1.Visit Ierapetra

Ierapetra is one of the least known towns on the Island of Crete an has a population of approximately 20,000 residents. Tourism is second to agriculture in terms of economic contribution.

Visit Ierapetra is the official e-marketing campaign for this small town and began in 2012 as a practitioner/academic collaboration between the municipality's DMO and the Technological Educational Institute of Crete. The aim was to use Web 2.0 technology in a cost-effective way to improve perceptions in key European target markets and increase visitor arrivals at a time of increasing economic uncertainly in Greece. All municipalities faced public sector faced funding cuts, and the local tourism board made the decision to reduce traditional promotional activity in favour of social media marketing.

Most of the strategy was directed toward Facebook, with one profile page for municipality issues and an English language site for tourism information. The plan was to post a photo or story three times daily and to collaborate with related pages to facilitate sharing. Profiles were also set up for trials on other social media platforms such as Flickr, Pinterest, YouTube, Foursquare, Scribd, ISSUU and Twitter. Since the tourism board's photo library was not of suitable digital quality, a group of local volunteer amateur photographers was used to generate appropriate content at little cost. The decision was also made to have the photos watermarked with the destination name, but available under Creative Commons license, to enable free sharing.

Preliminary results:

-In less than two months the tourism page had attractive over 3000 followers

-A summer festival brochure on Scribd was viewed 8000 times in four months

-After 500 tweets the Twitter account had only attracted 55 followers

As of 18 January 2015, the Visit Ierapetra Facebook page had attracted 4390 likes. The cover page had remained unchanged since 2 June 2014 and had attracted 11 likes. Prior to January 2015, the most recent activity had been five months previously when three posts were made in August 2014.

Discussion questions:

1.What are the possible reasons for the slowdown in Facebook activity by the DMO in 2014?

2.If you were hired by the DMO to improve their results, what would you do to accomplish that task?

Sources: Pike, S. 2016