Travelblather

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?

A genuinely funny story has been getting a good number of retweets of late. It's a write up by James Gritt of Vice magazine. Basically he slams the place - and he does it with some genuinely funny irony too.

"Usually you go to these places and it’s impossible to find something that isn’t penis-shaped, so it was a relief to find this understated little trinket to take home to my grandparents" - alongside a badge with the slogan 'Show us yer piss flaps' on it for example!

Be warned before you read PR Holiday - We went on a foam party to Magaluf that there are graphic pictures of people shagging on the beach, drunken half naked girls at a foam party and more. (I bet I get more clicks from this link than any other on my blog... and that kind of says it all...)

It's being hailed as a PR fail of epic proportions. And you can see why - James clearly hated the place. Or at least that's the impression you take away from his piece.

But I'm not so sure.

Magaluf is what it is. It's sleazy, it's drunken, it's hell on earth for some holiday makers. But for everyone? And specifically for the kids who read Vice? You could argue that the PR guy got his demographic targetting just right. Vice magazine has attracted some very high profile backers and it's seen as one of a handful of publications that has real engagement with the teen/young adult market. It's a really impressive product. The print version used to be available in Brighton and I've read several issues.

James does a great job - he doesn't condone this kind of stuff and, actually, that's the clever bit. If he'd written a 'phwwoar get pissed in Magaluf ' kind of post, he'd have had a stream of 'how could you... this is disgusting' comments under his post and probably far fewer tweets and retweets. Conversely, if he'd tried to make out that Magaluf was some kind of family-friendly sophisticated beach resort - that would have been doing his readers a huge disservice. It's an honest write-up. And if you look at other posts on the Vice website you see that it's totally what you'd expect - Amsterdam Squat Riot! is another recent post.

Read the comments below the post and you see plenty saying 'ugh!'... and a good few saying 'I'm booking a trip there right now!'

I wonder if James put his camera back in his room and then went back out to join in the mayhem once he'd got his shots for the piece?

And... Is the PR exec who arranged the trip packing their desk into a box or cracking the champagne right now?

What do you think?

Pic credit: James Gritt/Vice magazine

I recently headed to East Africa to write a feature for the Sunday Telegraph about Rwanda and a feature for Wanderlust magazine about Rwanda and Burundi.

Brussels Airlines provided a reduced cost flight to get me to Bujumbura (Burundi’s capital) and back from Kigali the capital of Rwanda. The cost - as is usually the case with this kind of thing - was covered by the tour operator I was working with the excellent Bridge and Wickers. I figured the flights would be jammed full - that the night flight on the return journey would be pretty nightmarish. So I put in a request for an upgrade and crossed my fingers.

Now,  there’s all sorts of guff written online about ‘how to score an upgrade’. Stuff about wearing a smart suit and asking nicely is rubbish.  You can’t charm your way into the front cabin when you check in. No way. If you aren’t a frequent flyer – with a seriously high status too – you haven’t a hope.

But what about travel journos?

Well, in my experience it’s incredibly varied. I flew 3 or 4 times with Qatar Airways a few years back and got upgraded to Business every time. Service and seat were top quality and for long trips to Nepal and to the Philippines with layovers in the Middle East this was a godsend. I remain a fan of Qatar Airways as a result and often recommend them. I’ve flown economy with them too and it’s been pretty good. But I have no idea if they are as generous now. At the time the airline was new and keen to make a name for itself in a very competitive market.

British Airways, China Airlines and Iceland Air have been good to me too – usually putting me in economy one way and business the other – which makes a lot of sense - as  I get to see service in both cabins. Conversely Sri Lankan, refused point blank.

In this instance with Brussels Airlines I got a resounding ‘NON’ too. The premise was “We gave you a significant discount on the ticket. Upgrading you means the cost comes out of our PR budget. We therefore only upgrade journalists who are writing about our service.” (Rather than just giving the airline a mention in the ‘How to get there’ section of the info box in a travel feature which is the case for the features I am writing.)

Now, I’m not sure how good the discount was for the airfare as the cost of the flights were covered for me. But I do question the approach that Brussels Airways takes.

I emailed to ask what would constitute ‘writing about the service’ – would a blog post suffice? Maybe I could pitch something at one of the travel industry newspapers like Travel Weekly. They used to do a regular review column called Flight Check which would have been perfect. Apart from that where else realistically could someone write a piece about their experience on a flight? CNBusiness traveller perhaps – I can’t think of many other places (can anyone else?). So is this just a convenient excuse to cover up for saying no? Unfortunately I didn’t get a response about this so I can only make informed assumptions. (I did however get Business Lounge access at Brussels which was a pleasant way to start my trip and for which I am grateful.)

What of the flight itself? The economy section of the plane – an Airbus A330 – was no more than a third full both ways so in fact I had a perfectly comfortable flight. The Business class cabin looked like it had no more than 3 or 4 people in it. So, the thing I don’t understand is, why the airline assumes a budget for upgrading me to Business. If it’s full up front fair enough – no way I should take the seat of a fare paying passenger. But if it’s half empty, what’s the real additional cost to their business? Virtually nothing I’d suggest - it's almost all fixed cost.

So why the policy? I find it mystifying.

And what is there to gain if they do upgrade me? Plenty I’d argue (yeah OK, of course I would). But so much of what goes on these days in business is focussed on short term return and it's depressing. This is understandable, but I think the internet which was in my opinion at fault for some of this trend with its focus on the 'right now' could be beginning to drive a renewed focus in the opposite direction - on establishing long term relationships. Why? Well, these days it’s so easy for a customer to make price comparisons at the click of a mouse that service, relationships and so on have to be the real differentiator again.

So, I’d suggest it makes a lot of sense to build relationships with travel writers – Brussels Airlines’ services to Africa from Brussels cover the whole continent from Abidjan in Ivory Coast to Yaoundé in Cameroon. It’s a really impressive network. But who in the UK really knows about it? I certainly didn’t and I write about travel for a living.

Clearly the airline needs to be sure that the writer they are working with has genuine credibility and connections. In the old days that wasn’t always easy to verify. These days I can forward the commissioning emails I got from the editor of the Sunday Telegraph travel section and the editor of Wanderlust.

But there’s more. You can check out my twitter followers – among them are many of the UK’s most influential travel writers, editors and PR people. I’d suggest that in the context of the need to see something published about the service to justify an upgrade, social media delivers in spades if the writer has the connections and on-line credibility. (Which I hope people would agree that I have?!)

Some tweets about the service. Some images on my Flickr stream and a blog post which if written with the right terms in it will be mega-visible in search results really quickly. (I bet I could rank within the top 5 on google.co.uk for the term ‘Brussels airlines to Bujumbura’ within days.)

So…  what’s been your experience of upgrades and  how do you think airline PR and corporate comms people should engage with travel writers?

Pic from Flickr by Schuey

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?

There is a lot of talk about how Google is 'running scared of Facebook'. Whilst the algorithm Google uses is far more complex these days, at its basic level it relies primarily on assessing the quality of inbound links from other sites to help score the relative appropriateness and usefulness of pages. So type in a query like say 'Rwanda holidays' and the search engine checks out all the sites where this phrase appears in key places on the page and assesses the links from other sites to that page. The higher quality the links (for example from more reputable sources like newspapers and universities) and the greater the number, the higher up the search results the page will appear. (SEO types I know this is very rudimentary - but I hope you'll agree it's more or less how it works.)

What Facebook is doing increasingly successfully is allowing people to get recommendations not from a link-based algorithm like Google's, but from their networks of friends and associates. So instead of relying solely on links to a particular page in my Rwandda holidays example, higher priority is given to pages that people in my network have written or linked to or 'liked'. This network of friends and colleagues is sometimes referred to as your social graph.

Unsurprisingly Google is trying add in this kind of functionality to its search engine – if you are signed into a Google account when you search and have connected with friends on Google it adjusts results to prioritise what your friends and colleagues rate. Google Buzz is another example of the company trying to get social connections and recommendations into the search results mix. Apparently there's yet another new Google toy in the pipeline called Google Me too.

Others are following suit. Trip Advisor now carries hundreds of reviews for some hotels. Wouldn’t it be smart if the reviews it served up to you weren’t simply the most recent, but the most recent by people like you? Well, that’s exactly what’s happening and TripAdvisor is using Facebook to do it.

All over the place people are working to plug in your social graph to make your search queries more relevant to you. This all makes perfect sense to me. I’d far rather consider the merits of staying at hotel based on reviews by people I know or people who are like me.

But what about really specialised stuff? Even if I take into account friends of friends and even friends of friends of friends, sometimes I just won’t be connected to the right people for my network to be useful in helping me find what’s most appropriate for me. If I’m looking for a hotel in Prague, there will doubtless be people in my immediate network who have stayed in the city and whose blog posts, 'likes' and reviews of their Prague hotels can help prioritise more appropriate places for me to stay. But what about my recent trip to Burundi? I had an itinerary organised by the Ministry of Tourism, but if I’d had to construct it from scratch my social network (even as a travel writer) would probably have been of little use. Using the net (there are no guidebooks that I have been able to find) I’d be back to having to rely on Google’s link-based approach to delivering the best search results possible.

And that’s why I think quality, niche content written by experts will outlast the current excitement about social media and the social graph.

In real world terms it’s the same. My friends and friends of friends can often be useful for providing recommendations for say someone to fit a new set of tyres to my car – but when it comes to finding a specialist structural engineer to advise about excavating a new cellar below a house I’m buying, I’m obliged to go back to things like the phone directory and advertisements in local newspapers. And should I come across a feature about building new basements in a local magazine, wow that would be very handy indeed - far more useful than what a friend of a friend who is a builder might be able to tell me.

For content creators this means the focus should be ever more on the really credible, expert stuff. Think about the complicated and usual things about your product or service and ensure you create really well researched and crafted content about them. It will absolutely pay off in the long term.

Anyone seen any particularly good examples of search empowered by social connections really working well?