I had the fortune to be invited as guestblogger to IMC by Lennart Svanberg and I will start by saying Thanks to him for this opportunity! This post will be a summary of my Imprssions and thoughts after an fantastic day.
Combining the Best of the Web by Maria Ziv and Tommy Sollén, VisitSweden
Learn how VisitSweden (Swedish Travel and Tourism Council) strengthens the relationship with its audience through visitor interaction and how it creates real results from cost-efficient communication.
VisitSweden website incorporates inspirational photography, visitors’ stories, mashups, tags, voting, embedded YouTube videos —you name it. VisitSweden strives to be at the forefront of website development and is continuously looking for new ways to reach its audience.
Maria and Tommy made an really good presentation of VisitSweden and CommunityofSweden where they spotlighted on the use of Socialmedia and users supplying and sharing content.
Maria
VisitSweden is a part of Sweden’s Marketing department
They work Internationally marketing Sweden and do that as Nation Branding
Focus on international visitors not resident Swedes
Works on 13 markets partly owned by government
Working together w diffrent organizations to do campaigns
Consumer Marketing Socialmedia, ads and Direct messaging like email and sofort.
Vistors
Booking images and maps
Effective use of resources
Interactive communication
Modern navigation
SEO friendly
They have done a lot of work with SEO to get the best rankings
VisitSweden got the Internet best website award in 2008 – But says: “Its not enough!”
How do we search for information
Visitors recommend each other where to go to, what too see etc
transparency throughout and development blog
They let bets testers be involved in the development process
Most visits from USA, UK, Sweden and Germany
Focus on Photos and travelstories
Sweden have gained an higher ranking amoung travelers
Printed catalog, how to use material on the community
+6800 registred members +13000 photos and 1200 travelstories total 3,3 million views
Enhanced precense travel 2.0
How to be on all the diffrent SM places
Let the users help in the process (traditional SM behaivorism)
Use AddThis to share on wherever
Have channels on Flickr, Youtube and so on
Uses the Youtube and Facebook to communicate both own materail and visitors material (check this later on!)
Spreading content through widgets,personlize with users
In March they launched the widget, you can customize it as you want to have it on your own blog, website.
Why use widgets? Its platform independent, you can use as you want, customizable.
Core Campaigns
Building core campaigns but use the widgets to be more efficiant
Use the traditional channels but also putting more power on sm, widgets, youtube etc
How to keep the visitors? They use newsletters and so on
Forming relationships through the channels available
Thinking about doing podcasts but haven’t done any yet, some members podcasts though.
Summary
When I listened to Maria and Tommy I was impressed how far Visitsweden has come, but I realize well as they do that there’s still loads of work to do. The widget is an excellent idea, using it as an Adboard that users themselves can customize with photos, travlsltories etc. It’s the content shared by users that makes you curious to visit a place. I look forward to following Vistsweden in their work from now on to see how they implement more use of Socialmedia in their site.
