Do you know Atlanta like the back of your hand? We’re looking for great tours of the Atlanta region to showcase at the ITMI Symposium in January. Publish a mobile tour of any locations in the Atlanta region on the MyTourGuide website by January 12 and we will feature it with a free 1/4 page promotion in our Atlanta tour catalog. We will be distributing the catalog in Atlanta during the Symposium.
In addition to the exposure your tour will receive through the tour catalog, MyTourGuide is working with the Atlanta CVB to promote mobile tours through the MyTourGuide platform. The CVB reaches over 2.5 million guests via its website alone. With the CVB’s support, we will be able to get your tour into the hands of many potential customers.
Don’t miss this opportunity. Creating a tour is easy at MyTourGuide.com! Here are some potential tour locations to consider:
Stone Mountain
Atlanta Botanical Garden
Neighborhoods: Little Five Points, East Atlanta, Cabbagetown, and Buckhead
Atlanta History Center
Centennial Park
Decatur Square
Chattahoochee River
Grant Park
Marietta Historic District
Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site
Underground Atlanta
Zoo Atlanta
One final suggestion. Keep your tours between 8-12 tour stops with 3-4 minutes of narration at each stop. That will ensure that the time required to download your tour is short and easy for customers to accomplish. Let us know if you have any questions – email us at info@mytourguide.com.
There are approximately 10 million fourth graders in the US. Probably all of them are learning about their home state this year in school. Here in New Hampshire, my kids learned about the unsung hero of the American Revolution, General John Stark, who gave us our motto, “Live Free or Die; Death is not the worst of evils.” Stark happens to be one of my two most beloved historical figures, so I took my kids over to Manchester to see General Stark’s home and the statue to him in the local park. It’s an absolutely perfect example of a tour that should be made. There is next to nothing at these locations to explain the history of the people and places that shaped our state and country. How great would it be to have a tour that complemented what my child was learning in the classroom. It would be great to be able to share a fun day exploring these sites with my kids and learning at the same time. Those kind of experiences create wonderful memories and give so much more meaning to the history the kids are supposed to remember. They’re also the kind of experiences that parents are willing to spend money on!
So here’s some food for thought. Get a hold of the 4th grade history curriculum at your local school and see what they’re learning. Pick some local sites that played an essential role in the state’s history and put together several tours that reinforce the curriculum. I would even consider creating a short quiz that you can attach to your tour as a PDF document (you can do this in the main tour info tab on the tour editor). Add some augmented reality images of famous people and you’ll have the students begging to take the tour! (see the example of Abraham Lincoln below)
Once you have your tour published – contact the local papers and have them do a story about it! Even better – get to know the teacher and see if he/she would mention the tour in the school notes that go home to parents. Now you have a built in audience that gets refreshed every year.
Let me start this blog post with a big thank you! Thank you for your patience during our development process. We are a small team and we have been working around the clock to upgrade the site over the past several months. I am happy to say that the newest version of MyTourGuide is open and ready to use.
One of the biggest differences that you will notice with the new tour editor is the media library. You can use the media library to upload and store your tour content (images, audio files, video, and augmented reality images). You can also use the built-in recording feature to record audio narration to use in your tours. All of your media files will be stored in your media library and can be used in any of your tours. One of my favorite aspects of the new media library is the drag and drop feature – If you want to add content to your tour, simply drag and drop any piece of content from your library onto your POIs or stories and it will become part of the tour.
The second thing I would like to do is to ask a favor. If you previously created tours on the site using our first version of the tour editor, I would like to request that you inspect the text description fields of your tours. When we imported your tours and their contents into the new tour editor, some text descriptions were imported with extra HTML text. You can delete any text that does not belong in the text descriptions of your tours or points of interest. I apologize for this hassle.
We are currently doing the final testing of the iPhone app this week and are shooting for Friday to submit it to Apple. Once the iPhone app is approved, we will officially be open for business. Between then and now, the website is open and available for you to develop tours, but it will not be possible to download tours until our app is officially approved by Apple. When we receive the official approval, we will enable downloads from the website and through the iPhone app.
Finally, I will be setting up a series of webinars to assist tour guides with using the new tools available on the web site. The first webinar will be this Friday. I will post the exact time and registration information tomorrow.
Once again, thank you for your patience and I look forward to seeing your tours!
Sincerely,
Paul Davis
