by Mat Churchill

Budding travel writers have the chance to win a holiday by Facebooking about their favourite Queensland trip.

The Tourism Queensland campaign is calling on travellers from around the globe to write in 300 characters or less about what a Queensland holiday means to them. 

Tourism Minister Peter Lawlor said they had to post their message on the Queensland Facebook page. 'Our aim is to increase the Queensland Facebook page fan base and harness people's passion for Queensland,' Mr Lawlor said in a statement.  'It's about positioning user-generated content on Queensland in more accessible locations for both today's and tomorrow's visitors to Queensland.'

Local authors Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow and Best Job in the World winner, Briton Ben Southall will judge the winner.

Tourism Port Douglas', Managing Director Sam Cullen said "the success they have recieved with regard to Port Douglas' own Facebook photo and content competitions has provided superb imagery and reviews of the region bringing thousands of new users to tourismportdouglas.com every month"

He expects Tourism Queensland's adoption of this type of initiatve to be another great move in the right direction for the organisation towards the future of Interactive Tourism.  

The Tourism Queensland competition closes on August 6 and the winner will be announced on August 12.  The top five entries will receive a $500 holiday voucher.

Editors comments : This will be great competition and is guaranteed to attract a mass of attention, well done Tourism Queensland! As provided in the article our own very Tourism body TPDD and private destination marketing   company tourismportdouglas.com have hosted a number of successful interactive social network competitions to generate valuable reviews and content for over 12 months now.

We are proud to say Port Douglas realised very early the potential of how powerful social networking is when included as part of an innovative and co-ordinated promotional campaign.  We still need to measure these campaigns for actual effectiveness like all others but it does looks to me like Tourism Queensland is on the same wave, hey, if they need any other advice on the future of Interactive Tourism, I'm sure our guys are only a twitter away!