The Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) is seeking “like”-minded Canadians to help promote Canada as a tourism destination, and is providing funding for Canada’s amateur athletes in exchange.
The CTC has teamed with the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) on a Facebook promotion in which it will donate $1 to the Canadian Olympic team for each “like” it receives on its “Keep Exploring” page.
Darlene Small, media relations specialist with the CTC in Vancouver, said the objective is to attract more people who can extol the virtues of Canada to their overseas Facebook friends.
“In the social space we want to have really passionate, engaged Canadians who can share their love of Canada with the rest of the world,” said Small. The program will cost about the same as a traditional online ad buy for the CTC, she added.
The CTC has raised more than $10,000 for Canadian Olympians since the program got underway in mid February, with its Facebook “likes” increasing from 30,101 to more than 42,000 as of Feb. 23, 2011.
“We didn’t really know what our [donation] objective would be,” said Small. “But the good thing about this is that the CTC’s costs from a marketing point of view really are a function of how successful it is.”
Small said the CTC/COC partnership is a perfect union since fans of the Canadian Olympic team tend to be passionate and engaged. “Our thinking is that when you ‘like’ the Canadian Olympic team you like Canada,” she said.
Developed by DDB Canada’s Vancouver office, the outreach program is timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Vancouver Olympics.
The program launched with street teams that fanned out throughout Vancouver on the one-year anniversary of the start of the 2010 Winter Games. The street teams distributed giant foam hands resembling Facebook’s Like symbol and featuring a call-to-action, as well as miniature Canadian flags featuring a QR code that took mobile users to the CTC’s Facebook page.
It is also being supported by social media efforts through both the CTC and COC. The program concludes at midnight on Monday.
Last year, the CTC announced that it was scaling back some of its overseas operations to focus its marketing and advertising initiatives on key markets where, in the words of president and CEO Michele McKenzie, the “Canada tourism brand leads and where Canada will be resourced to compete meaningfully in high-value international markets.”
The mandate included a significant change in how Canada was marketed to U.S. consumers, with the CTC announcing that it was ceding consumer and trade development activities in the U.S. market to regional Canadian destinations, which McKenzie said were already “heavily invested” in marketing outreach.
The CTC, McKenzie said, would continue to place an emphasis on business-to-business marketing through what she described as a “more selective channel strategy.”
