The blog4NZ project is an awesome initiative by New Zealand travel bloggers Jim McIntosh and John Reese that I have suddenly become heavily involved in and am very proud to do so.  The Christchurch earthquake has created an incredible sense of despair in New Zealand and an equal sense of community.  I don’t think there is anyone that has not been deeply effected.  However, New Zealand and the rest of the world have rallied generously as much as we can to donate monies and otherwise to the support of people in Christchurch and the rebuilding of the city.

But long-term the economic implications could be deeper.  Tourism in New Zealand is massive business and the impact of the images of the quake that were beamed around the world in the days afterwards are likely to have incredible knock-on effect on our tourism economy.  I have already been told anecdotally that as many as 5,000 bed nights have been cancelled in Queenstown alone.

The blog4NZ project is an initiative to cover the world in content about how great it is to travel New Zealand for a 72 hour period starting 21st March.  Travel bloggers, photographers and social media users are being asked to generate non-stop content about travelling to New Zealand and publish these across their blogs, across Facebook,You Tube, Flickr and Twitter.  Event Organiser Craig Martin of INdie Travel Podcasts described it as “a complete black-out of travel content across the world, we want Twitter dominated by Tweets about travelling to New Zealand, we hope that all travel bloggers rally behind this cause and publish as many articles as possible throughout this period about travelling to New Zealand” .

From my perspective if successful the long-term value of something like this is immeasurable.  The shear amount of content that might be authored and shared across the Internet could surely put New Zealand on everyone’s travel radar for this year or next.  Because the content is not being produced on a single site – but travel bloggers are being asked to produce the content on their own sites – the reach could be enormous and ongoing.  Even if someone does not come across the volume of content during the 72 hour #blog4NZ period they will come across the stories and images at some stage.

If you produce content get on board please.  There is more information at http://blog4nz.indietravelmedia.com.  If you are a New Zealand travel provider contact me on how you can help us with images and content for the bloggers to use.  If you don’t have somewhere to create content I will post anything anyone produces on TravelGeneration.com during this period.

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