Yesterday, 9 March 2011, the Tourism Authority of Thailand Khon Kaen Office posted on their Facebook page that they attended the Tokyo Marathon Expo from 24-26 February to promote the Khon Kaen International Marathon.

Khon Kaen International Marathon Tourism Authority of Thailand

Khon Kaen International Marathon Tourism Authority of Thailand

The problem is that the Khon Kaen International Marathon was held on 23 January 2011.  I guess that the Tourism Authority of Thailand staff went to Japan one month AFTER the Khon Kaen International Marathon to tell all of the Japanese runners what they missed.  Or maybe for the after Christmas sales.

Here is part of the post from the Tourism Authority of Thailand Khon Kaen:

“The purpose of joining this event is, to promote Khon Kaen International Marathon to Japanese runners and Japanese travel agents”

Hmmmm.  TAT must be relying heavily on the Japanese having great memories or that they are really long range planners.

Now, the Tourism Authority of Thailand Khon Kaen Facebook page made absolutely no mention of the Khon Kaen International Marathon prior to the race being run.  I asked them for start times, locations, map, etc and got no reply whatsoever.

Here is my comment to their post:

Larry Westfall You were promoting the Khon Kaen Marathon one month AFTER it was already finished? Brilliant

And their wonderful reply:

TAT Khonkaen

For this year,2011, we are sorry that we did not promote the Khon Kaen Internarional Marathon via Facebook, because of our lack of IT staff, but that does not mean that we did not promote it. We do promote the marathon via press release before it was held and almost all of our staff were busy and tried our best to prepare the optional tour for runners who join the marathon. We are sorry for our mistake in not to promote the marathon via all channels, and hope you understand us.

For Tokyo Marathon Expo 2011, we joined the expo to promote the Khon Kaen International Marathon 2012. We are proud that the Khon Kaen Marathon is one of the nine big international marathons in Thailand which be presented in the Tokyo Marathon Expo – the biggest marathon expo in Japan with around 80,000 visitors in each year.

Thank you for your comment.

Once again, this just goes to show that the Tourism Authority of Thailand Khon Kaen office doesn’t have any idea of how to market events in the area.  You don’t need “IT staff” to post an event in Facebook.  Unless all of the TAT workers are totally computer illiterate.  And, I am willing to bet that the press release was in the Thai language and sent to all of the Thai newspapers.  I did a search on Google for “Khon Kaen International Marathon Press Release Tourism Authority of Thailand” and found nothing from TAT – only an article on the Khon Kaen University web site.
Add to this, the BIG Tourism Authority of Thailand office in Bangkok also did NOT promote this event on Facebook.  Shows again that the Tourism Authority of Thailand doesn’t market to foreign countries properly and only markets to the local Thai community.
Now, I understand that the Tourism Authority of Thailand doesn’t have control over when Japan holds their Marathon Expo – but will TAT do anything to track how many tourists from Japan will attend the Khon Kaen International Marathon in 2012?  I doubt it.  Is any analysis done to see how many tourists come to Thailand and what the cost of promoting is – you know – how much baht did TAT spend to get one tourist here?
Maybe the Tourist Authority of Thailand should spend some of their BIG budget dollars to hire more IT staff to help post events on Facebook.  And, since “almost all our staff were busy”, maybe hire a few more to help out there too.  Always a solution – hire more staff.  Don’t look at what you are presently doing wrong and fix it in-house. That would be an admission of failure.
Once again the Tourism Authority of Thailand fails when it comes to marketing using social media.

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