man & nature # 34 ~ The Adirondack Coast pt. 2

A personal pleasure craft at one of the many marinas along Lake Champlain * NO click to embiggen

Another look at The Adirondack Coast - quaint B&Bs, strawberry festivals, lakeside dining, and captivating sunsets • click to embiggenAs many of you know, one of my "jobs" involves developing concepts and creating marketing and advertising materials. In my semi-retired state, I have limited my activities almost exclusively to tourism clients, the most notable being the Essex County / Lake Placid Convention & Visitors Bureau.

I have been servicing this client in one capacity or another for the past 8 years. During that time, a trend has become apparent in the industry - one that I strongly disagree with. That trend is a direct result of the web-based "information age". What has happened is that many tourism related marketing entities have been seduced by the web's ability to deliver "information" and that has lead directly to many of them confusing "information" with "story telling". Getting the message out (the ubiquitous, come to our wonderful place) has been relegated to getting the "information" out - a sometimes overwhelming amount of information that fails miserably at telling the story of a place.

In fact, too much information can often work against telling the story of a place - it can overwhelm and confuse, which ultimately destroys any notion of romance and desire. IMO, creating an irresistible feeling of romance / intrigue / uniqueness about a place is the prerequisite to instilling the desire to visit it.

What is strange about this trend is that many tourism marketing entities recognize without reservation, the value of PR (public relations) in the form of media articles - travel magazines, special interest publications, newsprint travel sections, radio / television features, etc., all of which are engaged in story telling. And, like Pavlov's dogs, the readers who encounter this story telling set the phones a-ringing and the websites a-clicking.

The conclusion is glaringly obvious - story telling works. The printed word (and pictures) is far from dead (as the web gurus would have you believe). The printed word and pictures can seduce and romance in a way that the web simply can't touch.

The web is a virtual, transient, and "cold" experience - turn the computer off and it's gone. Printed words / pictures have a tactile permanence and warmth - put it on the coffee table, take to the toilet, rip out a page and put it on the refrigerator door, take it to bed and fall asleep with visions of, in our case, majestic mountains and lakes or quaint early American lakeside villages, dancing in your head.

And, as an added bonus, unless you need to upgrade your eyewear prescription, everyone will see the printed / pictures exactly as was intended. There is no need to upgrade to the newest Flash, Firefox, Safari, Quicktime, etc., etc., etc., in order to view the content.

Now, I am not demeaning the web for what it does best - deliver information. What I am suggesting is that a balance needs to be arrived at that utilizes the best of what each medium can deliver - something that many have lost sight of in the "imformation age".

FYI; relative to the part of the above, it seems that those of you who are using less than the latest update of IE are missing part of the show here. Updating on home computers shouldn't be an issue. For those of you visiting from work-based computers, I guess you'll have to convince the System Administrator to get on the stick and get everyone up to date. Good luck.

and BTW, here's a tourism story about me. It's short and sweet and, for something so short, it is filled with inaccuracies - I rocket down the new combined track - bobsled, skeleton, luge - from the halfway point (10 stories, not 20). If I were to drop from the top (20 stories) and survived, I would be hitting speeds approaching 90 mph.