Below you’ll find our Share the Excitement widget. We’re all very excited about here at Tourism BC.
This widget allows anybody to publish our blog entries on their own website. Every time a new entry is added to HelloBC, the content on the widget will also be updated,
We get a lot of questions from communities and operators in BC about consumer blogs. They ask if they should start their own. But without some significant website traffic, it would be very hard for smaller destinations and businesses to create critical mass. By collaborating on generating the right User Generated Content for all of British Columbia, we can all benefit through this widget.
The entries can be filtered by a British Columbia community so you can only show entries from a particular part of BC. Our Share the Excitement mark also contains our connection with the 2010 games.
The widget is available for download on HelloBC. It’s available in 3 sizes and 3 colours. It should be extremely easy for a webmaster to include it in any website.
We’re in the process of developing some new initiatives around HelloBC blogs. Stay tuned for more.
Last week was a Milestone week for us. We launched 3 new Asian websites:
We stay true to our user centered approach while supporting a growing number of websites. Our decisions are driven by research; we try not to guess. Turning research results into sounds decisions regarding technology, content and acquisition strategies is where the fun is at.
Our approach to our Asian was no different from our other websites. We worked with in-market specialists, including our staff, who where instrumental at turning this project into a success. Here are some details about our approach to international websites.
Technology
Our core technology platform now support websites for our North American, UK, Australian, Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese markets. Our websites are integrated with our Destination Management System that serves as the core of our content management. Product information collected through TourismBC.net is included on all 6 websites.
Information Architecture
We have conducted focus groups, phone interviews, card sorts and/or usability tests to find the best way to organize the content on each website. We start with research about how our target audience in a particular market approach their trip planning; their mental model.
We adjust our taxonomy where needed. For example, in North America a farm accommodation is called a ‘guest ranch‘. In the UK it’s called a ‘cowboy ranch‘ and in Australia a farmstay.
Templates & design
We’ve re-used our templates for HelloBC.com for our other market websites. This is partly because of economic reasons. We don’t have unlimited people and budget. By keeping things consistent, we also make it easier to maintain the templates over time. Content makes a website appropriate for a market. Changing a picture around can have a significant impact. We keep a close eye on things and might migrate into more a distinct look and feel for certain markets if our research tell us to do so.
Content
As I mentioned earlier, all tourism operators who have enrolled in our HelloBC Listing Program are automatically published on all 6 websites.
We also support a large volume of destination information on each website. In order to make this more efficient, we have connected certain pages on our market websites with HelloBC. Even though they might fit someplace different in the Information Architecture, the copy and images are the same as HelloBC. If anything changes on HelloBC, so does the copy on the other websites. There are still areas on each page to publish market specific content. Each website also has disconnected pages. These pages are either unique for that market, or need different copy from HelloBC (the getting to British Columbia page for example)
This is “easy” on our UK and Australian market websites because they are in English. But it’s different for our websites in a foreign language. For these websites we are using the services of a translation partner. Pages can still be connected. But when a page on HelloBC is updated, our content specialist has to option to send a work order to our translation partner. A translator who’s located in the respective country will translate the new or updated content. One of our in-market staff members will approve the copy and publish the new content. It’s fully automated with a work-flow system.
There’s no time to sit still. The 2010 games are just 500 days away and we need to be ready. We kicked off our German website project last week. But that’s not the only things we’re working on. More about other activities soon.
I’ve started to incorporate 5 e-marketing tips for tourism operators in my presentations for a while. They were the inspiration for the “Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century” were based on.
One of my tips is to start a blog. I always envision this blog were an operator can provide some ‘behind the scenes’ info about their property. Introduce the staff, the experience, guest comments, etc. I’m sure every business deals with hilareous moments as well that would be fun (and appropriate) to share.
The Opus Hotel here in Vancouver has an awesome blog, but I’m always looking for something a little less corporate. And I could never find one, until today. The Hawtorne Hotel is a 3 star hotel in Salem, MA. They’ve posted stories about the hotel, its gardens, the town, their staff, guest comments, special menu items from their restaurant since March 2005. In the 3.5 year, they’ve accumulated almost 2000 postings.
I think it’s a great example of using a blog to create a connection with potential visitors. I would suggest to share more stories instead of making announcements. Where people travel, stories happen.Where people work, stories happen. Somebody with a bit of wit can create a great blog that can create a following like a soap opera. People will want to visit the real deal and be part of the story.
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: