Social Web in Destination Marketing - tu felix Austria II?

My last English post about the rather sad attempts of hopping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon by the Austrian National Tourist Office, the Austrian Railways and Austrian Airlines had quite an disenchanted flavour to it. Nevertheless, I am delighted that it has sparked quite emotional comments.

Stop wasting tax payers' money asks Ronald from the Dutch Mindz-Blog and questions the efforts done by the Dutch Tourist board:

"These travelsites, even the ones you mention to be successfull, like www.holland.com will never be succesfull. These sites are simply no social networks: people often travel to a destionation once and why should they start blogging, post videoos and more? There is simple no personal reason for tourists do to so as they have no bonding, like people have with youtube.com or tripadvisor.com .

Holland.com uses already "hired" bloggers, the activities on this recently started site are low and so on. Hey folks, stop waisting our tax money! Only if European countries are starting to work together on a European web2.0 project, there may be change of success. In the end the private sector, like ad-hoc cooperation between hotel-chains and airlines, working closely together with local initiatives/people, will take over these activities and (unfortunately for them) the traditional tourist boards are doomed to disappear..."

I do not agree with him 100 percent. I doubt that a joint effort by all European countries would ensure success. Just look at the so called pan-European portal VisitEurope: too many different countries, too many different interests. No one is likely to benefit. Any pan-European cooperation in tourism is most likely to fail.

Furthermore, I do not believe that the private sector will start to cooperate successfully. Again, too many different interests at stake, not enough money and no human resources to coordinate such an effort. While the Swiss and Canada succeeded in establishing business cooperations with their national railways, the legal structure of other national tourism boards strictly forbids such efforts. One of the reasons, I am still a true believer of DMOs.

I would rather suggest any company to start with a blog. The Austrian National Tourist Office was wise enough to do just that. On top Martin Schobert is wise enough to address each critical blog post on their project CoolAustria in person. See for yourself:

"Thanks Karin for your critical comment. Especially your refering to Helge´s comment brings it to the point: what is the value for somebody to open his privacy in the www? The only suitable answer: Only when there is a return on investment for himself, for the time and the engagement to produce content which possibly might not be interessting for anybody else. This is not only valid for travel communities - each social web-platform has to follow to this rule. If not - there is no chance to develop as "living community".

You know that coolaustria.com is "under construction". It is still a beta version and our partner is still working on an improvement of the beta version. And at the moment we (Austrian National Tourist Office) develop our new social web strategy for the next few years. You know, that there was an organisational change in our company and also the responsible persons for online-strategy and e-marketing have changed a few weeks ago.

Please - give us some more time to find the best solutions for future social web activities of our organisations. You will be one of the first who are informed when we know more about this. Do you agree?"

Now this kind of open interaction is what the Web 2.0 is all about, don't you agree with me?

To be fair, I believe companies and DMOs are quite brave to experiment with the social web. But they should choose their agencies and implementers wisely. That said, agencies and implementers should admit their lack of experience and work closely with free agents who have gathered some insight at a national and international level (no, this is not a shameless plug for me!).

What are your suggestions? Please feel free to comment.

Update: Please make sure to read the excellent comments by Joe Buhler and Claude Benard.

Also read:

• Web 2.0 & Destination marketing - Holland.com leads the Way
• The Social Web in Destination Marketing - Canada & New Zealand relaunch
• Travel 2.0 & User Generated Content in Destination Marketing - Interview with William Bakker from Tourism British Columbia

This was my traditional English post on Monday. More to come in my English category. Every Monday, I promise.