Cape Town Tourism’s most recent marketing initiative used a clever combination of travel blogging, crowdsourcing and social media to draw attention to the city, ranked 23rd among the top 25 travel destinations worldwide in TripAdvisor’s  2012 list of Traveler’s Choice Destinations. And even before the 2010 event, Cape Town Tourism was no stranger to crowdsourcing and social media, having produced a city guide with content crowdsourced using Facebook and Twitter. Will other cities embrace crowdsourcing as tools to promote tourism? Locals? Local cuisine? MORE >>

Conferences and industry events are always a thrill. Having covered a few technology conferences from the safe confines of my office space, I’ve now learned the value of having people both on location at an event and back at home base for support. Here are a few tips I’ve gathered from my experience in remote event coverage. Twitter’s hashtag system is a simple and easy way to keep track of any event. Do a Google search for your event and filter the results by news and blogs sources. Follow the Hashtag. Pictures and Video Tell It All. MORE >>

And there are a lot of innovation crowdsourced communities online. Perhaps BP might want to  understand that by simply posting the need for a solution on a crowdsourced website , putting up a reward, and using a small part of their PR budget to promote discussions online about possible solutions, they can start to recover from at least the public relations disaster even if they can’t from the environmental one. So I got to thinking: what if we crowdsourced a solution? And my second question was… would BP listen to a crowdsourced solution? Schweeeeeet. MORE >>

Launched on October 18 th 2011, Gushcloud’s community now reaches close to 40 million people through Gushers’ sharing, tweeting, downloading applications and blogging about products, events or brands in their networks. Marketing & Communication Social Media Social Network Crowdsourcing Facebook Gushcloud Mobilizing Rewards Sharing social media marketing SXSWTweet. SXSW is a sizzling hub for the rising stars of social media. Mobilizing target networks online. Transparency of Community. Gushcloud is more than a social media marketing tool. Growing at a great pace! MORE >>

The company used its customer newsletter and social media to promote the event. ”Compensation: ” It’s also a good idea to communicate as much as possible in advance of the event to “bat around, or bat down some ideas that won’t work beforehand.” ” The best Betabrand brand hack from the event?  If your brand culture is not quite as open as Betabrand’s, you can still invite customers to participate in a hackathon event–and start the process of listening, learning and creating a more open culture. The mission? MORE >>