Travelblather

Twitter on a Sunday afternoon. I shouldn’t do it. But I did and found this tweet from @rafat (Rafat Ali) the guy who set up Paidcontent.

“Corruption endemic in travel industry, free travel junkets that FTC should *really* crack down on: http://bit.ly/rVlIah”

The link is to a page on Keith Jenkin’s Velvet Escape blog about a new program he has launched called iambassador.

Quoting from this page:

“The iambassador model involves a collaboration between travel bloggers and the tourism industry. The product can be utilised by tourism boards, tour operators, cruise companies, airlines and/or hotel chains to market a specific destination or travel theme (adventure, cruises, gastronomy, safaris, city trips or beach holidays to name a few).”

The benefits to the tourist board etc:
“iambassador maximises the value generated by blog trips by turning the bloggers into digital ambassadors…. The model involves a collaboration between influential travel bloggers and their blog trip sponsors and is designed to generate a social media ‘blitz’ centred on the destination as well as increase brand visibility of the sponsors.”

I pointed out to Rafat on twitter that press trips (‘junkets’ in his parlance) happen in many industries (the motoring writer gets loaned the new Porsche for a weekend, he doesn’t have to buy one to write his review – is this corrupt?). And that in travel, the cost of actually experiencing a destination is so much that if a travel writer or travel publisher paid for the trips that got covered in their publication they would run at a huge loss.

Rafat pointed to the first example of the iambassador trip – a sponsored blog trip with Visit Jordan.

I pointed out that if the bloggers disclose that their trip is hosted by Visit Jordan what’s the problem. The reader can make up their own mind.

Frankly for those of us who write about travel for a living (bloggers, travel writers whatever) this is a very old debate. If we didn’t have press trips there’d be very little good quality travel content at all anywhere. (I’m not condoning the current situation by saying this. I just don’t really see another way right now.)

But Rafat went on to say (and here I really part company with him):

“I am saying even disclosure isn't enough. corruption disclosed isn't corruption corrected”

I just don’t see corruption here. Corruption implies that the bloggers will intentionally mislead their readers – by for example saying positive things about stuff that’s actually not that good.

But then again… Keith talks explicitly about this as a ‘marketing exercise’. Here’s the text of his tweet back to Rafat:

“i appreciate your comments. However, this is a fully disclosed sponsored marketing campaign, not a free junket.”

To me as a writer employed several days a week by a marketing agency I completely get this language and approach. I can see straight away how for a tourist board like Visit Jordan it has real value.

But as someone who still thinks of himself as a travel writer I'm less sure. It’s incredibly overt. I think Keith should be applauded for his openness. But if I was a reader of Velvet Escape… how would I feel if I read that page? Maybe I'm just being an old travel writer here? Perhaps people who read blogs like Keith's (which is full of genuinely useful, quality travel features and advice) couldn't care less.

For me though this more overtly commercial approach is perhaps the final outcome for free travel content online. Reader… you come a long way down the list of priorities these days. (But what do you expect? You’re getting free content!)

This more overt commercial focus is not unique to travel bloggers. I know of at least one major UK national newspaper that is actively looking to tie sale of product (flights, hotels etc) more directly to its travel editorial – because ad revenue alone just doesn’t stack up.

So… expect to see a more ‘buy this now’ calls to action around travel content in the future.

And expect to see the divide between promotion and editorial become ever thinner.

And consider… would you prefer content farm crap written by a student who has never visited a destination (but who is of course 'impartial'!) or content written by a potentially ‘corrupt’ travel writer who got a free trip to the place?

Pic by Flickr user: Mike Licht

With pretty much everyone in the whole wide world now on Facebook (well, you know what I mean) it's becoming a 'no brainer' for any company with customers to get itself a Facebook presence. Some travel companies are doing cool stuff too - just one example: Visit Wales has over 200,000 fans now and there is stacks going on on their page. [Disclosure: Visit Wales is a company I work with.] So now if the Visit Wales crew pose a question on their wall, they get loads of responses. Truly cool - more on this later.

What about publishers though?
I couldn't find a Daily Mail travel Facebook page - their main Facebook page for the whole paper has just over 9000 fans. The Times & Sunday Times has a combined Facebook page with 24,000 fans and, because of the paywall every time they post a link to one of their features on their Facebook wall unless you are a subscriber you can't read it anyway. There's another page which aggregates all their Twitter feeds which is an interesting idea (actually it's an app). The Sunday Times travel magazine Facebook page has 141 fans. There's actually quite a lot going on there - but it's not working that well with so few fans. Perhaps it's early days? The Telegraph travel team has a Facebook page with 7000 fans. Most of what is on here is an RSS feed synched with when new features are published on their website – although there is some interaction. But if you want to enter the Where in the World comp or leave a Travel Tip (both recent  wall posts) you have to click a link to the website – you can’t enter or leave responses on Facebook. (Well you can, but it doesn’t look like they count.)

Of all the major UK newspapers (well the ones worth reading) only The Guardian has really embraced Facebook - its recently launched app is a genuinely interesting experiment into trying to drive its content deep into Facebook conversations and discussions. Basically you stay within the Facebook environment to read the Guardian's content and when you read something it publishes an update on your Facebook wall telling people so.  That is very smart indeed. (You can control what you share and who with too. But, there is no travel content. I wonder why?

I could go on, but from an admittedly relatively cursory glance, few of the big traditional publishers seem to be really 'getting' Facebook. Compare this with Visit Wales? Why this huge difference? When you think about the huge reach and influence these publications have it doesn’t make sense.

It’s a two-way street
Maybe the problem here is publishers are stuck in publish mode? Facebook and the social web more generally are about interaction, discussion and conversation. Most Facebook pages for UK publishers are being used as just another channel for pumping out their own content. The fact that people can comment, discuss and do all kinds of other stuff like take part in polls or answer questions seems to have been completely forgotten or intentionally ignored. This tendency to push content out rather than listen and interact explains I think why many mainstream newspapers are having significantly more success with twitter which lends itself better to this ‘publish-only’ approach.

So, I wonder if publishers should even bother being on Facebook. If they aren’t making use of all the built-in sharing and discussing functionality, what’s the point?

What would you do if you were running a travel desk at a national newspaper? Would you use Facebook and if so, how?

How does the way we interact with print media and the internet differ? That’s something I’ve been considering lately. Traditional publishers currently populate most of their web real estate with content from their print editions.

Traditional wisdom has it that people ‘sit back’ to read and to watch TV, but they ‘sit forward’ when they are online. They are more engaged, typing queries into a search engine, clicking on stuff. If we are talking about the travel sector as an example, they're probably looking for deals or specific types of information rather than wanting to be spirited away to an exotic destination with poetic prose and beautiful imagery.

Following this logic, people often suggest that online content should be shorter, more to the point and more targeted at converting people to purchase than content in print tends to be. Print is a more reflective medium and it’s bigger, so better suited to inspiration and richer description. So you need to take a different approach with your online content and at the least rework stuff created for print quite aggressively before publishing on the net.

As a result, as little as a year or so ago I’d have advocated quite different approaches to creating content for web and for print. I’d have said that simply sticking print edition content online wasn’t likely to work for your business model or your reader/customer. The way people interact with them is just too different.

But I’m not so sure anymore.

I always felt the iPad was a bit of a product extension for the iPhone – “Hey! Why don’t we just make it, like… bigger!” But increasingly I think of all the remarkable products the late Steve Jobs’ will forever be associated with, it’s this one that will be the game- changer. Many of my techno-fan mates who bought an iPad did so I think because it was ‘the next new toy from Apple’. But it’s changing the way we interact with the net - massively. It’s turning the net into a ‘sit back’ medium. The ease of touchscreen interaction – which for the small screen iPhone just felt like an essential just to make it useable - becomes incredibly potent with a larger screen. It makes online content suddenly a much more browseable thing. The ramifications could be huge.

Maybe we need to start thinking about online travel content as being as much about inspiration and reflection as it is about hard detail and conversion. What that actually means right now, I’m not really sure.

What do you think?

Lovely pic by Flickr user: aperturismo

Well, the news is out. The travel content site launched by Simon Nixon (who made a lot of cash with moneysupermarket.com) is being wound down because it's not making enough money. So what went wrong?

I've blogged a lot about this site over the couple of years its been around. Part of me feels a little smug because I always felt they got some basic principles wrong, but I'm also sad because it was offering another avenue for travel writers to earn money for their writing. I'm actually quite surprised it has gone down as I felt they were more or less on the right track.

From launching with the intent of just harvesting what was little more than user generated content (Simon Nixon described a 'new cottage industry of travel writers' which really annoyed me and other pro writers) the site changed direction radically around a year or so ago with the hire of well known travel writer Nick Trend to oversee the roll out of a new strategy to pay pro writers to create 'proper' content. And they paid fairly decent rates too. Clearly the hoped for increase in traffic and bookings via affiliate links on the site didn't materialise quickly enough to offset the extra cost of paying for content. You can see this in the way the site now prominently features a booking engine. So what went wrong?

Simonseeks a dumb URL
The heart of the problem? It was a site for people looking for travel inspiration and travel guides. And its main revenue stream was ad revenue. So people HAD to be able to find its content easily. Lots of different elements go into making pages rank well on google, but a URL that reflects the kind of content on a website is a bit of an obvious requirement. The URL and the name of the site should have been all about travel ideas/guides. Choosing a name like Simonseeks - an unknown brand with no association with travel was plain silly. And, dare I say it, a bit arrogant?

Free content is worthless
If this site proved anything conclusively, it was that the idea that you can just go ask people to post their content on your site and low readers will come and ad revenues will flow just won't work. A few early arrivals like Trip Advisor have made that leap but I'd say personally this model is dead now. There are too many thousands of sites all trying to be the same now and achieving the kind of critical mass of traffic needed is virtually impossible. Unless you go down the content farm route and publish thousands of pages of poor quality content you won't make money this way. And Google is trying(?) hard to stamp out these practices. I think the Murdoch paid-for model will gain the ascendency... eventually, but it will take time and only the big players with the big pockets will have the cash to ride it out.

Brand really matters now
There's so much mediocre travel content out there now that people are lost in it and don't know what they can trust. No one had heard of Simonseeks and so it was never going to become a destination for people looking for travel content without serious advertising investment. The likes of the established guidebook publishers and travel magazines have a real opportunity to make ground here. This is increasingly the case as the Google algorithm seems more and more weighted towards trusted brands. Slowly the on-line world is beginning to look a bit more like the real offline world too.

The right promotion?
Simonseeks was really pushing its pro-writers to develop Facebook and twitter profiles to publicise their content on the site. But from what I've seen and what I know it always felt like it was a bit of a lip-service thing. There was no real incentive to get writers to do this and no social media strategy from Simonseeks editorial team that I am aware of. They could and should have really invested in social media - by that I mean having someone on the editorial team responsible for a twitter feed and Facebook profile engaging with users, publicising content, driving traffic. Instead the blew £2million on TV ads. This for me really made clear that  they didn't 'get' online. Sure it might have worked for Simon's Moneysupermarket.com business, but that kind of site is about people arrivin ready to buy. Simonseeks was far more about people arriving ready to browse, consider, engage... and then maybe buy by clicking through somewhere else. A far lower revenue per visitor kind of model. I'd have spent a quarter of that sum on building a following on twitter and facebook and really leveraging the content that was there.

Wrong platform?
So... where does that leave this kind of concept? Dead and buried I think. The web has moved on - as swiftly as it always does - and I think the way people will pay for travel content in the very near future will be on their smartphones. Maybe a chunk of the 2 million they spent on ads they should have spent on an iPhone app and an android app.

Where next?
Lots of great writers have slogged long and hard to get great content on Simonseeks.com. The pros have been paid a decent rate and so in some ways that's that. But for example my friend Shawn who is the SS expert for Seville now has nowhere for that content. Will she be allowed to take it back and stick it on her own blog? Will SS retain it and delete it? Or will it sit there ageing quietly, the links being farmed and redirected by a third party.

What do you think will happen next and where did Simonseeks go wrong?

I've been working on several really interesting content strategy projects of late. (If you want to know more about content strategy read this post by my iCrossing colleague, Content Strategist Charlie Peverett.)

What has really struck me is that not all content out there is awful - even though those of us who work in content creation often bang on about how bad it is.

Some travel cos and DMOs are investing in the real thing, getting journalists to create genuinely useful blog posts and on-site content that users really want/need. And, if they haven't created it themselves for their customers, someone else probably has written something pretty similar - that's also pretty good - somewhere else on-line.

Unfortunately a lot of what is out there is dross. The good stuff is hard to find and it's not always easy to tell if you can trust it.

Do you ever feel like the web is full enough as it is? There's this immense surfeit of information that is impossible to process and assimilate successfully? I use Google Reader subscribed to RSS feeds from all over the place and it's hard to keep up. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is hard. It's often even worse if I just do a good old fashioned Google search. Lots of the pages that come up are pretty awful and finding the good ones is sometimes a hassle.

Wouldn't it be great if someone I trusted had put it all together for me?

I think the Content opportunities for travel cos (and others) in 2011 online are all about curation. Rather than add yet more content to that vast overflowing pile out there, start to help people navigate to the good stuff. Become a trusted advisor and a useful friend. You might need to top it and tail it with some content of your own, but consider the amazing resourse that's already out there. Save your cash, don't recreate the wheel - just make it spin more smoothly.

Trusted advisor? That's not exactly journalism is it? I've been similarly struck by how those journalists hired by travel cos to create genuinely great content for their customers often just don't 'get' the social/networked elements of web content. They are stuck in publish mode. They see doing their job as writing a set number of blog posts a week and that's about it. They wonder why they hardly ever get any comments on their blog posts, but ultimately, that's not something they are paid to worry about. And you can't blame them for that.

Writers who will thrive online I believe need to really get connectedness - the idea that due to the wonderful power of hyperlinks, RSS feeds, embedded videos, twitter feeds and more there's much more to publishing than creating some content and hitting the publish button.

Enter then the editor/curator (my iCrossing colleague Tamsin coined the term 'cureditor' what do you think?!). This kind of person is not just someone who can see an audience need and create great content to fulfill that need. They can do that, but they are also:

Connected: they understand the  broader context of the content. They know where to find that great infographic that someone else created that highlights and adds more value to their piece. They can plug in twitter feeds from people tweeting about the same subjects. They can pull in some cool video from YouTube that really shows off the destination they are writing about. They can pull in an RSS feed from another expert on the topic. The 'page' they create isn't all about them. It's about collaboration, conversation, cultivation, collection as well.

Respected: they are respected and known to those other people who are also creating great content around similar topic areas. They are already active on other blogs and in other online spaces, commenting, discussing adding value. So when they create something new and tweet about it/share it, the community pitches in and adds comments, interacts, shares with their followers too.

Engaging: they are also great at seeing ways to make their content and the content of others that they incorporate into their own space interesting and thought provoking for their readers. That's about writing and curating content that doesn't just state fact or opinion (though that's still part of it), but asks questions and encourages readers to share their thoughts too. It requires a good deal of creativity and empathy as well to get this right - and experience of doing it.

So... before you even think about creating yet more content in 2011. Ask yourself if someone else already did the job for you and ask yourself exactly what your readers need and how best to serve those needs. And, instead of spending all your time in publish mode, get into share mode - start to expand your connections and become known in the right places.

What do you think?

Pic by flickr user: annais