I’ve just returned from Kuching where we ran a Digital Marketing Bootcamp for the travel trade. The objective was to basically arm industry players with information and knowledge of how to make their business, and their destination, easily discoverable in the digital world.
If you’ve been to Kuching, you’ll know it’s a pretty laidback place – more laid than back – and time flows as slowly there as the Sarawak River. There’s not been much haste or urgency in wanting to connect to the world out there but you can sense the tide changing.
There’s definitely a hunger to learn among a younger generation who are entering tourism.
The group of about 80, representing hoteliers, tour operators/travel agents and tourism board officials, listened attentively, took notes, participated in breakout sessions, worked on problems and presented their solutions.
Because we wanted the event to meet their needs, we made it an Unconference – ie they set the agenda, they tell us what they want to learn and we tried to work through the exercise together so that at the end we would have a collective outcome.
It was challenging – you have to think very quickly on your feet – but exhilarating. Everyone who stayed felt a sense of purpose in wanting to arrive at the end point.
There was one thing I noticed though. Even though the event was all about digital, I didn’t see anyone in the audience fiddling with their smartphone or typing on their laptop throughout the day. They only did that during the breaks.
Now I am not so delusional to believe it was because we so captured their attention but thinking about it, I wondered if perhaps people in Kuching were just better-mannered or that they just weren’t as addicted to their devices as we in big urban cities seem to be.
Or perhaps they just didn’t assume it was okay to multi-task like most of us do these days, even when we are in the company of others. It seems normal to be sitting around dinner nowadays and have everyone looking down at their mobile phones instead of talking to each other. That would have been considered rude once, but today because everyone’s doing it, everyone assumes it’s okay to do it. And I dread to think how this social behaviour will change when smart watches become mainstream – imagine people looking at their watches all the time you’re talking to them.
One of the breakout groups at the Digital Marketing Bootcamp
I don’t believe I was particularly conscious about this at the time but I definitely felt a different energy in running this event – it was like everyone was paying full attention and being fully engaged unlike other conferences where people are always tapping away at something or other, or looking at their devices.
Discussing this with Robert Basiuk who runs Borneo Adventure, who’s more at home on dirt treks than the web, he says, “There seems to be this need to do everything instantly – could that email be so important that you have to look at it now? And do you have to respond to it immediately? When you do that, it raises the other person’s expectations as well, so next time they expect an immediate reply.”
As he said it – we were having dinner at a restaurant called See Good where the food is too good to just see, and not eat – I looked around and two of my friends (not from Kuching) were looking down at their mobile. One (from Kuching) was playing Words With Friends.
One of them (not from Kuching) looked at me looking at him and asked me, “Do you want my hot spot?”
Ah, how I miss the days of actually talking to someone who’s not talking to someone else and when “hot spot” meant something interesting you might want to explore in a man.
