Dragonfly Media Curacao

There are several companies and organisations on Curacao that represent Curacao abroad to bring in more tourism. The two most important ones in this respect are the Curacao Tourism Board (CTB) and the Curacao Hospitality And Tourism Association (CHATA).

Today these two organisations joined hands and presented the facts and figures for 2006 and moderated a discussion about the marketing plan 2008. Bo went to this meeting in the morning and I joined the afternoon session.

We are no off-line marketing guru so we can’t say very much about the what, where and when of promoting a Caribbean destination in the US, but we do know about the internet-side of this discussion. There are two things about the on-line marketing efforts which were discussed that piqued my interest.

1) There is still a great deal of work to be done in educating people about the web as a social platform. People that have been in marketing (or any other business) for a long time tend to approach their job in the same way as they did the year before. On the internet this is something that you need to avoid at all costs because the internet changes all the time. Especially in internet marketing you really need to be on top of recent developments to sort any kind of effect.

The other day we received a quote about advertising on a particular website. There are almost a dozen ways of advertising on this website, but the quote we got only talked about banners. The effectiveness of banners (especially flash-banners) is becoming less by the second, but that’s what we got instead of a creative proposal which shows that the company is thinking with the client and not for the client.

During this afternoon’s discussion there was talk about advertising on-line and everybody agreed that this was important. Regretfully there was only a handful of people that recognized the terms viral marketing and social media marketing and probably only two or three understood what they mean. The focus was, again, on banners and ‘brand exposure’. I am not saying these latter two concepts are useless, but I do think you should think of more creative ways to market a destination like Curacao. No, this is not a pitch.

2) A lot of interesting developments are happening for curacao.com. The official tourism website for curacao is curacao.com. Since two and a half years the CTB has ownership of the domain name and almost two years ago they launched the website that is there now. There have been some tweaks and changes, but not many.

Today Aimee Kleinmoedig (director of the North American offices of the CTB) announced that there is renewed effort to upgrade curacao.com to a web 2.0-savvy website. She was talking about blogging, podcasting and other ways of engaging visitors.

Although we don’t see how you would do an effective blog for a destination website, we do think it is a good sign that the CTB is taking a leading role in leveraging social media in their website(s). Hopefully other important companies/websites here will follow suit.

When we know more about what’s going on with promoting Curacao on-line (and are allowed to talk about it) we’ll let you know.

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Internet marketing, Hospitality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.