I stumbled upon the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions’ US market website. User can be upload content direct or by using Flickr, YouTube and other websites and appears mixed in with official content from the NBTC. The website includes tag clouds, social networking tools, social rating and bookmarking and more. On top of that, the website looks very stylish. Very Dutch.
It’s definitely not perfect. I can’t figure out how to upload pictures from Flickr or movies from YouTube for example (more then a small usability issue). There’s also not real way to browse the website through navigation (or is this the new reality?).
Is this a glimpse of the future where destinations are promoted by consumers and residents alongside the tourism board? It might just be. In either case, it’s a brave step and demonstrate vision from the NTBC, not afraid to take a risk. But it’s a calculated risk, by limiting the execution to the US market, where I assume, the target audience is a younger one.
UPDATE 7/2: Karin Schmollgruber posted about Holland 2.0 as well.