Over the past seven years I’ve written over 1500 blog posts (835 here). I’ve visited most of Canada’s provinces and territories and traveled extensively throughout Ontario helping tourism industry professionals get a handle on technology. In recent days I’ve been reflecting on where I want to invest my time and energy and the result of that reflection, in part; is that I will no longer be doing a number of things, including writing this blog.

Want to know the rest of the story?

Over the years, I’ve written manuals and books for the tourism industry in Ontario and beyond, worked on research projects, given experience design presentations, too-many-to-count internet marketing trainings and conference keynote presentations, facilitated cluster development workshops and seminars and more. I’ve stood in front of over 4000 tourism professionals during that time and provided on average twice weekly updates to over a thousand blog subscribers like you.

I want to give you all a big hug and say thank you for reading, commenting and sharing the inspiration you’ve found here with colleagues.

Where it began:
I got my experience and expertise in tourism by being an operator first – founding Northern Edge Algonquin with my wife, Martha in 1995.

Part of my excitement in establishing and growing Northern Edge Algonquin was to demonstrate that a business could be environmentally, socially and economically sustainable. Our focus: paying our team a fair wage to do inspiring work, helping our guests experience nature, delivering lovingly prepared local and organic food, and providing learning experiences and outdoor activities so that our guests and our staff could Rediscover ourselves, Empower one another, and Restore their connection with the Earth.

To support my endeavors to help the industry, we created whole new ways of doing business at the Edge. We created co-operating partnerships with experience providers, facilitators and guides. With respect, trust, appreciation and caring we’ve empowered partners to make decisions, to learn and grow while providing partners direct benefits based on the success of experiences we’ve co-created.

Training began as a nice off-season endeavor that brought additional revenue into Northern Edge Algonquin. My background as an educator in the school system from ’87-’95 made teaching the tourism industry a great fit.
But . . .
External projects, blogging and producing media are too much fun! This “beyond the Edge” work takes most of my energy and doesn’t allow me to focus on my other business and community.

I am so thankful to have met so many people like you over the years who have inspired me to take on this role as advocate, educator, and industry supporter.

In my travels, I’ve inspired connections between other people and helped them connect with the people, places and experiences that make their tourism offerings special, at the cost of disconnecting myself from this special place, the experiences I designed, the people who deliver experiences and the guests who share them here.

Over the past few years I’ve spent less and less quality time with family, partners, and team members who deliver experiences, and communicate with our guests and fans. I have noticed that the allocation of time, resources and focus on things away from my Edge has led to a loss of my ability to demonstrate respect, trust, appreciation and caring for the people, experiences and places that are most important to me.

I need to spend my time and energy attending to the garden of people, facilities and experiences that I planted here at Northern Edge Algonquin.

It’s funny, that here in the middle of the woods we don’t let our guests use the Internet. We want them to have experiences here without the distraction of technology. Meanwhile, I’ve often been found, out of sight, nose down, pecking at the keyboard doing work for other – too much of the time.

From where I sit today
Over the past week I have had inspiring conversations about new projects involving a brand new workshop series, online training programs and media production projects; new and exciting initiatives to be sure. When they were offered, I was so excited, I couldn’t sit down. I missed dinner with family and found myself inspired . . . or perhaps a better word would be out-spired – excited about opportunities to use the new skills I’ve been developing over the past few years on new projects away from home.

I spent the weekend in quiet contemplation, getting a sense of where and how I want to spend my time and energy. I realized there are many projects here at Northern Edge Algonquin that cannot proceed without my undivided attention.

Small is Beautiful
E.F. Schumacher proposed the idea of “smallness within bigness”. One of his ideas was that consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. ~ Wikipedia.

Less is More.

In short, I’m putting my time, attention, energy, focus on the place I call home, Northern Edge Algonquin. I need to focus on helping Northern Edge Algonquin get smaller and more beautiful.

It means, as of June 1, 2012 2011

• I’ll not be delivering workshops, keynotes, presentations or providing coaching on tourism or technology.
• I’ll discontinue writing my blogs here and at http://tourismcafe.ca
• I’ll not be tweeting or facebooking about tourism or technology.
• I’ll not be podcasting or producing media for clients or “This Week in Tourism” Videos that I, and many followers enjoyed.
• I’ll not be working on tourism industry projects or writing reports for tourism partners, attending tourism industry networking meetings and conferences, or responding to RFP’s.

To me, why I’m making the decision to leave isn’t quite as interesting a question as, What took me so long to make the shift? What makes the decision to leave something I’ve spent so much time developing is easier NOW, knowing that many of you are using social media and face to face meetings to help one another grow. Keep up the good work.

The World Needs Edginess . . .
The world needs edginess now more than ever. My role, is to demonstrate Edginess, rather than teaching others.

I’m super excited about the way forward as I plant my feet here on the ground on the Edge of Algonquin Park, Canada and rediscover myself, empower our guests and enhance my relationship with this little patch of earth I call home. Here, I’m investing my skills talents and abilities on behalf of this place, these people, and these experiences.

Once again, thank you for supporting this project. I look forward to crossing paths with many of you in the future.

cheers,
todd.

Final POST #835 on Tourism Keys

The biggest challenge for delivering meaningful conference presentations with remote video is in engaging the audience from outside the room. I think later this year we’ll see a number of posts on how to give a great remote keynote, until then, consider the basics. If I had this video to shoot again, I’d take out the reference to powerpoint type presentations for Keynotes.

I think PPT is fine for some online learning experiences, but not Keynote presentations. When I gave the Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia presentation I stuck with face time and didn’t show any slides. There may be a time for remote powerpoint slides, but I think it’s better to be animated and be visible on screen.

What do you think? What is powerpoint presentations place on the web?

Catch my online keynote as it was delivered shortly after shooting this video.
Unfortunately, it’s just a thumbnail, but perhaps you can get a sense of how camera work can contribute to an online keynote.

Over the past few months I’ve been producing a weekly rant on a variety of subjects under the title – This Week in Tourism.  Helping tourism operators achieve high levels of consumer satisfaction by providing rich web-based marketing experiences and providing above average customer service is the focus of these 140 second videos.

Over the past five months, I’ve produced a video each Friday.  However twice in the past four weeks I’ve not uploaded TWIT.

Here’s why…. they were good enough, but not really really good.

The messages were great, the audio was great, but personally I was unhappy with the camera work on one of the videos, in another I was unhappy with my temperment – too calm! and in one other case recently, the length of the piece was not consistent with my objective to keep the videos under three minutes long (it was over four minutes!).

As a result, I held them back and didn’t link to the This Week in Tourism Videos.

I know a lot of bloggers and podcasters focus on keeping a schedule and sticking to it.  Sometimes, when quality is lacking, I think it’s better to hold back the content and try to cover it another time, with a better, more polished presentation that is up to the standards I set for myself.

I’m sure some folks in the audience look forward to a weekly dose of inspiration and miss it when I don’t publish.  But I’d rather have you miss me than give you something that is not quite up to snuff and perhaps risk losing a fan.   At the end of the day, I hope to not disappoint, but thought I’d take a few minutes to explain.

What do you think, is good enough, good enough, or should we be focusing on just releasing our best stuff as tourism businesses and communities?  Do you have quality control standards?  Who’s responsibility is it to keep the standards high in your organization?

Aivar Ruukel recently conducted a survey regarding internet use in National Parks in Estonia. The results showcase internet use of international travelers who visit National Parks and their use of internet in planning their visit and sharing the story of their visit on social media.

The results of the survey give support to the often debated question of whether or not National Parks should provide Internet access to travelers.

For those parks who want to be better known, it seems providing Internet access is a great idea.

What are you investing in? This Week in Tourism from Gros Morne Nat’l Park.

Facebook’s uniquitous Like button is almost ready to celebrate its first birthday.  Yesterday, Google launched the “+ 1” button to search results in the U.S., bringing real time social recommendations to search results.  Essentially, pressing the button on the Google search result is a way for users to vote for the search result.  Unlike the earlier social search experiment run by Google, user recommendations will show up in the search results!

If you were Google, what would you do with such votes? If I were Google I’d have them play some roll in the ranking of search results.

Try Google +1 on your browser

Users with a Google account can turn on “+1″ in the Google Experimental settings for their account.

The new +1 button only applies to Google.com, not global domains that are forced on users browsers depending on where in the world they are located – ie: Google.ca.  Depending on your country of origin, you’ll need to force Google to show the default U.S. domain in your browser.  Try:http://www.google.com/ncr (ncr stands for no country redirect)

What +1 looks like

When your mouse hovers over the Plus one button it becomes a colourful icon that you click in order to make a recommendation.  +1 users will also show up in the search results of people in their plus 1 network.  When users like a search result, but are not in your search network, results will show the number of people who like the search result.

Users can even +1 Ads!

According to Search Engine Land the Plus One button will also show up in Google Adwords Advertising.  Get the FAQ’s on this at Search Engine Land.

Here’s How Google explains +1.

Social Buttons everywhere!
Google will be rolling out +1 buttons for users to add to their websites soon! Sign up for an invitation to add Google’s button to your Website.
Stay tuned, it’s going to get very interesting for all of us on the social Web. Will +1 buttons have the same cachet that Facebook Like buttons do? Will users begin to get bored or overwhelmed with the plethora of choices awaiting them to like, +1 and tweet their favourite brands on the Web?

Latest trends in mobile:

• over a third of folks are using Facebook with their handheld device. (that’s over 200 Million people!)
• Travelport reports more than half of business customers now use mobile technology for researching and booking hotels.
• 80% of these folks said mobile applications offering suggested restaurants and bars around the hotel location and a similar number want suggestions for recreational activities.
• 71% think Wi-Fi should be standard in hotel rooms.  (Just who are the other 29% hotel bookkeepers?)
• EMarketer estimates that 31% of mobile Internet users / 34% of smartphone users (nearly 25 million US mobile users) will research travel information on their mobile devices before making a trip this year. Nearly 12 million will use the mobile channel to book their plans.

I have answers to the most common reasons why many tourism folks haven’t started working on a handheld version of their website.

• You don’t know where to start. You hesitating because you don’t know what to do or how to do it.   Ask your guests what kind of info would be helpful.  Think like a traveler.  That’s a good start. Then see this little video.
  • Start with a map
  • Your phone number
  • Your SMS text number (if you don’t have one, get one.  Simple solution is a dedicated cell phone, but there are other options – Google Voice, Toktumi.)

• You can’t afford another website. You can’t afford NOT to have a mobile site.  Your traditional website will be gathering dust and be all but forgotten once you see the responses to your mobile efforts grow.  Check out Onbile.com and try their mobile website creation tool.  We used it to create our site.  Makes it easy to make changes anytime online and opens in a browser for those with mobile devices instead of our main site.  Oh, btw, it’s Free.
• You think your site looks just fine on the tiny screens. Get real.  Even with those fancy phones that zoom in are poor substitute to a well designed mobile website.  Take care of simple things for your traveler with a clean minimalist site.
• You don’t have the time to get working on your mobile site. You will soon have lots of time.   When all the business is going to those who make the time to create their mobile site.
• You think this accelerating growth trend is temporary and that folks will soon abandon their mobile devices? Your website is probably still a free geocities website and you still use a  hotmail address.  How did you ever find yourself on this page discussing mobile websites and tourism?

What are your thoughts on mobile websites? Any tips or resources to share?  Do you use a mobile service, a web or app designer that could help others get their mobile site up and running?

Todd’s had it with out of control costs for telephones. He wants to shift that budget for overpriced phone calls into something that better drives business – starting with online media!
Todd explains the benefits of cutting the cord and going with a web based telephone service.

Links:

• Toktumi
• HeadsetPlus.com

If you are interested in using video to differentiate tourism in your region or your business, these three basics are what you need to look after to produce video folks will watch.
This video demonstrates the difference between 1080i and 1080p HD video, mic’d and unmic’d audio and shows the impact studio lighting can have.
We kept the shot wide so you could see what we were up to.

What do you want your ideal guest to do for you?  Let ‘em know, with Calls-to-Action.
You’ll be glad you did.