Tourism Ireland - another short sighted attempt at new media marketing
Published September 12th, 2005 in PR in IrelandThese days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future - Vernon Cooper
Electric News report about Tourism Ireland claiming to offer the world’s first ‘travelmentary’ - Taxi - which will follow two competition winners as they trek across the country in a bid to win cash and promote tourism in Ireland to the UK. Despite the fact that some tourism board in the United States paid a couple of bloggers to document their travels over the Summer as far as I remember.
The site purports to offer a video diary and is ‘part of Tourism Ireland’s continuing commitment to new media marketing.’ Well that last part is just plain BS because Paul O’Kane hammered them for their online strategy in the Sunday Business Post a few weeks back.
The site isn’t a video blog, doesn’t offer Webfeeds/RSS or even a plain old blog - all emerging tools of new media marketing or Social Media as I prefer to call it. It’s also a broadband only site - <sarcasm>that really fits in with the Irish government’s plans for bridging the digital divide!</sarcasm>
It’s another example of ‘How not to do it!’ I’m going to have to pick up a camcorder soon and start my own tourist blog for Ireland at this rate.
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Piaras Kelly, Podcasting, Tourism Ireland, Social Media
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I like the site, I think its well done. It may not have all the blog bells and whistles but lets face it the average consumer would not know and RSS feed if it hit them in the head. The video is nice and clear, over 50% of UK & USA now has broadband, so i would say this is their main target market.
A better question to ask might be why it takes an London web agency (http://www.unit9.com/) to do an irish tourism site. Even though to be fair they did an excellent job.
But it lasts for what? All of a week!? They could do something similar on an ongoing basis.
It’s Flash in the pan stuff, you just know there’s some guy sitting in Tourism Ireland with a checklist sitting there saying ‘New Media Marketing - Check’
Paul O’Kane slaughtered them a few weeks ago in terms of their overall strategy. I hardly think the Taxi Tourism Challenge is going to solve all their woes.
They need a complete overhaul and a continuos strategy to build up the Pagerank of key sites.
Google Ireland and the Tourism Ireland website is fourth from bottom. The internal Irish Tourism site ranks higher. Now that’s a joke!