Food for Thought
Online communication has become the driving force behind share of mind, and share of wallet. Advances in manufacturing, communications, computer technology, and processing power brought us this brilliant reinvention of our world, and have fundamentally transformed our lives. But the question remains: in this new age, what role will digital smarts play in community development, and by extension, good growth of a town?
Google Street View Is Helping Tour Guides Go Virtual
Just published last April, a month after the pandemic was well underway, an article by the title above, Google has revealed how its Street View app has been letting tour guides work virtually during the COVID-19 lockdown. And it’s not just tour guides who are turning to virtual tourism at the moment, but also travel agents, tourism bureaus and travel guides.
Google published an interview with Katie Wignall, who in normal times is an experienced and accredited tour guide operating in London. Unsurprisingly, she’s been unable to offer physical tours through London’s streets since March 24th of 2020, when the U.K. government instituted a nationwide lockdown. After receiving queries about virtual tours on Instagram, Katie had the idea of using Street View to show people around Britain’s capital city. “So now, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday … I use Street View to give a virtual tour on Instagram Live,” she says.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that Google Street View tours are mostly a novelty people are turning to during a period of inactivity and boredom. Far from it! Indeed, virtual tours have exploded since the coronavirus outbreak, and not just on Google Street View.
Basically, any nation, city or company that wants visitors has turned to virtual reality or digital technology in some capacity. It has a direct impact on businesses within that town – often making the difference between success and failure.
Destination marketing organizations (DMO’s), are publicly funded organizations tasked with spurring their local tourism industries. (BRIGET is a hybrid DMO, the new breed of community marketing enterprises for small towns). The use of maps is increasingly about exploring a destination before you make a decision to go there. There is no better tool to help that process than Google’s Street View platform. In other words, using maps is increasingly about exploring a destination before you make a decision to go there.
Up until about 2018, 99 percent of DMO’s didn’t have a role on that platform, because the only way Street View imagery could be created was through Google. Now, with equipment and expertise, the DMO can capture up-to-date Street View images and post them directly to Google Maps at any time. However, just like using any camera, there’s a difference between having the ability to capture 360 images and achieving the quality of imagery that best represents the destination. Part of what we do here at BRIGET is to add virtual tours and Street View to help destinations tell their stories and bring in more visitors.
Something very similar is being done by Trip Advisor, which started a “#RoamFromHome” virtual travel campaign. It’s currently offering over 100 experiences as part of this campaign.
Things will get back to normal, but we know that Google Street View tours and other kinds of virtual tourism are already firmly established. In fact, Instagram has become the purveyor of the intangible – conveying dreams of new towns, wistful elements of a vacation, and picturesque cobblestone streets.
So, to paraphrase our opening sentence: Online visual communication has become the driving force behind share of mind, and share of wallet, for growing towns. This is exactly the kind of experience that BRIGET curates brilliantly and diligently: Engaging experiences that enhance and amplify all of the good parts of small town life.
