Agent Wildfire Speaks at Canada e-Connect, Vancouver

Glad to have landed in Vancouver and expectedly for November, it's drizzling. Regradless, I still love VanCity - from its vistas, outdoor fanaticism and grassroots coffee culture, boutique retail and startup universe, it's one of the world's joys. Sometimes I regret not moving out here a few years ago when I was asked to lead the marketing efforts of an iconic West Coast brand, but I digress...

I'm out here on the left coast to present to the Canadian travel world at Canada e-Connect the merits of word of mouth, community building, social media, influencer, viral and buzz marketing and if there is one audience that should respond well to this message, it's travel and tourism.

Travel and hotels are the #3 and #5 ranked word of mouth categories, one of a word of mouth influencer's cardinal traits is their love of travel both near and far (they are more than twice as likely to be frequent and long haul travellers) and user generated content has taken root of the tourism world with thriving traveller rating sites like Tripadvisor (remarkably 114 reviews posted for my Hotel Fairmont Vancouver) and RealTravel in addition to consumer-enabled commenting in sites like Expedia and Travelocity.

Thanks to Jens Thraenhart, Executive Director for the Canadian Tourism Commission for pulling this inaugural conference together. I feel confident the future of Canada's travel face to the world is in safe hands given the progressive outlook, enthusiasm and professionalism Jens and his staff have put into the conference.

So why am I excited to be out here at Canada e-Connect, and why if you have any interest in the future of Canadian travel at all, you should be too:

1) a great canvas that may have been swept up by the Long Tail - Canada used to be in 2nd place gloablly in inbound travel 50 years ago with the top 5 countries representing 71% of the world's tourism, now Canada is in 11th place and the top 5 represents 32% of the pie (Deloitte) - new challengers and new options require new tactics for what still is one of the best travel destinations in the world (sorry for my homer-ism leaking out, but it's true)

2) Some very enterprising Canadian startups

- GPS TOURS Canada

- Planet Eye

- Iceberg Finder

3) A chance to hear about the user generated brilliance and quirkiness from Bugaboo This, Whistler Slush Skiing and Vancouver in the Mornng

4) Speaking on a panel with big brained Hunter Madsen from Yahoo and home country booster Paula Prociuk Blacklock from Canadian Geographic under the traditional, modern and future format that the conference has infused in its panels.

5) Equally interesting and perhaps more threateningly, being squared off in a discussion from industry challengers Jon Mamela from Fairmont and Denny Kobayashi from Tourism Yukon

6) Tips from the T-List - a profile of the best 100 posts from travel bloggers

7) My New Paradigm cohort in crime Anthony Williams is presenting Wikinomics - i've usually seen co-author and mastermind Don Tapscott present the book so this will be interesting to see the other side of the brain work and speak

8) Mobile and Travel Segment - with 85% of mobile phones to be enabled with cameras by 2010 and a tidal shift to GPS-enabled phones - the future of travel and travel communication may be seen through the lense of a cell phone, should be interesting

9) Travel Social Media and Trends - unfortuantely, I'll be leaving before then but beyond the topic, it would have been nice to see Patricia Brusha talk about her venture Chicks Away, I will however see Jeremy Gutsche from Trendhunter, a pioneering site in the world of open source trends.

10) Marketing to Americans - with a Canadian dollar now above $1.10, this has become very challenging particularly for the short to mid haul trips - Joel Peter, CMO from Tourism Toronto and Siobhan Chretien will try and crack that one. Perhaps tellingly of our future challenge, a Deloitte survey suggested Canada was viewed as "friendly, nice, unpretentious and reliable"as a person and ranked very low for being "sophisticated, witty and fashionable". I think people enjoy the former but are more willing to pay a premium for the latter.

11) A whackload of other tourism insights and goodies - CEOs, CMOs, pundits and experts, bloggers and columnists, awards and after-awards...should be a valuable time spent.