The Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) has put up interactive twitter walls in NYC, Chicago and Los Angeles which display twitter streams with photos and tweets abut Canadian destinations.

Canada Tourism Twitter Wall

The campaign was created by DDB Canada, and uses large 8 x10 foot touchscreens installed in Times Square and Chelsea in New York, Michigan Avenue in Chicago and The Grove in Los Angeles.

It’s not just for display, though. As you can see in this video, passers-by can interact with the touchscreens, and pull up photos and info about a Canadian destination related to a tweet on the screen, or one in which they’re interested.

Twitter walls are usually used at conferences and events to aggregate tweets based on the event’s hashtag, but video screens fed with twitter streams have been installed at public places before. The Berlin Twitter Wall set up last year for the 20th anniversary of the real Berlin Wall’s fall is a prominent example.

The Footwall, London

Another recent example is The Footwall – a giant 4-story World Cup twitter wall in London. The company that set it up – The Brand Union, simply used a projector to post a live stream of tweets from their @thefootwall account on to the side of their office building in Farrington.

Paul Wood, Account Director for The Brand Union, explains why they’re doing this. He says “Many companies use social media to be seen to be keeping up, but consumers are interested in relevance to create social currency. The Footwall is about uniting fans through the power that social media offers, giving them a voice.”

The Canadian Tourism Commission’s twitter walls and what they hope to gain from it is a slightly more complex issue. To motivate more people to engage with them on twitter, the CTC is offering Americans a chance to win a $5,000 travel voucher for a free trip to Canada.

All you have to do is follow the @Keep_Exploring account and reply to them mentioning your favorite Canadian destination. This will get others in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles interested in taking a deeper look at these Canadian destinations when the tweets show up on the twitter walls.

It’s a neat combination of online and offline destination marketing, and shows just how much power a social media-based tourism ad campaign has to influence and engage even an offline audience.

On Feb 16, 2010, faculty members of Vancouver Island University’s tourism dept. will engage in an interesting debate - Are the Olympic Games worth the high price tag to British Columbians?

Intervistas 2010 Olympic tourism forecast

The answer can easily be found in the fact that it’s only been hours since the 2010 Winter Olympics got underway in Vancouver, but Canada has already kicked off a push to prop up post-Olympic tourism.

That would be because the price tag for the Olympics stands at $6 billion, while revised tourism forecasts now put the economic impact of the games at between $2 billion to $2.4 billion for the period in between 2008 and 2015.

A  jump in BC tourism in the 2 years leading up to the Games, forecasted by an Intervistas economic impact report which was used to justify the massive spending, never came true. In fact, BC Tourism has actually dropped and is now below levels recorded 5 years ago.

On the plus side of the debate, the $6 billion price tag includes long-term infrastructure projects such as the Canada Line, the expansion of the Vancouver Convention Center and Sea to Sky Highway improvements. The Canadian Tourism Commission is hoping the 3 billion strong audience for the Olympic Games provides an opportunity for a 17 day advertisement to brand Canada as a destination, and has set itself up for a 30% boost in tourism reciepts -$100 billion between next year and 2015.

But there’s probably more than a little bit of fear among officials that its not going to pan out as they’re hoping it will. It would explain why the government is folding the Crown Corporation in charge of BC Tourism, and handing over the tourism management to a government ministry.

It would also be the reason that BC is running a $38 million ‘follow-up’ North American tourism ad campaign featuring celebrities such as Sarah McLachlan, Michael J. Fox, and Kim Cattrall, among others. Here’s the ad on youtube.

BC Tourism Minister Kevin Krueger explains that the additional ad spending is because past Olympic hosts have complained of not getting the expected economic boost in the post-Olympic period, and BC didn’t want to be in the same boat.

Vancouver Tourism president Rick Antonson is literally doing the selling in a daily video blog directed at the meetings industry. He touts Vancouver’s new Convention Center which is three times as big, and also offers a behind the scenes view of how Vancouver deals with problems and issues associated with hosting and managing large events. 

You can see the videos at www.meetingsvancouver.com. They’re sending emails with links to the daily video to Meetings Associations in the U.S.

Is all this going to be enough to give BC and Vancouver a significant edge in tourism and branding to offset the Olympic Games’ price tag? If you go by past history, not a single Olympic Games todate has shown a net profit, taking into consideration the federal investment in infrastructure.

Related Posts:-
Olympic Avoidance Effect – Tourism Tanks in Whistler & Vancouver
The Olympic Effect – Chicago Lost, but Chicago Tourism Strikes Gold