Nowadays all you hear about is social media marketing, Web 2.0, UGC (user generated content) and how it is going to revolutionize the way we market; and if you’re not doing it shame on you, get with the program.

Personally I feel that social media is not for everyone, there are companies that by the nature of their business are ‘anti-social’ and there’s nothing wrong with this. For example many government organizations are going to have a hard time with the open dialog that UGC will bring; so medians such as blogs, forums and or video sharing may present a concern.

We as marketers need to evaluate social media and determine the right median; though it is hard to measure social media, we should always have success metrics.

Below are two great examples on how national tourism boards have leveraged social media within Yahoo!

Tourism Australia has been able to integrate flickr where users can share their pictures, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo Groups and great content via the destination guides.

This is a great Web 2.0 piece that still allows them to have control, manage their brand but still allow users to generate content; the great thing is that they can leverage this platform globally – for example they could launch a US campaign by placing media on Yahoo.com and drive users to this integrated landing page sitting on Yahoo Travel Australia.

The next example is from the Canadian Tourism Commission based here in Vancouver. The CTC campaign leveraged the Yahoo! Groups platform on Yahoo.ca to build this social media campaign

The key elements were the launch of the i-Can-Travel group, the picture sharing by users on flickr and a UGC contest where users were encouraged to submit pictures, poems, mp3 files or video about ‘their Canada’.

Both of these are excellent examples of how tourism markets can leverage existing Web 2.0 platforms without having to reinvent the wheel within a reasonably controlled environment.