A great idea this – a photo contest to highlight the effects of climate change on the Mekong Delta, also known as Ricebowl of Vietnam because of the huge amount of food it produces.
So if you’ve been to the Delta recently and taken any relevant pics, visit the competition website and upload them!
Thanks to Thomas Wanhoff for the link.
Thanks to my fellow blogger Thomas Wanhoff for sharing this (on Facebook) – a great internet marketing campaign from the Icelandic Tourist Board, showing that you don’t have to spend loads of money to come up with effective tourism marketing (which is just as well because as we all know, Iceland doesn’t have any money!).
It’s simple, friendly, engaging, unintrusive and interactive – everything that good social media campaigns should be. And it even has the brilliant Olafur Arnalds on the soundtrack. Takk, Iceland!
I woke up this morning to find that Google Buzz had landed in my inbox. After spending half the morning playing around with it, it would seem to be a hybrid of the Facebook status update and Twitter, combining the best bits of both, and leaving out the worst (ie no character limit, and no Farmville updates). It’s certainly a more impressive first day than Google Wave.
But I’ve noticed it’s currently missing a few features that would make it even more useful:
1. Integration with Twitter & Facebook
Goes without saying this one – I don’t want to have to post a link or update my status in 2 different interfaces. And being able to display selected Facebook & Twitter updates in Google Buzz would be great from a business perspective – most of our customers don’t use Twitter, and I have a policy of not befriending customers on Facebook (my postings aren’t always good for business!), but nearly all of them have Gmail accounts, so Buzz is potentially a great way of talking to our customer base.
2. Integration with Third Party Apps
Twitter’s amazing growth in the last couple of years has largely been down to the huge number of developer apps (such as Tweetdeck, which I use), enabling people to tweet from multiple accounts, add photos and integrate Twitter with other social media sites such as Facebook & Friendfeed, all from one interface. Does anybody actually go to twitter.com any more?
Hopefully it won’t be long before I can update Buzz via Tweetdeck.
3. Auto-follow
I have several hundred contacts in my Gmail address book – it would be nice if I had an option of just following all of them and then unfollowing those I don’t want to see, rather than having to trawl through them all and add individuals. It would also be useful to auto-follow any new contacts that are added, and to import followees from Facebook, Twitter & Yahoo Mail. Maybe this is already possible, but if it is, Google haven’t made it very obvious!
4. Google Earth/Maps integration
Particularly useful from a tour operator point of view, being able to add a Google Earth/Maps reference/snapshot of whatever destination I happen to be talking about, without having to log into Maps/Earth in a separate screen & do a copy/paste job.
5. Integration with Google Translate
…for when Thomas Wanhoff posts status updates in German! But seriously, automatic status translation would be a real boon and would allow me to follow a lot more people, and would also allow my postings to be read by many others. We also sell to the French market, and I don’t have time to write each update out in two languages.
What features would you like to see in Buzz?
This morning’s Tweetdeck feed threw up a link to a new campaign called Exciting Saigon. Or it might be Exciting Ho Chi Minh City, they don’t seem too sure themselves. What initially appears to be some welcome destination marketing for our city is, in reality, further evidence of how out of touch the locals are when it comes to marketing to tourists and expats.
Glossing over the landing page, with a logo that looks like it was designed on a ZX Spectrum and a mis-spelling of Ho Chi Minh City, and the generally non-existent proofreading, the campaign limits itself to the same old venues that have been appearing in guidebooks and tourism magazines since 2002 at least, when I first visited.
The restaurant list contains only a handful of local tourist restaurants – no fine dining, no international cuisine, no hotel restaurants, no hidden Vietnamese gems. While the entertainment list just contains hotel bars, water puppetry, and a couple of local nightclubs. NONE of the city’s popular watering holes get a mention.
Saigon does need destination marketing to improve its image, but a list of the same old tired venues that could have been put together at any time in the last 7 years is not it!
My fellow blogger Thomas Wanhoff has already given his thoughts, now let’s hear yours!
Thanks to fellow Saigon blogger Thomas Wanhoff for this little gem – Mashable’s guide to using social media for planning your trip. One glaring omission is a relatively new site called Localyte, which puts travellers in touch with local destination experts.
HOW TO: Use Social Media for Travel Research (Mashable)
