Last week I met Nick Baker of Tourism Australia who gave a great presentation at the Asian Marketing Effectiveness awards about how Tourism Australia uses media and social media to attract visitors to the country. (Disclosure: Tourism Australia is an Ogilvy client for some Social Media work.)
Some catching ideas:
Australia, the movie
One of my favorite moments was when a member of the audience asked Nick whether Tourism Australia was concerned about spending so much money on teaming up with the film when they did not know if it would be a critical success. (It was not a critical success). Baker said they didn't mind because they knew the landscapes and panoramas would look spectacular, no matter what (they did).
Social Media Strategy
In terms of Social Media, various levels of Australian government have been on the bleeding edge of Social Media promotion. Queensland ran a competition for the "The Best Job in the World" to find a blogger and Tourism Australia has one of the highest profile blogger outreach campaigns.
Unlikely choice of blogger
In the below video Nick describes their overview of social media and why they decided to make the unlikely choice of sponsoring a visit by the blogger "The Sartorialist" out to Australia rather than a journalist or travel-related blogger.
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