TOURISM BLOGGERS CONFERENCE 2012

Some 350 people mostly Malaysians were seen at the Malaysia International Tourism Bloggers Conference which was held on 8 and 9 May 2012 at the Seri Pacific Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. Organised by the Ministry of Tourism and managed by the Malaysia Social Media Chambers the conference was graced by the presence of 18 prominent social media activists and bloggers. However most of the attendees were local Malaysians who were not blogging for tourism. Other than the tourist guides who were there in full force there was a glaring absence of tourism players from the other clusters. So to call it a tourism bloggers conference is not very correct. Topics discussed were wide ranging from outreach beyond travel bloggers to entrepreneurship in tourism using social media. There were also workshops on how to make social media tools work for tourism and the leisure business using social media. These were excellent topics but certainly did not reach the right target audience. It was learnt that a sum of RM600,000 were allocated for this event which was not managed by the mainstream tourism NGO.