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Mayor Street announces the launch of the Uwishunu.com Web log, which is expected to attract younger, technologically savvy tourists to the city. The launch is supported by a $5 million budget.

To the tech-savvy tourist planning on taking a trip to the States, Philadelphia has only one thing to say: uwishunu.

That's the name of a new Web log unveiled Friday by Mayor John Street. Its mission is to make the City of Brotherly Love more marketable to potential tourists, who often rely on technology to find destination spots.

The site is intended to be the face of a larger $5 million, two-year initiative that will market the city via blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and other "new media."

The blog aims to connect to younger people using methods that appeal to them, Street said at a press conference.

To target this audience of twentysomethings, Street said Philadelphia "couldn't use the same old, tired" methods of mainstream marketing. Instead, travelers "want to see the different side of Philadelphia."

Uwishunu.com is meant to do just that. Moderated by the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp., a non-profit group dedicated to drawing visitors to the city, the site features posts that are meant to showcase parts of the city the average tourist book or Web site won't tell you about.

For example, a post Friday by a blogger named Troy details an anarchist-run community center on the 4700 block of Baltimore Avenue, just west of Penn's campus.

While $5 million may seem like a large sum of money to pour into a seemingly simple blog, Toby Bloomberg, who runs The Diva Marketing Blog and is president of Atlanta-based Bloomberg Marketing, said that spending that much cash on new marketing strategies is the right thing to do for anyone wishing to draw in a younger demographic of readers.

She cited an effort by Holland last year, in which the country paid for several prominent American bloggers to visit in the hopes that they would get the word out to their readers.

And after looking at Uwishunu.com, Bloomberg said that it's mostly on the right track.

"I think this is a great first step," she said, citing its compatibility with the popular social bookmarking sites Del.icio.us and Digg.com.

Bloomberg added that, in order to drive traffic to the site, the company should link itself to major travel blogs and market itself on popular Web sites - steps GPTMC officials said they plan on taking.

Errin Cecil-Smith, the blog's program director, said the site is intended to "deputize the people who are making it happen" by letting Philadelphians submit potential posts for publication.

Those who want to contribute but are stumped for ideas can utilize the site's "inspiration machine," proprietary software that gives people ideas for what to write about by asking questions about their interests.

The press conference Friday was perhaps indicative of the lengths the company is going to promote a hip image for the city. Organizers paid several people to check cell phones and listen to music in an effort to represent the blog's target audience - young wired adults, the workers said.

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