Telling our story

I’ve been thinking about the media we can employ to communicate our ideas and the form we want our feature to take. With regards to Myvawny’s suggestion about gearing the feature towards the travelers themselves, I’m for it all the way. I think this approach will give our project more momentum; when we decide on something, at the back of our minds we should consider the question ‘Would your average tech-savvy 21^st century traveller want to read this? Would they benefit from it?’ In that vein we could write cheeky articles like ’10 Biggest Mistakes First-Time Back-Packers Make,’ or get a veteran traveller to guest write a post to divulge their years of hard won wisdom. 

It's supposed to look like luggage.

Some possible ways we could utilise video: as we discussed, we could find a couch surfer who is coming down to Sydney and document their experience – from how they got connected to their host and how what the host and guest felt about the whole experiment. We could talk to other people who are involved in the scene – I have an acquaintance that is a serial couch host (not sure what the nomenclature is). She can give us frank insights into the good, bad and very ugly side of this sub-culture and how social media has made this whole thing possible. As a whim, I’m also thinking of doing a short 30-second video about social media and how truly revolutionary it is. It’ll be done in the style of those 1920’s newsreels where they would talk about amazing new technology like the automobile or the toaster. 

An example of said newsreels.

Another thing we could do is use social media itself to tell our story. Perhaps we could start hash tags like #travellerstips or #travellinghorrorstories or #bestadventureever.  Maybe a Facebook page, where we invite people to share their stories and even engage in real time dialogue with our audience. 

Going forward, there's really lot we could do that is within our reach. And I'm pretty stoked to see what we can create.