Are Bloggers The Wave Of The Advertising Future For Atlantic City? [AUDIO]

When you want to get away for some leisure time, a vacation or just to relax, usually you turn to friends, family or people you trust for the best advice.

That’s the idea behind the recent push by tourism officials in Atlantic City who brought in 11 out-of-town bloggers over the July fourth holiday in an effort to boost the city’s reputation as a travel destination. The use of bloggers likely isn’t going to stop there.

“Clearly the bloggers have built up a high degree of trust with people who follow them, who have used their advice over some period of time and they feel that they resonate with that individual because of similar interests or tastes or history,” said Liza Cartmell, President of the Atlantic City Alliance. “It’s a really, really cost effective way to reach a huge audience in a way that can be very impactful. These 11 media pros we brought in over the Fourth of July holiday, in a very immediate way, were able to reach almost 400,000 different accounts. More than a million absolute impressions were created. There were hundreds and hundreds of tweets. That allowed for an immediate involvement and engagement in something that was exciting and happening in Atlantic City with people who were interested in travel and in enjoying a destination resort.”

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“We launched a social media campaign that was part of the broad scale campaign back in April in terms of optimizing search engines and upgrading the website. There are plans to continue to do that to make it a more mobile friendly site. When people think of Atlantic City, it’s a very spontaneous destination, but it’s also a very large destination in terms of things you can do. Our objective is to communicate to people and help them plan their trip here in terms of what kinds of things are here for them,” said Cartmell. “Using bloggers is a very productive way to get special interests involved and enjoy their experience when they come because they’ve had the right people guiding them.”

“Atlantic City appeals to so many different people on so many different levels. It is an incredibly effective way for us to be laser-like in terms of our marketing approach versus the traditional methodology which is still valuable because we needed to absolutely send a broad message around the new approach that Atlantic City needs to take,” said Cartmell. “But, we need to make sure it’s significant and relevant to each individual. Bloggers have built these networks of people that have high trust, they share the same interests and that’s why they follow them. So, you have tens of thousands of people you can reach literally instantaneously with a very brief, cost effective outline of what someone did that was fun in Atlantic City. So, it really sells itself.”