Pure Michigan Governor’s Conference on Tourism

Dave Serino PresentingThe 2015 Pure Michigan Governor’s Conference on Tourism was held in Grand Rapids earlier this week. The event was attended by travel and tourism marketers, CVB’s, hoteliers, exhibitors and everyone else in between. The conference provided the perfect backdrop for these people to come together to discuss and learn from different practices around the industry. The keynote was delivered by the first winner of NBC’s The Apprentice, Bill Rancic, who had some inspiration words for everyone in the room. Attendees were also treated to a great presentation on visual storytelling by Sheila Scarborough with Tourism Currents.

Michigan Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley was on hand to announce a venture between Pure Michigan and Google to provide 360-degree imagery of more than 40 locations across Michigan using a mounted camera called the Google Trekker. Check out the short video overview below to get a better idea of the technology and how it’s used.

Additionally, some exciting news and information on the state of Michigan tourism was presented by David West, Vice President of Travel Michigan. While we could provide an exhaustive list of some of the fascinating points made, some of the key takeaways mentioned:

  • #PureMichigan is the number one travel hashtag used in the entire world
  •  Pure Michigan ad campaign generated $6.87 for every $1 invested in 2014
  • A record 113.4 million visitors came to Michigan in 2014, spending a record $22.3 billion

Dave Serino TweetsTwoSix Digital was also represented by founder and strategist, Dave Serino. Dave gave a presentation called “How to Create Content that Converts & How to Build an Audience That Engages.” The presentation touched on a number of ideas and worked to inform people of some of the free tools at their disposal to help reach the right audience and get them to advocate for your brand.

In all, the event was a huge success in the eyes of attendees, which was made evident by the social media stats from the three day event which included more than 680 tweets and more than 6 million impressions. You can check out those stats and see what people were saying in the Pure Michigan Tourism Conference Twitter Report. We’ve also created a Twitter list with everyone from the conference who used the conference hashtag, #PMGCT2015. We will see everyone next year in Lansing!