1. Visit Mendocino County Taps Trazzler for iPhone Application

    We’ve always encouraged writers and photographers to get cinematic and zoom in, to capture the experience of being at a place. To tell stories.

    In the Spring, we launched an iOS application that extended our platform to the iPhone, so writers, photographers and creative people could tell stories on the go. 

    Today, we’re extending our mobile platform to destination marketing organizations, starting with Visit Mendocino County in Northern California. Our solution for destination-based apps is unique, because it’s not a one-off project where the result is often static list of places. It’s about engagement, new content, and social media. 

    • Leverages world-class editorial content through the Open Places project.
    • Sits on top of a social content platform, curated by real people.
    • Taps the collective passion of travelers and locals.
    • Connects mobile actions to Facebook, extending the message and driving new users to the app.

    “Engagement and the authentic experience are core values for our destination,” said Brendan McGuigan, Director of Interactive Media at Visit Mendocino County. “Our visitors come as much for the overall ‘feel’ of the county as they do for any specific attraction. Finding an app that reflected those values proved to be virtually impossible, with most functioning simply as geo-locating yellow pages, and a custom build was well outside our budget or time constraints. Then we heard about the localized Trazzler app.”

    “We’ve partnered with Trazzler in the past, largely because of their unique model of user-submitted content generation, which encourages vibrant, lush, and incredibly human descriptions rather than the banal rants we saw on most sites. It dovetailed perfectly with the connections we aim to form with our visitors, and we’ve been nothing but thrilled with past joint projects.”

    “The Trazzler app is a perfect fit for us. The Open Places initiative lets us leverage the large amount of content already on Trazzler for our destination; social media integration lets our visitors share the beauty and experiences they encounter with their friends; and above all, the interface inspires users to take their own photos and write their own descriptions, helping us flesh out the story of our destination with a diversity of viewpoints that far exceeds anything we could do in-house.”