Travelblather

I don’t usually do PR things. But I was offered the chance to talk to Pete Ward the CEO of WAYN (Where Are You Now?) a few weeks back. I vaguely remembered this backpacker social network site from way back – long before Facebook. And, it’s still going strong with some 21 million users. Regular readers will know I am no fan of Facebook. So, how was a social media business like WAYN surviving? I was curious to find out – particularly because they were on the verge of relaunching with a completely new user experience. I found Pete engaging, thoughtful and interesting. Here’s what we talked about:

What’s WAYN’s mission? Has it changed?
Imagine you can see where your mates are on a map. That was how it started. Mainly as a result of my own backpacking experiences. Nowadays it has evolved - to help people make the most out of life. Our vision is to help people discover where to go, what do to and who to meet.

Who are your customers?
It’s a global audience of people who love to travel. But not as big a backpacker market concentration as you’d think. Our biggest demographic is 25 to 35. But our most active demographic is over 50. I think that participating in it made older people feel a bit younger – and even allowed them to be a bit voyeuristic.

What does the new site do compared to the old site?
This has been the biggest shift we’ve ever made. We are only 10% of the way. Even at 10% we’re very excited. Not just the travel website scene but the web more generally has seen the ‘Pinterestisation’ of media, the way we engage with content on line is evolving - fast. Previously we had a quite magazinesque site -  a nice shop front but not much else. But social sites like Facebook reinvented this – things like the newsfeed, the wall for accessing info and ideas are quite different… adding content from people like you – personalization and relevance and timeliness is changing the way we consume and create content. Filtering is a big thing and it's still not done very well.

Why have you made these changes?
I don’t think anyone has cracked social travel including ourselves. Trip Advisor are doing it quite well, Gogobot has nice design features but doesn’t have the scale. We’re been around a while and have an ever growing community. What has been the core ingredient? We are social in our DNA. People come to the site to connect and socialise – that is the glue for our community and that’s what makes it a sticky site.

Our realisation was that if we are going to truly become the leading travel social platform we need to rebuild from the bottom up- but we mustn’t lose the social engagement. So we took the social engagement stuff and fused it with a recommendation engine for where to go and what to do. We recognise that our users will provide some of that info, but there are other things like check ins from other social sites, content like recommendations from Time Out and expert reviews that complement the decision-making process so the wall is a great way to integrate all  those elements and then to personalise it so that it’s really relevant.

What’s your view on making people share more to access more of your services? The premium services look exactly like Badoo - a dating site – is WAYN about dating or about travelling?
Is the impulse the same? Yes from a purely social context. There’s the same human needs that drive engagement – influence – everyone wants to be seen to be influential in something… the more friends you have the better.

People are that shallow…?
[Laughs] Well, they are interested in popularity – it makes them feel good. Everyone. Even the over 50s. Think about the celebrity factor. Much as you’d like to treat these people like anyone else, you can’t help being a bit keen to be their friend. We look up to people who are better than us and want to be like them – it’s in our DNA.

That’s one side of sociability – but there’s a more generous thing. If you can encourage people to share advice and recommendations that makes them feel good about themselves.

Social in the context of travel isn’t ‘I want to meet them because they are fit’ it’s ‘I want to connect with them because I know they are influential on Paris’. So we want to algorithmically bring people who are authorities/experts to the fore – so people can endorse people they see as experts.

Could these experts be professionals rather than members? For example a brand’s social media manager?
Yes. We could say the social media manager for Visit London could be one of these experts. A tourist board can sponsor a page directly. We did a recent promotion where the Air New Zealand marketing manager was promoted as a genuine user and he used it to add content about his travels round the world and we promoted it more. It was hugely successful. Our members really engaged with it.

Do many people use the premium services?
Those who pay are 10 times more active. Less than one percent are subscribers at  the moment. But they represent nearly 10 percent of our traffic.

What’s the core revenue driver? Subscribers or advertising?
The real value is, we think, in monetisation with brands – that is the scalable opportunity. Once you have an active audience, that’s your opportunity - as long as you engage with them in a way that is relevant.

Do you agree that the moment a free service starts to focus more on monetization, the user experience deteriorates?
We’ve come full circle – you used to have to buy premium membership to interact. Then we went free and ad funded and now we are freemium. Money v traffic is the trade-off. We reckoned there is a way to get the best of both. Restrict the things that don’t stifle interaction but that are still regarded as valuable by users.

For example?
Sending messages – now you can send as many as you want. But if you receive a message you have to pay to see it. Another way to offset that is – if you don’t want to pay - do something that we value as a business... do something else to help us and we will give you access. So share WAYN with a bunch more of your friends for example - that gives us new customers.

Do you see a role for professionally written content on WAYN?
I do funnily enough – beforehand it was no. Now we are seeing the value in creating an aspirational platform which inspires people to discover new places and partnering with tourist boards has shown us that. Mostly it’s Tourist Boards that are the people who have the best content on their destination. By doing innovative social engagement campaigns with them we have found that users respond really well. So whether it will be commissioning directly from writers or more likely working with third parties like Tourist Boards I think it’s useful. There’s a place for pro-content on a social platform but it needs to be served up in a really smart way. Like say an awesome photo to get people to engage with something quick and short and then maybe dive deeper.

How is WAYN different to Trip Advisor?
We have a strong advantage over Trip Advisor. You know the 1 to 99% rule? Most people don’t add reviews only a minority do. People go to Trip Advisor much closer to the end of the booking process. What you don’t do is hang out there… it’s not like that. People’s WAYN profiles are much more rich… what people like, where they want to go, what they’d love to do… we have huge numbers of data points about people and social signal data too. You can follow a brand on WAYN as well… just like Facebook. We can break down the 350k friends of South Africa and look at the data and see… what are they looking for? We know for South Africa it’s adventure sports, then wine tasting. We got 160,000 respondents to a survey we did with South Africa. Doing more surveys with consumer brands is something we see as really interesting for our future business – everyone has an opinion and we can aggregate them really fast.

Do you see privacy as a growing issue
I’d say it’s a ‘perceived risk’ with privacy. Despite the naysayers – those same people are adding more content on themselves. Ultimately people don’t feel as protective – they accept it’s part of the process. You have to do it  to make the most of the service. The winning businesses will respect privacy and not abuse that trust. The negative impact is 10-fold… 28-fold. We aggregate data – which allows us to present more tailored offers to you. We’re going to serve you ads anyway – so might as well show you ads that. You might be interested in.

Any questions you think I should have asked and didn't?

'Big data’ is a phrase that’s getting a lot of airplay at the moment. The basic premise is that nowadays we have the computing power at our fingertips to be able to crunch massive quantities of disparate information and use it to unearth previously unappreciated things - about people.

The US election came down ultimately to just few counties in a few swing states according to various media reports. And that’s because both parties had huge databases of information that they had gathered about voters that allowed them to predict very accurately how states and even counties would vote long before polling day. This allowed them to micromanage the campaign. Spending their resources only on the people that ‘mattered’.

On the one hand this seems really smart. It’s a bit of a holy grail for marketers this kind of stuff. To roll out the oft quoted phrase attributed to John Wanamaker. "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” Increasingly with the web and big data to help them, marketers DO know which half is wasted. (Or they think they do.)

Take this thinking to its conclusion and you can see that in politics this approach could be massively undemocratic. People who live in states which are bound to vote a particular way regardless (according to the data wonks) aren’t worth talking to at all. Leave them alone – don’t even bother to tell them anything much at all. Conversely, imagine if you just happen to live in one of the key swing state counties that the data wonks have worked out really matter – your vote is suddenly worth exponentially more than the votes of millions of people elsewhere. It would be worth moving to one of these counties just to have that kind of influence.

I’ve recently read The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser and it’s just brilliant. Its basic premise is quite similar. As algorithms get better and better at knowing what you want (or what they think you want), they’ll just keep dishing that up and you’ll never see anything else. So, click on the same friend a few more times on Facebook and their updates get pushed up in your newsfeed – do that enough and it’s possible that you’ll increasingly see only the updates of same few friends that Facebook thinks ‘really’ matter to you at the expense of all the others. Likewise for Google. Keep searching for say information that suggests you have a bias towards voting Republican (stuff that’s pro gun ownership maybe?) and slowly the search engine will start serving up more of the same and you’ll see less and less stuff that’s more Democrat leaning (stuff that’s pro gay marriage for example). You’ll begin to be locked inside a bubble of stuff that is highly 'relevant' to you to the extent that it will shut out all conflicting points of view.

Both of these concepts are fundamentally about the ability of technology to know us better than we know ourselves or to be better at deducing subtle connections than we can ever hope to be. And maybe (maybe) it is. But is that a good thing?

You know all that stuff you stick on your Facebook page? It’s not just Facebook using it. It gets sold on to huge third party companies that use it to model and predict behaviour. They are getting better and better at it. Soon they will know that because you like Homeland you are more likely to buy one brand of soft drink over another or one car over another. Did you know that when you read a book on Kindle, Amazon is watching what you read? So you spent the afternoon reading a book of fiction which has a chapter in it featuring a car chase where the hero drives a BMW? It won’t be long before the ad you get served up next time you hit Amazon will be for… a BMW.

So… you might have guessed that I’m not a huge fan of big data. I believe the Net should be about helping us make more interesting and unexpected connections – about serendipity and about humanity ahead of technology and profit.

What has all this got to do with content then? This week a company called Percolate raised 9 million USD in series A funding. Percolate has developed a platform to help brands use social media more effectively. It uses an algorithm to suggest content ideas for social media community managers (ie the people that run a brand’s Facebook page or blog etc). This means they can spend their time producing more content that’s ‘appropriate’ more quickly.

To quote some of the stuff on their website: Percolate’s goal is to make content creation easy by prompting community managers with ideas and inspiration…  Percolate is constantly scanning for interesting areas for the brand to explore for stock content, whether that’s a long-form blog post, an infographic or a video.

Who needs research and consideration to write content? Just get an algorithm to come up with the ideas for you. But how would you feel if you were reading stuff created off the back of prompts from a piece of technology rather than by a real person?

Social media will make tits out of all of us

I don’t mean Facebook or Twitter per se when I say this. I mean the way the industry is starting to leverage these platforms – usually (of course) in attempts for financial gain.

And that, is currently about influence and networks. How these new platforms make it much easier to see the connections between people and - to a degree - the different levels of influence that we have over each other too.

The information that we share on these places gets hoovered up and used in all kinds of ways. And this will only get more sophisticated and invasive. Personally I feel really uncomfortable with this – maybe it’s a generational thing? The innocent pleasure of sharing some holiday snaps with your friends has frankly, been soiled.

I’d like to define a new phrase – data blackmailing. To mean the increasing number of websites that mandate that you use your Facebook or Twitter log-in and password to use them. I came across this one yesterday.

No way to check out if it’s any good without first ponying up my Facebook details and by extension allowing the company to know all kinds of stuff about me. It’s like going on a blind date with someone and having to tell them all about your relationship hangups, your friends and your quirks and foibles before you even have time to work out if you like them enough to see them again.

Frankly, you can sod off.

Perhaps the most insidious example of this I’ve come across is the influence score app Klout. If you want to know more about Klout read this great piece in Wired magazine. Basically you have to sign up to Klout with either Twitter or Facebook and are then encouraged to connect it with all your other social networking sites like Linked In, your blog, etc etc. It then uses an algorithm to give you an influence score. (Based on for example how many people you follow on twitter compared with how many follow you, how often your friends on Facebook re-share things that you have posted etc)

It’s immensely powerful as a concept. Let’s say you’re selling a new kind of super-light backpack, ideal for gap year travellers. There are stacks of travel bloggers out there talking to this kind of audience. Who to try and work with? If they all had Klout scores you could make the decision really easily. The higher their score, the higher their level of influence and the more likely they are to be able to generate additional sales for you.

Assuming of course Klout actually works.

Klout is frankly very rudimentary – it’s very gameable. A key way to up your score is tweet more frequently about a more tightly defined subject. There’s a hilarious story in that Wired feature I linked to, about a guy who started to feel worried whilst on holiday for 2 weeks because there was no internet connection so he couldn’t tweet – which would mean his Klout score would go down. How incredibly sad and stupid. How vacuous.

But it’s taken hold regardless. In the US, people with high Klout scores are getting all kinds of attention – free stuff to trial, better job opportunities. The Wired piece I linked to starts with a story about a guy who got turned down for a job on the basis of his Klout score!

Call me old fashioned but I simply don’t believe technology can (should?) define the value of the relationships I have with other people or their intrinsic worth. Can you imagine a world where everyone is trying to increase some random score about themselves to gain greater prestige and advantage? Mental.

This social media trend isn’t just about people either – it’s companies too. Increasingly companies are trying to up the number of Facebook fans they have by running competitions that require people to ‘like’ the company’s Facebook page.

And, we’re seeing a similar trend in SEO. Social signals are now the big noise for SEO-types. The more ‘likes’ and ‘+1’s a page has the higher it will rank in search results (apparently). So, again, companies are looking for ways to generate more ‘like’s and ‘+1’s for their pages. Expect a deluge of quirky videos, dumb competitions and ‘clever’ infographics going forward. How tedious.

Everyone online seems to be screaming ‘like me, like me, like me’!

I’m a huge believer in doing less, better. I’m a huge believer in real relationships. The way you influence people is by getting to know them and understanding what makes them tick. It’s an immensely human activity.

Technology won’t replace this and to assume it will is stupid and lazy. Agree?

Pic credit: lauralewis23

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.

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?