Minehead Farmer's Market
The biggest problem facing tourism in Minehead in West Somerset is the level of ‘electronic buzz’ that is generated online about the benefits of coming to West Somerset.
Quite simply, if we increased the amount of comment and discussion about the benefits of coming to Minehead and West Somerset tenfold, we would get more people visiting us here.
This electronic buzz may involve people talking to each other online, generating information online and making links to each other online or it may involve informational articles.
In any open open space, and the Internet is a virtual space, if several people start talking to each other, the rest will join in. In Minehead and West Somerset’s case, ‘the rest’ means ‘the world’.
If one person shouts, few listen. If one hundred people shout, it’s heard miles away. If a thousand people shout, the world listens .
The more people in Minehead and West Somerset talk to each other online, the more links will be made with each other; the more messages will be created; the more solutions will be found and the more interest will be attracted from people outside Minehead and West Somerset both to join in the conversations and to visit Minehead and West Somerset.
This isn’t just a theory. My brother has a hotel in Bournemouth and I have successfully increased his turnover throughout the Winter (of all times) by raising his profile online, despite the recession. Increasing tourism is easy. It just involves writing lots of stuff about what your tourism target audience wants to read about the area.
The ideal form of communication is like a cobweb where every ‘node’ is capable of talking to each other node. Successful methods of communication can be blogs or online forums – one way communication in the form of static sites just doesn’t work. (How many people like other people ‘talking at them’?) Engaging in a conversation is much more polite and engaging.
Of course, having better things for people to see and do when they come to Minehead and West Somerset is important but it doesn’t matter how many new facilities are here if potential tourists don’t know about the wonders of what is already available.
If you want to regenerate tourism in West Somerset, start by giving the many writers in West Somerset an incentive to write stuff online about West Somerset. Writers come cheap – we are all poor. It is also very labour intensive so needs to involve lots of writers – one won’t do. Each writer you get involved helps regenerate West Somerset by giving the writer work.
Writers can write interesting articles about just about anything so why not get them writing about the artists, sculptors, woodworkers, millers, traditions and history of Minehead and West Somerset … The list of subjects about which writers can write really is endless.
Of course, there is already a lot of this information about Minehead and West Somerset online already – but more is more and we want more tourism, don’t we?
The key to making a lot of electronic noise is getting the greatest number of writers possible involved so they all shout together.
If you select just one writer through one site and the writer writes about Minehead and West Somerset, there will be an increase in West Somerset’s profile but a small one and it will hardly be noticed.
If you get all the writers in Minehead and West Somerset writing about West Somerset and talking together, the amount of extra noise online would be considerable.
All this is not rocket science or even something I have invented. It is called Web 2.0 and you can find lots of discussion and information about it all over the Web. It is immensely powerful.
Increasing tourism in Minehead and West Somerset is easy. The method I am suggesting would also regenerate other industries in Minehead and West Somerset such as writers directly but would also benefit a lot of other micro-businesses with low visibility who work from home such as artists, wood carvers etc.
Naturally, the Minehead and West Somerset hotels, guest houses and other residential establishments would benefit directly from the increase in visitors who would be attracted to Minehead and West Somerset by its vibrant and innovative personality.
Getting people to talk online and in public to generate more publicity is the key to benefiting tourism in Minehead and West Somerset.
Agree? Disagree? You are welcome to talk to me and anybody else who cares to join in on any of my www.hopcott.net sites. I look forward to hearing from you.
The prospect of scarce, expensive oil in the future is daunting, but Somerset is one of the counties leading the way in dealing with this and the major issue of climate change. 
