Top Fashion Blogger to Visit Australia

One of the world’s most influential bloggers, The Sartorialist, will visit Australia this month as part of a new Tourism Australia initiative to target social media opinion leaders.

The Satorialist, aka Scott Schuman, who was rated by Time Magazine as one of the world’s top 100 design influencers and by The Observer as the 20th most powerful blog in the world, will visit Australia in April. His New York based blog site:  http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/ currently receives in excess of 36 million visits per annum, with many visitors joining in the conversation via interactive blogging.

Mr Schuman has been invited as part of Tourism Australia’s new push to invite leading online opinion leaders to experience Australia. Tourism Australia aims to work with these key influencers to drive the desire in others to travel to Australia through positive word of mouth commentary.

Tourism Australia Managing Director Geoff Buckley said the addition of the Visiting Opinion Leaders Program to Tourism Australia’s existing public relations activities provided new ways to reach consumers in the rapidly changing communications landscape.

“In addition to traditional advertising there are so many more ways to reach consumers today, particularly in the digital environment,” Mr Buckley said.

“We know that the consumers we target – Experience Seekers – are very active in the digital space which is a key reason why we are targeting digital opinion leaders who have a vast audience and influential voice.”

Mr Buckley said the Visiting Opinion Leaders Program will work in the same way as Tourism Australia’s very effective international media hosting programs, which have been running for more than 20 years.

“The key difference is that we are now adding online opinion leaders to our hosting mix in order to extend our storytelling into new and highly influential channels,” Mr Buckley said.

Other opinion leaders who will be visiting the country in the coming months include:

• Andy Rouse, a nature blogger based in the United Kingdom, with in excess of 50,000 hits per month;

• Lesmads.de, aka Julia Knolle, based in Germany, who writes a blog about lifestyle, fashion, design and photography, and has in excess of 210,000 visits and 830,000 page views per month; and

• Yibo FAN or ‘The Colourful Map’ – one of China’s top travel bloggers.

The opinion leaders program follows a number of Tourism Australia activities in digital and social media including a Facebook page, and activities with MySpace and Bebo to target working holiday makers.

Tourism Australia’s Facebook page has a following of well over 200,000 people,
which is growing at a rate of almost 1,000 new fans a day. This month Tourism
Australia has expanded its activities to integrate Twitter followers’ comments or
suggestions directly into its Facebook page.

Mr Buckley said this new development provided a way of connecting up people on Twitter with a real interest in Australia with people on Facebook with the same interest in our country.

“Social media is a great way for people to connect instantly on a large scale around things they are interested in – like Australian holidays,” Mr Buckley said.

For more information visit the website www.tourism.australia.com