Local tourism groups have partnered with DDB Canada to aggregate positive cyber content about Vancouver to a new website, thisisourvancouver.com, to counter damage done to the city’s reputation as a result of last week’s Stanley Cup riot.
“From the tourism bureau’s perspective, we know that there’s this great positive information and energy and images and comments all over the Internet, but there wasn’t one place that somebody that was not in Vancouver or wasn’t really plugged in could go and find it all,” said Amber Sessions, Tourism Vancouver’s manager of trade and travel media relations.
“So for us that’s really the motivator – that our clients maybe or people who are potentially put off of Vancouver after what happened, hopefully this website will spread around the world and people will see all of the positive things that have come out of this.”
Creative agency DDB Canada is the force behind the website, working pro bono to develop an online platform based on Tumblr that scours the web for content from sources such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.
Sessions said the technology targets post-riot content by zeroing in on the #thisismyvancouver Twitter hashtag.
“As far as I know, the #thisismyvancouver hashtag is a post-riot thing, although I’m certainly not an authority on that,” she said, noting that if the hashtag existed previously it has gained its momentum in the past week.
Sessions said the URL for thisismyvancouver was already taken, but thisisourvancouver.com seemed “really fitting.”
See this week’s edition of Business in Vancouver for Bob Mackin's take how the riot has undermined Vancouver’s brand.
Jenny Wagler
Twitter: JennyWagler_BIV