When I started this blog in September, I announced that I would look at last year’s  BloggersinAmsterdam project by the Netherlands Board for Tourism. Together with the blog advertising network BlogAds they sent 25 US-bloggers to Amsterdam from February to March. The A-bloggers selected got free roundtrips, 5 nights at a 5-star hotel and a citycard for Amsterdam. In exchange for the trip each blogger a) conceded to be interviewed by the Dutch Tourism Board, b) had to give Holland.com one month of premium adspace and c) had to post the Bloggers in Amsterdam-logo in their navigation bar for one year. While blogging about the trip was not required, full disclosure about the arrangement was. Here is the long promised interview with Justin Abbott from Blogads.com, who was in charge of the project. 

Justin, how did the idea for the project come up?

It was a "eureka!" moment. We were talking with the Netherlands Tourism Board, trying to think of how to get more people going to Holland. They mentioned bringing journalists over for visits, and it made a ton of sense to bring over a bunch of bloggers instead. Let them go around and explore, and of course they’re going to blog everything they do.

Did it take a lot of convincing before the clients agreed?

Nope! They were excited about the idea and saw the potential from the very beginning.

How did you select the bloggers?

We picked a hodgepodge of bloggers, of big and medium size, so that a lot of different niches would be represented – food, political, mommy, Hollywood and music bloggers – and so that we would get each niche’s view point.

Did the negative reactions of the so called blogosphere come as a suprise to you?

No, not really. There are always going to be people with sour grapes, no matter what you’re doing.

How did you deal with these negative reactions? Do you think, it is necessary to take the blogosphere’s rampages seriously?

We just sat back and let the bloggers hash it out amongst themselves, and the overall reactions were ultimately very positive. How you respond totally depends on the situation; are people upset because there is some wrong that needs to be righted? Some miscommunication that needs to be clarified? Or is it just a debate, no matter how heated it gets. The key to remember: anytime that you’re dealing with an enormous group of disparate people, you need to have patience.

Why did you keep the blog interface so "clean". Instead of adding pics, typical tourist info and so on.

It wasn’t meant to be a tourism portal – you can surf over to holland.com for that – this was a central place to collate info about what was going on with the bloggers that were in Amsterdam. Linking to their posts, and pulling in their pictures.

Do you still get referrals from the participating blogs?

Definitely, we get a bunch of traffic from the participating blogs, and a whole lot from Google too.

How would you describe the overall return on investment or return on image? Were the initial goals achieved?

It was an experiment more than anything else, we hoped to create a little bit of buzz around the trip — but never expected that there would be so many blog posts, so many pictures, so many articles in newspapers about it, etc.

Would you repeat the campaign? If so, would you change anything?

Definitely, I’d love to! Only next time instead of having the bloggers travel staggered over six weeks, I’d have them all go in a much smaller window. That way you’d get even more dynamic action between the bloggers, and even more attention.

Read the view of Sebastiann Paaw from the Netherlands Board for Tourism here. Bloggers in Amsterdam was produced by Blogads.com.
Founded in 2002, Blogads.com is a cooperative of leading bloggers
helping advertisers place and manage ads on nearly 1300 blogs.

This was my traditional weekly English post. If you liked it, please check out my recent English articles:

• Travel 2.0 & User Generated Content in Destination Marketing – Interview with William Bakker from Tourism British Columbia
• Hotels & the Social Web – Some suggestions for Yotel
• Fake Travel Reviews are no Issue – Interview with Ian Rumgay from Tripadvisor continued
• About Hotel 2.0 & Travel 2.0 – Interview with Ian Rumgay from TripAdvisor
• Hotel 2.0 – Interview with Opus Hotel CEO Blogger Daniel Craig
• Travel planning today – Greetings from the Easter Island III
• Marketing manifesto for the travel industry – Interpretation of Jeff Jarvis

More to come at English category.

For my German language savvy readers: please check out my Travel 2.0 category.