Cape Town: a city that ‘gets’ social media

By Steve Keenan

In 2009, in the run-up to the World Cup, Cape Town Tourism rolled out its first digital tourism marketing strategy. Five years later, the city is now widely recognised as one of the world’s leading destinations when it comes to making best use of digital and social media.

It’s fair to say that one woman spearheaded the far-sighted revolution. In the early part of the millennium, Mariette du Toit-Hembold had pulled together the city’s fragmented tourism industry under one roof - an achievement many destinations still work toward.

And in 2004, at the aged of 28, she became the first CEO of the newly-formed Cape Town Tourism (CTT). The brand has gone on to collect a trophy cabinet of gongs and accolades for its marketing strategy and innovation, including recognition from the UN World Tourism Organisation and US magazine Travel & Leisure (#SMITTY award for best overall use of social media globally).

After nearly a decade at the helm, she left CTT last autumn to set up her own tourism marketing agency in Cape Town, Desinate, having helped secure three more years of funding from the city. Cape Town Tourism is in a strong position to keep innovating in social and digital.

In a video interview, she summarised how the city went about embracing the new mediums. “We all know that the world has changed fundamentally. Our world is so much more social now and it’s so important to have the customer at the centre of our marketing.”

Its Facebook page has 311k fans, one of the world’s biggest in tourism, helped by a FB game launched in 2012 but with a tremendous attention to constantly posting content. “The secret has been to allow it to grow organically,” she said. “Really investing in time and effort and getting cool people to work on it who really ‘get it’ and to continue to innovate and learn.”

A key strategy has also been to build around the hashtag #lovecapetown. The idea is to encourage Cape Town residents and visitors to create content, so that the potential customer has peer-to-peer information and reviews to rely on - it’s not just Cape Town Tourism pushing a message. The CTT website has a #lovecapetown section, “for the people who love Cape Town, by the people who love Cape Town.” It is a space ‘for authentic voices and personal stories. Your pictures, your blog posts, your #lovecapetown moments,’ it adds.

Says Du Toit-Hembold: “The essence of everything we do is about the stories we generate. We have provided platforms for people to tell those stories - and for us to stand back and not interfere. There’s nothing plastic about it - it’s very real and authentic.”

The philosophy has become central in the past five years. Keith Jenkins, CEO of travel blogger consultancy iAmbassadors, worked with CTT on two #lovecapetown projects, bringing overseas bloggers to the city, in 2012 and 2013.

“The campaigns contained a big element of crowdsourcing travel tips,” he says. “The iAmbassador bloggers were basically utilised to get Capetonians to talk about their city and share their favourite spots and tips. The result was a barrage of tips via Twitter (Capetonians are very tuned into social media) which were collected and displayed on the Cape Town Tourism blog.

“A point to make is also how well CTT has integrated traditional media channels into the #lovecapetown campaign, mobilising newspapers, radio and TV stations to cover the campaign, interviewing the bloggers and doing all sorts of articles. I loved how traditional and new media were weaved together so seamlessly to give the relatively small campaign a lot more weight.”

Integrating traditional media and continued use of the hashtag are clever and sensible ideas. It’s a long-term strategy after all, with CTT helping accommodate everybody to promote the city together - and not launching a series of one-off, unrelated projects as so many Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) still do.