Electric Scotland Blog

Take one guess, The Scottish Executive. It has been my experience that they do not understand how to promote Scotland and Tourism and where the money should go.

If Scotland won't do it, let us and all the Scottish Societies do it. The video made my cry to and I came up with a theme, Scoltand, the Home of Heart. Or I am Scotland I would love ta see ya. I know, again from experience that Visit Scotland has no idea how important the games and festivals of N.American are. And tis true, those of Scottish descent care more about Scotland and know more of her history than most Scots. Let us band together and I know that there are plenty of creative people in this community that could come up with great ideas. With the internet we could accomplish more to increase tourism than an government agency there would ever do. Good thinking Alastair

Alastair,

Arrange a work visa for me and I will go to Scotland and talk to some of them Good Ol Boys....But they might not cotton to an EX Pat.....anyway....with my gift of gab surely I oulde motivate the right people.....and please tell me, who is Euan Colville and where can I find him ?

Another good blog..
Lu..

Alastair, for over 18 months I worked very hard for the "Homecoming Scotland" organizers here in Australia, I promoted the event in every way I could think of and I must have sent well over 2000 emails alone, the biggest problem I had was getting information from the committee in Scotland as to what was actually going on and when I did I was constantly emailing them back for clarification, I honestly think that the promotion from Canada, the USA and Australia/New Zealand went unrecognized however I was given a square foot of land in East Lothian for my efforts,
What really cheeses me off is that Scotland has so much to offer the tourist industry but those in charge of this area seem to be lacking, recently some Aussie surfers came back from Scotland raving about the surfing but I did not see anything in the Scottish media.

I guess I should clarify that Scotland is by no means alone when it comes to promoting it's tourism industry but as we are Scottish focussed we tend to focus on Scotland.

You note wind surfing and you are quite correct... we do have some about wind surfing on the site but I've never seen anything about it on tourism sites.

I've been wanting to do "Educational Advertising" on the site for a while but no takers as yet. What I mean by educational advertising is to use it to educate our visitors on parts of the world that have a good Scottish ethnic mix. So I have looked to Scotland of course as well as other countries, states and provinces to see if I could get them involved.

As an example I got some interest from the Province of Alberta in Canada. The media and marketing company that worked for the Province has 88 x 20,000 word articles about the Province together with thousands of pictures. The idea was for them to purchase the large 300 x 250 box in my site header. They would place a teaser graphic there and change it weekly. Each teaser graphic would link to a 20,000 word article complete with at least 50 pictures and even videos.

All of this would educate our visitors on the Province of Alberta and as some 25% of it's prominent citizens are Scots or of Scots descent I thought it would make interesting reading while also of course promoting the Provice of Alberta.

Sad to say nothing happened and I've also tried to get Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, other Canadian provinces and US states involved but no biters yet. The cost for it is US$3000 per month but it's a very prominent advert on all pages of our site and really no more than what you'd pay for a single page colour advert in a magazine but of course a heck of a lot more exposure than a magazine would give you.

Personally I'd like to see more web advertising going down this route where we really get educated.

You might want to talk to Magnus Orr, he is the one that did the Pipefest 2005 and 2010, he also is working on promoting extreme sports in Scotland as a tourism effort. Magnus can give you some good insight into the workings of the Scottish tourism effort. Magnus is a good, good friend of mine and his email is magnus@pipefest.com. Just mention my name, Annie

Thanks Annie and have sent him an email.

I subscribe to STV (Scotland On Television) and receive the weekly newsletter (free) which gives great publicity to Scotland and all things Scottish......it's a pity that a resource like this is not utilised by more Scottish businesses to have their product/venture or whatever field they are involved in given world wide access.........the following are the headline events from this weeks bulletin...plus many extra links...


Say cheese...
Scotland is not particularly well known for its cheese, but Phoebe Weller, AKA the Roving Fromagiere, is determined to change that. Watch as she showcases some mouth-watering examples in this video.

Fancy a wee dauner?
The Scottish countryside provides some of the best walks in the world and we have picked out a few of our favourites in this video. From beautiful Loch Katrine to the rugged terrain of Rannoch Moor, lace up your boots and let's go walking.

Enjoy the sweet taste of Scotland
Creme brulee is a deliciously indulgent dessert and this special Scottish raspberry recipe is so tasty, it's sure to become a family favourite. Watch as chef Nick Nairn demonstrates how to make the sweet dish. Delightful!

Gone to sea
Brigid Benson, author of 52 Weekends by the Sea, has taken a great interest in areas of Scotland that still rely on the sea as part of their way of life. She visited the fishing communities of Eyemouth and St Abbs to see what life is like by the water.

http://www.stv.tv/ just search through to register for newsletter

I will say that I've been puzzled why the BBC is not viewable outside the UK. Strikes me as a public body all of its content should be available to the world and thus help promote the UK to the world. It just seems to me that there is a lack of understanding by the UK and of course Scotland in using its own assets to promote themselves to the world.

I agree with you that STV does produce excellent programs. I did work with them for a few months but they just didn't have a business model at that time that worked. Like as a commercial company they really should have had some adverts in their videos but at the time they didn't. They also kept messing around with how they played the videos so that meant placing a link to a video often got broken.

They should really make their videos available in a YouTube way so that folk could embed their videos in their web sites. Over time that would offer them a significant audience.

They could also come up with a widget so that other web sites could link to them through that. That way it offers the web sites some content but of course sends people to their videos.

Gosh, I live just a train ride away from Edinburgh. What would I need to do to get some of these answers? Shall I use our family Coville connection or what? Just say the word Allie.

It's really more about the various tourism companies and organisations not being interested enough to do more to promote themselves. It's like the Festival Fringe. They could send someone out to take lots of wee videos of the various street performers and then make them available on YouTube.

It's like I have done quite a major section about the Gairloch and Loch Maree area of Northern Scotland. I worked hard to try and contact people in the area to share with us their own family and work life in the area but so far we've had not one contribution. I really don't understand it.

Alastair

You can lead a Scot to the water but you can't make him drink. It seems to me that Scotland in particular suffers from myopia. As the author of Stone Voices proclaims, "the trouble with Scotland is Scotland" I highly recommend this book by Neil Akerman to anyone who wants to really delve into the mind of Scotland and why it is so dense. Annie

Hi everybody. When do you think we will see Homecoming Scotland II promoted and do you think we have learned from the previous mistakes mentioned above?
Going by what's been said here, we could do a better job but then again who is in control of the promotion and finance?

It's always been my opinion that we need to educate people about Scotland and that means a whole series of meaningful articles of between 5,000 and 20,000 words along with great hi-res pictures and even videos. It's not only Scotland at fault here. All of the Travel trade around the world has failed to educate us on their areas. When it comes to the web there is a lack of vision and enterprize. To them the web means pretty sites with few words and tiny pictures.