To the question I’m often posed, “ why do you write a blog and who are you trying to reach?” I’d have to say the following.
1. For myself – I blog to sort out my thoughts, to hang concepts and interesting links where I’ll find them later, to develop my own voice and most importantly attract conversations with others. There’s a wonderful lline in the movie Shadowlands about the Oxford don, C.S.Lewis – “we read not to feel alone”. I think that’s especially true of bloggers – we blog to attract company, to give witness and, most importantly to share.
2. For my clients – I serve, or try to, leaders in the travel, tourism and hospitality communities responsible for marketing and managing precious places. Their lives are hectic, full of meetings, responding to stakeholder’s priorites and changing external fornces, often hard to discern and evaluate. So my blogs are designed to be a safe haven from the storms of uncertainty and change. A place where they can make sense of the strange forces buffeting their agencies. Well, that’s the intent! The reality is that most of these same leaders don’t read blogs or use the encyclopedic resources of the internet to learn, so I also write for….
3. The next generation of leaders in their organizations. Those who can see the future more clearly because they are creating it. I write to provide them with the facts, insights and the arguments they need to make their propositions ring true to their busy leaders.
I’d like to say a big thank you to my readers and followers, whoever you are and all the other bloggers I have followed and met in 2009. You’ve inspired and informed me immensely during the year.
It's been quite a year (summarized in my newsletter (Download Speak out ), made possible by the support of many. As an expression of my appreciation, there are three stockings under the Christmas Tree:
You may of course, chose all three, but I'll give you a sneak preview!
Stocking A A letter template and gift suggestion that the next generation of destination and business leaders might give to their bosses this Christmas; and
Stocking B. A selection of seven videos that your organizations could and should view to understand what’s happenung in their world; and
Stocking C. A set of technology forecasts for 2010. They pertain mostly to place marketers and folks interested in how all this social media will evolve in the business world...
OK - so the abbreviation in the headline was to jack up my viewing stats!
This is really about Social Media and the longer, more thoughtful article is here. This post is just a tease.
Anyway the stats now show that women outnumber men on most Social Media sites and I am grateful to a man, Ian Delaney, for pointing this out on his post here.
So why is it that men do most of the programming and participate and dominate most of the technology conferences?
I think it's time women (as customers) get more assertive - perhaps we could develop a pink usability rating widget that could be slapped on sites (embedded without permission) that showed just how relevant and useful it was from a woman's perspective. We'd all rave about the ones with five ribbons and you know how talkative we women can be....Anyway, guys, in keeping with the SM theme, read the article and do as you're told at the end of it. It's right here.
He argues that the new dividing line in politics is not between right or left but between expanders and restrainers: those who believe that there should be no impediments, and those who believe that we must live within limits. He goes onto to say:
The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.
While I dislike the language of wars and battles, I do agree with the fact the the divide exists, is growing and will widen before it shrinks.
Fear is the force that is driving a wedge between these two groups. The expanders fear loss of control, position, power, wealth, comfort, familiar stuff (the list goes on). Restrainers miss loss of access to cultural diversity, to well-being, biodiversity, health, community, security and happiness.
It seems always to be about fear. Fear will trump ambition every time. But even fear runs out of steam when people have lost all – as Victor Frankl showed in Auschwitz. The human search for meaning stays alight among some amidst the darkest darkness. It’s that sputtering flame we must each kindle…
I wish I could write as eloquently as Monbiot – he can be convincing, except that there’s flaw in his thinking that comes from a flaw of perception. There are colours in our world. He has identified two modes of thought but not seen the connections that link and unify.
I don't know about you, but there are also colours in my personality – at various times I am an expander and a restrainer. Some degree of expansion is necessary, or entropy would take over and we’d all end up in a useless heap under our duvets. Some form of restraint is necessary or we’d all burst from satiation. George rightly alludes to the fact that each of us harbours a capacity for great acts of selflessness and goodness and horrific acts of selfishness and evil. I am “all of us” but so are "you" too – and from where you’re standing, the view is different. Before WW2, Carl Jung warned of the shadow that exists within each and the dangers of denying it.
If humanity needs anything right now it’s to develop a universal capacity to grasp and feel comfortable with complexity, ambiguity even paradox. It’s the ability to say “yes and” not just “yes but”. But in the same way our psychology has difficulty handling gradual threats and responds best to immediate danger, the media we have created (and especially the new, digital social media) values the brief, the new, the instant, the “real-time”. Our thought processes are constantly interrupted, distracted and divided and our capacity to mull over an idea or article is reduced. Never was there such a need for our leaders to take time out to think (God forbid) but, when they do, we describe them as indecisive.
Another new and promising writer, Jane Young of The Resonance Blog, has tried to capture this need to handle complexity in a slide deck that should enjoy wide distribution. Her blog is well worth a read too.
I include it here not just because I enjoyed it but because it supports my last point – the dividing line (if there is such a thing) is not between people but modes of perception. People can shift back and forth between different modes of perception relatively easily. (In the illustration to the right, most of you can see an image of both a young lady in a fine hat, and an old crone clad in scarf).
One mode of perception views the planet as a living organism, a complex system continuously self-regulating and all forms of matter and energy as agents within that system, connected to and influencing all other agents. This paradigm necessitates a healthy respect for all other agents and an intrinsic, pervasive humility - the complexity of the interconnections means that we never know how they might impact each other.
The other model sees the planet as a storehouse of resources that any set of agents (any tribe) can exploit ad infinitum for its own personal benefit. This mode of perception has developed its knowledge based on a paradigm that divides subject from object; that underplays the deep connections that constantly link the two; and that assumes that agents can be neatly labeled, grouped, un-grouped and manipulated like the pixels on your screen. For as long as this paradigm “worked” (and it has for over 350 years) practicing humility was disadvantageous. What was needed was daring, courage, and boldness to break through barriers of ignorance and build new edifices that proved my tribe's superior intelligence and strength.
After 350 years or so, it’s not just the physical resources that have been plundered and are running low, but a healthy sense of wonder; a willingness to realize that there is far more we don’t know about our amazing universe than what we could ever know. As students of nature we are all in kindergarten where a bit more hand holding would serve us well. The old expansionist paradigm is losing its ability to describe our world accurately and predict the future - everywhere we read of systemic flaws, meltdowns and crises.
So, methinks a real paradigm shift is finally afoot.
If that's the case, then George, while I respect your passion, eloquence, intelligence, and wit, I reject your analysis of a new form of class struggle - even though I will fess up and state that I'm a moderate restrainer. If as you suggest, there are two mountains of thought separated by a chasm of misunderstanding, we need bridge builders and integrators not polarizers. Without such, it's gonna get a lot uglier….Let's not be responsible for that...It's not time for barricades but bridges......
Postscript
My tourism readers might be thinking - what has this to do with tourism? Well everything. For starters, I believe the tourism community can and should act as bridge builders. But I also see evidence for the perception division growing within our ranks as evidenced by recent press releases issued by the WTTC, the Ecumenical Council on Tourism and the UNWTO. More in next post!!
* Have you ever attended a conference or business event and imagined how it would be great to have your name positioned on your forehead to avoid watching eyeballs failing to find contact as they search for the label known innocuously as a name tag but used as a social filter?
* Did you think that the ideas Pranav Mistry described in the previous post were too futuristic to be believable?
* Have you wondered how Augmented Reality could be used in addition to finding nearby cafes, hotspots or bars that sell Stella Artois?
If so, be careful what you ask for. The bright young folks at The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) have just produced a powerful demo eliminating the problem - whom do I talk to in a crowded room? What might we have in common? Simply whip out your iphone (of course) and point it at a person of interest (their face not their label) and layered upon your screen will be details of the individual which he or she has deemed relevant for the event.
Would this app add value to an already amazingly good-value conference - Phocuswright, next year? or would it mean that, instead of looking at name tags, participants would be tripping over each other as they view their real world through the augmented lens of an iphone. A new meaning for "stumble upon" perhaps? But then, it won't be long before we'll have a nano camera attached to our bluetooth headsets (or equivalent) that will deliver the relevant information orally and chance encounters - the source of innovation - will be few and far between. What a pity!
PS: Don't underestimate these guys - they hail from Malmo, Sweden the city that brought us Spotify....
Pranav Mistry is an Indian engineer with a mission - to completely collapse the boundaries separating the digital and analogue worlds in order to fully augment and enhance our experience of reality. Watch this video - it should blow the lids of your minds. A few months ago I had seen his boss at MIT introduce the concepts of Sixth Sense Technology and, while she did a great job - see here (2.40 mins into video) - was more specific about applications, and concentrated on ones that are the most practical and achievable now, this presentation really conveys the power of this integration and the ensuing possibilities.
In the same way that iphone users take for granted that they can pinch their screen to re-size its content (an invention that is barely two years old and created gasps of wonder at TED in August 2006 when Jeff Han illustrated it the first time), such wondrous technologies will be our hands sooner than we might expect. The concept of Augmented Reality is fast becoming "the next big thing" with companies like Layer presenting digital content through the wifi connected viewfinders of our digital cameras.
But it's Mistry's heart that makes him a genius innovator - not just his brilliant mind. The real gem emerges at the end of his video when he announces that, instead of rushing to the patent office, he plans to provide the software behind his inventions to the broader community and crowdsource the development of applications. The hardware is dirt cheap to manufacture and assemble. We've seen what happened when Apple opened up the iphone API's so imagine what Mistry's peers around the world will do with this and how it might enhance so many people's lives (he's already thinking of applications for persons with disabilities)
The mantra for the 21st century is that coined by dear friend Leon Benjamin, Winning By Sharing. And it was the spirit of sharing that lead me to Pranav's latest video - Shelly Kuipers of the Calgary-based company, Chaordix, that helps business use crowdsourcing, linked me to this on her company blog. If you're not sure about crowdsourcing, learn all about it on the Chaordix webinar;
If the internet killed distance, this family of inventions will link the mobile, analogue personal body not just with rich encyclopedic content but with all our senses, movements and gestures. The information exchange will be two way and nothing will be the same again....What a way to end the week......Just imagine.........
If as I've been saying for as long as I can remember that two-thirds of the visitor experience is in their heads and virtual (existing either as fantasies or memories), then Mr. Mistry and his associates are going to be a real source of relevance help to the tourism community.
Long before social media erupted as "the next big thing, many observers noticed that, as power shifted towards the consumer, PUSH marketing would be replaced by PULL marketing. We even wrote a paper called When Push Comes to Pull ( Download Push-pull) back in 2002! And I'm pleased to discover on a recent reading that our predictions then are now becoming today's reality. For example, here are 3 prognostications dated 2002:
1. There'll be a shift in focus from promoting to listening, from selling to serving, from control to relationship building and from marketing as sophisticated promotion to a committed form of customer care.
2. A task/event driven approach will be enbled by the widespread adoption of open standards, XML-wrapped web services and service-oriented architectures.
3. A collaborative, event-driven approach to satisfying consumer's needs will, in turn, be enabled by a new business ecology comprising service providers, brokers, channel managers, affinity agents and network providers........
Sadly, with every generation and every new, "next big thing", the lexicon is reinvented to distinguish those "in the know" from those still struggling to keep up. That trend is unfortunate because it only slows down the process of diffusion.
The word now being used to describe PULL marketing (ie where the customer assembles the information they need when and where it is convenient to them, is INBOUND marketing and I think Mike Volpe of Hubspot is the author. Not that I wish to appear critical of Mike as he is a GREAT communicator; has done much to advance understanding of this critical marketing shift and his firm delivers practical solutions that deliver results. Hubspot's slides on the topic are a good place to start and The Social Times Consultancy has just published this precise summary of Inbound Marketing that is useful for those in a hurry.
The graphic of the magnet - copied, without permission from the Social Times post - provides the thousand word summary: PULL or INBOUND marketing is all about ATTRACTION.
STOP PROMOTING and START ATTRACTING
That means stop talking about how great you are and start living and modeling your values and brand attributes. For tourism destinations that means ensuring that you ARE friendly and welcoming. Have you interacted with airline check-in staff recently or the taxi drivers that provide that critical first impression?. If you claim to be green and sustainable, is that commitment immediately obvious to the visitor on arrival and throughout every aspect of their experience? If you have positioned your city as one that is cool and creative, is WIFI ubiquitous and free?
It's an old maxim that "like attracts like". The beauty being that customers will self select if you act authentically and consistently with your brand's values. Given that so many parties are involved in the delivery of the experience, such consistency cannot be assured without widespread community effort. Branding is not a task that can be delegated to an agency no matter how creative or clever. A destination brand has to "ring true" and reflect the past, present and future aspiration and values of the community and they way its residents would like to welcome guests. PULL marketing is really all about service delivery and exceeding guest expectations. The concept maybe about 10 years old now - hardly new - but from an execution point of view is hardly out the womb!
Here’s a superb example of tourism leaders re-thinking marketing in response to the down-turn and the emergence of social and rich media. CEO Rob Katz explains via video, of course, how Vail has completely re-thought its marketing strategy and relationships with skiers.
The full story is available from Advertising Age link here
The recession significantly shortened the planning time for the purchase and sale of ski experiences - decreasing from 4-6 months to 2-3 weeks. Vail also recognized the volatility in the marketplace and realized that print media restricted their ability to respond to short-term, even real-time demand.
Last year Vail had spent 80% of its budget before the vacation period so couldn’t respond to last minute demand. So they took the brave decision to pull 50% of their ad spend out of print and put in reserve. Vail now uses social media and operates like a political campaign to communicate in real time response to local market conditions.
It’s a brave call – their competitors are still present in the big ski publications with the conventional rich brand messaging but Vail has a war chest with which to strike as demand rises closer to the holidays. No wonder Katz likens himself to Braveheart!
If it works and the gamble pays off, you can bet others will follow – hopefully the print community possesses similar gutsy leadership within its ranks. They’re going to need it.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news - scouts bringing back negative intelligence from their explorations are rarely welcome. But I cannot stand by and watch my clients and colleagues in Canadian tourism be ambushed - especially come February when they host the world for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver-Whistler. I have stated publicly that claims such as "the best place on earth"and "Canada's sustainable games" could and would invite intense scrutiny by the world's environmental media that could backfire unless every effort was made to tell compelling stories of the commitment by tourism enterprises to reducing their footprint.
Last week I wrote a piece called A Tale of Two Canada's indicating that Canada's international reputation was taking a beating in the very markets from which it derives visitors. I also posted similar thoughts on Up in the Air, the blog for The Icarus Foundation. While I writing that piece, a far more influential blogger in the UK - George Monbiot, author of Heat, an activist and well read journalist - was penning this flaming critique of the country.
I urge my Canadian colleagues to read Monbiot's piece carefully (especially paragraphs 6 & 7 repeated below) and not go immediately into defensive mode. Canada has the resources (energy and minerals) that the global economy needs and wants. They will be exploited regardless and it's in Canada's best interests - as a nation - to ensure these resource generate the best net return to its citizens. Surely, that means focusing on exploiting the resource at a pace, on a scale and using methods that minimize the costs and maximize the benefits to all sectors of the economy. One day, the resource larder will be bare - all the more important that Canada develops other vibrant sources of wealth creation; and more importantly, does not alienate its future customers, while grabbing what's on nature's shelves.
Most people in tourism detest confrontation - especially with politicians - and prefer to stay out of national, let alone international diplomatic affairs. But this is a time when marketing spin will sound really hollow. Now is the time to demonstrate, through action, that Canada is a place that cares about the whole and still has the capacity to lead by example. It's time for tourism to become the healing change agent it was always destined to be and get engaged in protecting not just its resources but its reputation.
Monbiot's account of Canada's actions in Preventing a Global Agreement
At the end of 2007 it single-handedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations(3). After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country which had done most to disrupt the talks(4). The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world’s 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th(5).
In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed that the government was scheming to divide the Europeans(6). During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying(7). Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada’s obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth(8)
The numbers refer to references included in Monbiot's original article
As the climate change debate heats up prior
to the meeting in Copenhagen, some activists are, in my humble opinion,
allowing their concern to morph into dangerous hysteria. While PlaneStupid’s ad
campaign, launched last week in cinemas across the UK,is designed to shock, its likely
outcome will be simply to harden already entrenched positions on either side of
the debate. (The message being that the weight of one polar bear at 800lbs is
equivalent to the amount of carbon generated by one person flying between
Europe and North America).
But, as discussed in an earlier post,
Reputation, Reputation, Reputation, the campaign also serves to draw an otherwise rather diffident community
onto the debate’s central stage. Was it coincidence or irony that the bears appear to fall past the windows of the Vancouver-based Canadian Tourism Commission – Canada's national agency
responsible for promoting Canada’s brand image and Canada as a place to keep
exploring?
Many leaders meeting at the recent World Travel
Market continue to take the position that aviation and tourism are being
unfairly punished. That argument is about as helpful as Plane Stupid’s ad
campaign and also impedes speedy movement towards constructive solutions.
Both sides of the stop/continue flying argument have some merit
– if we all stopped flying in a global economy (including the makers and
producers of Plane Stupid's ad) then we’d fail to find the means or the will to move
society to a lower carbon lifestyle. Furthermore, the poor in developing nations, who are likely to experience the negative effects of climate change first, will also suffer. On the other hand, stopping flying is the
one single act that a well travelled individual like myself could make at a
personal level to reduce a carbon footprint. It’s also a tragic irony that one of the fastest
growth sectors in tourism involves transporting people to see places, phenomena
and wildlife before they disappear.
Isn’t it time for the tourism industry to
stop making excuses and engage their customers and peers in an honest debate about how to live in better harmony with the earth? We cannot have our cake and eat it too. Venice has shown that there are social as well as environmental limits to tourism growth. It’s also time for the finger pointing environmentalists – many (but not all!) keen to blame others – to recognize that their remaining three fingers are pointing in a direction that calls for less guilt inducing hysteria, less name calling and more role modeling.
The issues are complex, warrant
sustained and thoughtful debate and, in the coming months and years are likely to polarize and divide communities further. While we’re unlikely to experience polar bears
falling on our heads, Dylan was right in predicting that it would be another
kind of metaphoric“hard rain
that’s gonna fall” if we keep avoiding our individual and collective responsibilities. Wake up DMO's - this issue is also yours. Ignore it at your peril.
Forgive me for sounding increasingly grumpy. I know one is supposed to be positive and always look on the bright side of life but the evidence to support my worst fears keeps coming in. Just 14 days ago the citizens of Venice held a mock funeral to lament the disappearance of its true citizens (see previous post) and today I discovered this earlier article (written over a year ago) in a very reputable travel ezine moaning about another Italian destination icon - the golden city of Firenze.
There's one line on this page that tells the real tale - "How to do Firenze for free". While I am pleased to think that there are museums and galleries that don't charge the equivalent of a second mortgage to be enjoyed, can travel ever be undertaken for free? Even the language "doing Firenze" implies doing it over and not treating it with respect.
Surely it's this failure to understand that there are costs associated with tourism as well as benefits that is the source of the problem. I love travel; I've devoted my life to supporting a community that welcomes strangers, offers hospitality and encourages cultures to mix and appreciate one another. But I am, as any reader of the blog will affirm, increasingly intolerant of the woolly headed thinking that talks about tourism as a right; that suggests there aren't limits to its growth; and believes that branding is a substitute for management and conservation.
If I sound like a broken record, so be it. Tourism will suffer if it doesn't join and contribute to the debate on growth and management. The M in DMO will in future stand for Management. Problem is - we simply don't yet know how to manage demand equitably and efficiently at the destination level unless, of course, it has become a crisis. Any thoughts anyone? Anyone out there? Who is looking seriously at the NET benefit of tourism and engaging residents in determining how much and what type of tourism they feel comfortable accommodating?
Come to think about it - I withdraw my apology about being grumpy on this one. Where's the chianti?
