PhillipDade.com

I have spent a considerable amount of time over the last few days thinking of the benefits that can be gained by incorporating Social Media into a resort marketing strategy. In my previous role, I was responsible for web development within the Public Sector tourism industry at Local Authority level; and regularly found that budget constraints impacted heavily on resort marketing.

Great Yarmouth Tourism’s website is becoming an ever popular tool in the dissemination of resort marketing information. The resort’s website now offers a digital brochure, online booking, undertakes private sector e-marketing campaigns and also have a Destination Management System in operation.

When I attended the “Building the Perfect Council Website”, the SOCITM Better Connected Reviewers were advising that they are now looking for the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies into Local Authority websites. The incorporation of these services will provide benefits to both parties, however thought will need to be given to potential privacy and security concerns with some of the services. None of the services listed below are resource intensive and could work well with, and complement other form of viral marketing.

Twitter, can be used to update current and potential visitors on events and activities taking place in the town at no cost. At present, this service doesn’t cost the follower or the information provider. The user can only receive this information if the have a Twitter account and are “following” your account.

Google/Yahoo/Windows Live Calendars could be used to provide dates of events in a publicly accessible calendar. I, personally am an heavy user of Google Calendar and expect this could be a very popular service.

Developing an online presence within the Social Networking world could reap huge benefits. Facebook has a user base of over 80 million, when combining this with MySpace and Bebo, you have an attractive and engaging audience.

Instead of offering only telephone and face to face communication within the Tourist Information Centre, why not offer Instant Messaging and/or Online Live Chat? The vast majority of new phones provide IM services as standard and the cost of data packages with competing mobile telephony service providers is continually falling. IM communication can be used prior to visits, en-route and whilst in the caravan or sitting on the beach. You have no automated phone service or TIC queue and the accumulation of completed queries through short message exchange could support the service in terms of LA Performance Indicators.

Services as such as Woopra provide analytics and statistical tools, whilst also enabling you to commence dialogue with visitors. Crafty Syntax is an Open Source MySQL/PHP application that is available free of charge and is licensed via GPL.

Why not set up a blog for the resort? Wordpress and Movable Type provide a hosted application that can be customised to your requirements. Both offer plugins to enhance your services, some of which enhance SEO and other key services that are already built or expansion through third parties i.e. YouTube and Flickr.

The vast majority of these service providers offer API’s or other methods to enable developers to integrate their services into websites.