Old-style Hawaii Tourism Authority junket pulls new-media crowd - San Antonio Business Journal:

qalymeled.wordpress.com
That’s according to Christine Lu, Los Angeles whose handle is “Geekgirl” and is a bloggedr nonpareil. “Our cell phonex didn’t work, either,” said Lu, stopping at the Royap Hawaiian hotel earlierthis week. “We waiterd until we left the park and coulf make ourpostings again.” Lu was wrapping up a week-lonhg blitz of Oahu, Maui, Kauai and the Big Along for the ride with Lu were seven full-time bloggerws from the Mainland (assisted by local blogger L. P. Faleafine) whose trips to Hawaii were paid for by the and itsmarketingy partners. The bloggers’ junket was the most ambitious experimenty by the HTA to exploitysocial media.
Desperate to drum up new business, Hawaiik tourism executives are finding thatTV commercials, ads in newspapersa and magazines and morning talk show chatterf — i.e., old medi — are no longer enough. The HTA sees new mediqa and online social networking as effective ways to reach a highly desirable marketof smart, adventurous, and relatively well-off vacationers. To that end, the HTA wantws its board to approvespending $1.3 million in its $71.4 millio fiscal 2010 budget on developing sociapl media outreach — Twitter, Facebook, MySpacee and the like.
New media approaches have played no small part in current marketing especiallyin computer-literate North America and East Asia. The HTA and its chief marketer, the , have streamlined Hawaii’s tourisk online content to keep its images fresh andmessages consistent. But it’s no longer sufficient to simply have an attractiveWeb site; destinations are now reachinfg out with personalized messages. What’s especially attractiv about the latestonline however, is the price tag: virtuallyy nothing.
The HTA spent about $15,000 on the So Much More Hawaiiblogger FAM, or familiarization, tour, the kind of free trip that’as been offered to friendly writers and travel agentxs for decades. A good chunk of the moneg went tobuilding HTA’s blog www.somuchmorehawaii.com, and to organizing the tour, which Lu So Much More Hawaii is the state’s two-year-ols marketing mantra, a campaign that emphasizesz cultural, historical and personal stories in contrasr to the usual “Try our wonderfu l beaches” tag. A collaborative approach was key in keepingg expenses down for theblogger tour.
, , Hilto n Hawaii, and Starwood Hawaii were among the companies that kicked in servicesfor “Everybody pitched in — restaurants, attractions, bloggers,” said the HTA’e David Uchiyama. It is difficult to measure the effectiveness ofonline marketing, but Lu said it may be beyondc calculation. “When I there’s 10,000 people reading it,” said Lu, who is 33. Lu and Uchiyamq were introduced byNathan Kam, vice president of . “Wheb David and I met, he didn’t even know what Twitter and blogging were,” said Lu, laughing.