When faced with the masterpieces of a museum do you suffer from Stendhal Syndrome? No need to worry: you can get instant relief by sharing it in real time with your friends via Twitter. A dream holiday in an exotic paradise? This becomes a tale to tell on Facebook. Meetings with highly professional businesses and persons? A contact to cultivate on LinkedIn.

In short, the social media are now an established part of our lives and travel, increasingly regarded as a life experience rather than a “commodity”, is a natural protagonist. Also when it comes to business.

The figures provide confirmation: according to research by Cornell University based on a sample of 500 tourism marketing managers in the US, 80% of companies in the sector have already implemented at least one campaign via the social media as well as search engine optimisation activities and pay-per-click advertising. The most important media are, in descending order, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIN. They are followed by Gowalla, Flickr, MySpace and FourSquare.

Bit also among web leaders
And as of November 2011 Bit – Borsa Internazionale del Turismo, one of the four biggest tourism trade fairs in the world and the most prominent in Italy, will be strengthening its digital presence also across the social media, particularly in relation to B2B and travel agents, with the Bit Community, a genuine virtual professional community hosted on the Bit website.

“With the Bit Community" explains Marco Serioli, Director of the Exhibitions Division of Fiera Milano "Bit also strengthens its leadership on the web with an integrated website tool: thanks to a proprietary and specially developed vertical search engine, Bit Community dialogues with the social networks and optimises web resources, information, technologies and languages to provide both travellers and operators with value added, in line with Bit’s overall philosophy”. 

Three channels for the Public...
The area dedicated to travellers comprises 3 different channels: Italy, The World and Travel Agents.

Italy
Italy is the channel for Italian regions and destinations. Thanks to the database of the official tourism sites of the regional and local promotional associations at the event, Bit Community has developed an organised themed feed aggregator dedicated to the regions, which is fed by information deriving from the social profiles and official sites of the institutions.

The World
The World is one of the Bit Community’s strengths: this is the outgoing destination channel in which tourism organisations from all over the world present tourist destinations. The Bit Community is able to gather the information flows from institutional exhibitors (States, macroregions and promotional bodies) in an automated manner and create a rich informative environment where it is possible to identify the themes of interest in an intuitive and effective way. Using RSS feeds and multimedia information from the social networks, again deriving from Bit exhibitors, the community also guarantees continuous updates on events, locations, attractions and tourist seasons. The search engine makes it possible to carry out advanced searches by keyword within information flows. 

Travel Agents
With the opening of pre-registration for Bit, a special channel is created for travel agent information. During the registration phase, as well as adding their personal data, users can also specify a URL address for their social media activities (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Trip Advisor, Flickr, Canale You Tube or the RSS feed related to their site). In this way, travel agents can promote, through Bit, their services for both travellers and businesses in the sector in a simple and effective manner. 

... and an area reserved for B2B
As well as the channels for travellers and travel agents, the Bit Community will also offer themed B2B channels in a reserved area, accessible with a username and password received following pre-registration. Gathering and organising information flows (social profiles and websites with RSS feeds) from industry journalistic sources and the exhibitors, the Bit Community makes more vertical and specialised information channels available, dedicated, for example, to tour pperators, transport, accommodation, technologies and Mice.
Still in the B2B area, the search engine makes it possible to refine searches using keywords within information flows. 

Bit is therefore becoming increasingly social: indeed, for the first time, there will be free entry for travel bloggers. 

Bit 2012 will be taking place at fieramilano from Thursday 16 to Sunday 19 February.