Training for tourism in social media

If you are interested in training for social media marketing in tourism, look at the courses Sheila Scarborough and I developed at Tourism Currents. Enrollment for the new courses starts today. (yay!)

Sheila Scarborough, Liz Strauss,
and Becky McCray

Sheila and I met on Liz Strauss’s Successful Blog, on her open mic nights a couple of years ago. Fast forward to Liz’s SOBCon 2009, and I arrived with a notebook full of possible business ideas, including a travel/tourism/social media education project with Sheila. And it makes sense, with Sheila’s background as a travel writer, and my background with small towns and tourism, and both of us experienced in social media tools. We had both been on a tourism “fam” (familiarization) tour of Hutchinson, Kansas, with a group of bloggers.

We started talking to every tourism professional we could meet. We networked locally. We networked online. We participated in every tourism conference being discussed on Twitter. We attended local events. We did everything else we could think of to connect with people working in tourism.

All that insight lead to making courses that reflect the actual work that tourism professionals do. Every tourism person deals with special events all year long. We dedicated an entire lesson to promoting your special events, before, during, and even after the big day. We carry that same approach into making more of your tours, finding your online champions, listening online, building your home base and outposts. Instead of “how to use Twitter,” we show you how to reach a network of people who want to promote your destination, and how Twitter is one part of that. The focus is not on the tools, but on the application.

One of the biggest roadblocks we hear about over and over is no time. Tourism professionals already have too much to do, and there is no time or staff to throw at pioneering this new field. We get that. We’re busy, too. We knew that if tourism professionals were going to make a difference in social media, we’d have to show them ways to multiply their results. That was the inspiration for our Results Multipliers course. The centerpiece of that course is Finding Your Online Champions. By finding and working with your online champions, you stop having to do all the work yourself. You mobilize a small army of supporters who go out and promote your destination for you.

Enrollment is open through June 30, 2010. If you’re interested, please stop by Tourism Currents to get all the details.

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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.