Travelblather

I just checked - I published 23 posts in 2011. Just about one a fortnight. I had some help from some great guests too.

So, looking back, which of my posts do I think are really insightful? Which ones do I think I'd tell a newcomer to Travelblather to read? Here's my top 5 for 2011. Interestingly(?) they are often posts that didn't get that many comments. Perhaps because they are more distilled and emphatic with less room for discussion? What do you think?

Free Sucks - Seriously I hate it
This theme percolates through much of my writing here on Travelblather. The idea that free is always good is frankly lazy and stupid. It typifies the mindset of the dumb consumer endlessly feeding on stuff that they are thrown - just because they can. With no thought about why it's free and what the implications are longer term of accepting it. Free is often really, really bad. This post explains why.

Forget Content - Think Curation and Connections
One of my first posts of 2011, this I think remains pretty pertinent - why create yet more content just because you can if someone else has done a great job already? With the zillions of new pages of content being added all the time online, search engines are struggling to make sense of it all. Maybe real people hold the final answer!

Choose Your 'Friends' Wisely
Many commentators suggest that social media came of age in 2011. Did it? I'm not so sure. But one thing is for certain, our online connections will have increasing importance as we go forward - in all sorts of ways. Some good, some bad. Maybe we need to think more carefully about who we are 'friends' with online and why?

Will Quality Content Beat Social Connections?
Just one comment on this post. But for me it's a bit of a call to arms for content creators. I feel strongly that the skills we possess are so undervalued in the online world. I remain convinced - as I say in this post - that quality, niche content written by experts will outlast the current excitement about social media and the social graph.

Endemic Corruption Or Just A Travel Press Trip?
OK. This one did garner a lot of comments (over 50). As often happens when the comments snowball, they went off topic quite a bit. There's some really interesting innovation going on with the travel blogging community as they seek to monetize their work more aggressively. I admire their boldness, but because travel bloggers are publishers as well as writers they risk alienating their readers if they get too caught up in chasing the bucks too overtly.

Thanks everyone who has read and commented in the last year. It's been great fun!

Any posts you found particularly useful? Anything you'd like to see more or less of in 2012? I'd love to hear what you think.

I’ve blathered a bit already about ‘free’.

I don’t buy this myth precipitated by internet companies and web savants – (Google, Chris Anderson etc) that somehow content just arrives by magic online with no cost associated with it. And somehow people make lots of money. It seems to me that almost all of the time, the people who create the free content (publishers, academics, enthusiasts) don’t make the money. It’s the tech companies that package and deliver it – think iTunes, Google again and so on.

I think 2012 is going to be a really interesting year for content and for monetization.

From my experience of talking to big media organisations and one-(wo)man blog operations alike, advertising alone usually does not pay your way. There are too many pages online chasing our eyeballs for the necessary scale to be achieved. And of course the number of pages keeps on and on growing.

As the world economy continues to slump, publishers – small and large – are just not going to be able to keep funding the creation and curation of free content in the vague hope that some day they will make money.

So... There’s pressure to monetize like never before.

Then there’s the Google panda update. For those who aren’t familiar with this, Google made quite radical changes to the way they rank pages about 6 months ago. The key reason for these changes was to try and stamp out the really poor quality content that clogged up search results. Content farms that published 100s even 1000s of pages every day using search term research to create poorly written pages of content that did just enough to make Google think they were decent. (Here’s how you do make money from advertising – by creating monstrous scale – and not giving a toss about readers.)

Panda kind of worked – a lot of the crap has dropped right off the search results. Many bonafide companies would argue they have been unfairly demoted too however, whilst big brands seem to have done rather well.

So... Quality content and a well-known, trusted brand matter like never before.

For the travel sector (and probably many others) I now see a really interesting race taking place between travel publishers and travel businesses.

Travel Publishers
The free content (aka advertising) model doesn’t work, so publishers (newspaper travel sections, travel magazines) will have to find other revenue streams for their online operations. They could put up paywalls and charge you to read. Some have done that – but general consensus would seem to be it’s hardly delivering vast revenues.

So, either the quality of their free content will have to diminish (they’ll cut costs even more to try and at least break even with what ad revenue they are achieving) or they’ll have to sell us stuff much more overtly. Maybe a combination of both. Think more Top 20-style charticles with more overt ‘buy this holiday now’ messages alongside. (We could get to a point where the website and the print editions look increasingly different as a result. In fact I’d argue for this model to work, they should be. Radically so.)

Travel Businesses
There has been much talk of brands as publishers. The idea that online, anyone can publish stuff, so why not be a publisher too? But up to now I don’t see many that have taken this idea really seriously. By this I mean doing far more than sticking up some destination guides and trying to get customers to add reviews. This could all change with the impact of Google’s panda update. Think of the typical online travel agent (OTA) (someone like Expedia) or the metasearch engine (someone like Travelsupermarket.com). I know nothing about the SEO strategy of these businesses, but I’d bet they’ve spent a lot on old school SEO over the years – using link building and all the other smart ways that SEO people know to ensure that they stay top of search results... with far, far less investment in quality content. But, me-too bog-standard content isn’t working so well now. Google is pushing people to create better, more authoritative content by implementing the panda update. The quality of its content will increasingly impact how high up the search results a website is. The smart online travel businesses (big and small) are beginning to get this. They are investing in really good, well written content. And if they are smarter still they will keep investing.

What I find fascinating about this situation is that travel companies have a huge advantage over publishers. They have a business model that works. They sell holidays/flights etc. and make money. The publishers don’t (yet).

Who is best placed to dominate in the travel sector online ultimately?

Can the publishers plug product into their online offering without giving the impression that their hard-earned reputation for impartiality is now worthless? Conversely can the travel companies publish really excellent unbiassed content without reverting to their standard mantra of buy, buy, buy?

I think 2012 could be the year we really see.

Image  aveCrosby

This is a follow-up post to my previous one about the 'value' of 'friends' in social networks and how the way that search engines are starting to try and plug  the opinions of our friends into our search queries could really start to have an impact on the results they provide for us.

I wanted to take this a step further and think more specifically about the travel sector. And there's an obvious place to look. Trip Advisor (TA).

There's always a story somewhere about how the reviews on TA can't be trusted. And always a firm rebuttal from TA when the accusation is made. Clearly UGC review sites are open to manipulation - but on balance I've found TA to be a useful tool for choosing hotels. The problem (once you have decided that actually most reviews on TA are genuine) is "is this reviewer like me". Does their opinion matter to me? Some bloke called Bob from Wyoming thought this place was 'awesome...' but does that mean I will too?

Back in December TA accounced Instant Personalisation. Log in to TA using your Facebook account and it plugs all your friends' recommendations in. I was pretty sceptical at first - as I am of any Facebook app - I hate the way it tells you it's about to share all your data. Scares me silly. But I did it. And I really see the value of it too. You get a map (nice interface - I LIKE maps) which shows you all the places your FB friends have been to in the world. Mine have visited 1800+ cities between them. That's actually quite a lot. Chances are then that at least one of my friends will have already been to wherever I am planning my next trip to. It tells me who has been where - so it makes it really easy to seek advice from a friend who really knows.

It gets more interesting if you happen to have friends that review on TA too. I don't have many, but Rhonda Carrier who writes lots about family travel does a bit - and so if I look for restaurants in Manchester where she lives - I get a box above the search results that highlights the two places she has reviewed there. That is genuinely useful. I know Rhonda. I know she is a travel writer too so she knows her stuff when it comes to reviewing as well. Bringing her opinion into the mix and highlighting it for me offers me far more than the standard list of reviews.

Now, if only my mates who are travel eds and travel writers all reviewed stuff on TA as a matter of course. What an incredible resource that could be.

Take that a step further. What an incredible resource the 'right' network could be for delivering the 'best' search results from a search engine.' If you could plug the likes, shares, tweets and reviews of a whole bunch of talented travel writers into your google/bing searches for a 'holiday in Spain' - how much more useful, credible and time-saving would that be?

Knowing these networks - having access to them... that could become the golden ticket for search engine optimisation in the new world of personalised search. Getting the 'right' people into the mix. If I want awesome recommendations for mountain bikes then maybe I should ask my mate Andy who is a bike nut to search for me - plugging his contacts into the mix. If he wants really great search results for his holiday in Spain maybe I could search for him in return...

Turning that idea around to look at it from the perspective of a travel company that wants to rank better in search results for say holidays to Spain - you'd better know who the key influencers are in the context of travel searches and make sure they've had a change to experience and review your product if you want to rank well for this term in the - perhaps not so distant - future.

And from the perspective of a travel writer... Could I one day go to a hotel and say 'give me a free night (please) and I'll review* your hotel' and they'd decide whether to give it to me on the basis of the 'friends' I am connected to online and, by extension the influence I could have over the search results of people looking for a hotel in that particular city? (*Completely impartially of course!?)

Maybe the future of SEO is about owning (or having access to) networks that cover specific interest areas like say travel, parenting, financial advice and being able to influence them?