Photo: Minna Van (@thenetworkhub)
Last week, I attended #TourismRichmondTalks, an event organized by the Social Media Network. The hour-long meetup focused on the use of social media in the tourism industry using 365 Days of Dining, a Tourism Richmond initiative, as a case study. Brittany Riddell, Marketing Manager at Tourism Richmond, gave the talk.
In case you’re not aware, 365 Days of Dining was a social media-driven, global audition for a yearlong paid gig for a food blogger whose main job will be to eat at a different restaurant every day for a full year and blog about it. At stake was a salary of $50,000, apartment and living compensation, a daily stipend for all restaurant meals, and a one-year membership to the Richmond Olympic Oval. After a rigorous process, Vancouver-based blogger Lindsay Anderson was announced the winner.
As more and more companies are now are hiring bloggers, Brittany’s talk was useful and relevant. The purpose of hiring bloggers goes beyond getting someone who will write for your website — as Tourism Richmond has done, some organizations have taken advantage of the process to generate earned media.
