World of Mouth: Social media and food tourism

by Mark Frary

I spoke last week at the Flavours of the Silk Road conference in Baku. The conference, organised by the UN’s World Tourism Organization, had as its focus the idea of using the food and drink of the countries of the famous Silk Road – everywhere from Turkey to China via points between including Azerbaijan – to encourage tourists to visit.

The food of the Silk Road is rich and varied: caviar from the Caspian Sea, the rich rice dish plov from Uzbekistan, besbarmark from Kazakhstan, syrupy baklava from Turkey, cheesy khachapuri from Georgia, ash reshteh from Iran and many more besides. No wonder the UNWTO believes that food is the perfect hook for tourists.

Food and social media were made for each other.

First of all, food is highly visual. I challenge you to look at the food and drink section on Pinterest and not want to eat or travel afterwards. Then you have food and travel bloggers like Adam Goldberg of A Life Worth Eating, travelling and sharing his gorgeous food pictures from around the world on Instagram. As Adam says, “Stay tuned, it’s bound to make you hungry.”

Facebook is also getting a more interesting place for people wishing to promote food tourism, thanks to its new timeline design that really lets you show off your best images. Check out what Food Tourism South West Wales is doing on the social network, for example.

Food and drink have complex stories behind them too. Iñaki Gaztelumendi, a UNWTO food tourism consultant, told the conference that anyone wanting to promote food tourism needed to involve everyone in chain of getting ingredients from the field to the table; that means telling the stories of the farmers, the food they grow, how it gets to the table and what the chef does to those ingredients to make something greater than the constituent parts.

Video is the perfect story-telling medium for these stories. I showed this video of Vietnamese food at the conference that did just that. It is by video bloggers Perennial Plate, aka Daniel Klein and ‘cameragal’ Mirra Fine. The video has been seen 300,000 times and was picked up by Huffington Post and the New York Times.

I also showed STA Travel Australia’s Eat video, showing how a simple idea – eating all sorts of traditional food at locations around the world – can create a compelling video.

Twitter lets you create a buzz around food too. Check out what @YorkFoodFest is doing to promote its 10-day-long festival while Tasting Spain is doing a more general promotion of food from all of Spain’s regions.

One thing I talked about was how Word of Mouth was being replaced by World of Mouth. I can’t claim to have coined the phrase – that honour belongs to Erik Qualmann, author of Socialnomics – but I thought it was a particularly apt turn of phrase for the concept of using social media to promote food tourism.

I told delegates that social media is a double-edged sword and showed this through the example of a new restaurant trying to get customers. In the Word of Mouth world, this generally happens slowly because the “amplification” at each stage – the number of people each diner tells – is relatively limited. Social media means that details of a good restaurant – or it could be a street food stand somewhere – happens at an accelerated rate. Great news if you are trying to establish yourself but with the potential downside that you get too popular too quickly, destroying the ambience, service or whatever that brought people there in the first place.

You can see my World of Mouth presentation.