Speech at European Cultural Tourism Network

Last week I held a presentation in Turku at European Cultural Tourism Network. I started the presentation by comparing different fresh Nordic visit.com sites: visitfinland.com, visitsweden.com and visitnorway.com from the social media point of view. I went through the sites and described how they utilized social media.

The aspect for utilizing the social media varied from a lot. Visitnorway.com had practically no social media elements and the channels they had in other social media sites were not very active - taken that they had had YouTube channel for the site for one year and published about nine videos over there - with pretty marginal hits. It seems that visitnorway.com lacked social media strategy. Implementing social media to the sites and utilizing existing channels is not a easy task: it demands lots of resources and time and it is often not a task someone can do alongside with his/her ordinary tasks.

Visitfinland had some functions which utilize personalisation of the service according to user's wishes. The recommendation tool based by action/tourism images (alternative was traditional tick boxes) was a nice concept and worked actually pretty well and gave interesting suggestions. Two of the recommendations I got were from lake district and Carelia - which is very nice since I come from Southern Carelia. How did they mangage to do that?! LOL.

But visitfinland lacks more deeper levels of connectivity to the personal profile and utilizing the UCC/UGC aspect - personalised e-mail from the tourist officials is not an answer nowdays, because people are practically using less and less e-mails for they personal communication today. Email accounts are becoming more and more spam accounts for storaging subrcribed newsletters - which no one reads.

Absolute winner for the Nordic comparison was visitsweden.com. They had produced a nice looking, fresh and multimedial community communityofsweden.com which - though - was not integrated part of the country portal, but offered a fresh social site for the fans of Sweden (which I am too). Community had a clever strategy for profile building and it actually works for collecting visitors' memories and material from the Sweden. What could have been done is the more closer connections to the existing social media sites.

Then I moved towards marketing and why the social media matters from the marketing point of view. Statistics and the data is somewhat the same I had in my earlier presentation I held at Creative Economy and Beyond conference, but not in so close details (so if you are interested in that, check out the other prezi presentation in this very same blog).

Impementation of the social media is not a easy task. But in order to go in details to that issue would need another presentation.

Lastly I presented some shots from the live2011.com site - which is Turku 2011 projects digital European Capital of Culture. We are going to build new tools for participation, interaction and community for the cultural sector. Follow this site, it will change gradually towards an interesting cultural portal.



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Turku is the European Capital of Culture 2011 together with Tallinn, Estonia. The Turku 2011 Foundation has been commissioned by the City of Turku to oversee the implementation of the Capital of Culture year.

The Turku 2011 Foundation provides partial funding for the programme content. The Capital of Culture year will comprise a total of 150 projects and numerous individual events. The projects and events will form an interesting and diverse programme that comprehensively involves different cultural fields and encourages interaction between these fields.
The main objectives for the Capital of Culture year are to further develop creative industries and cultural exports, strengthen internationality and increase well-being. All activities are aimed at having long-term impacts.

Guests can follow the process of putting together the 2011 programme online at www.turku2011.fi – Programme and Projects.

The final programme is scheduled to be announced during the summer of 2010.
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The writings and stuff in this blog are personal notes of the Live2011 team at Turku2011 Foundation. We wish to bring up interesting stuff we have popped in to interesting field of digital media, social media and media technology.