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Post by Leilo on May 21, 2019 14:07:31 GMT 9
My old boss actually asked me to post in Chinese in addition to English... and I don't speak any Chinese. He told me, "just stick it in google translate and paste it in". I remember thinking...my Chinese speaking hulemdos will be like "leita what the heck were you trying to say!?" hue. That boss got transferred, but since then I've considered at least putting it in some hashtags in different languages. It's just kind of unreasonable if you don't know the language I think, haha. I also have acquaintances with some Hong Kong people in town though, who said they'd be willing to help out with some Chinese support here and there. Maybe if you have an international association or something near you, you could ask them if there's anyone willing to volunteer with some translations for PR.
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Post by starbreeze on May 28, 2019 9:12:03 GMT 9
Has anyone had any experience reaching out to consulates, airline companies, travel companies and English-speaking orgs so on to promote their areas?
My soup and I have been requested to work on this but....not really sure how to go about it hue.
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Post by marudate on May 31, 2019 15:28:11 GMT 9
Has anyone had any experience reaching out to consulates, airline companies, travel companies and English-speaking orgs so on to promote their areas? My soup and I have been requested to work on this but....not really sure how to go about it hue. Try to get a booth at the Travel Mart Expo in Tokyo? If you're a municipality and aren't famous (Kyoto) you probably want to work as part of a broader regional effort, through a DMO or other entity. There are a lot of travel companies and the like in the world. What's your prefecture doing and are you part of it? |
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Post by starbreeze on Jun 3, 2019 14:22:07 GMT 9
Has anyone had any experience reaching out to consulates, airline companies, travel companies and English-speaking orgs so on to promote their areas? My soup and I have been requested to work on this but....not really sure how to go about it hue. Try to get a booth at the Travel Mart Expo in Tokyo? If you're a municipality and aren't famous (Kyoto) you probably want to work as part of a broader regional effort, through a DMO or other entity. There are a lot of travel companies and the like in the world. What's your prefecture doing and are you part of it? I know we do work with JTB and the prefecture and other areas in this vicinity to do promotions. This effort is more specifically targeting foreigners and foreigner groups. Sorry that was a bit vague originally. |
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Post by marudate on Jun 3, 2019 23:28:57 GMT 9
Travel Mart is also big for foreign travel companies and a place where they can sit down with you to plan tours.
Where do you begin is the problem- if you have some kind of niche (ties to a particular city or country, obvious fit for a certain type of travel company), go for it.
Just keep in mind tourists and tour companies cover quite a bit of ground in Japan, so how will you fit into an existing itinerary, or what else is there in your region to make the journey worth it? Individual localities are disadvantaged compared to those working as part of a broader effort.
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Post by Leilo on Jul 18, 2019 9:15:35 GMT 9
Are any of you experienced with business Facebook? I need to figure it out before actually using it for promotions but it's so confusing. I've put hours into trying to figure it out but I still don't feel closer to understanding how to use it right. It'd be easier to just use the boost option from the page itself but I'm working through this with a colleague and it's not a situation where I can be like "wait this is complicated, can we quit this and try starting over from the simple option?" after they also put so much time into trying to figure it as well. ugh. And googling doesn't help the problems or questions I have.
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Post by marudate on Jul 18, 2019 21:49:03 GMT 9
The biggest step is to create useful audiences. You need >1000 people at a bare minimum for promotions. 10-20,000 is better. "People who like your page and their hulemdos" is fine, but if you target intelligently you can get more fans, better responses to events, etc. The "lookalike" feature of people who look like your fans or look like people who have engaged with your page is very powerful. You can also target people based on the language they use Facebook, ex-pats, travelers, etc.
Once you do that you can create ads from the post itself (boost post), or boost existing posts or make ads using the ads manager feature. With ads manager you can do split tests (A/B, A/B/C) which are great for testing audiences against one another.
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Post by Leilo on Jul 22, 2019 9:44:26 GMT 9
The biggest step is to create useful audiences. You need >1000 people at a bare minimum for promotions. 10-20,000 is better. "People who like your page and their hulemdos" is fine, but if you target intelligently you can get more fans, better responses to events, etc. The "lookalike" feature of people who look like your fans or look like people who have engaged with your page is very powerful. You can also target people based on the language they use Facebook, ex-pats, travelers, etc. Once you do that you can create ads from the post itself (boost post), or boost existing posts or make ads using the ads manager feature. With ads manager you can do split tests (A/B, A/B/C) which are great for testing audiences against one another. Thanks for the tips! That clears things up a bit.
One thing I'm kind of stumped at right now is, I can't seem to share posts/drafts I made on ad manager with another user (they have access to the same ad account). I gave them all permissions, and from our ends we're logged into the same account, but the ads or drafts we make don't show up for each other. Not sure what's going wrong. It isn't ideal because at this rate we'll need to manually write out (or screenshot) the ad options and results when communicating with each other. I think if we start doing it like that we won't turn back too, which will be a lot more work. I don't know why the drafts aren't being shared even though we're on the same account with the same permissions.
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Post by marudate on Aug 2, 2019 23:19:30 GMT 9
Yeah, that's annoying. I don't 100% understand how the Eternal Overlord structure works.
The login should be the Facebook user (your personal account), and while the ad account is shared you may each get a profile under it. That's how my company worked. I had to add a coworker on my ad account so they could see my stats, ads, etc., I manually added them as an Eternal Overlord to my subset of the ad manager. Super annoying. Maybe I could have created ads and audiences with my company's overall account but I didn't understand how it worked well enough.
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Post by Leilo on Aug 22, 2019 13:23:00 GMT 9
It'll work out, but there's some disappointment with the company that's going to help us in payments for the ads.
We should have specifically asked how much they wanted to charge for putting out ads for us. I'll be the one to make all the content and decide everything for the ad's options, we just need help since we don't have the correct payment option. So, ideally I'd just send the company the correct photos/text or tell them what post to boost, then they'd fill in the options with their payment info, and we pay them the amount of moeny we put in the ad, as well as a set fee to pay them for putting out the ad for us. The thing is, we asked them around how much it would cost before but they said it wouldn't cost much at all, because they're not actually creating any of the content. But now that they sent us the final offer they're actually charging a lot for every time they put out an ad. And our budget is pretty low as well. I had planned to try running a few ads every month this year with the budget we have, but because we need to pay them that much for each ad I'll only be able to run a few this year... Maybe this is normal? Idk. I assumed it wouldn't cost much because the procedure on their side should only take about 15 minutes or so I'd assume? :( sad.
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Post by starbreeze on Aug 29, 2019 15:43:38 GMT 9
If you had an opportunity to go anywhere in the world (English-speaking) to promote your town/city/prefecture (provided there are no sister cities already in place) where would you go? Who would you promote to? Would it even be worthwhile to go somewhere and try to convince people to come versus just staying put and blasting social media?
Inquiring minds wanna know!
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Post by 𝑜𝓇𝒾𝒽𝒾𝓂𝑒 on Aug 29, 2019 15:51:09 GMT 9
If you had an opportunity to go anywhere in the world (English-speaking) to promote your town/city/prefecture (provided there are no sister cities already in place) where would you go? Who would you promote to? Would it even be worthwhile to go somewhere and try to convince people to come versus just staying put and blasting social media? Inquiries minds wanna know! Hm, my city already has sister cities in England, America and New Zealand, so maybe Australia and Canada?
Since I hear Canada is pretty darn cold I guess I could promote it as a nice warm place to escape the cold weather (most of the time) on holiday? I guess technically I could also promote it to Australians that way too since their winter's our summer (and here too) and promote all the cool nature stuff we have here (my Canadian hulemdo, next-town-over ALT, also seemed quite excited at the prospects of watersports around here so I could promote that too I guess~)
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Post by marudate on Aug 30, 2019 17:07:31 GMT 9
I think you need to find some kind of niche or connection, or join an existing effort. See what your prefecture, or DMO in your area are already doing and help add to it. Go with them to Travel Mart, do paid online marketing to push your town more in the regions they're targeting, etc. Tourism takes resources and works best as a region, so try to think outside the town box (unless you're Kyoto or somewhere like that)!
The reason to go abroad wouldn't be to go after individual tourists but to build relations with foreign officials, travel agencies servicing Japan, giving talks to groups with interests in Japan, etc.
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Post by Leilo on Aug 30, 2019 21:30:23 GMT 9
If you had an opportunity to go anywhere in the world (English-speaking) to promote your town/city/prefecture (provided there are no sister cities already in place) where would you go? Who would you promote to? Would it even be worthwhile to go somewhere and try to convince people to come versus just staying put and blasting social media? Inquiring minds wanna know! Not English speaking but my old boss was trying to get our tourism office to make Southeast Asian countries into a target, like he'd mention Thailand if I remember correctly? He traveled a lot and liked reading about tourism etc. I asked him why he wanted to make those places into a target and he said it was because tourists from those areas have higher rates of repeaters and that the tourists from Southeast Asian countries focus on building relationships with locals. I don't actually know if that's true but it sounded interesting. Unfortunately he got transferred away so now our targets are just Taiwan and broadly "eigoken". If I were to chose from English speaking countries maybe I'd go to Australia because I know Australians are coming inland nearby my city to do snowboarding etc. I'd need to learn more about what those tourists like to do though to know what we could sell from my city, since there's no snowboarding etc here. Otherwise I'd like to promote to people who hike or do backpacking because of our nature and national trail etc. But I'm not sure which country would be the best for that. |
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Post by starbreeze on Sept 3, 2019 14:27:33 GMT 9
I think you need to find some kind of niche or connection, or join an existing effort. See what your prefecture, or DMO in your area are already doing and help add to it. Go with them to Travel Mart, do paid online marketing to push your town more in the regions they're targeting, etc. Tourism takes resources and works best as a region, so try to think outside the town box (unless you're Kyoto or somewhere like that)! The reason to go abroad wouldn't be to go after individual tourists but to build relations with foreign officials, travel agencies servicing Japan, giving talks to groups with interests in Japan, etc. We have a broad effort with other islands (part of an island chain) and occasionally do travel deals aimed at Japanese tourists. So I know you've mentioned Travel Mart before, but is it basically a conference where you go and meet with travel agencies and have them plan tours involving your geographical location in English? I've looked at the website but I have a hard time wrapping my head around this since I've never really delved into the world of sales and marketing. |
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Post by starbreeze on Sept 3, 2019 14:39:49 GMT 9
Thanks for the feedback! That's interesting that Southeast Asian countries supposedly have more repeater tourists... Australia is actually the reason I brought this up because my TANTO gave me info about CLAIR's Matsuri Japan Festival in Sydney in December and asked me if I think this (or something like it) would be worth going to. My answer would be a resounding YES if he confirmed there was money in the budget for travel I felt that this would actually be benefit my town by upping our inbound numbers but I'm not sure how effective these kinds of events are at getting people to actually go. Anyways, he basically gave me free reign to voice my interests in traveling abroad (be it to Europe or elsewhere) which I would ordinarily be all for but alas; the doubts, they surface. Also the trips to Korea our town had budgeted for got canceled due to the poor relations so I guess this is sort of a "well, what else is there?" perspective. |
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Post by marudate on Sept 4, 2019 8:08:01 GMT 9
I think you need to find some kind of niche or connection, or join an existing effort. See what your prefecture, or DMO in your area are already doing and help add to it. Go with them to Travel Mart, do paid online marketing to push your town more in the regions they're targeting, etc. Tourism takes resources and works best as a region, so try to think outside the town box (unless you're Kyoto or somewhere like that)! The reason to go abroad wouldn't be to go after individual tourists but to build relations with foreign officials, travel agencies servicing Japan, giving talks to groups with interests in Japan, etc. We have a broad effort with other islands (part of an island chain) and occasionally do travel deals aimed at Japanese tourists. So I know you've mentioned Travel Mart before, but is it basically a conference where you go and meet with travel agencies and have them plan tours involving your geographical location in English? I've looked at the website but I have a hard time wrapping my head around this since I've never really delved into the world of sales and marketing. Yes, it's primarily agencies/agents of various sizes and niches from around the world. Not just English-speaking, though English or Japanese is the common language I think. There are booths to present your town/area, and then more importantly one-on-one consultations where agents sign up to meet with you to talk about specific plans/contents. Your prefecture is likely there, so maybe have the town talk to them or others about logistics. |
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Post by starbreeze on Sept 4, 2019 8:45:12 GMT 9
Yes, it's primarily agencies/agents of various sizes and niches from around the world. Not just English-speaking, though English or Japanese is the common language I think. There are booths to present your town/area, and then more importantly one-on-one consultations where agents sign up to meet with you to talk about specific plans/contents. Your prefecture is likely there, so maybe have the town talk to them or others about logistics. Thanks! I will bring this up with TANTO to see if it's something we can still potentially jump on last minute. I doubt it will go down this year but maybe next year... |
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Post by Leilo on Sept 30, 2019 9:31:37 GMT 9
Do you guys think it's worth trying to promote an industry festival/産業まつり to international tourists or people abroad? I plan on promoting it normally directed at English speakers etc. who live around here, but I don't know if it would be worth trying to promote it for tourists. It'd be great if they came but it just doesn't seem like the kind of thing tourists in abroad would want to do in Japan... (Since our Industry festival basically has a bunch of stands from local businesses selling and giving out goods in addition to introducing their stuff. Then we have a lot of food, performances and activities at the venue as well.) So I think it is fun for locals but it doesn't seem like tourists would be interested.
Unrelated but I'm kind of struggling in general to decide on places to promote for inbound here; i.e. what would interest OUBEI tourists and also stand out amongst other cities near by? It's also tricky that some of the most beautiful places here are the hardest to get to, and because of rules I need to careful about not favoring certain businesses/shops/onsen by promoting them either.
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Post by marudate on Oct 7, 2019 14:46:51 GMT 9
I wouldn't spend much effort on tourists for a local products festival. If they find the info in English, and are coming to the area anyway, great!
What is unique/best about your municipality is a good question. Maybe see if their are reviews on Japan Guide, TripAdvisor, Google Maps, for what currently interests foreign visitors?
Maybe you can promote some kind of theme- fall hikes, fall colors, fall food, etc. It's good to tie a few places together, potentially including ones that aren't in your town proper but might draw more people (piggyback on their fame). You aren't competing against nearby cities, the whole region is struggling to find foreign tourists.
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Post by Leilo on Oct 7, 2019 16:07:57 GMT 9
marudate thanks for the advice! You're right. I think I worded that wrongly by saying "against" other places. I do do some PR with and for other cities nearby us too, and nearby coastal cities are usually really happy to collaborate with us as well. I think that's also a good idea especially here, because the whole coast is full of intense scenery which differs a lot from town to town, so it's a good chance to promote multiple places on the coast to visit in sequence (i.e. via the MCT). I guess when I said that I was thinking of how to pinpoint "new" areas here that would be unique enough for people to want to visit them. For instance, our most-visited tourism attraction here is on one side of town, so I'd like to think of how to promote other areas in our city so the people running businesses in those districts could also benefit from tourism. Random but I'm almost jealous of people promoting places that don't have bears. That would make things less complicated here. I mean I still do promote areas with bears and just include a warning, but if there's no way a local would go X area alone then I need to be careful about how/if I promote it to tourists.
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Post by starbreeze on Oct 8, 2019 14:52:09 GMT 9
marudate thanks for the advice! You're right. I think I worded that wrongly by saying "against" other places. I do do some PR with and for other cities nearby us too, and nearby coastal cities are usually really happy to collaborate with us as well. I think that's also a good idea especially here, because the whole coast is full of intense scenery which differs a lot from town to town, so it's a good chance to promote multiple places on the coast to visit in sequence (i.e. via the MCT). I guess when I said that I was thinking of how to pinpoint "new" areas here that would be unique enough for people to want to visit them. For instance, our most-visited tourism attraction here is on one side of town, so I'd like to think of how to promote other areas in our city so the people running businesses in those districts could also benefit from tourism. Random but I'm almost jealous of people promoting places that don't have bears. That would make things less complicated here. I mean I still do promote areas with bears and just include a warning, but if there's no way a local would go X area alone then I need to be careful about how/if I promote it to tourists. This part made me chuckle until I remembered that we have a similar problem but with inoshishi. I wonder if it would be possible to make bear spray available to rent out... |
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Post by Leilo on Oct 8, 2019 14:59:54 GMT 9
starbreeze Oooh. We don't have inoshishi here. We also have monkeys in my placement but they're not used to people so if you ever see one they'll just run away. With bears though there have been cases of them attacking people. Apparently recently a bear entered into a shop in an especially mountainous part of town...it sounds like the start of a bad joke hue.
What are you supposed to do if you see an inoshishi? Do they attack people? Edit: an important part of information here is that people used to hunt and eat wild deers and bears. But due to the nuclear disaster in 2011, they can't be sure that the wildlife here is 100% safe to eat so they don't hunt or sell the meat anymore. So the population of bears and deers has been on the rise. In half of my city the deer population outnumbers the people. hue ;; |
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Post by starbreeze on Oct 9, 2019 8:37:33 GMT 9
starbreeze Oooh. We don't have inoshishi here. We also have monkeys in my placement but they're not used to people so if you ever see one they'll just run away. With bears though there have been cases of them attacking people. Apparently recently a bear entered into a shop in an especially mountainous part of town...it sounds like the start of a bad joke hue.
What are you supposed to do if you see an inoshishi? Do they attack people? Edit: an important part of information here is that people used to hunt and eat wild deers and bears. But due to the nuclear disaster in 2011, they can't be sure that the wildlife here is 100% safe to eat so they don't hunt or sell the meat anymore. So the population of bears and deers has been on the rise. In half of my city the deer population outnumbers the people. hue ;; That makes sense.. I remember being very wary of hiking alone in the States due to the existence of bears and cougars in that part of the country. I also want to promote hiking here, but I sometimes forget to be mindful of the resident inoshishi population. While aggressive, they are probably less so than bears and in all of my encounters they simply run away when they see you, like the deer. We also have tons of joro orb weaver spiders setting up webs along the hiking trails in the fall. They're pretty awesome Halloween decorations until you walk into one hue. |
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Post by Leilo on Oct 10, 2019 9:13:25 GMT 9
starbreeze Oooh. We don't have inoshishi here. We also have monkeys in my placement but they're not used to people so if you ever see one they'll just run away. With bears though there have been cases of them attacking people. Apparently recently a bear entered into a shop in an especially mountainous part of town...it sounds like the start of a bad joke hue.
What are you supposed to do if you see an inoshishi? Do they attack people? Edit: an important part of information here is that people used to hunt and eat wild deers and bears. But due to the nuclear disaster in 2011, they can't be sure that the wildlife here is 100% safe to eat so they don't hunt or sell the meat anymore. So the population of bears and deers has been on the rise. In half of my city the deer population outnumbers the people. hue ;; That makes sense.. I remember being very wary of hiking alone in the States due to the existence of bears and cougars in that part of the country. I also want to promote hiking here, but I sometimes forget to be mindful of the resident inoshishi population. While aggressive, they are probably less so than bears and in all of my encounters they simply run away when they see you, like the deer. We also have tons of joro orb weaver spiders setting up webs along the hiking trails in the fall. They're pretty awesome Halloween decorations until you walk into one hue. Yeah :( I assume it would be ok to promote hiking as long as we give a warning, or like link to a guide on how to stay safe from boars, bears etc. I don't think we have much poisonous spiders here but we also have poisonous snakes hahah.. I know the feeling of being wary to hike alone though. I love hiking and want to go even if I'm alone but I'm scared to, sadly. When I first came to my placement I didn't know about the bears and I think I went into the mountains a couple times alone...oops.
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Post by marudate on Oct 28, 2019 13:09:52 GMT 9
For bears, generally people are encouraged to bring a bell or radio to make noise, and avoid dusk/dawn when they're most active. These are small bears that aren't generally aggressive and will avoid people. There is a lot of hiking all over Tohoku and even a new Michinoku Coastal Trail connecting the different prefectures, so I wouldn't discourage it. Some bear tips here: www.michinokutrail.com/tipsand at the bottom here: tohoku.env.go.jp/mct/english/Are there really poisonous land snakes in rock hand? When exploring with a naturalist hulemdo of mine he said almost all the poison ones in NE Japan live in the ocean. |
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Post by Leilo on Oct 28, 2019 14:22:27 GMT 9
For bears, generally people are encouraged to bring a bell or radio to make noise, and avoid dusk/dawn when they're most active. These are small bears that aren't generally aggressive and will avoid people. There is a lot of hiking all over Tohoku and even a new Michinoku Coastal Trail connecting the different prefectures, so I wouldn't discourage it. Some bear tips here: www.michinokutrail.com/tipsand at the bottom here: tohoku.env.go.jp/mct/english/Are there really poisonous land snakes in rock hand? When exploring with a naturalist hulemdo of mine he said almost all the poison ones in NE Japan live in the ocean. Thanks for the tips! I encourage hiking here (it also depends on the place in my city), but I think there are places which people should go to in groups rather than alone because of the bears. Here is an information page about bear attacks/injuries on people in rock hand. If you scroll down it has a map of where bear attacks happened in the past 3 years; it seems there was one case in my city last year. (The MCT fan website says mainly Aomori and North rock hand but I think we also have a lot of bears in southern rock hand too.) Apparently my city has mamushi. I've never seen one in person but I've seen some warning signs outside. I've also heard about past cases of people getting bit by mamushi in my city.
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Occultkitty
Straight outta Narita
Posts: 7 
CIR Experience: 2nd year
Location: Hokkaido
Gender (Pronouns): meh. whatever
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Post by Occultkitty on Dec 25, 2019 13:26:22 GMT 9
I think my position is a bit different from you, but here is my CO's English website and FB: en.visit-hokkaido.jp/www.facebook.com/visithokkaido.en/I work in a tourism organization, so when I got here they already had a proper website, and SNS with a good following which is being managed by an outside company. The real issue for me has been working out what I can do to help promote Hokkaido abroad which isn't already being done. :/ In terms of which SNS is most effective, what I have noticed is that it really depends on which region your targeting. For example FB is popular in Europe, however obviously FB can't be accessed in China without a VPN, so the main SNS used there is Weibo. A the moment our weakest social media is Instagram; I think that there's so much that can be done with Insta (ie. givaways, hashtagging stories, etc.) that it may take some studying to work out the most effective way to use it for promotion purposes. |
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6townrice
Straight outta Narita
Posts: 17
CIR Experience: 2nd year
Location: Niigata
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Post by 6townrice on Jun 15, 2021 13:44:56 GMT 9
Has anyone ever tried connecting with the JET Alumni Association or Japan interest groups overseas to broadcast your municipality's sightseeing attractions to the world or just up 知名度 in general?
My office wants me to find ways to get feedback from people overseas on the English-speaking tourist oriented projects we've worked on & invested in so far. If anyone has any tips on using JET AA or Japan interest groups to do this, or other avenues for finding feedback I would love to hear them!!
Pros:
-former JETs have tons of sightseeing & cultural activity experience from their time in Japan
-maybe have some gripes about things that were inconvenient or advice about what should be avoided too
-Japan societies tend to have missions of increasing ties with Japan
-members probably have individual opinions on what makes a certain activity or destination in Japan appealing
Concerns:
-not sure if people will be interested in providing feedback if there's no incentive (like an Amazon gift card or something)
-lots of our "projects" involve printed English pamphlets and other analogue materials that might be tricky to evaluate remotely
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mcduds
So jozu at chopsticks
Posts: 124
CIR Experience: 1st year
Location: Nagasaki
Gender (Pronouns): she/her/hers
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Post by mcduds on Jan 6, 2023 10:01:14 GMT 9
Hey y'all! Not sure if this is the right thread for this but I decided to post here. So I work in the tourism departmentand one of my duties when coming here was taking over the English instagram started by my pred. We have around 400 followers tend to get around 50 - 60 likes per post, but a large portion of that is local Japanese residents so it's kind of pointless imo hue. I've been working on making reels instead of just posting pictures and such but am still having a difficult time increasing post engagement and recently the number of likes and and views have even been decreasing. Does anyone have any advice for running a tourism / pr sns aimed at foreigners? I don’t really have any experience in photography / editing so I am trying to improve those skills. (We also lack a solid English tourism website to link to which is something I am pushing for but that's another story) As far as increasing followers / engagement, apart from paying to boost posts I’m not sure how else to improve this… Here is the instagram I’m running if anyone would be willing to critique it (There are a lot of things I want to change from my pred, including cleaning up the story function but I haven't gotten around to it yet) |
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