Web 2.0 & Destination marketing - Holland.com leads the Way

Unbeknown to me, the US-version of Holland.com relaunched in June. I am glad Martin Schobert from the Austrian National Tourist Office told me, when we met last week. We wanted to chill out over Sacher cake and Viennese coffee over bagels and cola but ended up discussing Web 2.0 - as you might have guessed - including the recent relaunches of New Zealand and Canada. Today William bakker's blog post reminded me to give Holland.com a look.

Well, what shall I say, I am thrilled intrigued. To me the Netherland Board of Tourism & Convention has become the new destination marketing guru I will pray to every day is really leading the way in social media. First their BloggersinAmsterdam project last year, and now this!

Let the announcement on their site speak for itself:

"Join. Share. Learn. Grow. Registered users are a valuable piece of this mutually beneficial community. Join today and help us build the most powerful web 2.0 resource for Dutch travelers ever!"

And yes, there is a tagcloud, a vast offer of social tagging, networking and rating tools from delicious to digg, plus a blog section, which requires registration before commenting. To my uttermost joy, they also enrich their official content with user generated content form Flickr and YouTube. Another of their revolutionary features is the courage to mix official content  with that from the travel sections of say CNN and Yahoo. Why write it all by yourself, right?

Upon registration users can upload content using this very clean interface:

However, like William, I still don't know how to link to pictures or videos on Flickr and YouTube. I suppose they monitor these platforms and prefer to handpick content. No harm in that, but, where is the basic info? There is no systematic approach to the touristic highlights of the country. Navigation consists of a challenging combination of the buttons on the right with the tags on the left. It took me far too long to figure that out.

Click on "Museums" and you get a meager and unorderly list featuring 13 museums, some even twice. To me the flashy part on the top is far too much wasted space. I know it looks great, but there is no apparent value, after a while. How about moving that to a less prominent space on the site.

I strongly recommend to include more structured content. Usability of design, navigation and content is still the greatest issue online.

Needless to say, there is also a Second Life destination, the Club Gogh Gogh.

Note: The site was done by the same agency that is responsible for Coolcapitals. I do not care, how many web awards that flashy site gets, as the former content manager at the Vienna Tourist Office, I assure you, it does not generate any traffic for Vienna at all!

This was my traditional weekly English post. If you liked it, please check out my recent English articles:

• The Social Web in Destination Marketing - Canada & New Zealand relaunch
• Updated T-List of Tourism & Travel Blogs
• When Travel 2.0 meets Print Advertising 1.0
• Travel 2.0 & User Generated Content in Destination Marketing - Interview with William Bakker from Tourism British Columbia
• Hotels & the Social Web - Some suggestions for Yotel
• Fake Travel Reviews are no Issue - Interview with Ian Rumgay from Tripadvisor continued
• About Hotel 2.0 & Travel 2.0 - Interview with Ian Rumgay from TripAdvisor
• Hotel 2.0 - Interview with Opus Hotel CEO Blogger Daniel Craig
• Travel planning today - Greetings from the Easter Island III
• Marketing manifesto for the travel industry - Interpretation of Jeff Jarvis

More to come at my English category. Every Monday, I promise!