Q&A: Welcome to Yorkshire's Kristal Ireland

Excitement! Typically: lots of tweeting, developing content for Yorkshire.com, experimenting with Apps and working with a passionate team

How important is digital to Welcome to Yorkshire's overall marketing strategy?

Digital is very important to Welcome to Yorkshire, which suites me down to the ground. Yorkshire.com has been instrumental across all of our marketing activity this year, everything from our TV campaigns, This is Y magazine, all of our print materials, branding and communications. Combined with extensive SEO, PPC and display campaigns we have seen year on year traffic to the site increase by over 85%, with the site achieving over 4 million unique visits since launch, which I think only highlights again how important the web is to the tourism industry.

Our commitment to digital extends beyond just the website. This year we have launched 2 iPhone Applications, developed a full social media strategy across Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and run a series of social media training workshops for over 400 of our members throughout the county.

We have lots more developments in the pipeline for next year, I don’t want to give too much away but Yorkshire.com is going to focus heavily on a more content rich experience, and give users the chance to find out about some of the ‘Hidden Gems’ in our fabulous county. We have access to some truly stunning imagery, video footage, even music, and with the help of our extensive member network we are eager to develop something really special in 2011.

Welcome to Yorkshire notably dabbled with Foursquare in 2010. How important will location-based social media prove to be for the tourism industry?

We definitely did want to give Foursquare a chance to add something to our digital marketing activities. Personally I watched Foursquare develop in the States for 6 months before I felt it was time for us to experiment with it for domestic tourism. Tourist Boards are often criticised for not pushing the boundaries with their marketing and simply producing ‘another leaflet’. I saw this as our opportunity to try something new. I’m certainly not shy about using technology in innovative ways and I’m a firm believer in not being afraid to try new things, which is why I love working in digital. It didn’t cost us anything to set up and trial Foursquare and they have actually been really great to work with over in the States, supporting our efforts and sending us lots of official window clings for our members.

What I think is special about Foursquare is that it gives users the chance to find out tips about things to do around their location. We have worked with our members to explore how tips and the special offers can work to drive footfall to their businesses. The great thing for Welcome to Yorkshire is that as we have an official branded page on Foursquare - when a user ‘checks-in’ around one of our pre loaded attractions they get a Welcome to Yorkshire message on their mobile, which is great for our brand.

I’m sure you want to know – has it worked? That’s a difficult question to answer as I’m not sure anyone has got any firm way of measuring location based social media yet. But we now have over 3,500 friends on Foursquare, we have members putting on special offers, from free cupcakes after 5 ‘check in’s’, discounted entry to attractions and a pub in Leeds offering a free pint to their Mayor on a Friday. We have set up this Tumblr account so our members can send us pictures of their window clings. All in all I know my team have had a great time working on the project. It has certainly injected some excitement in our members for digital marketing. I am keen to see how Facebook Places develops and whether the user up take is significant enough to make it stand out as the winning format in location based social media, as some believe it will do, let’s wait and see what 2011 brings!

Which websites (apart from Welcome to Yorkshire's) do you visit every day, and which is your all-time favourite?

As I’m known in our office as a bit of a geek I love sites like The Next Web, Ted.com and econsultancy. But my all time favourite has to be gofugyourself.com. I think the humour and the celebrity commentary on the site is really good. I’ve followed it for years now.

2010 ended with WikiLeaks and hacking attacks dominating the headlines. What will be the big digital talking points of 2011?

I think we are going to continue to see an even more maturing attitude in the way brands, businesses and organisations behave on the internet. Having watched the explosion of social media over the last couple of years, witnessing some amazing successes (Old Spice) and some less than successful (Nestle), I think we will see a consolidation of the various social media platforms.

I think there will be some interesting debate in the industry around social media measurement and calculating the ROI of social media activities. A lot of companies have spent a lot of money on social media, either with agencies, consultants or in-house, I believe that the industry will need to start agreeing on or compiling some core metrics for measurement if it is to be taken seriously in a brands marketing strategy, especially as budgets may remain tight into 2011.

On a technology front I think we will see even more development of mobile web and the use of QR code technology as a way of providing synergy between print and digital media. As much as I love digital I don’t believe print is dead, there are still vast amounts of people who love actually reading a book or flicking through a beautifully compiled magazine.

What I think the challenge to print and digital producers will be is to harness the opportunity for the two to work in harmony. Japan is leading the way on this at the moment with entire magazines being generated with QR codes, but it’s encouraging to see the potential application of QR codes in print magazines as a way of boosting online revenue from mobile e-commerce. We are tracking an ever increasing amount of traffic from mobile devices to Yorkshire.com and I think this will only increase going forwards.

Throughout today Kristal will be picking out her favourite campaigns and news stories from 2010 and looking ahead to what the next 12 months has in store. Her choices will run alongside The Drum's regular news reports.