Last week was spent in Riga at the eBusiness Academy hosted by the European Travel Commission. All of that is just a fancy title for a gathering of e-marketing folks from European national tourism organizations to share some knowledge, enjoy some drinks, and experience Riga. (in that order- promise).

I was invited as a guest speaker on the subject of tourism and social media. No, not facebook and twitter type social media, rather literally making your website “social” with other websites. For tourism websites this means distributing content across the web and integrating with other sites. This is something we are working on here at Joobili as well. Like the tourism organizations, we are sitting on great content and we need to do a better job getting it out to the wider web. It makes sense if you are a tourism organization to try getting your content in front of as many people as possible it’s not that simple. Performance is usually measured by the amount of visitors to visitdestination.com and the idea of tracking “influence” and “reach” in multiple channels is too fuzzy for some people, even if it is more effective.

I came away feeling encouraged by the number of people who do “get it”. They understand the evolving nature of the web and are working hard to promote their countries in the proper way. Some are held back by the inevitable bureaucracy of a government institution, but overall I’m optimistic about the future. One of my fellow presenters, William Bakker gave a good summary of the event on his blog.