Koala Bears are to Eastern Australia what Pandas are to China. The same can be said of Gorillas and Uganda. Uganda is home to a little over half of the world's population of these amazing creatures which stands at about 720 individuals and whose year of dedication, 2009, is coming to an end.

Uganda recently launched an internet-based tourism campaign, code-named 'Friend a Gorilla', which provides people worldwide the unique opportunity to befriend the rare primates through social networks such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, where for the latter, it costs only one US dollar for one to befriend this endangered creature.

The campaign is expected to raise $100 million which will greatly boost the implementation of various Uganda Wildlife Authority conservation programmes. In another arena, the Uganda Tourism Board (UTB) has also made further strides. For the 14th year since 1995, it recently participated in the World Travel Market Tourism (WTM) exhibition, organised by Reed Exhibitions.

WTM attracts 45,000 travel professionals from 202 countries and regions in a business-to-business environment, enabling exhibitors to meet and negotiate with top travel buyers and influencers.

UTB's presence at the exhibition for the past several years has reaped dividends as the number of tourists visiting Uganda has steadily shot up, with the country reporting a 32% increase in tourist arrivals in the year 2008 as compared to 2007, bringing the number of tourists to 844,000.

Uganda Investment Authority (UIA) has taken a similar route. In partnership with Infomania, an online and offline business communications portal (that features Uganda government, private sector institutions /businesses and entertainment features), the agency is now able to market Uganda as an investment destination by reaching its online target audiences and end-users with instant updates of investment opportunities.

This ties in neatly with the fact that industrial parks are now being set up countrywide. With the optimum use of such technology, it comes as no surprise that Uganda is scoring highly in attracting foreign investment. According to a recent World Bank report, Uganda was ranked ninth out of forty sub-Saharan economies, in attracting foreign investment.

However, Uganda's long time ailment has been her ignorance of the power of Public Relations and information dissemination so much so that relevant institutions for a long time were sitting back and assuming their target audiences are all knowing and information stakeholders were holding back their information files.

However much achievement and points scored, with no publicity, a project will not be celebrated but will, instead, remain shrouded in mystery and little understood. A good example is the rural electrification project in which the once dark districts are now able to carry out a lot of activities which stretch to the wee hours of the morning because of their access to commercially generated electricity.

But who knows about this brilliant achievement? Very few, and this is because the project has had a silent run. Pictures and words can help market a product or place to areas that would otherwise never have known about it.

The Mountain Gorilla, through Facebook, has been able to connect with over 11,000 foreigners online and also enjoy airtime play on Cable News Network (CNN). Who would ever have known that the simple click of a mouse would create such an impact? UTB is now targeting one million tourists by the year 2012 through a series of campaigns and networking programmes like the one handled by the world renowned media giant Saatchi & Saatchi, UK.

The saying goes "Don't live carelessly and unthinkingly. Make sure you understand what the master wants." In this case the master is the market. How well do we package our products for it?

The writer works at Uganda Media Centre