There are number of other destinations/communities that I think are currently working very successfully in this manner, for example:

Sweden – http://communityofsweden.com
Tourism BC – http://uk.britishcolumbia.travel/en-CA/default.htm

and also Holland – http://us.holland.com/

I urge you and your readers to take a look at the My Baltimore site as an example of branded marketing social media website. I think it’s a brilliant idea and hope to see other communities to use this model in the future.

http://www.visitmybaltimore.com/index.html

You make an important point that businesses need to shift focus from themselves towards customers.

We’re at a point now where online is where the bulk of tourism decisions are formed and the research shows consumers are prepared to trust each other more than they are prepared to trust advertisers and organisations.

I’ve just returned from the Emetrics Summit (post to follow shortly) where understanding the customer experience and a customer-centric view of analysis and website strategy were major themes.

I do think that there is increasing awareness amongst some industries that marketing is shifting to become a two way conversation, but as you note with the tourism industry, there are few prominent shining examples out there yet.

I think it will come, as the market (or at least key segments of the market) will demand it.

I’ve across a few interesting niche examples. But I think from a user perspective, there is inherent trustworthiness in critical mass, where the fake and the extreme views become tempered by the views of the majority.

I shall finish with a question that I heard posed at Emetrics, where there was a lot of talk about the value of the long tail when it comes to search term measurement and a lot of talk about social media niches. “Is the long tail the antipathy of social networking or is it the place that will feed social networking?”

I’m not sure I know the answer, but I do think that for an industry like tourism – where there are millions of consumers, thousands of different types of desired visitor experiences, hundreds of thousands of destinations, millions of different businesses from restaurants to attractions – there is scope for several bigger players to amass a broad, content rich social platform, because consumers are looking for breadth and depth of information about their potential experience.

For anyone unfamiliar with the long tail concept, there original Wired article is here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html?pg=1&topic=tail&topic_set=

Thanks for your comment Jeremy

On the otherhand, the travel and tourism industry is, IMHO, slow to adapt to change. Tripadvisor does crowd sourcing well but they really only handle the hotel sector. And besides Tripadvisor, very few other prominent travel companies are taking any advantage of the merging of traditional services with the social platform.

Travature.com is one of the few new breed travel startups that are actively pursuing the merging of traditional travel services like flight metasearching with new social concepts like wiki travel guides, community driven restaurant reviews,flickr photostreams, etc. There is definitely a need for the Tourism Industry needs to shift its focus off themselves and onto the travelers. Hopefully the supposed “travel 2.0″ platform, that startup companies like ourselves are working on can be the catalyst.

At any rate, my perspective is with the enormous potential with new media like Youtube, Flickr, and others, its not a matter of will the Travel and Tourism industry be transformed, its just a matter of how much.

I value your comments and am trying to restore them.

I guess that some of the best surprises as a visitor come from the unexpected gem of a place that you stay in or discover. And when you come across a place like that in reality, you’ll forgive it being a little rough around the edges if it has some emotional magic or “dream factor”.

And as you say, there have also been cases of faked user generated content. Not something that goes down well!