Destinations Expo 2010 Cape Town

Sub­se­quent to my pre­vi­ous post about the Des­ti­na­tion Expo 2010 in Cape Town, I received some com­ments point­ing to a video clip on YouTube about the event.

I have used the exam­ple of the Des­ti­na­tion Expo as a study case for Ycad­emy, our online busi­ness coach­ing cen­ter. The idea is to ana­lyze the way the Expo Orga­niz­ers use the inter­net to pro­mote their event, con­sid­er­ing namely, that tourism related low tech events are of inter­est to a global audi­ence reach­able through the internet.

Yor­go­Man at the Tavern

My first obser­va­tion was, that search­ing Google, I could barely find more than an invi­ta­tion text release and the open­ing hours. I con­cluded that the orga­niz­ers were not really inter­ested in pro­mot­ing the event using the Inter­net and I also con­cluded that the way the Expo is pro­moted is to no ben­e­fit of the Expo par­tic­i­pants in as much as the Inter­net is concerned.

After some research I found a domain destinationsexpo.co.za. How sur­prised was I to find that the domain is redi­rected to a domain called cadek.co.za/des. There we find a  web­site with infor­ma­tive con­tent per­tain­ing to the Des­ti­na­tions Expo 2010 in Cape Town. We learn on the site that:

“The Des­ti­na­tions Expo is owned and organ­ised by:

CADEK Media
P.O. Box 5111
Helder­berg
7135
South Africa”

There you go: the des­ti­na­tions expo web­site serves the pur­pose of pro­mot­ing CADEK Media rather than the expo or its par­tic­i­pants. The site does not have a very pro­fes­sional touch in spite the brochure gim­mick. In any case the Inter­net as pro­mo­tional medium is not exploited for the ben­e­fit of par­tic­i­pants. From the tar­iffs we see that there is no online pro­mo­tion avail­able to participants …

It’s easy to crit­i­cize sit­ting at the beach here in Greece. As said above, the pur­pose is to look at the Des­ti­na­tions Expo as a study case for the pur­pose of Ycad­emy. I there­fore will also try to exper­i­ment with some ideas.

My research shows, that the Top Level Domains of “des­ti­na­tion­sexpo” are all avail­able! How sur­pris­ing. Local domains (co.za may be fine, but when you have inter­na­tional or global ambi­tions, you want to grab the .com and maybe some other TLDs). In fact the local domains have lost their sig­nif­i­cance to a large extent dur­ing the past few years as devel­op­ers notice that peo­ple have just a .com-reflex. Also, one always loses vis­i­tors to the .com … Brand pro­tec­tion starts with grab­bing the main TLDs, which is a rather cheap affair as you get the domains for just a few bucks.

For the pur­pose of this exper­i­ment I have reg­is­tered destinationsexpo.com with Yor­goDom and then I set up a host­ing account at Host­ing South Africa at 1 Rand per Day. I will load a Semi­oman­tics XO 3.x Pub­lish­ing Frame­work and shoot at some related key­words, respec­tively I will show how par­tic­i­pants could eas­ily profit from an online pro­mo­tion reach­ing far beyond the dura­tion of the low tech Expo in Cape Town.

For the pur­pose of the exer­cise I will find my inspi­ra­tion at the excel­lent Gar­den Route Direc­tory as well as on other bril­liant Projects, such as the Mon­key Val­ley Resort Project by Bianca Gubalke from Noordhoek.

More about this exper­i­ment later. Let me install a site first :-).

Think­ing about a web­site project:

Des­ti­na­tion Expos take place all over the globe and one could even cre­ate a Des­ti­na­tions Expo Global Direc­tory, invit­ing all such Expo orga­niz­ers to join forces for mar­ket­ing pur­poses and later may be for net­work­ing  (just an idea :-)).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfUJhcUQrP0

The Des­ti­na­tion Expo Cape Town YouTube Clip has some great con­tent and footage. Too bad the stitch­ing of the pieces, namely of the first clip from Cape Town Tourism leads to dis­tor­tions. (Would need to be post-edited again).

Shoot­ing some sequences at this years event could lead to a more lively, less ster­ile video, whereas the pro­duc­tion could be financed by the par­tic­i­pants who are fea­tured in the clip or who pro­vide mini clips to be inserted. Lalakoi Pub­lish­ing from the Gar­den Route is work­ing with Cus­tomer Clips to pro­vide high vis­i­bil­ity to adver­tis­ers or site owners.

I could imag­ine that a Semi­oman­tics Evo­lu­tion site could be a great sup­port for pro­mo­tional clips linked to a dynamic con­tent CMS.

• des­ti­na­tions expo cadek media cape town
• des­ti­na­tions expo cape town 2011

Related posts:

1. Des­ti­na­tions Expo Cape Town
2. Mon­key Vally Cape Town News
3. Mon­key Val­ley Resort Cape Town
4. WP Best Town Project
5. Mon­key Val­ley Resort News

Tags: Cape Town Destinations, Destinations Expo, Destinations Expo 2010, Destinations Expo Cape Town, South Africa

This entry was posted on August 20, 2010 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Cape Town, Destinations Expo Cape Town, South Africa, Yorgo Nestoridis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.