The social side of WTM Latin America

By Mark Frary

Anyone who read our recent WTM Social Media country report on Brazil will know just how important social media is in Brazil, where I have been this week for the first ever WTM Latin America in Sao Paulo. The event has been busy and buzzy and, if the attendance at the various conference sessions I have been running here are anything to go by, there is a keen desire to learn more.

At the WTM Vision conference session, Euromonitor’s Lisandra Minussi underlined the importance of social media in Brazil. She said that the country was the fifth most internet-connected country in the world. Broadband penetration is expected to reach 25% by 2015. Minussi told a packed room, “Brazilian consumers trust social media posts from friends and family about brands.”

Hidden Pousadas’ chief executive Alison McGowan shared her compelling story of how the company had become one of the biggest proponents of social media in Brazilian tourism.

Greg Brand, creative director of travel video agency Travizeo, shared with a room of destination marketing organisations (DMOs) practical tips about using the world’s second biggest search engine – video platform YouTube – to promote themselves. Recent research from Experian Hitwise shared during the session revealed the growing number of visits to video sites such as YouTube which end up on a transactional site. Travizeo’s Brand showed those present how they could make sure that that final destination site was the country’s own.

Facebook’s client partner for travel in Brazil, Joao Carlos Pastore Chieregati shared a platform with Hotel Urbano, one of the country’s most socially successful travel brands, in a packed session on how travel brands could work with the world’s - and Brazil’s - most popular social platform.

The online travel agent’s chief marketing officer Roberta Oliveira shared with the audience how it had worked with Facebook to achieve a fan base of more than 6 million people with an impressive level of engagement. Pastore also shared his thoughts on the social network’s most recent developments – Newsfeed and Graph Search.

Many of the more than 1,200 exhibitors at the show showed their social side too. Event partner Germany was promoting its youth campaign HotSpots which relies heavily on sharing tips for cool places via apps.

Canada, which had a big presence at the show, proudly displayed its Twitter handle and hashtag on its stand where others relied on “old-fashioned” website addresses.

User-generated review site TripAdvisor also had a high profile presence at the show, including its mascot Ollie the Owl. Here’s me pictured with the old bird, discussing the prevalence or otherwise of fake reviews.

Lisandra Minussi (Euromonitor); Alison McGowan (Hidden Pousadas Brazil), Mark Frary (Travel Perspective), and Micaela Juarez (WTM)

The show was also attended by an impressive number of travel bloggers from around the world as well as from Brazil itself. The appetite among destination marketing organisations from the region to work more closely with bloggers was a refreshing change.