Costa Brava, Catalunya and Instagram
Yesterday, the 46,000th photo was posted on Instagram using the hashtag #incostabrava. How long did it take to reach that number? One year, more or less - that’s all. Or put it another way, at a rate of around 1,000 photos a week.
This week will see another fresh batch of images, as the Costa Brava and Catalunya Tourist Boards jointly host six British parent bloggers in a trip co-hosted by Travel Perspective. You can see five images on the right from the bloggers on their first day, in Girona.
Collecting differing views of a region is, well, nice for the hosting region. But it’s proving much more than that. By harnessing visiting media and local enthusiasts, Costa Brava and Catalunya have built a huge image bank of their region seen through thousands of different pairs of eyes.
Jaume Marin, marketing manager for Costa Brava, says the two tourist boards have now run more than 25 blog trips and/or competitions using Instagram. One finishes this week, challenging residents to win a highly-prized day (for three) inside the kitchens of El Celler de Can Roca, the Girona restaurant voted best in the world last month.
But they are now ingrained as a way of encouraging communities to think social. In May and June alone, nine villages or towns will run Instagram competitions with nominal prizes to best show off their community. This Saturday, it will be Cadaques.
While Costa Brava primarily thinks locally, parent promotion board Catalunya thinks globally. In mid-June, it will again invite 10 international Instagrammers from seven countries, with a combined following of 1.3m people, to spend six days snapping the region. This is serious promotion, for relatively little budget (nobody is paid to visit).
Marin uses Instagram images of the region on his business cards, always emailing the photographer and asking for permission, who he then credits on the cards. The region also uses images for promotional purposes, again with permission. And it even gives out Instagram pins per challenge, inevitably now collector items.
And do you know what? Nobody has ever said no - because they all want to promote where they live and are chuffed to bits that they can help. It’s a fascinating psychology, with Marin orchestrating and billing those contributors as ‘heroes’ who do the actually promoting.
It’s also a very effective way of getting the residents of a region to ‘buy into’ social media, by engaging and enlisting their help. And it’s not confined to Costa Brava and Catalunya - Scotland is another to have benefitted from such willingness to share.
At World Travel Market last November, Visit Scotland’s social media manager, Simone Kurtzke, said that she ran a photo competition last year – which generated as many images for official use as Visit Scotland had managed to collect in the previous 40 years. “People are saying use my images. It’s like an open door,” she said.
Since starting to write this, another 23 images have been hashtagged #incostabrava and by the end of this week, there will be hundreds more from the parent bloggers adding their take on what the region has to offer families.
Who knows, they may also end up as ‘heroes’ - maybe even with one of their images on Jaume’s business cards. If they’re lucky.
Instagram photos by FamilyAffairs, SteveKeenan, MarkFrary, FamilyAdventureProject.
Follow the Costa Brava Parent Bloggers trip on Storify and on the Costa Brava/Catalunya Storify site
Tourist boards start to get the social message
By Steve Keenan
This weekend, 28 bloggers will arrive in Canada to begin an epic rail trip from three different departure points that meet up in Toronto at the end of the project.
It’s the brainchild of the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC), arranged to tie in with a blogger conference in Toronto, and shows yet again how tourist boards (or Destination Management Organisations - DMOs - in new media speak) are increasingly engaged with social media.
The bloggers will travel from Vancouver, Gander and Halifax stopping off en route, and will blog, video and Instagram on their travels, which will all be collated on an excellent Tumblr page created for the event. The CTC is also lobbing in the chance to win a rail trip - entrants must retweet the page, ensuring wide distribution of the project.
Canada has been at the forefront of DMO development into digital and social media: it’s Facebook page has more than 217,000 ‘Likes’ and the latest #ExploreCanada project follows on from other blogtrips created by the CMC.
But Canada is still in a minority among DMOs, however. A conversation I had recently with one in-house expert painted a rather dismal picture of how the 200 DMOs in England are getting to grips with social - she estimated fewer than 10 are ‘getting it.’ Scotland, Wales and Ireland are far further advanced, although that is much to do with funding and political will.
Internationally, Spain, notably the Costa Brava and Valencia regions, is doing extremely well - with necessity the mother of invention (the country’s international marketing budget has been cut by 90% in the current economic climate). Australia, Germany, Flanders, Austria and several US states are also advanced in moving to social to build personal relationships with visitors.
Others are starting out on their social journey, particularly in south-east Asia where Thailand and Malaysia have publicly stated intentions to further develop their digital/social output. But large swathes of the Middle East, eastern and central Europe and Africa (South Africa excepted) have yet to begin.
One critical decision they will have to make is how to start that journey. Facebook and blogtrips are two important components, although it is interesting to note that Canada is using Tumblr as the main platform to promote its blogger rail trip. Costa Brava is a big fan of Instagram, and brilliantly sustains the hashtag #incostabrava for all blog trips and social interactions.
By doing so, Costa Brava keeps the conversation going indefinitely, acknowledging that a lot of social interaction will take place long after a blog trip - so it makes sense to find all the created content in one place. Canada, with its #ExploreCanada hashtag, has the same philosophy.
It all serves to remind that social and digital marketing is still in its infancy among DMOs, with many heading in different directions as they strive to understand and implement future policy. But that’s the beauty of social at the moment - a fizzing box of technology which inspires a technicolour raincoat of innovation. Long may it continue - and we’ll all work it out in the future.
Hands up who likes Facebook check-ins
The result of a show of hands during a conference session is rarely surprising. The idea is generally that it gives the speaker comfort that what they are about to say strikes a chord or that the results (“Anyone new to Twitter here?”) can be used to gauge the level at which the presentation is pitched.
A show of hands at the inaugural WTM Latin America exhibition did surprise me however. I was in São Paulo running a number of sessions for the conference alongside the exhibition and all were well attended. I suspected the last session of the week would be the most popular and so it proved. After all, everyone wants to hear someone from Facebook talk, don’t they?
We were lucky enough to have João Carlos Pastore, Facebook’s client partner for travel in Brazil on the podium, and the room was packed with people wanting to hear whether the omnipresent social network was a threat, an opportunity - or both.
His opening question to the audience surprised me. “How many people here have used Facebook to check in to the conference centre today?”
I turned to the audience expecting to see a small number of hands among the sea of faces. Instead, a good third of the room raised their hands.
I had known that Brazil was in love with Facebook - it is the second biggest nation on the network as we reported in our recent country report on Brazil - but I hadn’t realised to what extent the love affair extended.
It’s also worth remembering that checking in using Facebook is a relatively recent innovation. It only launched Places in 2010 before shutting it down in 2011 and moving over to what we have now - where anything you post can have a location attached. (It also bought and closed down geolocation network Gowalla during this period.) The vote of affirmation from the audience showed just how much people like the idea of geolocation - or at least have not opted out in their privacy settings. In fact, more than 250 million check-ins are made every month, according to Facebook.
At WTM Latin America, Pastore then went on to reveal the top ten check-in locations in Brazil. Eight of the ten were airports, showing just how important Facebook and geolocation are in the world of travel.
It is not just Brazil either. A look at this check-in ranking from Socialbakers shows that airports dominate the lists. The top place is Los Angeles International Airport, with more than 2 million check-ins (beating Facebook HQ in Palo Alto by a couple of hundred thousand - its high position presumably as a result of a company policy or extensive testing before launch).
The prevalence of airports is very telling. People have to waste a lot of time at airports, going through security, sitting at the gate and so on. Increasingly, there is free wi-fi at airports too. Spare time and ease of connection are made for check-ins.
Yet the bragging factor cannot be underestimated. Who doesn’t want to show off to the friends and colleagues they are leaving behind when they are heading off on a trip? And if social media isn’t about bragging, then what is it about?
Community tourism in the Welsh Valleys
By Steve Keenan
I nearly saw the future of community tourism last week. It is tantalisingly close, and I do keenly hope that it comes to fruition.
The premise is simple. A decade ago, Capital Region Tourism was set up to promote tourism to the Welsh Valleys. It was one of four regions established in Wales by the devolved Government.
And one initiative created in 2009 was The Valleys Heart and Soul, with a brief to encourage communities to “understand how to make the Valleys a successful, proud and culturally diverse area and to increase levels of tourism, make citizens proud of where they live and raise aspirations.”
The project was only launched thanks to £22m EU funding for the region, of which £2m was earmarked for community tourism. Says CRT’s regional strategy director, Peter Cole: “No-one was quite sure what that would look like, or mean at the time.”
Now the concept is being adopted worldwide, with social media underpinning the ability of a community to tell their own story widely. To put themselves on the map, if you will, and determine how they want to be seen.
It’s a concept I love: self-determination, sustainability and social all wrapped into one emboldening story. Which is why I came to be at a conference in Port Talbot last week, to catch up with the CRT’s community tourism programme.
Read the background Storify page on the community tourism conference
Cole told delegates: “We began to understand, eventually, that there were other ways of doing things. I looked at how we could tell the Valley story much better - and people of The Valleys are the key element of the visitor experience.”
The Heart and Soul campaign name came from Valley residents themselves, he said - “they gave us our USP (Unique Selling Point).” Now more than 400 people who work in tourism have been trained as ‘ambassadors’ for the region, representing 150 local tourism-related organisations.
The two-day courses are designed to address two main points: customer care and service, and giving ambassadors the confidence to talk about their place. Trainer Ruth Taylor-Davies said: “We taught them to look at their area with fresh eyes. If you are behind the concept, visitors will be too.”
Three community tourism officers now ‘handle’ the ambassadors, including Elen Davies, who told the conference: “Nearly 60% of ambassadors say they work in a job where they welcome visitors.” That includes working in country parks, whisky distilleries and former coal mines. Even a nun has been trained - Sister Anna Larkins at Llantarnam Abbey in Cwmbran.
So far, so good. I met several impassioned ambassadors, including Wayne Jones of Dare Valley Country Park who will give you guided walks of the park, and Phil Brown of The Barn B&B in Margam who is happy to take guests to his local pub.
I heard about big developments in mountain biking tracks, spoke to enthusiastic climber Luke Maggs of Natural Resources Wales and met inspirational speaker James Turner of Hidden Britain, a charity set up 10 years ago to promote community tourism.
But, but… the EU funding runs out soon and in cash-strapped times, the EU and Welsh government can’t, and shouldn’t, necessarily be relied on to fund further. As Chris Garner, Head of Regeneration Policy at the Welsh Government, told the conference: “We can’t pin down where the money is coming from… but if you have confidence, a Minister will find money.”
The initiative has done too much already to fall by the wayside. Further funding is welcome but more needs to be done to better promote the ambassadors, to bring their personal stories alive on The Valleys website (with video, live chats, bookable links), while the project could be so expanded in so many ways.
Personally, I would love to watch the video of Wayne Jones walking his country park, to hear his story of the regeneration of old coalpit land, and to book a walk with him personally with a picnic on a ridge. And then to stay in a self-catering pit cottage, to dine with the neighbours and hear mining stories in the pub - preferably the one where Richard Burton drank, and follow his trail the next day.
The money then stays in the community, to create jobs and to fund future developments. It stops people leaving the community and brings skills back in. It makes communities work better together and learn to take responsibility for their own future.
All is possible, and practical, and The Valleys is not a million miles off making it happen. It’s a region packed to the gunwhales with stories and the ambassador scheme is excellent - the hard work has been done in finding the voices of the region. But they need to be better harnessed, to be more accessible and to have a collective voice.
Then with private sector money and guidance from the CRT and its tourism partners, then The Valleys really could be alive with the sound of visitors. Let’s hear it!
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