TAT turns to social networking sites

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TAT turns to social networking sites 
Bangkok Post: 27 Oct 2009
www.bangkokpost.com/business/economics/26346/tat-turns-to-social-networking-sites

TAT turns to social networking sites
Facebook and Twitter cheap and popular

Writer: Chadamas Chinmaneevong

The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) is using social networking to reach tourists and is confident it will become an important marketing strategy.

Social networking is popular with consumers and marketers, especially Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, because of their low cost and high returns.

Social networking yielded better results than expected for the TAT's first project, Ultimate Thailand Explorers, with 7.89 million viewers in only eight weeks. It expects up to 25 million viewers when the project ends in February.

The project garnered 356 video clips from visitors with 638,720 viewers in eight weeks, while the contest was mentioned by 576,000 articles and blogs.

There were 21,250 news clips about the project, higher than the 2,000 expected. The 25 semi-finalists are promoting their clips in their homelands to woo as many votes as possible. This also promotes the country through social networks, said Suraphon Svetasreni, the TAT deputy governor for policy and planning.

The TAT will promote Thai tourism to registered voters participating in the project, a number expected to top 10,000 worldwide. It will also conduct research in the future.

"We set a budget of 35 million baht to promote Thai tourism online next year, up from 15 million this year," said Mr Suraphon.

The Ultimate Thailand Explorers campaign was launched last month with an investment of 18.5 million baht.

The TAT invited global travellers to enter a contest by filming videos about what they would do if they won and visited Thailand and what should be done to promote Thai tourism.

Five qualified couples will be awarded six-day tour packages to visit five provinces in Thailand: Pattaya, Bangkok, Phuket, Chiang Mai and Koh Samui. They will share their experiences by writing blogs and uploading pictures or video clips online to encourage Thai tourism. The contestants who attract the most viewers and highest number of votes will win US$15,000.

The TAT will also launch the same campaign in other languages such as French and Japanese. It will offer more destinations in other provinces as well.