Implementing Information Technology and Social Media for Promoting Tourism Pongyeang Subdistrict, Chiang Mai, Thailand

In recent years, tourists have been relying more on information from online sources for planning and managing their trips. The local tourism communities engage these changing behaviours by using information technology and social media for better connection with customers. Tourism agencies use several online channels such as a website, a social media application, and manage their own contents. For Thai local operators, this approach could be quite costly and time consuming. In case of the Pongyeang tourism community, there is a demand for a community website and a social media page for stakeholder to be sharing and managing their information in one place. We applied the agile methodology which allows the users to be involved in the entire processes of a website development. The results shown that since our community website located at www.pongyeangtravel.com has been launched, it has fifty registered tourist agencies that keep the contents up to date. During the first high season period, the website attracted five thousands pageviews, and the ReviewPongyeang Facebook page has around seven hundreds number of likes.