Social Media for Tourism: VisitManchester.com releases the Manchester API
Brendan Dawes, creative director of digital design company magneticNorth shows off the new VisitManchester.com on his Apple iPad
Here comes that promised blog post about the launch of the new and improved VisitManchester.com.
I had the pleasure of attending the launch of the new VisitManchester.com website in the rather salubrious settings of the Portico Library last week.
VisitManchester.com is the destination website for Manchester, managed by Marketing Manchester the tourist board for the city.
The Portico Library is a subscription library focused on 19th century literature housed in a Grade II* neo-classical listed building on Mosley Street, Manchester city centre.
It is absolutely gorgeous inside.
Opened in 1806, one of the secretaries of the library was Peter Mark Roget who began his famous Thesaurus there.
I joined over a hundred guests invited to this exclusive preview event of the new destination site for Manchester, dubbed in the press release as, “a first stage in a brand new approach to the digital promotion of the city”.
We were hosted by Nick Johnson, chairman of Marketing Manchester, Shaun Fensom, chairman of Manchester Digital, the trade association for the region’s digital and marketing industry and Brendan Dawes, creative director of the digital design company behind the new incarnation of the website, magnetic North, who presided over a presentation and panel discussion about the new site.
It’s not often one gets invited to the launch of a website and one got the impression that no expense had been spared to make us feel welcome: there was great food from Heathcotes, the celebrated Manchester restaurant at the end.
My belated thanks to the team at Marketing Manchester for a lovely evening.
Here’s a great summary video of the event for those that couldn’t attend. A short clip of a demo of the site on an iPad I captured with Brendan is embedded below.
During the Q&A session with the audience after Brendan’s impressive presentation, I asked the panel what was being offered to web developers who might want to use the ‘Manchester API’ launched as part of the new website.
The “Application Programming Interface for the city”, touted in the event’s press release as “the heart of the progressive strategy and one that in effect listens to the web and collects together relevant information from social media feeds and other sources about what to do and discover in Manchester”, appeared to be a collection of cleverly sourced content about Manchester on the social web.
Fresh content about Manchester from Twitter feeds, Vimeo and YouTube videos and Flickr pictures are presented to visitors on the new VisitManchester.com in a visually engaging river of news that puts a new spin on aggregating social media content.
You can view this feature in action on the site by clicking on the ‘Manchester Now’ link in the top right hand corner of visitmanchester.com.
As the press release continues, the Manchester API “has been named ‘FABRIC’ in tribute to the city’s past”.
In addition, the site presents tourist information about the city alongside helpful features like ‘Nearby hotels’ for whatever information you are viewing, all wrapped in an ingenious design that keeps the user’s visit contained on a single page.
You can also Save Content you view on the site without having to log in. Try it.
The answer from the panel was that the Manchester API is not currently available in this release but will be in coming months.
At present, the site is populated using carefully curated social media from around the web.
Whilst this was a bit of an anti-climax, I don’t think this it is necessarily a bad thing as allowing any old content tagged ‘Manchester’ to show up on the site would be a very bad idea during a local derby, for example!
In response, I suggested the creation of a Manchester tourism-specific hashtag.
This would ensure that content populating the stream of social media content in the site’s background would at least relate to specific information delivered on the site.
It could also potentially resolve issues with sourcing content from users.
Otherwise it would appear that information delivered by the Manchester API is nothing more than content a savvy web user can easily find themselves through a basic search on Twitter or Flickr or YouTube.
Having said all that, I came away very impressed by the new VisitManchester.com website. I’ve visited it again since the launch and feel it justifies some of the hyperbole used in the press release!
Here’s a short video of Brendan demoing the site on his Apple iPad. Neat!
Here’s another write up about the event by Nigel Barlow, co-founder of Inside The M60, Manchester’s new hyper local website.
What do you think? Where you there? Any suggestions for a hashtag for Manchester tourism?
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