US Virgin Islands Hotel & Tourism Association
As USVIHTA members may know, on June 1, ChartLocal, the digital marketing division of Morris Caribbean Publications, took over management of USVIHTA’s digital assets. Our consumer website and member website have both been migrated over to new servers on Amazon Web Services. The first month has been focused on a lot of technical work being done in the background that members won’t see – fixing broken or missing links, updating plugins and other tweaks on the back-end that the geek squad needs to do to make sure navigation is working right for users on the front end of the site.
In July, the focus will be getting the consumer website updated with new content from members of the Cooperative Marketing Initiative. There’s also a refresh of the site in the works that will be unveiled by the end of summer. USVIHTA has renewed our partnership with JackRabbit’s booking referral engine, and ChartLocal will work with both JackRabbit and members to add javascripts to members’ websites in order to track intersite traffic.
What’s happening that members can see is in the social media realm. Lynnsy Jones, who has lived and worked in the USVI for more than a decade, is dedicated to posting regular and engaging updates on USVIHTA’s Facebook page that visitors and would-be visitors all over the world see. On our consumer Facebook page, her goal is to drive traffic to our consumer website and to the sites of CMI members as well as to raise our digital profile across social media channels. Our goal is to use social media to entice visitors to come to the USVI and do business with our members! She has also created a new Facebook page for the overall membership in order for us to promote and share details about association events, initiatives and the cool things our members have going on as well as tout the benefits of membership to new prospects.
You can help by sharing information, images, videos and links with Lynnsy. The easiest way to do that is to simply post it on your business Facebook and social pages and tag USVIHTA in your posts, and Lynnsy will be notified. You can also email your information to Lynnsy at ljones@stthomasthisweek.com.
If you have questions about anything ChartLocal is working on for our membership, feel free to email digital marketing specialist Phillip Giles at pgiles@stthomasthisweek.com.