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.

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?

I've watched with interest as the travel blogosphere has filled with people 'living the dream' of funding an existence of non-stop travel by blogging about it. Good luck to everyone attempting to do this - but as an ex freelance travel writer I take this whole 'digital travel nomad' business with a large pinch of salt.

Something I learned during that decade of jumping on and off planes and writing about the last trip as I planned the next trip during the current trip - is that travel for travel's sake is tedious after a while.

Travel friendships are shallow
Before I got into travel writing - like most people bitten by the bug - I travelled quite a lot on my own. And I loved the way it freed me to make friends with anyone. At first I felt self conscious. Almost like I had a sign on my back saying "He has no friends!". But after I'd plucked up courage to talk to strangers it was fantastic fun. (A few beers helped to begin with but now I will talk to anyone!). For a while this ability to just meet interesting people totally rocked. Problem was a lot of these 'friendships' were transient and ultimately a bit meaningless. We bonded over a shared need for info about the next place we wanted to visit or whatever - but we talked the same old stuff most of the time. After a while I grew tired of this.

It's hard to observe and to participate
Once you realise these 'pseudo friendships' aren't that sustaining you tend to withdraw a bit. You sit back and observe. I kept a diary (blogs didn't exist!). Sometimes I realised I was watching with a degree of cynicism. There's a dumb pecking order to backpacking. The deeper the tan, the more battered the rucksack - the cooler the traveller. (Maybe now it's also about how many twitter followers you have?). I got tired of it all. But there were still amazing temples to see, incredible food to eat, local people with totally different lifestyles to learn from. I found though that the more I observed, the harder it became to click back into participation mode. Once I started writing full time as a travel writer this observation/participation partition seemed more pronounced still. I wasn't doing a trip just to experience it. I was there to get a story, take pictures, make notes. The first few trips were fine. I lived in the moment and just scribbled a few notes and took some pictures, but increasingly the pressure to nail the story took away from the delight of exploration. If you're serious about monetization for your travel blog I reckon you'll feel the same way. Nomadic Matt's comment in his post about how he makes money sums this up well:

"I spend more time trying to put bread on my table than I do anything else, and often it really takes away from being able to just travel and enjoy where I am."

It's lonely on the road
I've been thinking about writing a post on this topic for a while but a post by Nomadic Chick called The Definition of Lonely made me get on and write it. It's a short, oddly wistful post. It begins:

“Today, I feel lonely. I wonder what I hunger for? Male companionship?  To have my friends surrounding me? … Sometimes it’s intangible, something I can’t quite grasp.”

She goes on to say she's learnt after a year on the road that she's "discovering a drawback to long-term travel and that’s the reflex to be reserved... it leaves me somewhat alone, even when I’m surrounded by human contact."

She nails that feeling I described above perfectly. Is this a new definition of loneliness? For me, no (for her I guess, yes.) I felt that way a lot, particularly after I'd been doing the job a while.

It's wonderfully self-indulgent to gorge yourself on new stimulation day in and day out. But after a while - just like any drug - we get hardened to it.

Oh yeah. Another camel ride. Great one more temple to tick off the list… Angkor Wat next.

So, if you're reading all those blog posts selling the dream about making money just by writing blog posts and doing smart things with ebooks, advertising and sponsored posts... as you wander your way around the big wide world. Pause for a while.

Do you understand the reality of what you're actually taking on?

Image by Flickr user: Giorgio Montersino

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?

Well, Google launched + a while back and like lots of people I've been tinkering with its functionality. And, I've been thinking about what it means to have a 'friend' on-line and what value all those supposed 'friendships' really offer.

I've tried to keep my different social media profiles separate. So Facebook is primarily social, Linked In is 100% business connections (people I really know), Twitter is all about sharing interesting stuff relating to what I do work-wise (absolutely hate it when people tweet mundane junk like what they fancy for lunch and unfollow them if they do it a lot).  When a business connection tries to friend me on Facebook, I tell them I'd rather connect on Linked In. Mates on Linked In? Only if they work in a similar field as a rule.

Where does that leave brands on Facebook then? Many of the travel cos I work with want to develop their Facebook presence. They see it as a great way to really engage with their customers and prospects. So they have pages which people can choose to 'like'. If you do this, the brand's wall posts show up in your news stream.

I did this with a bunch of them. And before I knew it there were so many posts from brands in my news stream they swamped the stuff from my friends. I do wonder where this will all end up. For the majority of brands hiting their 'like' button is just saying 'hey plug your products at me'. I can't see people doing this for long. I laboriously went back to every brand page I'd 'like'd on Facebook and 'unlike'd them. That was another interesting learning - it's much easier to 'like' than to 'unlike'. In fact I had to google it to find out. And try 'unliking' something using the Facebook iPhone app. I still haven't worked out how to that.

I decided to try a little experiment and set up a new Facebook account just to follow brands.

It taught me some interesting things. First you can't set up a Facebook account without connecting it to an email account. First time I did this I connected it to my gmail account which I don't use much. I was flabberghasted to see that within moments of opening up my brand new virgin Facebook account it was already recommending people to 'friend' - people I knew really well.

How?

It was of course interrogating my gmail contacts - and there are lots of them! It was frankly a bit spooky. I deleted this Facebook account, created a brand new email account on yahoomail with no contacts, no mail, nothing, and used this to set up a new Facebook account. It was with some satisfaction that I saw an empty 'People You Might Know' box. I then started 'liking' various brands using my new account. Each time I got an annoying pop-up box that made me enter a random 'captcha' number before I could proceed - to prove I was a 'real' person. To avoid this all I had to do was give Facebook my mobile phone number so it could then validate the account by sending me a text message with a unique code. So, I did this. To be honest, using a Facebook account without doing this would be insanely frustrating.

You know what happened? Facebook now knows that two different Facebook accounts have the same mobile phone number associated with them - so it suggested to me on my new account that I might know 'Jeremy Head'. Scary. And given that the number was asked for and offered up in the context of account 'security' to me rather duplicitous.

What this really showed me is that Facebook is utterly determined to connect you to as many people as possible.

The basic premise is the more connections people have with each other, the more data there is  to mine and the more potential 'likes' and 'shares' there will be when a brand advertises something on a profile. Every time you become 'friends' with someone on Facebook it's like sticking your email address on a load of new advertiser databases.

Linked In provided some interesting insight on this subject too. Linked In has always (in my opinion) been about 'proper' contacts. If you use the free basic level service you can't connect with random people. In theory you have to say how you are connected - 'we worked together at XXXX ltd' for example.

But... there is a 'friend' option. And increasingly I get people I don't know trying to connect with me on Linked In by saying we are 'friends'. Random people from India or China in particular. I also had an amusing email exchange with someone I've never met in Devon who does similar stuff to me who wanted to connect on Linked In as we were in her opinion 'friends'. She was a bit miffed when I pointed out that we'd never met and that saying we were friends when we'd never met was basically a lie.

It occured to me that in this instance though, Linked In might have mined our mutual contacts and worked out that we have a connection twice removed in common and suggested to her that she might know me. Maybe I should have accepted the invitation? She actually seemed like a genuinely interesting person!

By doing this Linked In kind of undermines itself. There's an interesting tension here between the need to keep it business-like - make 'proper connections - and the need to get people to connect to as many people as possible to make the network more interesting and valuable to potential advertisers. From a user perspective, being left to choose my own connections seems far more appropriate. I build the right network for me.

Back to google+. Many commentators point out that it's about google getting its hands on people's connections and their 'likes' (or '+1's in google-speak) and using this to make search results more personalised and more relevant. You can see that this will be really powerful. If I'm signed into google when I search I now already see relevant pages that friends on google+ have  '+1'd being pushed up the search results.

But too many 'friends' - rather like too many brands in my personal Facebook newstream - will mean the results could be less and less useful. Someone that an algorithm (which is totally focussed on making me connect with as many people as possible) suggested should be my 'friend', thinks this hotel (or whatever else I am searching for) is amazing. Should I value that opinion any more than someone I don't know at all? I'm not sure.

So... I'm thinking more and more about the quality of my social networks rather than the size of them. Maybe I should have a clear out and disconnect from all the people that frankly I can't remember why I friended in the first place? Ultimately that network could be influencing the way search engines serve up results when I am looking for stuff, the sorts of ads I get served up and who knows what else.

Perhaps we should let our online connections be more like our offline ones. Do you want an algorithm to tell you who should be your friend?

How do you use social media for connecting with people?