This year’s National Travel and Tourism Week featured the first-ever U.S. Travel Rally Day on Tuesday, May 12. On that day, more than 40 cities across the country united to make a bold statement that travel matters. Rallies spotlighted the impact that travel has on each city’s economy, businesses and community as a whole.

The Meeting Planners podcast source for what’s new and exciting in meetings and events industry!

Mike McAllen of Grass Shack Events & Media
Rachel Globus, head tweeter for Keep America Meeting and editor of Event Solutions Magazine

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Transcripts:

Mike McAllen: Thank you for tuning in to Meetings Podcast. This is Mike McAllen and today we have Rachel Globus from Event Solutions. She is the Editor in Chief and Educational Director. Welcome back Rachel.

Rachel Globus: Thanks for having me again.

Mike McAllen: Yeah, it’s great. And today I thought we would talk about the Rally Day that you’re involved in today. Sound good?

Rachel Globus: Yes indeed. Sounds great.

Mike McAllen: So, so tell the audience what exactly Rally Day is.

Rachel Globus: Well, this week is the National Travel and Tourism Week which was set-up by the U.S. Travel Association and as part of it they announced that Tuesday, May 12, which is today, would be U.S. Travel Rally Day. And what they did was they kind of left it up to local convention visitors’ bureaus to set up whatever they wanted to set up, whether it was an actual rally or events or activities or giveaways. So, what we decided to do with Keep America Meeting was just sort of add on to that through the social media component. So we created a hashtag on Twitter which was rallyday and it was just sort of a way for everybody to be part of the conversation about the rally. Whether they were in Kansas rallying at the local convention visitors bureau or they were in Orlando or California or they were just sitting at their desk because they weren’t able to leave because hopefully they were too busy working on current projects. They could use that Rally Day hashtag to participate. So that’s the long and the short of it I suppose for Travel Rally Day.

Mike McAllen: Yeah that’s great. So they’re having events too today for this?

Rachel Globus: Yes, there were events all across the country.

Mike McAllen: All across the country? Oh wow.

Rachel Globus: There were a number of Convention and Visitors Bureaus that were involved and it was all published on the U.S. Travel Associations website. So people were doing a lot of different things. I mean sometimes it was like meet at the mall and rally. Or, in Washington D.C. they met at a museum and rallied and everybody was asked to wear red. There was just a whole bunch of different things that people did.

Mike McAllen: Cool.

Rachel Globus: And there’s a list of CVB’s that were involved and they were all across the country. Although I did find that it was a little bit easier to find something to do for Rally Day if you were on the east coast. It was a little bit challenging out here on the west coast. I went up to Santa Monica and participated in Rally Day there and it was a great time.

Mike McAllen: Very cool. Yeah, I have been out of the country for awhile. I’ve been out of touch with stuff for awhile. But that’s really great. I’m looking at the Twitter stream on Search.Twitter for the actual tag and it’s still going. I mean there’s lots of stuff happening now. As we just started I have seventeen more tweets that came up which is kind of cool.

Rachel Globus: Indeed. Yeah, it was really neat to see it start to wave across the country. I had set up my first tweets to go at five something California time and that was just to kind of tell people what was going on on the east coast and then we started talking about what was going on on the west coast, or the midwest mountain range and then the west coast. And this is all through Keep Meeting which is you know, the Twitter account for Keep America Meeting. And there’s still stuff going on right now.

Mike McAllen: Umhm.

Rachel Globus: I know, around here in Palm Springs at 4:30 there’s an event going on. It’s basically a networking event and everybody’s encouraged to come in uniform and get together and just sort of stand strong for the industry. So, its really cool to see all the stuff that’s going on.

Mike McAllen: That’s great. And so what other places is it online if people wanted to see more about it? They could go to Twitter obviously but…

Rachel Globus: Yeah. The best, I have to say that, the place where I put together a bunch of information is actually, it was actually on our website and I’ll give you the link so that you can include it with this podcast. Its actually the top story on the website right now. But you could also go to Twitter/keepmeeting and that would take you to the Keep America Meeting website or you can go directly there which is keepamericameeting.com.

Mike McAllen: That’s very cool and I guess that people will take pictures and stuff and put them up on Flickr

Rachel Globus: Yeah.

Mike McAllen: and so you can actually see all about it. Its a great idea.

Rachel Globus: Yeah it was just sort of an experiment. I mean, you know, everybody wants to do something to support our industry and I think social media really gives us an opportunity to do that. Especially because it kind of takes all those live events, those live experiences and social media kind of amplifies them and allows people to connect up into a larger conversation that’s beyond just Tennessee or Colorado Springs or wherever they happen to be participating in their local event.

Mike McAllen: Right. Right, right, right. And then also now with places like Twitter that a lot of the reporters that are the mainstream reporters that are on there looking for stories and finding out things so its a great place to be on there to get some positive feedback about, you know, meetings.

Rachel Globus: Yeah. You know it was interesting. As a journalist, it was sort of interesting because I was up in Santa Monica and they had organized an annual beach summit which was sort of bringing together people from the community and people from the city and different leaders to talk about basically improving Santa Monica for the tourists as well as the locals. And, normally I would have been there with a notebook and a pen but instead I just had my phone and I was just taking pictures of people and trying to condense their responses, their quotes, into a hundred and forty characters and Tweeting them out. So, you know, sort of live reporting in a very condensed format but it was an interesting experience format but it was an interesting experience.

Mike McAllen: It is funny how the whole kind of landscape is changing how people are doing things huh? I mean your job right there.

Rachel Globus: Right. Yeah. I can imagine… You know it’s interesting. I mean it’s a certain type of journalism. It’s definitely… I guess I would compare it more to maybe broadcast journalism being as it’s sort of on the scene. It’s not a very reflective form. And it’s very, very easy to make mistakes when you’re sending stuff so quickly. You try taking notes on an iPhone, it’s not necessarily that easy. But it also does get information out there more quickly and it gets it out to people who are interested in a certain topic. So, it was a fun experiment and people seem to be really, kind of into the idea that they were going to be injected… their picture was going to be injected into some conversation in the Twittersphere. So hopefully someone will go back and look up and see their picture and see what was said about them.

Mike McAllen: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Funny, funny, great, great, great ideas. That’s a great idea, I think just in general our industry needs to do more stuff like this sort of thing.

Rachel Globus: Well that’s part of what Keep America Meeting and Event Solutions that we both kind of had in mind. Which was, kind of, giving people the opportunity to, you know, practice. It’s sort of… social media is the wild, wild west is what I always say, you know? And at this point it is. We all can just practice and learn. And this is a great opportunity for us to practice, figure stuff out, while supporting our industry. We also had a, I’m not sure how popular this was but we have, Keep America Meeting has a Facebook page and we asked people to post pictures to there. On Flickr you could post pictures with the tag ntw09 which was National Travel Week 09 and so pictures were being, people had some pictures posted with those tags. So, we’ve definitely hit up all the major sites, from Flickr to Twitter to Facebook. And people really, really got into it. I’ve kind of been noticing it from the Twitter side but wherever you go it’s just exciting to see how much people are into learning these new technologies and into supporting their industry.

Mike McAllen: Yeah. And it gives them a voice which is great because, sometimes you read stuff in the paper and there’s nothing you can do about it

Rachel Globus: Right.

Mike McAllen: But, you know, now-a-days you can really talk back which is pretty good. You know? And having such a huge industry in which we have people need to start talking.

Rachel Globus: And this is… yeah one of… oh I’m sorry? Go ahead.

Mike McAllen: No, no, no go ahead. I just was going to say that we have such a large industry we should be talking back now, you know, it’s time to start doing this kind of stuff and talking.

Rachel Globus: Exactly. And one of the things we had in mind was for people to not only just Tweet about what the value of meetings, events, conventions, incentives, all that was to them, but to find other people and ask them. Maybe your boss or a maybe an attendee at one of your conventions that you’re planning or… You know, there’s every- our industry touches so many people all across the country. And so, one of the ideas was to get people to kind of spread the word. So we’re not… I mean it’s great for us all to support each other and talk about how strong our industry is but at some point we need to kind of get out there and bring in other people and have them realize why our industry is so important and kind of have them become our evangelists. So, I don’t think we quite got there with this Rally Day but maybe we’ll have another Rally Day down the line and we’ll get everybody getting their bosses to Tweet about why events and meetings are so important.

Mike McAllen: When I – That was what I noticed today when I was skimming through my Twitter stream there was that’s the one post that I saw with the Rally Day and I didn’t know what Rally Day was and I was all Oh my gosh, you know? And it was tell two people who that not in the events and meetings industry about the events and meetings industry, what’s going on. You know, and I did. And I was all hey that’s a cool idea, because we do get in the bubble of us all talking amongst ourselves.

Rachel Globus: Right. Yeah. I mean, It’s good I think that for us all to understand how much power we have collectively but ultimately I think that power needs to be outward facing to reach, you know, just sort of the man on the street. When we say meetings I don’t want them to think AIG I want them to think about connecting with other people and learning information and, you know, getting business done.

Mike McAllen: Yeah, so great. Yeah. I had this – I talked to John about this on the last podcast. It was about this USA Today article that I read on the front page was about GM doing their meeting in Arizona just recently. Did you read that? It was just…

Rachel Globus: I didn’t read it.

Mike McAllen: Well it was just slamming them, you know, in an AIG, basically article about, you know, this GM meeting but, and then that was it on the front page. And then in a little box on the bottom it says well, you know, to learn more about this go to, you know, something, learn about it more go to the business page and then on like the third page of the business page they talk about all the great things they did at this meeting, you know, they’re able to fly all their customers in to show them the fleet and they cut away all their- the fluffy things and they stopped doing anything that’s not customer contact meetings. And they’re not sponsoring the Academy Awards anymore or all these other things that they’re spending money on but they actually get their customers there, show them their product, you know? I thought it was really a great meeting, it was- it should have been a positive thing but it was, you know, to sell papers I guess it’s better to put the negative stuff up.

Rachel Globus: I know. And I started to see a little bit of push back in the mainstream media talking about the value of meetings. But we could definitely go a lot farther. When I was up in Santa Monica I asked everybody you know, how does this affect you in your business, and, you know, jobs, and how does it affect you directly, because it does… it’s sort of like, it’s hard to think of anyone that isn’t somehow directly or indirectly affected by our industry. Whether they’re taking a trip themselves or maybe they’re in the industry. It’s definitely something that we need to get the mainstream media thinking more about so that it’s not so easy for them to do those types of stories.

Mike McAllen: And what you’re doing with the Rally Day is a perfect example of how to get to the mainstream media because they are on Twitter.

Rachel Globus: Yeah. I haven’t heard anything yet but, definitely we’ll be happy to field any media requests if they come our way.

Mike McAllen: For sure, for sure. Alright well, anything you want to talk about with the next edition of Event Solutions?

Rachel Globus: Well, since we’re talking about Keep America Meeting I mean I guess I would just say kind of keep an eye, just going back to that organization, keep an eye on the site, it’s keepamericameeting.com and follow us on Twitter. We’ll be full of good news and inspiring and uplifting news about the industry and good statistics about how important it is. So definitely keep an eye on that. And Event Solutions will definitely continue to report on that kind of stuff because it’s definitely a commitment of ours.

Mike McAllen: Awesome. Alright Rachel, So I guess I’ll talk to you next month?

Rachel Globus: Alright. Sounds like a plan.

Mike McAllen: Alright, thanks a lot.

Rachel Globus: Thank you.

Mike McAllen: Bye bye.

Rachel Globus: Bye.

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