New Visit Birmingham site up for tender

Well, no sooner had I said goodbye to all that than I get a phone call from Marketing Birmingham at the airport. Suffice to say the phone is now off but this one’s worth posting immediately.

(That and I’m stuck in Osaka airport with free wifi for the next five hours…)

The Visit Birmingham website, which should be the first port of call for anyone planning to come here, is having a massive overhaul in the new year and local web companies are invited to bid for the tender. Or something.

Agencies are asked to register their interest and complete a pre-qualification questionnaire by 5pm Monday 17 December by post to Lisa Smith, On-line Campaign Manager. Invitation information is obtainable from lisa.smith@marketingbirmingham.com or telephone 0121 202 5115.

I’ve had a look through the material and there’s a reasonable emphasis on Web 2.0 stuff which boils down the following:

In the proposal please consider how Marketing Birmingham should apply Web 2.0 technologies, platforms and applications to their brand visitbirmingham.com on-line?
• Blogs
• Vlogs
• Social networks / communities
• User Generated Content (UGC)
• Wikis
• Podcasts
• Online video
• RSS
• Tagging
• Mash-ups and Open API’s
• AJAX (Asynchronous Java and XML)

While this is very welcome to see, how it’s implemented is going to be crucial. Do you “apply” blogs by having them or by providing adequate information for bloggers to use? Or both? By Social Networks do you mean developing on in house (NO!) or integrating effectively with Facebook, etc? With UGC (a horrible term but pretty defacto now) why should people submit their own work to your site? What kind of ownership are you giving them? Is RSS just going to be a token offering or will it be taylored? Open APIs are a fantastic thing to see but what exactly does Mashup mean?

Whatever, I’m just the messenger here but this could be something really excellent if only the right company gets the job. So if you’re the right company get in touch with them right away.

But please, let it be someone who understands the social aspects of such a site and not just the techincal bits. And, above all, not some Web 2.Oaf.