Allison Markin

Allison Markin has nearly twenty years of experience in communications, having worked in the worlds of marketing, media relations, crisis communications and writing. She is an early adopter of social media and brings her years of skills in traditional media to the new frontier of online engagement marketing through her company, All She Wrote. She is a strategic thinker and storyteller, an avid community volunteer, loves to teach and tell the story of how All She Wrote began with a single tweet: "Will work for wine."

Allison has worked in many sectors, from the arts to municipal government, to higher education; her focus has turned to developing online engagement plans in the food, wine and tourism sectors, while continuing to develop partnerships with the potential to boost economic development across her client base.

She has amassed a following on multiple social networks of more than 25,000, frequently writes and blogs about social media, food and wine, and in her spare time is pursuing her professional designation as a sommelier. Through her networks, she led a successful bid to bring the Wine Bloggers Conference to Penticton in June 2013, one of the largest social media wine events in the world, generating a whopping 31 million online impressions in a mere three days, placing BC wine country and the Okanagan solidly on the world map of wine destinations not to be missed.

All She Wrote is the winner of the Thompson Okanagan Tourism Association's 2011 and 2012 awards for Social Media Initiative, and an International LERN award for marketing for Eat.Drink.Tweet., an innovative seminar concept that combines social media with food and wine.

Allison together with Erin Korpisto delivered a talk titled:

Wine Tourism in British Columbia: Small Wine Region, Big Visitor Impact

A practical case study, presented as a 30-minute talk, on how to use the digital world to create real-life visitor engagement, attendees will learn the history and planning behind the Okanagan's drive to use social networks to target digital media, bloggers, and content generators to visit this emerging wine region, becoming champions of BC wine and driving visitor traffic.

Presenter Allison Markin partnered with local, regional and provincial destination marketing organizations to attract the (North American) Wine Bloggers Conference to Penticton, BC in 2013: three years of online engagement and real-life lobbying brought the conference to Canada for the first time, generating more than 30 million social media impressions in less than three days. Allison will discuss how to identify strategic partners, create local buzz, identify influential bloggers, and build online relationships that translate into real-life visits and economic impact, using the Wine Bloggers Conference as an example. The session will finish with an outline of how the Okanagan region is working together to keep the momentum from this one event moving forward and growing, continuing to attract both new and repeat visitors.

Tour operators and tourism agencies will benefit from this case study, learning practical tips to work together to create a vibrant virtual community that brings real visitors to their region, large or small, established or emerging.

Get the speaker notes here>>