Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

The level of passion that the ATEC members had for their sector was nothing more than astonishing; from Matt Hingerty (who is the Managing Director for ATEC) to the member level.  Everyone I met was truly interested in knowing more from the speakers and using the event for networking opportunities. I felt that the quality of speaker was very high, each bringing a sound knowledge of their specific area and being able to relate it to the travel sector. Surprisingly, Senator Nick Sherry (Minister Assisting the Minister for Tourism) provided a good opening welcome. Not political and showed a sound knowledge of the industry. His key message- China. It's a huge opportunity and going to be a significant force for Australian tourism with the introduction of new direct China Southern flights and the almost doubling of Chinese tourism in the next few years. Other notable presentations were given by Chris Flynn (PATA), Peter Ovenden (Global Gossip), Tim Hughes (Orbitz Worldwide) and Dr Adam Fraser (who gave a great presentation on, 'the art of flow').

In my presentation, I gave an overview of social media in the tourism sector, specifically with reference to China. The audience appeared to have embraced the idea about China inbound tourism being too hard to ignore and therefore were hungry for trying to understand using social media as a distribution channel.  The key messages were:

• Social Media has a significant impact in the purchase intent of a traveler.
• Chinese tourists are researching, purchasing and sharing information on travel
• Travel, hospitality, destinations and tour operators need to 'listen' to what is being said online
• SinoBuzz is the leading social media analytics platform that can bridge English and Chinese social media monitoring

Here is my presentation;