The power of New Media..Hello World!!

Nowadays the easiest way to sell something is to go online. Tourism is probably one of the hardest things to sell, mainly because stakeholders have little control over the country’s image. In this generation there are limitless possibilities when it comes to what you can do with a Computer and the Internet. It is not surprising that the JTB has taken advantage of this opportunity. On the 31st of May 2003, the JTB launched their virtual website. The dynamic web application is the visit jamaica web page. The site at present is the largest tourist website in the Caribbean. It is expected to grow by 50 to 100 megabytes per month, offering visitors the opportunity to experience Jamaica virtually, with awesome high-tech manoeuvres, including an interactive map of Jamaica.

Adrian Palmer, author of Destination Branding and the Web states that ‘An interactive website provides a good opportunity for the multiple suppliers involved in a tourism destination to uniquely fashion together the specific components of a destination offer, which are sought by individual visitors.’ The visitjamaica website does exactly this and you can plan your own unique holiday with just a click of the mouse.

PR agency Ruder Finn has also been doing a great job in terms of using new media to promote Jamaica. With online Press Releases, they are able to disseminate information to relevant media houses within seconds. Plus having the latest tourism news placed on PRNewswire is an added incentive. Another added advantage is that promotional messages can be changed quickly and easily than if you were to use traditional media forms – which are slowly becoming extinct (for lack of a better word).

Youtube has definitely been good to the JTB. Press conferences, numerous ads (in case you haven’t seen them), and promotional activities are all posted on the site which guarantees thousands of hits on a daily basis. This is definitely good exposure for the country. The only problem is that, it is relatively difficult to control what is put on the internet so, if someone has a bad experience in Jamaica, this information can be distributed just as easy and quickly as the JTB can say ‘go to visitjamaica.com’.

For those who listen to the radio online, you will find a virtual interactive display of the visit Jamaica website on Choicefm.com ‘the UK’s number one station for hip-hop and RnB.

Barbados take note …you can learn from this.

References

Techjamaica.com JTB sells Jamaica seductively, virtually May 31, 2003, http://www.techjamaica.com/content/view/211/50/ [Accessed Jan. 10, 2009]

Choicefm. com, Listen Online http://www.choice-fm.co.uk/ [Accessed Jan. 10, 2009]

Palmer, Adrian, Destination branding and the Web in the book, Destination Branding: Creating the unique destination proposition edited by Nigel Morgan, Annett Pritchard and Roger Pride (2002), Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford