South Africa Get Social with Wayn.com

In our last blogpost we talked about Uganda’s plan to put their wild gorilla populations on Facebook- a great result from our recent seminars held in Kampala. We are seeing a groundswell of realization among destinations of the importance of online marketing and management- and critically the rewards that engaging social media can reap for tourism.

Wayn.com were introduced to SA Tourism at an E-Tourism Africa Event

We still have a way to go as “Destination Africa”- but there are some obvious leaders emerging- and South Africa is proving to be leading the game when it comes to using social media. At our E-Tourism Southern Africa event last year in Johannesburg, we introduced the region to Wayn.com the world’s largest social network for travel.

Wayn co-founder and CEO Jerome Touze gave an excellent presentation on how destinations can work with his social network, with over 15 million connected members, to market their products- via specifc campaigns incorporating traffic generation, brand awareness, interaction, UGC (User Generated Content), data capture and lead generation. South African Tourism took up the discussion from this event- and their resulting campaigns have borne excellent results- which they presented at the Online Business Seminars hosted by E-Tourism Africa at the Indaba Trade Fair in Durban this year. Their recent campaigns on WAYN generated the highest number of views for their promotional video – in fact, the highest number of views ever generated for any promotional video they have ever run. Their online competition to give away a South Africa trip to a Wayn member resulted in 20,000 entries in a month and over 5 Million views of the displayed inventory.

Wayn.com believe there is tremendous interest about African destinations among their travelling membership- and this can easily translate into business and market visibility. The guys from Wayn.com will be back at our soon to be announced E-Tourism Africa Summit- and will be presenting the results of their South African campaigns. To see more on their work with South Africa- visit their blog.

This is yet another example of how easily and powerfully African destinations can engage social media and reap results- and an example for other destinations to follow.

E-Tourism Africa Teaches Gorillas to Get Friendly on Facebook

Going Ape - Going Online

E-Tourism Africa are thrilled to see our training bearing positive results- as Uganda catches the world’s attention by putting their endangered Mountain Gorillas online. By creating Facebook pages for these treasured animals- the world can now befriend a gorilla- learn about them, help protect them and plan to visit them.

During our recent East African seminar roadshow- we spent two days with Tourism managers and stakeholders in Uganda- holding training seminars on e-commerce, bookings and reservations and online marketing. We discussed the use of social networking sites and new media to increase public interest in tourist attractions and to let the online community take up your message and spread the message far and wide.

Uganda Wildlife Authority PR Manager Lillian Nsubuga, who attended the seminars, has announced that her organization has taken up the challenge- and will be using Facebook to create an online presence for Uganda’s gorilla population. “Through geo-tracking and GPS, you?ll be able to get information about new births within the family and other information,” she said, referring to a programme that will launch online next month.

This announcement quickly caught the world’s attention, with AFP running the story globally.

The online community quickly took up the story, with popular Social Media Guide Mashable discussing the idea- saying “the idea is cute, especially if you’re the type that devours animal documentaries and want to know more about the lifestyle of gorillas”.

This simple idea, put into practice, shows the power of online marketing and how easy a destination can engage with the online community and generate interest, support, discussion and business. Henry Okecho, Chairman of the Association of Ugandan Tour Operators, said  “We thank E-Tourism Africa for these seminars and it is great to see some of the ideas coming to fruition- it’s encouraging to see UWA thinking out of the box”.

We look forward to everyone befriending Uganda’s gorillas online.