Tourism New Zealand - Using You Tube to communicate the with potential visitors

Tourism New Zealand, the National Tourism Organisation for New Zealand, set out to become more innovative in a drive to try to obtain a creative edge over competing destinations and attract extensive PR to attract more the eye of potential visitors.

The Campaign called 'Have Your Say" involves the production of short film (interviews) involving actual tourists on their trip in New Zealand. These are asked to speak about their trip and the interview is then edited and posted on social networking sites around the web as well as on the Tourism New Zealand You Tube Channel.

Tourism New Zealand said the campaign is a first in tourism marketing, and enables travellers to share their experiences with other potential visitors to New Zealand through social networking. This Campaign seeks to capitalise on the fact that people tend to believe more the opinion of other people who have tried the advertised experience (in this case the experience of visiting New Zealand) if they hear or read it from past visitors rather than from the Tourism organisations themselves. In fact this is why site such as Trip Advisor have become so popular, as they report first hand experiences from past visitors of different destinations.

The campaign seems to have been a success as the videos were After four months more than 1,500 video diaries were recorded and viewed by almost 140,000 people on the dedicated YouTube site. Gregg Anderson, Tourism New Zealand's regional manager UK and Europe, said: "Social media is used by people from all walks of life to connect with people back home while they are travelling.

Apart from this, this campaign aims on riding on the wave of word-of-mouth as it is one of the most effective marketing tools to promote a destination. The agency report that the mobile movie studio was a real proven success and was worth it. Tourism New Zealand is currently developing working on developing further it's Social Media Strategy since it has proven to be relatively inexpensive and successful. Other Destination Management Organisations should learn from these best practice examples and adopt these online guerrilla marketing strategies to increase the impact of their campaigns.