I spent yesterday evening at the Scarborough Library here in Perth chatting with a bunch of travel-mad locals about how best to use social media on your travels. As usual at these kind of library talks, I get to meet a variety of people with varying levels of expertise in social media but this group had another interest in common, which made for lots of interesting interaction.
What I hadn’t expected (although it’s logical, in retrospect) was that most of these attendees are planning incredible trips for 2013! One is headed to Everest Base Camp, another to scale Kilimanjaro, yet another to drive around the United States for a year, someone spending six months backpacking around South America … the list goes on. To say I was a little envious is an understatement!
Fortunately, I managed to (more or less) get over my jealousy and continue to tell them all about the possible social media tools they might consider using to keep family and friends back home informed about their travels, and to reach new friends (and even strangers!) to get information to help them on their trips.
We covered enormous ground in just an hour, talking about Facebook, Twitter, blogging and Instagram and you can imagine I was rather thrilled when it sounded like a few new blogs might be some of the aftermath of the talk! As usual, I also learned a lot – for example, I hadn’t realised to what extend Cuba blocks social media and this will be a communication stumbling block for one of last night’s attendees who’s planning to spend a month there as part of her South American jaunt.
Of course, being there is the best option but if you couldn’t make it, here’s the overview of what we talked about.
Thanks to Stig Nygaard for the Kilimanjaro pic
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