This year, the International Tourism Exchange (BIT, or Borsa Internazionale del Turismo) begins even before it opens: thanks to an integrated communication project that aims to increase the initiative’s customer engagement, the three-day event dedicated to tourism and travel is already coming to life three months in advance.
Here’s how to turn a three-day event into a topic of conversation for three months before it even takes place.

What does customer engagement mean for BIT?

It means taking an event of international importance and turning it into an experience that is meaningful and engaging, for all stakeholders involved. The world of travel obviously offers incredible opportunities for the imagination, but at the same time one may have the feeling that a fair of this sort is just a collection of stands and tourist brochures.

How have you re-thought the BIT experience for 2013?

We focused on the powerful insight that each traveller is most akin to a particular kind of tourism: natural, cultural, adventurous or related to food and wine. Consequently, we created four worlds (Nature, Taste, Culture and Adventure) and brought them into BIT. In a way, we built a geography in which the experiences describe the places, rather than simple topography.

How have you introduced this concept into the social media strategy?

We spotted an exceptional opportunity: visiting BIT through experiences collected from all over the world. By completing a quiz, one can select the preferred experience, thus defining one’s traveller profile. The reasoning works, but for this application to become a trigger, it still needed a viral component that could increase access and the viewing of curious facts.

What was this viral element?

We were very pleased with the structure we had built, but in the work process we realised that the curious facts, fascinating as they might  be, might create a boring and not particularly immediate interaction. For this reason, we decided to turn them into cartoons and have them drawn by Makkox, the famous author of the strips in Il Post and Internazionale. Now we had not only content, but 300  viral bullets.