Tourism Australia: Can Social Media Attract Visitors?

Jun 1, 2009

Last week I met Nick Baker of Tourism Australia who gave a great presentation at the Asian Marketing Effectiveness awards about how Tourism Australia uses media and social media to attract visitors to the country. (Disclosure: Tourism Australia is an Ogilvy client for some Social Media work.)

Some catching ideas:

Australia, the movie
One of my favorite moments was when a member of the audience asked Nick whether Tourism Australia was concerned about spending so much money on teaming up with the film when they did not know if it would be a critical success. (It was not a critical success). Baker said they didn’t mind because they knew the landscapes and panoramas would look spectacular, no matter what (they did).

Social Media Strategy
In terms of Social Media, various levels of Australian government have been on the bleeding edge of Social Media promotion. Queensland ran a competition for the “The Best Job in the World” to find a blogger and Tourism Australia has one of the highest profile blogger outreach campaigns.

Unlikely choice of blogger
In the below video Nick describes their overview of social media and why they decided to make the unlikely choice of sponsoring a visit by the blogger “The Sartorialist” out to Australia rather than a journalist or travel-related blogger.

Discussion

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View Comments for “Tourism Australia: Can Social Media Attract Visitors?”

adamgollam

Social media has proven to work like magic if you have the know-how. You just need to hire a few professionals and you are on the way to success.
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Ho Chi Minh City Hotels
Melbourne hotels

Social Media promotion is a very good strategy. Can I find the presentation of Nick somewhere?
critic

Wish I'd been there to see his speech. Really don't understand how he can justify the massive investment in the Australia film, seems to me like one of the most highly INeffective examples of marketing in history, did he give any detail on how they were measuring this so-called "success"? Contrast that with the Queensland promotion (done by Nitro Cummins I believe) which has been an AMAZING campaign and I'm sure HIGHLY effective and with a WAY smaller budget. The ironic thing is that if, as I expect it will, the Queensland campaign draws more tourists to Australia then I'm sure Mr Baker will double count and claim those visits as proof that the "Australia" debalce was also successful!
Novocastrian

Partnering with Australia the film was the stupidist decision ever. Much worse than the previous government's 'Where the Bloody Hell are you?' campaign. The film was not only terrible, but didn't present the country or its people in the best light.
James Poulter

Very interesting Thomas - Insightful.

We have been working with the Brazilian tourism board in the UK to think about how they could best approach social media, and through conversation mapping we have spotted some real potential in this.

The question is what kind of role does the tourism board play in these situations - with a clear promotions remit how trustworthy is their "editorial" content going to appear to potential customers/visitors?

A fine line to tread...
JOE LEE

I think New Zealand Toursim is doing great in social media, at least a good start! They had used youtube, twitter and website for some promotion. http://www.tourismnewzealand.c...