Social Media Marketing and Edinburgh's Tourist Trails
Edinburgh's tourist trails have gone high-tech with the
development of the Foursquare
based 'Mayor
of Edinburgh' competition. Michael Milne, web
and digital marketing manager for Destination Edinburgh
Marketing Alliance, explains...
What does this application do?
The
Edinburgh Trail is a mash-up using mobile smart phone
technology, social media and geolocation information that
creates an off-beat tourist trail of Edinburgh. There are now
38 tourist attractions, shops, restaurants, bars, festival
locations and other venues plotted on a Google map. People are
invited to check into any of the venues using Foursquare, the
location-based social networking website, and receive points for
doing so. The person who checks into the most venues by 23
September will be named 'Mayor of Edinburgh' and win a meal for two
at a Michelin-starred restaurant and tickets for two to a show.
There are also prizes for second and third place...
Why was it developed?
The idea was to highlight some of Edinburgh's less well-known
venues and make the trail interesting to a younger age group. Also
to do something different with social media and engage with the so
called 'generation y' age band over the increasingly essential
mobile phone. The app is part of This Is My
Edinburgh, a summer campaign of activity from
Destination
Edinburgh Marketing Aliiance. The technical
term for this is GeoMarketing where
location information is used to market specific destinations.
Is it a first?
We don't know of anywhere else in Britain that has created a
foursquare-based tourist trail.
How important is mobile technology to today's
tourists?
The key point is that mobile phones are becoming incredibly
powerful, including smart phone applications that can work out your
location. There are also apps that can tell you what tourist
attraction you're looking at and that can identify speech. The
mobile phone is the one piece of technology that tourists will
bring along with them because it's a familiar and portable source
of information. So developing applications that
can inform and also entertain them is very
important. Finally, any app aimed at today's tourist should be as
'dynamic' as possible. By that I mean that it should use location,
social media connectivity, multi-media and and as much
'intelligence' sucked in from the web as possible...
Venue List
Here's a list of all the current venues. Grab a copy of
Foursquare for
your mobile...or access the mobile browser
version of the site and get checking in!
www.thisismyedinburgh.com/our-edinburgh-trail
