We’ve seen it done at the DMO Mojo event last spring and at the DMAI annual meeting this summer. Now you will see it again – this time in its purest form and in an environment tailor-made for the experience.

It is called Pecha Kucha (Japanese for chit-chat). If you are not familiar with the concept, it is a presentation methodology in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each.  Most Pecha Kucha events consist of around a dozen presentations, each presenter having 20 slides, each shown for 20 seconds on a timer. Thus, each presenter has just 6 minutes and 40 seconds to explain their ideas before the next takes the stage.

Thanks to our generous friends at TIG Global, we will be holding the Inaugural #SoMeT Pecha Kucha Night at the Funny Bone Comedy Club at Harrah’s Tunica. And, the stars of the show are you! Yes, anyone who is registered and attending #SoMeT – sponsors, presenters, attendees, etc – can participate.  The presentation the audience votes as the best will be awarded a $500 cash prize. Here are the details:

• We will accept presentation ideas until 5:00 pm PST, on Wednesday, October 26^th, more details below on requirements.

·    We will vote to be sure we have most interesting 8 presentations – in your eyes.

• Following the 8 presentations on that night, we will vote on the best one. The winner gets the $500 cash prize.

• The event will be held in conjunction with the evening reception on Thursday, November 10th

We are looking forward to your participation. Based on the schedule for the evening and timing, we can include 6 to 8 total presenters.  Each presenter gets 20 slides and they will have 20 seconds per slide.  If you are interested in participating here are the requirements:

• Your presentation must be educational and/or focused on a case study, approach to challenge that you or your organization faced, etc. Please remember no sales pitches.

• The topic of the presentation must be tourism and/or social media, technology, online marketing, etc. focused.    

If you would like to participate and have a chance to win the $500 prize – and most importantly - bragging rights as the best Pecha Kucha at #SoMeT 2011, do the following:

• Submit a title of your presentation idea and a one sentence description to sometourism@gmail.com by Wednesday, October 26^th. Use “#SoMeT Pecha Kucha” in the subject line.

If we receive more than eight submissions, we will do a Facebook vote to select the top eight.

• On Friday, October 28^th, we will open the voting.  We will vote through Tuesday, November 1^st and the top eight presenters will be selected to present on Thursday evening.

If you are selected to present, we will need your 20 slides by Tuesday, November 8^th.  The slides can be modified in a walk through on Thursday afternoon for any copy changes, but we need to have them timed for the presentations. 

 Thank you again to TIG Global for their participation and sponsorship of the Inaugural #SoMeT Pecha Kucha Night!

It is with great pleasure and excitement that we would like to announce the host of 2011 Social Media Tourism Symposium.  Congratulations Tunica, MS!

All three finalists, which included Savannah, GA and Knoxville, TN – presented excellent proposals and each of the cities were more than capable to host the event.  Savannah compiled all the final bid information in a creative Tumblr blog format while Knoxville included a fun video.  If you attended #SoMeT last year, you will enjoy it. See it here. 

But in the end, Tunica did the best job.  Not only did they conduct a resourceful campaign to secure votes – but they addressed all of our concerns with great detail, while providing the best value for our attendees.

More information will follow soon. We will be conducting a site visit in the next few weeks to review the meeting space and select the host hotel.  To see the Tunica bid presentation, visit this link.

Congratulations to staff of the Tunica CVB and all of their industry partners that made this possible. Thank you all for your support and participation in the process!

We will begin developing the symposium content soon.  We are looking forward to all of your input as we begin to build one of the tourism industry’s strongest and most dynamic social media educational programs in 2011!

The final round of voting for the #SoMeT 2011 destination was wrapped up at midnight on Wednesday, March 23 and here are the final 3 locations – in order of finish:  

1) Tunica, MS

2)   Savannah, GA

3) Knoxville, TN 

We will be requesting and evaluating full proposals from each of the top three destinations in the next few weeks. We hope to have a decision on the host destination for #SoMeT 2011 in early May.

There were a total of 2,915 individual votes cast March 16 through the 23.  As, you can see in the attached screen shot from the Wildfire app, the big day for votes was Monday, March 21. That day we received 1,165 entries.

Here is a breakdown of the total votes and finish for each destination in the final 12:

1) Tunica CVB – 1,748

2) Visit Savannah – 1,450

3) Knoxville Tourism – 1,064

4) Columbia, SC – 760

5) El Paso, TX – 661

6) Aspen – 508

7) Travel Portland – 480

8) Grand Rapids – 460

9) Ann Arbor/Ypsi and Coeur d’ Alene CVB – 412

11) Spokane CVB – 401

12) Positively Cleveland - 364

Again, without all of you, this event would not be possible.  We thank you for all of your postings, tweets, votes and, of course, support during this whole process. Looking forward to seeing you in November!

Round One of voting for #SoMeT 2011 is complete and our choices are narrowed to the following 12 destinations – due to some ties.

Here are the top 12 – in order of finish:

1) Visit Savannah tie with Positively Cleveland 

3) Spokane Regional CVB 

4) Grand Rapids, MI 

5) Aspen Chamber 

6) Ann Arbor, MI Area 

7) Knoxville Tourism tie with Tunica CVB 

9) Travel Portland 

10) Coeur d’ Alene VB tied with El Paso, TX and Columbia , SC

There were a total of 413 individual votes cast in the 7 day period.  Here is a breakdown of the total votes and finish for each destination:

1) Positively Cleveland – 64 and Visit Savannah - 64

3) Spokane Regional CVB - 63

4) Grand Rapids - 60

5) Aspen Chamber - 57

6) Ann Arbor, MI Area -55

7) Knoxville Tourism -49 and Tunica CVB - 49

9) Travel Portland - 43

10) Coeur d’ Alene VB – 42; Columbia, SC – 42; Visit El Paso - 42

The remaining DMO’s with vote totals: Vancouver USA -39; Visit Wilmington – 35; Charlotte CVB-34; Fargo-Moorhead CVB – 34; Rapid City – 32; Chattanooga CVB- 31; Valley Forge CVB- 30; Visit Eau Claire – 29; Albuquerque CVB – 28; Chicago Southland – 28; Charleston WV CVB – 26; Buffalo Niagara CVB – 24; Sioux Falls CVB- 24; Woodfield Chicago- 23; Waterloo CVB- 22; Greater Madison CVB – 21; Greater Morgantown -21; Northern Kentucky- 20; Williamsburg- 20; Reno/Tahoe CVA- 19; Visit Sun Valley – 19; Cedar Rapids CVB- 17; Newport/Bristol CVB- 16; Destination Irvine- 10; and McHenry County CVB – 7.

What we learned:

Traffic to the Facebook page was up considerably from last year during the voting process, although numbers of votes were down.  We learned two things here. First, was that holding each voter to one vote per round, rather than one vote per day, cut down on the “ballot stuffing.”  Second, we learned people were concerned with the message to “add” or “allow the app to access your profile” in order to complete the voting process.  Based on the feedback, we had some abandonment at that point from prospective voters.  

So, in this round, we will try to make things clearer on the voting landing page.

A Note on Your Vote:

Round Two, which will take us down to the final 3, begins at 3:00 pm EST on March 16 and ends at midnight EST on March 23.  The rules will be the same, one vote per person, and you can pick your top three.  This will determine our top three potential host destinations for 2011.

To clarify, we will do our best to work with the destination that you consider your favorite or the best. But, we ask that you think through the voting process. Take a look at the proposals, think about the value, the airlift and the destination’s role with social media.  Without considering those options in our votes, we may be leaving some of our colleagues behind.  And, as we learned last year, this event is all about bringing our online tourism community together for knowledge sharing and networking.

Thanks again for all your participation in the process! Voting happens here - www.facebook.com/sometourism - see the #SoMeT 2011 tab on the left rail.

We will begin the voting process to select the location of the 2011 Symposium on the Use of Social Media in the Tourism Industry today!  It was very exciting to see all of the quality and creativity displayed in the 37 RFPs that met our requested specifications.

This year, we will be doing two phases of voting. The first phase of voting will run from 3:00 pm EST on March 4 through 3:00 pm EST on March 11. You will have the opportunity to select your top three locations.  We will then tally all of the votes and the top 10 destinations with the most total votes will move to Round Two.

The second round of voting will take place starting at 3:00 pm on Wednesday, March 16and end on Wednesday, March 23 at 11:59 EST.  We will select the top 3 destinations with the most votes and begin to work on hotel details, meeting space and the off-site event.  We then will select the destination that best fits the needs of our program and #SoMeT attendees.

The voting will take place via the Facebook page: www.facebook.com/sometourism. Visit the #SoMet 2011 tab to place your vote. 

It will be very important that you review the bids carefully prior to voting and select the top three destinations that you feel will be the best to host #SoMeT 2011.  In this year’s voting process, each voter will only get one vote per round.  So, you have one vote in round 1 and one vote in round 2. Each vote, 1 through 3 will be weighted the same.

If you would like to see the bids a bit closer, go to the photo set on Facebook and you will be able to download a high resolution .jpg of the bid.  You can enlarge it on your computer screen for better viewing.

Again, we are very excited about this process and looking forward to everyone’s participation!  

The Social Media on Tourism Symposium votes have been counted.  We officially had 1,593 individual votes cast, with a total of 4,779 votes for individual destinations – as each voter had the option to pick 3 destinations.

So, here are the top three - in order of votes received:

1) Loudoun, VA

2) Nashville, TN

3) Portland, OR

This was a very close race as only 5 votes separated the top three, which tell us that the system has worked very well so far.   As we stated earlier, we will now work with the top three vote recipients to determine which location we can negotiate the most cost effective package for attendees.  We hope to have a location locked up in early July.

Here are the rest of the top 10, in vote order:

4) Knoxville

5) Cleveland

6) Sonoma County

7) Columbus

8) Spokane

9) Snomish County

10)  Albuquerque  

Thanks to everyone for voting and participating! Without “You” none of this could be possible! We will soon be soliciting your input regarding the symposium content and potential speakers.  

Welcome to the Tumblr blog site for the “Symposium on the Use of Social Media in the Tourism Industry” – affectionately known SoMeTourism or #SoMeT!

This inaugural symposium will be held Wednesday, November 17 through Friday, November 19, 2010 and it will be like no other meeting or event ever held within the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. The difference in this event will be “You”.   Yes, “You”!  You will be part of the process from beginning to end – from location selection to education topics and even presenters.  You will have an opportunity to voice your opinion and tell us where you would like have the symposium, what subject matter you would like presented and who you would like to lead the instruction and discussions.

The process will begin with the selection of a host city for the symposium.  Over a two week period, from May 21^st through June 4^th, we will give all potential attendees the ability to vote for three of their favorite destinations as a possible host city for the event.  We currently have 26 eligible destinations from our initial call for RFP’s. These organizations have all met the outlined criteria needed to be a host city.  On June 7^th, we will announce the top three cities who have received the most votes.  We will then work directly with the hotel properties to determine which one fits our needs best and attempt to negotiate the best possible package for attendees.  When a contract is signed, we will announce the host city and hotel.

After we know the location, we will follow up with a survey regarding the educational content.  Once the educational topics of interest are defined by you, an official call for presenters will take place.  We will do a similar selection process through a public vote to determine the presenters.

All voting will happen via our Facebook Fan Page – www.facebook.com/sometourism  More updates will follow via our Facebook Page, Twitter stream – www.twitter.com/sometourism  and via the hash tag #SoMeT. To learn more about each destination eligible to host the event, please click through the photos and descriptions on the this blog.

We are looking forward to “You” participating in this inaugural and innovation event!   Thank you again for your interest and support! More to come very soon!

David Serino, aka @GammetGuy and Social Media Tourism Symposium Founder