A matter of days after hearing of plans by responsibletravel.com to run their own series of Webinars and writing about it, I read a tweet celebrating the success of the first travel Webinar run by Sustainable Travel International and learn that ATTA have also run one. The trouble is that not being heavily present in the Social Media space meant that the actually event was unheard of until afterwards in a couple of tweets by guests @voluntourismgal and @kathydragon.  I think its great that more travel companies and organisations are starting to engage in new media, it needs to happen but can we join together to fuel the conversation.

Our Webinars

We’ve been on a bit of a journey with the Webinars we started earlier this year following grass roots networking events that Your Safe Planet & The Blue Yonder started back in 2007. We’ve firmly established that inclusion and collaboration on these event is without a doubt the best and most valuable way forward.  The last few Webinars we’ve held certainly haven’t gone under the radar so it’s a surprise to find others having a go and not thinking about how we can work together in this space.

Let’s pool resources so that we can afford better tools, create a bigger noise, get even more people involved in these discussions.  This isn’t about who runs them, we haven’t built them as part of some PR or marketing plan, there’s space for everyone to be featured for their part.  Primarily this is about the dialogue, the conversations that we’re starting and the preconceptions of ‘green travel’ that we’re addressing. I guess perhaps this is where efforts and motivations will start to differ. Some companies will not want to be involved in these and give their time unless they are the hosts, the originators, taking centre stage to promote their brand.

We’ve had some fantastic people involved so far with what we’ve done and some generous ongoing support from whl.travel and Travelmole.  It was interesting that once we started to approach things more professionally and run bigger topics with bigger guests we started to lose our intended grass roots focus and support.  This is why we need collaboration – so that we can have a good mix and try to link two ends of the spectrum.

The challenges

1. Building a collaborative schedule of events.
2. Financing access to the Webinar technology required and the human resources needed to make them happen consistently.
3. Technological difficulties during large interactive Webinars.
4. Marketing.
5. Editing of recordings post Webinar.

The vision

An extensive schedule of Webinars drawn up by all parties interested in being involved, whether that means speaking, hosting or bringing ideas to the table.

All manner of travel companies, grass roots organisations and individuals featured throughout the course of the series.

It’s a huge task for one outfit to run these on anything more than a monthly basis without a dedicated team so why not crowd source the activity.

Would you like to collaborate?  Please leave your thoughts in the comments.