Where to now Social Media? Social media has become a very efficient means of
communication nowadays. People (specifically youths) have revolved so much
around technology, and the knowledge that they gain from these concepts have been utilized and applied to everyday life activities. Because social media is so
big now, it is very easy to get a hold of a large group of audience all over
the world. And having access and using the right social media tools, each and everyone has the potential to gather everyone’s
attention and interact with one another on-line.
History in the making
The first-ever Pacific
Community AgriTourism week was held from the 29th June to 3rd
July at Sofitel, Denarau, Nadi, Fiji, This history in the
making event is a joint collaborative effort of the European Union funded Pacific
Agriculture Policy Project (PAPP) implemented by the Secretariat of the Pacific
Community (SPC) and the EU funded Pacific Regional Capacity Building Programme
implemented by the South Pacific Tourism Organisation (SPTO) as well as the
School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, University of the South Pacific
(USP). The African Caribbean Pacific – European Union (ACP-EU), Technical
Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and the Pacific Islands
Private Sector Organisation (PIPSO) were also strategic partners providing
technical and business perspective to the events.
Social Media's role
The Technical Centre for
Agricultural and Rural Cooperation’s (CTA) in collaboration with the
Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) was supporting a team of young
social reporters to attend and report on the event throughout the week. Unfortunately
there were only eight participants from around the Pacific region that were
selected to report on-site for this historical event. Other interested
participants were also welcomed to join in the discussions as on-line
reporters. The two-day social media training for the young social reporters was held on 27th - 28th June just before the main event.
Nevertheless, the main goal for the social media reporting workshop
was to learn the concepts of social networking tools and applying them to raise
awareness for a series of events and reaching out to a wider audience remotely.
These social networking tools includes; Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Blogging,
Hootsuite, Flickr, and Slideshare.
What was accomplished...
Having the main event focusing "linking Agriculture to the Tourism sector", everyone gained so much from witnessing different perspectives from farmers, chefs, hoteliers and relevant partners to the event. The social media team managed to cover most of the event sessions throughout the week, the articles can be followed up on CTA's blog site and tweet messages through #PacAgriTo
These types of training's can be applied to Niue's Agricultural sector in terms of communicating and collaborating information's worldwide. Especially when holding workshops, seminars and conferences.
