The door is closing (courtesy brad montgomery at Flickr CC)Although my business partner Becky McCray and I were rather hammered by an ambitious schedule of conferences and workshops across the country during October, the good news is that we’ve gathered tons of useful information and insights for the lessons, videos and newsletter that we offer our online learning community at Tourism Currents.

The next Lesson, “How to Listen Online,” is being posted as we speak and will be fully available to paid members by Friday, November 6.

This month, we’re excited to include some very helpful video interviews with Ann Peavey, who tweets for Seattle Tourism as @SeattleMaven.  I shot the video while in Seattle during the Association for Women in Communications (AWC) conference (salmon taco or awesome coffee, anyone?) and can’t wait to share it with you. Ann is a real pro and a dynamite, fun person; you’ll love seeing how she’s mastered Twitter to show off her city!

The bottom line is this – once we finish editing and uploading all of this terrific content,  we are going to close the doors to further paid Tourism Currents members until the next class cycle in Spring 2010.

We’ll still accept more free newsletter-level members, but anyone who wants access to all of our lessons and videos will have to wait until the next class.

Our reason?

We said at our launch in September that we want to keep class sizes manageable, and we want to move our members through the content as a group so that no one feels left behind or overwhelmed by having to play catch-up.

Those who are already paid members are all set and don’t need to do anything else except to continue learning useful social media tips for their destination marketing.

New sign-ups and those who are already at the free newsletter level have until THIS FRIDAY, November 6, to upgrade to our paid Just the Basics level ($45/month for 6 months) or our Regular level ($75/month for 6 months) so that you can really dive into all of our training materials.

We think that these are exceptionally reasonable prices for this kind of detailed, tourism-specific learning material; in fact, we know you can’t beat it anywhere else, because we’ve snooped around to look.  🙂

These are the organizations and people that we think would find our training particularly helpful:

  • Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus (CVBs)
  • Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs)
  • Main Street, historic preservation and heritage trail organizations
  • Parks, nature preserves, botanical gardens and other nature/outdoors-related attractions
  • Public Relations professionals who do tourism work
  • Chambers of Commerce
  • Those with niche focus like agritourism, culinary tourism, arts/culture, sports/adventure and educational travel
  • Festival and event planners
  • Attractions, museums, lodging etc. that depend upon tourist traffic
  • Historic highways and scenic byways
  • State and city governments who do marketing and outreach related to tourism

Please do consider joining us to start learning – this stuff moves fast and frankly, your tourism organization can’t afford to dawdle. Don’t wait until Spring 2010 let us help you become social media savvy!

Interested?  Sign up here or go here to read more and see if Tourism Currents is right for you.

Thanks for your support.