– One hashtag, One momentary connectedness –
In 2016, the Hong Kong Tourism Board (HKTB) launched the #DiscoverHongKong UGC campaign in the hope of engaging people to share ‘I Never Knew’ Hong Kong stories by posting pictures or videos taken anywhere in Hong Kong with the hashtag #DiscoverHongKong together with a caption including the term ‘I Never Knew’. The campaign was initiated with partnerships with famous influencers like ‘Fung Bros’, a well-known travel keen opinion leader (KOL) to call for their worldwide fans to follow their steps and discover this more than a picture-perfect city.
‘HKTB is at the cutting edge of social media by embracing the concept of “Social First” to inspire travellers with powerful and unconventional content and perspectives’. – Anthony Lau, Former Executive Director of Hong Kong Tourism Board
While HKTB as a destination marketing organisation has made a new revolution in promoting Hong Kong to worldwide, the use of UGC has undoubtedly created a positive brand image of Hong Kong, showcasing its connectivity and bonding between people and the city. It allowed bilateral interaction between stakeholders, bringing out the message that every individual in Hong Kong plays an equal and significant role in contributing to the tourism industry. The ‘Social First’ approach could also increase the city’s competitiveness and reputation to the world as it showed the willingness to engage people and have a positive power relationship between the government and citizens.
The campaign generated more than 10,000 peer-to-peer recommendations with 5 million views for Hong Kong in just 4 weeks. While driving nearly 4.2 million people to navigate the campaign site over that time, this UGC event increased the user flow rate across the platform, and at the same time collected free content generated by participants. Adding on, HKTB collected free data generated by participants, like the most welcoming places and hidden tourist spots in Hong Kong, which allowed them to make reference to these data and decide on future campaigns based on people’s preferences. The company can even discover hidden photographers or content creators inside the pool of content, and make the search for future partnerships much easier.
The 2.17 million fan-based influencer Fung Bros had a paid partnership with HKTB, being the pioneer and starting point of the campaign. Their ‘MOST EPIC HONG KONG TRIP EVER!’ video dedicated to this campaign had driven over 8 million views, with over 10 thousand likes and up to 1 thousand comments. Setting their role as a visitor to Hong Kong and introducing the best to-go spots around the city, Fung Bros had exposed themselves to the local community, and at the same time to their international fanbase.
While KOL brightened up their brand image while engaging in the campaign, ordinary participants had also huge incentives while joining. What made this campaign attractive was its reward-based strategy, where participants might have the chance to win prizes ranging from shopping vouchers, five-star hotel rooms and theme park tickets by posting with the hashtag. The task was simple and open to any form of creation, which provided creators with have maximum level of freedom in their works, with the only criterion of exploring Hong Kong.
‘Travellers trust other travellers.’
Everyone around the world can be a consumer of Hong Kong, the brand that HKTB was promoting. #DiscoverHongKong was a peer-to-peer campaign that produced social relations in human networks. As Michel Bauwens described P2P is an ideal system in which human beings can put effort into the creation and maintenance of a shared resource, the creators have expanded the resources to visitors and travellers, providing them with a source of references when they visit Hong Kong. Rather than trusting tourism spots stated in a tour guide book, the unpaid content with generous and sentimental emotions tended to be more trustworthy.
All in all, who benefited most of all in #DiscoverHongKong? You may argue that HKTB as the government-subvented body was ultimately achieving the purpose of portraying a pleasant image of Hong Kong to the globe, while in a sense taking advantage of people’s engagements in the UGC campaign to accomplish their goal, but we could never oppose the fact of how the #DiscoverHongKong hashtag had brought a ‘momentary connectedness’ online, allowing broad audiences and people to cluster and co-exist within the same topical network, and to connect. I would rather take the side of concluding that this UGC campaign benefitted the most to every individual in the world who had discovered Hong Kong’s never-known stories.