Reputation specialist Steve Armitage helps to answer this question posed by Sean Gillespie of ‘The Aucklander’ in a feature article looking at the impact of social media on Auckland’s reputation as a tourist destination.

Since Marco Polo's first big OE, tourists have relied on informal and fresh information from other travellers to know where's hot, where's not and what's in between.Auckland tourism professor Simon Milne recognises this and says social media has become a new, much more powerful, word of mouth.

"It's a vital way for visitors to communicate with each other," he says, "and it's also a vital way for people to be able to put down their memories and discuss their thoughts after they leave a destination."

Dr Milne, who heads the NZ Tourism Research Institute at Auckland University of Technology, says monitoring internet blogs, opinions and comments is crucial for tourism organisations if they have the resources to do so.

"It gives you excellent insights into the performance of a region and you trace, like a barometer, how that performance evolves over time."

The internet is a goldmine of market research opportunities and connection with visitors - something Auckland would do well to focus on.

"We have a great city with a lot of wonderful attributes that, perhaps, are a little hidden from most visitors. We have to look at ways to increase their interaction with Auckland and Aucklanders," he says.

Tourism Auckland chief Graeme Osborne appreciates cyber chatter's value but is hamstrung by a small budget. "It's definitely the way the world's moving [but] we just don't have the resource to scan the world's chatter sheets."

Tourism Auckland receives about $3 million a year from local councils. Positively Wellington Tourism collects $6 million.

Mr Osborne says monitoring online activity isn't necessarily the best way to gauge opinion.

"Unless the comments are researched and are put in a context and balanced, so that we understand the critical mass of comment, we have to be a bit measured about how we respond."

To monitor visitors' experiences, Tourism Auckland uses an independent feedback survey - forms at the airport - which is updated every three months.

The 25-employee organisation might not have the staff to monitor online opinions or to contact potential visitors, but it does have five people working in the online area.

Tourism Auckland also has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr; runs an Auckland i-Phone application and is about to open a website for mobile phones.

Steve Armitage is a "reputation specialist" and was an advisor to former Tourism Minister Damien O'Connor. He says consumer opinion on social media is a growing area and it's important Auckland works with it wisely if it wants to be a major international destination.

Online comments can be damaging: "Particularly if there is a common thread coming through. Some of it can be dismissed as ravings but, if there's a common theme in what you're reading, then surely it's time to think, 'Hey, maybe we need to address this.'."

Mr Armitage says a reputation built over a very long time can be destroyed in an instant.

Examples of this are recent media attention on price gouging for accommodation around the Rugby World Cup and Chinese media reports of crime and safety issues in Auckland.  

Before New Zealand’s general elections many in the media mocked then Opposition Leader John Key’s comparison of himself to then presidential hopeful Barack Obama.  

Some in the media mischievously tried to claim that Key’s comparison was in style and rhetorical skills. What they missed in their rush to mock was Key’s desire to embark on “politics not as usual”. That was also a clear theme in Obama’s campaign and was recently reinforced in the president’s inauguration address when he proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics” and warned the cynics that “the ground has shifted beneath them – that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”   

But has this transformational new president the political ingenuity beyond the soaring rhetoric to reinvent partisan politics?  Does he even need to? It may just be that Obama could learn a thing or two from the political management of Key.    

Despite his enormous bank of political capital, the construction of his own ‘Yes We Can’ grassroots organization, and having effectively annexed the formidable Clinton machine within the Democratic Party, Obama must be mindful of the need to rein in his own party’s extremists and to govern from the centre rather than focusing too much time and effort on wooing his Republican fantasy. The fact that eleven of his fellow Democrats failed to vote for the economic recovery plan should have served as a timely ‘wake-up’ call to Obama; sometimes friends can be disaffected by your choice of partner, or by the fact that they are not the object of your attention anymore.     

Like Obama, Key is not scarred by the trench warfare of the old politics and enjoys the goodwill of the people. Although MMP makes cross-party consensus easier to negotiate than the U.S system, Key has done well to cultivate his own particular strain of non-partisan political pragmatism – by adopting centrist policies before the election and by embracing the Maori Party and indulging the Greens since, but deliberately stopping short of reaching across the aisle to Lady Labour, despite her recent make-over.  

It appears Key recognizes that bi-partisanship has a price. Instead, by ensuring that all is well within his own party, making the smaller players feel valued and by engaging with his natural constituencies, Key can press home his advantage and may ultimately achieve bi-partisan consensus by the simple fact that he has stolen Labour’s friends – both electorally and politically.   

Many guys will recognize the approach; you spot a girl that you like, talk to her friends, buy them a drink, create a rapport, and eventually the girl you like will wander over to see what all the fuss is about. Even if she doesn’t find you attractive, she won’t feel too comfortable standing on the dance floor on her own.  

True to his pre-election proclamations, Obama has reached out to Republicans to assemble his ‘team of rivals’, seeking to build cordial relationships, meeting with electoral rival Arizona Senator John McCain to discuss potential Republican appointments to the Cabinet, supporting independent Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, who campaigned for McCain, to retain his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, and appointing retired Marine general James L. Jones, who endorsed McCain, for the position of national security advisor. At Cabinet level, President Obama has named Republicans Ray La Hood for Transport Secretary and Robert Gates for Defense Secretary.  

Yet with the Lincoln Bible virtually still warm from oath-taking, the new administration’s failure to garner a single Republican vote in the House in favour of the President’s trillion dollar economic recovery plan, should signal to Obama that even though you may have had her fluttering her eyes at you after saying all the right things and planning the date meticulously, the courtship does not always go the way you had hoped. It seems that historical political partisanship will always get in the way of dessert and a nightcap back at the White House.    

Key and Obama share a similar political heritage. Both have carefully and deliberately built their relatively short political careers without the hand-up of a political family or a history of political activism in the family, but from understanding issues in the abstract, observing the jagged edges of their own worlds – Key business and Obama academia - up close, and making cautious connections at grassroots levels and within the elected political infrastructure. Learning from the lessons of history, they both have systematically attempted to mark out new political ground for themselves, neither bullying legislators nor gorging on the raw power of their party’s majority.   

But where they differ is in their ‘real world’ experience. Key’s time spent in the pressure cooker environment of the financial markets will have made him acutely aware of the need to keep his share-holders happy. In the same way that disgruntled investors can make life difficult if they feel their portfolio is under-performing, so too can political allies if the fire keeping them cosy is not regularly stoked. It is a valuable lesson that Obama will not have learnt walking the halls of Harvard, where the moot is always arguable.   

There is widespread agreement that the economic crisis requires broad-based consensus if it is to be successfully navigated, and while it may be giving him more credit than he is due, Key’s approach is more likely to achieve this. Politics is a fickle game, and the tribal nature of it makes it all the more volatile. But by making Labour come to him Key exerts his authority and keeps his own troops on-side, something that Obama’s approach significantly jeopardizes. It remains to be seen, but at this early stage it would appear that Key’s pragmatism outflanks Obama’s idealism.   

 © Three Point Two Communications Limited 2008