European Cities Marketing Annual Conference and General Assembly will be held from 9th to 12th June in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The seminar theme is a must for tourism professionals, entitled ‘Social Media – a hot topic, but does it really deliver visitors and revenue for city tourist organisations and convention bureaux’? The potential to interact with customers is huge, and over the past two years social media have become a vital part of our communications and marketing activities. The seminar will consider best practice from all over the globe and from within the network, to determine whether or not social media really do convert into new visitors for the destination and increased income for the city tourist office and convention bureau.
Camilla Nyman, Director Business Development , Göteborg & Co, tells us more about the seminar, which she is co-chairing with her colleague Ossian Stiernstrand, Director Research and Development, Göteborg & Co.
Why the topic of social media?
This is a topic that is of concern to all of us, an exciting new world with high potential. Social media have brought a completely revolutionary way to talk to our clients, it doesn’t matter if you are a tourist office or a convention bureau, it goes through all the units. The overall objective is not only to discuss social media, but the link to online marketing and sales. These trends strongly affect us as destinations and our commercialising habits. . .
What was your main objective when preparing the seminar content?
Most importantly, we wanted to look at social media from a destination point of view, a new dimension. We don’t want to repeat that it is an important topic, we don’t want to talk about how to use Facebook or Twitter, we want to discuss how to use social media in our business. The majority of us have been using social media for quite some time; now we should talk about how we can convert social media into commercial business. In Turku we asked for input from our fellow ECM members about their expectations. I believe we were able to come up with interesting and highly relevant content.
Can you give us a hint of the seminar content?
We can look forward to what we hope are very inspiring and exciting presentations – Vancouver is a great example of using a blog to drive and commercialise the traffic around the Olympic Games. We have invited a representative of one of the key players – Google, who will give us some tips on how a destination can be more successful with search engines. And then of course, we are proud and delighted to have examples from our own family. There are several ECM member cities that are going to share their experience and best practice of social media with us. Participants can already look forward to the case studies of Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Valencia.
The structure/form of the seminar is a little bit different this time – a panel debate rather than break out sessions. Why have you opted for this approach?
Simply because it is an overall issue relevant to all tourism sectors and combined with the results of the survey that’s being conducted by the Research & Statistics group the panel debate will hopefully create a forum where experiences from the earlier sessions together with the status in the European cities can be discussed and evaluated – and who knows, some creative new ideas might come up by the end of the day.
In your view, what is the future of social media in tourism?
It is a challenging and fascinating world and we still have a lot to learn. You can have direct contact with your clients and target your promotion and business in a much more efficient way. Social media is definitely here to stay.
