This week on Twitter at 9 – 10 pm (UK time), we’ll be discussing Walks, Trails and Climbs.  The six questions we’ll be posing are:

1.       Which is your favourite long distance path & have you walked it all? (9pm)

2.       Share a great easy walk for families and kids in your area (9.10pm)

3.       Recommend a walk accessible from a town/city via public transport (9.20pm)

4.       Climbing in Scotland – where to start and what do you recommend? (9.30pm)

5.       Nature & forest trails – which would you recommend and why? (9.40pm)

6. What’s your favourite city walk or walking tour? (9.50pm)

To participate:

• Remember to start your answer A1… A2, etc so that we can group answers together to provide useful information for potential visitors
• Use tag #ScotlandHour in your Tweet
• Answer the six questions sharing information about your area, or another area of Scotland you know well
• Interact with other participants by asking questions or commenting on their suggestions
• Keep it upbeat and positive – we’re reaching out to potential visitors to Scotland
• After the hour, check the stories we create (links will be posted by the hosts on Twitter and on the Facebook page)
• Follow others you meet during ScotlandHour – they all share an interest in Scotland

Your hosts are: Douglas Baird @BairdTravels, Aileen Lamb @AileenLamb, Lesley Judge @LesleyJudge,  Mark Calpin @HIEHamilton, Fiona Drane @FionaDrane and Susan McNaughton, @SusanMcNaughton and there is an @ScotlandHour account to follow too.  All the hosts will be Tweeting out the questions for you to answer.

If you enjoy joining in ScotlandHour, we’d love it if you used the information you found here to write blog posts for visitors to find and help to share the varied types of holiday, short break or day trip – remember to share them with us so that we can pass the information to our visitors too!

For those who are coming along to the ScotlandHour Tweetup(details), look forward to meeting you @29Studios from 7:30 pm.  It will be fun interacting and “live tweeting” on the night.

It was a delight to receive an email after ScotlandHour February 2013 asking me to share some insights about our regular monthly chat as the writer had been thinking about using “Twitter parties” for their destination.  What was even more exciting (for me at least) was that this email had come from Ontario, Canada.

While we know that ScotlandHour has started to meet its aim to engage people outwith our country, it’s great to see that we have been attracting attention from a place where many of Scotland’s tourists originate.

The email posed these questions:

• What type of engagement do you usually see?
• Do you offer prizing?
• Do participants RSVP in advance?
• What do you feel the benefits have been to having ScotlandHour

What type of engagement do you usually see?

In the early days of ScotlandHour, we asked people to share by means of re-Tweeting (RT) the times and date of the regular chat in order to make sure as many people as possible were around at the right time.  We followed this up by creating an annual calendar for 2012 and 2013 with themes for each month, and in 2013 have been experimenting with a new format of question and answer similar to the TTOT (Travel Talk on Twitter) chat run by TravelDudes.

During the hour-long chat, we see hundreds of people joining in, creating thousands of Tweets around the theme, leading to millions of impressions (number of Tweets created x number of followers for each user participating).  We also see a good amount of people talking about participating in the days and hours leading up to the chat, and also using the tag to ask questions at other times.  Our February 2013 chat results have been measured using Tweet-Tag.com.

We have wrestled with the question of measurement of our success – setting a baseline, and finding ways to have meaningful measures for the chat.  The issue is around this being a crowd-sourced chat started by individuals, rather than being one which is guided by a single business or funded governmental body.  We have been using free tools to monitor the chat, and the problem with “free” is that the cost is that they may not work consistently.  Paid for tools may be the way to go, and if this is the case, then we’ll need some sponsorship to cover the expenses of that.  We will need to look at this if we want to be able to publish reliable stats about the successes of ScotlandHour.

Do you offer prizing?

During the first few months of the ScotlandHour chats, some of the participants put up prizes to help publicise their businesses, and as an incentive to encourage more people to join in.  This was spontaneous and caused one or two problems for the hosts.  The pace of the chat is fast and furious, and it’s not easy to capture all the Tweets to select those which merit a prize.  To be honest, we found the offering of prizes unnecessary and rather a pain to manage.  Once people got used to the idea of a regular monthly chat, there wasn’t a real need to have prizes to encourage people to join in.  They join in because of the opportunity to share their knowledge about their area, and as a chance to meet others who are in the local area, or who are thinking of travelling to the area.

Do participants RSVP in advance?

For our early chats, we used Twtvite to invite participants to sign up to signify their attendance (you can see the invites we set up if you search for the tag “#ScotlandHour” on the site).  This became less necessary as time went on, and was really just an extra administrative chore which was replaced by having a regular calendar which people could refer to.

The hosts of ScotlandHour who have blogs (the ScotlandHour site run by our founder, Douglas Baird, Lesley Judge’s Smart Tourism site and this one)  use their blogs to write articles to help spread the word and provide a resource for new people to find out how to join in.  We’ve  also established a Facebook Page for ScotlandHour and have set up a Twitter account.

So, we no longer ask participants to RSVP, as we have an established calendar.  However, we do still have work to do to publicise the existence of the chat so that we get as many people as possible joining in.  The hosts Douglas Baird, Lesley Judge, Aileen Lamb, Mark Calpin, Fiona Drane and Susan McNaughton all mention the chat at tourism conferences and workshops, as well as reminding their followers on Twitter that the chat is coming up.

What do you feel the benefits have been to having ScotlandHour?

• It brings people in Scottish tourism and tourism-related businesses (such as shops, restaurants and cafés) together once a month to share their enthusiasm.
• People don’t need to travel to a meeting to network, they do it on Twitter.
• There is a regular time and a theme, so people can prepare.
• The content generated by Tweets using the tag ScotlandHour helps encourage visits to websites for the businesses.
• People who are thinking about visiting the country can find out about who the locals in their area of interest are and they can ask questions.
• New business relationships are being forged as people get to know one another better.
• Having a structure for the chats leads to people thinking about the monthly subject and can help them plan blog posts, share photographs and create content.
• The hosts are going to be recognised by the Scottish Parliament for their work in starting this initiative, which may lead to more publicity and more people joining in.
• It’s a way for individuals to demonstrate their knowledge of an area and a subject.
• There is vast potential in getting real people in small businesses together to tell their stories.
• It’s not run for the benefit of any one business or organisation, but is a shared effort.
• It’s fun!

Thanks for reading, and do let me know by commenting below if you have any good stories to add about how ScotlandHour has helped your business, or helped you connect with someone for your journey to Scotland.