WAYN signs three year, multi-million dollar advertising deal with South Africa Tourism

Under the terms of the deal, WAYN will promote South Africa to its 17 million strong membership, growing awareness and driving product via a dedicated microsite on the WAYN platform. The deal also incorporates a research element, giving South African Tourism (SAT) up to the minute statistics on its audience, as well as a competition that will run on the site.

The deal is an extension of a partnership that has existed between WAYN and South African Tourism since 2009, and is testament to WAYN’s key role within the travel and lifestyle vertical as the foremost conduit between brands and consumers. SAT has previously run other campaigns on the WAYN.com platform, most notably the ‘Face of South Africa’, a competition- similar to Tourism Queensland’s ‘Best job in the world campaign’- to find a face for SAT’s promotions in 2009, which proved to be a phenomenal success with over 20,000 applicants in just 3 weeks of the competition opening.

William Price, Head of e-marketing at South African Tourism, stated: ‘WAYN is the biggest travel and social media platform of its kind in the world, and our partnership with WAYN makes sense for many reasons. It gives us access to the broadest global demographic and direct access to the very people we want to invite to come and experience the amazing destination that South African is.’

The campaign will see the promotion of South Africa as a travel destination within user journeys on the site. By interacting on the platform according to interests such as ‘Going on Safari’ or ‘Wine tasting’, members are directed to the South Africa page on WAYN, where a wealth of information about engaging in that particular activity in South Africa can be found.

As a result, the South Africa profile has already collected 230,000 fans, contributing to SAT’s 7th position on WAYN Insights’ list of Top 10 socially engaged DMOs (see the article below). This has enabled SAT to interact with a geographically diverse audience, as highlighted by the map of the location of the profile’s fans.

To read the full press release, click here. To visit the South Africa profile on WAYN, click here.

 

WAYN to promote PromPeru, Western Union and Icelandair to its community of members

PromPeru, the DMO responsible for promoting Peru globally; the global leader in money transfers- Western Union, and Iceland’s national carrier Icelandair have all inked advertising deals with WAYN in the last quater.

The Peru profile continues a trend of national and regional DMOs, from Fiji to Ontario to Brazil who utilise the WAYN platform to engage with a travel dedicated audience. Indeed, WAYN.com provides a platform in addition to Facebook, Twitter et al to engage with and influence millions of travel consumers, providing a tremendous boost to a brand’s visibility in the digital media space. A profile for Visit Britain will also launch shortly to complement the Love UK community on Facebook and Visit Britain’s Twitter presence.

Meanwhile WAYN is helping Western Union in its drive to rebrand the company to appeal to a much larger demographic than its traditional audience of migrant travellers. With the tag line ‘Moving money for better’, the innovative campaign gives the Western Union brand prominent contextual exposure on various parts of the site.

Brand exposure is a key element of the Icelandair profile as well, the DMO using the WAYN campaign in a wider marketing push (which includes attractive all inclusive packages to see the Northern Lights this winter) to bring travellers back to the country since volcanic eruptions caused massive disruptions to European travel last year.

 

WAYN to launch ‘Destination Inspirations’ – Travel E-zine in 2012

WAYN is to launch its first interactive E-zine at the beginning of 2012, which will feature the world’s top destinations for 2012. The E-zine will showcase the results of over 30,000 votes cast by WAYN’s travel focused community, sharing their favoured destinations for nightlife & entertainment, adventure and culture amongst a host of other  key travel categories, culminating in a ‘Top 10 Destinations’ summary. The E-zine shall be shared with 17m members worldwide and hosted on WAYN.com

To discover how you can feature your destination and for more information on our sponsorship packages, email nathan.easom@wayn.com or steven.wakeling@wayn.com.

 

Top 10 Socially engaged DMOs online

A measurement of the online clout of national DMOs, WAYN Insights- WAYN’s research arm- has tallied up the fans and followers of the profiles of travel destinations on Facebook, Twitter, and WAYN.com. It is well established that in order to engage with an increasingly mobile and digitally active audience, destination brands must be at the heart of online conversations. The study- based on the number of ‘likes’ and followers National DMOs have accumulated on their official Facebook fan pages and Twitter and WAYN profiles- seeks to gauge the size of each DMO’s social media influence.

Source: www.facebook.com, www.twitter.com, www.wayn.com

*Figures correct as of October 2011

In the latest study, Australia leads the way by a very large margin- more than 1.3 million followers over second place UK- and has done so since WAYN Insights started collecting this data.

The study found two distinct approaches to using the two most popular social media platforms. On the one hand, the DMOs for Australia and the UK each had one main page on Facebook and one main Twitter profile to communicate with their global fan base. On the other, the likes of Ireland and Japan, had multiple Facebook fan pages and Twitter profiles, each one targeting a particular geographic region or country. The fact that Australia and the UK hold the top two spots suggests that their approach may be the more successful.

Interestingly, despite the ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter, South Africa Tourism’s profile on WAYN outnumbers its Facebook fans and Twitter followers together by just under 93,000.

 

Snapshot Travel Trends

WAYN Insights periodically conducts comprehensive travel and lifestyle surveys of its members. The most recent survey, conducted in May 2011, gathered over 45,000 responses and the results suggest that despite the gloomy economic outlook, many members were travelling more and spending more while on holiday than they were last year.

Taken together, these results are positive news for the industry, however they must be viewed in light of prevailing wisdom that suggests that many countries are close to recession. As governments struggle to get public spending down, the jobs market stagnates and inflation continues to rise, travel will become less a priority for many consumers.

Some of the highlights of the latest study include:

• The median average length of respondents’ last trip abroad was between one and two weeks:

This contrasts well to a WAYN poll last year when just over 50% of all respondents stated that their last trip abroad was between 2 and 7 days, and the median average length of respondents’ last trip abroad was only 5 – 7 days. There has therefore been a noticeable shift towards people taking longer holidays this year.

• Over two thirds of respondents  had taken at least one trip abroad in the last 12 months; 6.6% had taken more than 10:

This too is an improvement since last year when over 42% of respondents stated that they had not travelled abroad over the previous 12 month period. The percentage of people who had taken more than 10 trips abroad last year was also less than it was this year, with only 4.2% stating they had done so.

• Over half (55.7%) of all respondents spent more than $1500 on their last trip abroad:

The willingness to spend relatively larger sums of money on travel abroad is certainly encouraging for the wider travel industry. In a WAYN Panel poll last year, 41.6% of 7300 respondents stated they spent $1000 or less on a trip abroad, so there has indeed been a marked increase in individual spending.

• Over half (55.9%) of all respondents plan a trip abroad more than 3 months in advance of travel:

The first time this variable has been measured, this is an especially interesting piece of data which confirms that the industry needs to ensure that promotional activities grab the attention of the consumer as early in the decision making cycle as possible. Social media could play a huge role here- DMOs should aim to keep their destination at the forefront of the minds of the travel audience so that when it is time to make a purchase, that destination figures prominently in the decision making process.

In conclusion, the encouragement in these sets of data may be tempered by the impending financial crises in many part of the globe. However, as has been noted elsewhere, the BRIC nations continue to buck the (economic) trend, and it is to them perhaps that the industry should turn their attention to, if they haven’t already.

 

Social travel pick

Visit Britain Harry Potter game on FB

Over the summer, Visit Britain leveraged the immense popularity of Harry Potter and the hype surrounding the final instalment of the boy wizard film franchise. Sitting on the Facebook platform, the game allowed fans to work their way through 8 sets of ‘puzzles’ or quizzes , with each complete ‘chapter’ enabling Harry to move closer to defeating his arch nemesis Voldemort.

On completion of the ‘final chapter’ the user’s points (or Galleons) were converted to entries to a competition to win a trip to the UK. Simple and neat, the game allowed you to enjoy some healthy competition with members of your social graph to separate the muggles from the wizards.

According to Visit Britain, over the course of the 8 week campaign, there were 25,641 people who completed the quiz and the Love UK Facebook Fan page grew in size by 161,000. See the interview with Justin Reid, former Head of Digital at Visit Britain below, for more information on the game.

 

The Interview  

We caught up with the former Head of Digital at Visit Britain to give his take on a range of social media issues of importance to DMOs.

Justin speaks about the London Riots and social media strategies for dealing with adverse circumstances- specifically how Visit Britain chose to engage with its audience in those 3 days of intensely negative press; the Harry Potter game that was such a success on Visit Britain’s Facebook fan page; and the latest social media platforms including Google+ and WAYN.

 

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Hi everyone,

It’s Naresh taking over the blog this week.

After bit of a hiatus owing to, among other things, one of the WAYN founders getting married and going away on honeymoon (see below), I thought I’d update the blog about an exciting revamp coming your way.

Pete getting married in Montenegro

 Pete in the Maldives

But first, it’s been great to see the uptake of our newly launched feature, Tips and Q&A. It certainly proved invaluable for the WAYN team when we joined Pete in Montenegro to celebrate his wedding. Thanks especially to some great night life recommendations from our members, our time in Montenegro will never be forgotten. WAYN Tips also came in handy when Pete and his new wife Aga were checking out potential honeymoon destinations!

So continue to contribute to recommendations in your favourite locations and keep spreading the knowledge!

And as for what’s in the pipeline- I don’t want to give too much away, but we’ve got an exciting new revamp in the works. There is, as usual, a lot of testing involved and roll out will be incremental- so please be patient with us- but thought I’d give you a little teaser screenshot of what’s coming your way…

Stay tuned- more to follow very shortly

And finally, I’m happy to announce we’ve had a bunch of new recruits to the WAYN team, in London and Poland- to the commercial, product and development, and support departments. More WAYNers means more hands to ensure you, our members, are able to make the most of WAYN- to enable you to meet people based on where you are and what you want to do!

Bye for now,

Naresh

 

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By Mike Wendling

*This post was originally published as an article on the BBC website on 08 September 2011. Click here to access the original article or here to listen to the BBC Radio 4 podcast 

Can London really build the kind of entrepreneurial hub which could challenge California’s tech dominance?

They are brimming with confidence. They have the latest technology at their disposal. And they are looking for serious backers to fund their digital ideas.

“I’m skipping lunch,” one announces, hunched over a laptop. “I’ll take a break when I’m either rich or dead.”

These internet entrepreneurs are not in Silicon Valley, or even New York. They are in London, at an event called Seedcamp Week - a sort of networking event, venture capital competition and problem-solving session all rolled into one.

The ambition of the 20 start-ups at Seedcamp is matched by the breadth of industries they hope to disrupt. Crashpadder is a service taking on hotels, while FarmerOn wants to harness online tools to manage cows, crops and tractors.

TransferWise is a user-to-user foreign exchange site which cuts out banks and their commissions.

‘Organic’ growth

“Since our launch in January, we’ve handled £3m in transfers,” says TransferWise co-founder Kristo Kaarmann. “We’ve saved 100,000 euros (£88,000) for our customers and they love us for it.”

“For us, this week is about speaking to people and getting their advice about how we grow faster and make it a sustainable global business,” he says.

TransferWise is just one of the hundreds of companies that are based near so-called “Silicon Roundabout” in east London.

Before the recent flurry of Web 2.0 startups, it was simply Old Street Roundabout, a notorious – and notoriously ugly – traffic blackspot.

Around this shabby, hip neighbourhood, hundreds of small technology companies have started up this year alone, thumbing their noses at the economic gloom around them and hoping to build tech companies to compete with the world’s best.

The government has noticed. It has declared a swath of east London “Tech City UK“, and hopes that the roundabout magic will spread all the way out to the Olympic Village in Stratford, more than three miles away.

But Eric Van Der Kleij, Tech City’s “entrepreneur-in-residence”, insists that the government will keep a light touch:

“Tech City is one of the fastest-growing technology clusters in Europe at the moment,” he says. “It’s entirely organic… the companies that identified the Old Street Roundabout area of London as the right home for them did so naturally.”

He has no doubt about what kicked off the start-up boom – by his estimate, the number of new companies has doubled in under a year.

“It’s such an attractive area, and fun to be in,” he says. “Where we are now around Old Street Roundabout, if you did an hour’s walk you would come to 100 art galleries, and the culture of this area is what makes it so attractive to the creative classes.”

Some entrepreneurs bristle at the name even as they extol the tech virtues of the capital. Alex Asseily started Jawbone, a mobile phone products company, in California. But when it came time to start a new venture, he returned to London.

“We don’t make any silicon in London,” he says. “And Silicon Valley has held on to the name because they really did make silicon and the semiconductor industry really did start there.

“But it’s valuable to start thinking what is it that London really does well.”

Different flavour

“London is at the intersection of Europe and North America.

“Americans feel comfortable here, it’s a place where Europeans converge to do business, people from the Middle East come and of course people from the Far East come as well.

“What better place to have global ambitions than the global capital?”

One of the biggest hits of the new generation of London tech businesses is Mind Candy, creators of Moshi Monsters, a social network and game for under-13-year-olds.

Founder Michael Acton Smith is an industry veteran who started his first tech business in the 90s. He hit a wall when Mind Candy’s first big product, a complex online game, was a commercial failure.

Moshi Monsters was his last throw of the dice, but a good one – it now has 50 million tiny users.

“I love London – there’s a great buzz and energy here at the moment,” he says. “A lot of my friends are moving to build their businesses in Silicon Valley, but while I like visiting there, I’d rather build my business here.”

Spend some time on the fringes of the City of London, in old warehouses with creaky staircases and broken lifts, and you will definitely notice the companies here have a slightly different flavour than their Californian counterparts.

Many focus on art, design or music, such as early success story Last.fm, an online music recommendation service which was bought by American giant CBS for £140m in 2007.

Others are lifestyle-focused businesses hoping to create a new generation of social networks.

WAYN.com - the acronym stands for “Where Are You Now?” – began life as a travel network. It has since broadened its appeal, according to co-founder Jerome Touze, to “people who want to do stuff”.

“If you look at our business, we are more of a media company than a technology company,” he says.

“It makes a great deal of sense for us to be based in London, and I’m not convinced that being based in Silicon Valley would make any difference.”

From a slow start early in the last decade, WAYN now has more than 17 million users.

However, Touze does admit that funding and attention would probably have come more quickly in Silicon Valley, California.

And along with the relatively slow speed of growth come other big questions.

Is the boom really a bubble, ready to burst just like the first tech bubble a decade ago?

Will British tech companies stay here to grow instead of, as has been the pattern, being sold to American firms?

Can London really build the kind of Silicon Valley machine – including entrepreneurs, developers, and different types of investors – that is the envy of the world?

Those are some serious challenges, but they don’t seem to bother the entrepreneurs at Seedcamp Week very much.

They are too busy working hard, right through lunch.

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