2 Social Media Storytelling for Sustainable Destination Campaigns

 2 Social Media Storytelling for Sustainable Destination Campaigns

The Monograph as Textbook

The monograph Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding: Urban Place Writing Methodologies was created from research and the teaching of travel writing at tourism and business schools across Europe. The authors, Dr Charlie Mansfield and Dr Jasna Potočnik Topler, are grateful for the praise and the numerous expressions of gratitude received from teachers and practitioners since the publication of the book at the beginning of 2023. Nevertheless, they wanted to further explain and facilitate certain processes, approaches, and questions to enhance the planning of lessons or practical tasks. Therefore, they have compiled a collection of additional tools and resources. This handbook therefore aims to be additional support in teaching travel writing methodologies and in making advances in the methodology of dialogue as research.

 

Every place, city or a tourism destination is a complex system that needs to be understood, branded and managed as such. It is essential to emphasise that each destination has its characteristics associated with geographical location, culture, and history, which should be considered in destination marketing and the design of tourism products. It is also crucial to be aware of the existence of various stakeholders at the destination and invite their collaboration. The authors primarily aim to encourage creativity, engagement with these stakeholders, and the use of the proposed didactic methods in tourism and management studies.

About the Storytelling Teaching Pack

In this Storytelling Teaching Pack, we show you how to build a storytelling campaign on social media for tourism destinations. The study pack is for lecturers in tourism management and for lecturers in English who want to add place-making to their teaching. The students will learn to research and write narrative non-fiction. The pack can be useful for learners on their own but is written as if a class of students were pursuing the same module. We are making the pack to respond to the requests to provide a teacher’s route through the material of our textbook, published by Routledge (Taylor & Francis) Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding. The pack also helps lecturers focus on adding the following topics to their teaching: social media, content authoring and marketing, place-making and sustainable tourism design.  

The teaching and learning use the Microsoft platform called MS OneNote. We have made a notebook for this which is structured with sections and has templates for the notebook pages.

1.    Installing our Process Model as an MS OneNote Notebook

 

First, here is the installation guide for our model notebook with its page templates in MS OneNote. Microsoft provides a method for sharing complete Notebooks in zip file format. We have made our Notebook available as PROCESS.zip for you to download from our website Toureme, here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Z423NoObEHWnghKlPhlfNHcUTcHJ5HBT

On that web page, please scroll down to find and open the Google Drive folder called MS-ONENOTE-ZIP and download both files in there to your laptop’s download’s folder. Please unzip the file PROCESS.zip and locate the unzipped folder on your computer. This unzipping and installing cannot be done on phone or tablet. Once it is installed on your main computer, though, you can access the Process notebook with an App on your mobile devices.

Next, please make sure you are logged-in to your Microsoft account. At most universities your everyday login also logs you into your Microsoft account. OneNote is part of the Microsoft 365 suite of Apps. Then you can import our notebook with its section and page design, using this Import link:

Import Link for Unzipped Notebook https://www.onenote.com/notebooks/exportimport?auth=1&toImport=true

 

Note Containers in Microsoft’s Notebook Pages

Within each notebook page, you type or paste your journaling notes into Note Containers; they are rather like the cells in tables. The pale bar along the top of the frame, labelled 1 in the picture below, is the move handle. The arrow labelled 2 is the sizing handle.

An MS OneNote Note Container

 

We have designed the width of the Note Containers for our templates to be phone friendly for you and your students.

Please see our design for our Dialogue Note Container, below:

In this Note Container pose questions to your group and they will question you.

 

You will need to store page templates from the example pages in each of the three sections so that the function +Add Page, adds one of these empty dialogue journaling pages rather than a blank page. The best way to see how to store our page templates within your notebook sections is to type the word Template up in the Search box at the very top of the screen on your PC or laptop, like this screenshot detail from OneNote below:

Please select the Action: Page Templates and follow Microsoft’s instructions on-screen.

When you have stored the templates for pages in each of the three sections, you can begin to add your students and any external people who are going to contribute to the project or class. Under the File option, find the Notebook that you want to share and select ‘Invite people to this notebook’, like this:

 

             

Set the notebook to be a Class Notebook and add participants by using their email addresses. Students’ emails in many universities are also their Microsoft emails so these work well in OneNote.

Reading Section on Journaling

We used Microsoft OneNote as we researched and wrote the travel writing for tourism book. We have also used this platform with groups of students to bring them into live dialogue with tourism stakeholders.   

 

pp.74-76

Reading for Journaling Section: Pages 74-76 give you a clear idea of how and when to do journaling. These pages explain memory and journaling. In Table 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 we show the layout of the card file box or Zettelkasten.

 

Pages 74, 75 and 76 (print edition) show you and your students when to do journaling. We show our tried and tested design using an online card-filing system of notes. We have designed specific note containers to stimulate and store dialogue with others. In a university class, you already have peer groups who can engage in dialogue. The lecturer, in their teaching role can join in the dialogue, of course, to explain, to act as an animateur, and even give formative assessment for all participants to share   This is why we extended our design into page templates and a 3-section notebook structure to use in MS OneNote. If you set up what Microsoft calls a PLC Notebook, then everyone in the class can be given write-access. When you have found external stakeholders, and we found a local museum in one of our teaching modules, then they can also be given write-access to the OneNote Notebook. This is very exciting to work together on a written archive of sustainability solutions with professionals from heritage management, from visitor attractions and from local hospitality businesses.

When you have finished reading those three pages, please turn to pages 94, 95 and 96 to look at the designs for our MS OneNote knowledge management system. For the lecturer, it is useful to set up this format with our templates before the teaching starts so that the learners can see the live version on their university server.  All our icon designs, with transparent backgrounds, are also free to download and re-use from a Google Drive folder on that webpage on our website Toureme TKT, at this address:

https://sites.google.com/site/touremetkt/home/process?authuser=0

 

SIMPLIFIED SECTION NAME	Description of Step within the Dialogue Journaling Process
1. LIBRARY	1 Deep-mapping and Route Design
2. FIELD	2 Fieldwork
3. LAB	3 Recounting the travel story

Please cite the Teaching Pack using this Reference to meet the Creative Commons 'By' Requirements:

Potočnik Topler, J. & Mansfield, C. (2024). Social Media Storytelling for Sustainable Destination Campaigns:  A teaching companion with instructor resources. Totnes: Travel Writers Online. ISBN 9781838096458

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