resort in Michigan, the desk staff person handed me a paper copy of the events and activities calendar for the week. That’s a tourism idea that has been around forever, and we can make something more of it.
First, let’s adapt it for a small town.
Don’t think only of your big festivals and events, like the car show or craft fair. List activities of all kinds, especially your “insider” events. Your visitors from big towns would love to sit in your small town gym and cheer at the high school basketball game, or bid on cool junk at your country auctions, or watch movies without fighting a crowd at your local theatre.
Don’t think you have enough events? Cooperate with neighboring towns to add their events to yours.
Fill in empty spaces with “anytime” activities. Think about the experiences that make your small town special, like enjoying the walking trail, touring the historic neighborhood, playing at the playground, or laying out and watching the stars in the park at night.
And don’t get caught up in the pretty design in the example. Do a simple plain text listing instead. It fits your small town image better and takes much less work. Put your effort into the descriptions, so people can imagine the experience just from your words.
Second, let’s take it online.
How can you get this calendar into the hands of visitors and potential visitors? Of course you will hand out paper copies all around town: at the motels, the cafes, the gas stations. But you’ll also use some modern tools to share it online:
- Post it on your local blog, and let the magic of RSS deliver it to interested readers every week.
- Set up email subscriptions to your blog through FeedBurner or FeedBlitz.
- Email your key influencers to invite them to subscribe: the regional and state tourism staff, regional reporters, your elected officials and legislators, local bloggers, and those same businesses you gave paper copies to.
- Post it on your Facebook page (set it up to pick up the RSS feed automatically).
- Set up a local Twitter account to share one-line event notices.
- Call Utterli, and record the list in audio, shareable online.
- Show local bloggers how to use the RSS feed in a widget on their blog that will stay constantly up to date with local events.
- List all these outposts (Facebook, Twitter, Utterli) on your main web page, so visitors can choose the method they prefer to get updates.
Third, let’s add your ideas.
What ideas can you add? Do you have examples? Where did I get it wrong? Let me know in the comments.
This article is part of Tourism Tuesday, a series of posts for tourism businesses and associations in small towns and rural areas. If you have questions you’d like us to address in this series, leave a comment or send us an email at becky@smallbizsurvival.com. This is a community project!
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Wow Becky – great ideas! I already do an online calendar for my community at http://www.readhampton.com — now I’m going to send a press release to local and state reporters and get them to sign up for the email newsletter!
@debworks
Deb, great! They need to know about you. :)
I just forwarded this post to our local economic development organizations with a recommendation for your website. The beauty of this suggestion is in how simple it would be to implement.
Thanks for sharing these great tips, Becky! Our next Young Entrepreneur Cram Session (Aug 12) will focus on leveraging local so looking forward to the additional suggestions from your readers as well. Hope you all will be able to join us – we’ll post details soon at http://smallbusinessunitedblog.com.
Bobbie, thanks for passing our ideas along. I love reaching new folks.
Rachel, thanks for sharing that link. We’ll be watching.
Good ideas – by creating a Google Calendar it gives events extra prominence and it can be embedded on a website or blog, with others contributing.
Upcoming.org also excellent for getting attention…
Hi Becky,
You are so right about local events; in Jamesport, Missouri I found out about the local weekly Amish produce auction and went to check it out. The experience added immeasurably to our stay there and became the lead for a Jamesport travel article that I wrote for the “Dallas Morning News.”
Ken, Google Calendar and Upcoming are great ideas! Thanks for adding them.
Sheila, experience is where it’s at! Like you and I talked about tonight, we don’t realize how many cool experiences we have to offer.
I am starting to use QR codes on business cards, posters, etc. to get folks to connect to my website with the camera in the pda’s.
(neomedia has a reliable app and you can easily create codes, then integrate into your press materials and the like… works great on my bb!)
a bit novel now, but when people see how they can instantly view examples of my work online when I meet them wherever, they are immediately impressed.
developing a campaign linking codes to fact pages, videos and recreations for a historical site locally… can’t wait for the results!
cool stuff so far.
nice article!
I think setting up your online listings with a short easy mobile version would be a huge plus. How great to hand out just a postcard or business card (maybe with a QR code as well) and they can get the whole list, sortable by tag, straight on their phone. As more people have mobile web enabled phones, this could be huge
Kevin and Chris, thank you for adding useful mobile ideas to this discussion! Excellent!
One advantage of Google Calendar is that it’s very easy to use. You can have multiple people adding/editing the calendar and as soon as they make the change it’s live. No need to wait on a “webmaster” anymore!
Our church uses it and it’s working out very well: http://fumcwf.org/calendar
Sandra, that is a terrific example. Thank you for sharing your real-world experience!
Now I’ve been thinking about using Google Calendar for tourism promotion. It would still be useful to do a weekly summary as a blog post, which becomes and email and RSS item automatically, I think.