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Travelogy launches ComeSingapore.com, an online travel portal aimed to engage visitors at every stage of their travel to Singapore.

Travellers to Singapore can now visit an all-in-one travel portal – ComeSingapore.com, to plan their trip. Launched today, ComeSingapore.com aims to engage visitors at every stage of their travel. Prior to ComeSingapore.com, visitors to Singapore had to go to many different sources to complete their travel experience.

At ComeSingapore.com, users may use the portal for before-trip research, bookings and itinerary planning. The site offers resources such as articles and photographs from locals themselves and also invites readers to share their experience and tips as contributors. Also, the business directory lists local companies organised into different categories like hotels, attractions, retailers and food places to make search even easier.

“Singapore is seeing a record rise in visitor arrivals and spending and these numbers are expected to continue growing. We believe that ComeSingapore.com will become a useful resource for travellers as it fills a market need,” shares Winnie Tan, General Manager at Travelogy.com Pte Ltd.

The site emerged as one of the winners of the WITovation Entrepreneur Bootcamp held on October 18 last year for its innovative solutions that would assist businesses in the travel and hospitality industry by allowing them to reach out to a targeted group for lead-generation.

For more information, please visit:
ComeSingapore.com
Travelogy.com

Travelogy.com is a Singapore startup that provides infocomm and digital media solutions to the travel and hospitality industry.

If you are not sure what happened, here’s what my group did for a fundraising project in July.

My group was to raise funds for AWWA, where they provide seven different services to serve the disadvantaged through programmes for the elderly, children, young people and families with special needs like Down’s Syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism spectrum disorder.

http://give.sg/TeamGIVE/AWWA-Champions/causathon

Our social media strategy is aligned with the Project Reach Causathon’s framing – no sob stories involved. We were mindful to not use photos from the organization due to sensitivity issues – a cartoon of a boy (seen on right) was used to illustrate a typical day at AWWA SMILES.

Our biggest donations were only $54 (not including the $103 from the Starbucks effort), but we had more donors donating in smaller amounts.

Viral Video on YouTube

With the intention to create awareness that about giving back to society and how even the littlest donations make a difference. Money is not our ultimate goal – we were more concerned with changing the mindset of the public, one step at a time.

Wallpaper Downloads
Created wallpapers for download at http://tinyurl.com/awwasmiles to allow friends to show support.

Blog Post & Mentions
Fundraising 2.0 Blogpost – Penn Olson is a local social media blog that has a world web ranking of 30,000 and over 100,000 page views per month. It is viewed by not only locals but social media enthusiasts all over the globe.

The article was framed in a way to create awareness about how students are making use of social media to raise funds online, aka Fundraising 2.0.

Twitter Hashtag #projectreachsg
Hashtags are useful on Twitter as they provide real-time tweet updates about the conference. We leveraged on this to monitor our tweets and it has shown our messages were retweeted.

Asking people with more followers to retweet exposure helps to increase exposure and awareness of our message.

Electronic Direct Mailers (eDM)
A simple email template was created and forwarded to friends, encouraging them to watch the video and pass it on.

One week later, a second reminder eDM was sent – the message was edited to serve as a reminder.

Facebook Note Tagging
We posted notes and tagged a max of 50 friends within it. It appears that users are more responsive on Facebook than on personal mails as Facebook has a user interface more inviting for conversations.

We had friends who helped to spread the message by reposting them on their own Walls too.

URL Shortener
Using a TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com/awwachamp) allows us to conveniently post the links to friends without having to recall the original, long URL.

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Update: 29 July 2010

Our group won! This fundraising journey has been truly amazing for us – from NOthing to SOMEthing.
On July 6th we had $0 and in mere 23 days we have raised $604! It really proves how together, we can achieve more! Thank you all who played a part in making this happen!