YouTube diaries help promote New Zealand

It wasn’t long ago that we covered the Best Job in the World contest from Australia’s Tourism Queensland, and now another popular destination has appeared on our radar for its own promotional innovation. Specifically, Tourism New Zealand has been using a mobile recording studio to collect international visitors’ impressions of the region and then upload them to YouTube. More than 100,000 people have viewed video “raves” posted on Tourism New Zealand’s Have Your Say channel on YouTube, which now includes more than 1,400 clips of travellers from Australia, the US, UK, Japan, Germany, Canada and beyond expressing their thoughts and feelings about the country. The organization kicked off the effort in December as part of its “What Do You Say, UK?” campaign, focused on promoting word-of-mouth endorsements of the region among British travellers. Since then, Tourism New Zealand has been working closely with regional tourism groups along the way as it sent a fully equipped mobile recording studio—set up in a converted shipping container on the back of a 10-tonne flatbed truck—to about 40 towns around the nation. Within minutes of filming, each video diary is edited and posted on unpaid media channels, including the Have Your Say site and Tourism New Zealand’s consumer website; visitors can also post the videos directly onto their Facebook profile pages. The recording studio’s mobile effort is scheduled to wrap up at the end of this month, after which time Tourism New Zealand will use select raves in future advertising campaigns. Tourism New Zealand Chief Executive George Hickton explains: “Social media is used by people from all walks of life to connect with people back home while they are travelling. Add to this that word-of-mouth is one of the most effective marketing tools to promote a destination, and the 100,000 views milestone shows that the [effort] has really proven its worth.” Indeed, the effectiveness of traditional mass-media ads is already debatable during the best of times, but during a recession? The cost of a mobile studio for a few weeks could seem like a bargain! 😉 Spotted by: airlinetrends.com