Travelblather

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

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

Welcome the very excellent Tamsin Bishton-Hemingray - previously Head of Content at iCrossing and all round super-experienced web content person. I can't recommend her highly enough if you're looking for help with content or content strategy.

I've been badgering her to write me something for Travelblather... and now, here it is!

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This summer I spent a wonderful week inter-railing around Italy with my family. We spent 36 hours in Venice, a couple of days in Rome and a couple on the coast in the Cinque Terra national park. As well as being a fantastic holiday, it also gave me the opportunity to try out a travel app on my HTC Android phone, which being a content geek was quite exciting to me. I was really disappointed by the experience. This blog post explains why, and why I think that travel publishers have got to work a lot harder on their apps before they are going to put good, old-fashioned guidebooks out of business.

Planning the trip
Planning this holiday required some forethought. There were a lot of things that we wanted to do and see in Venice and Rome, and only limited time to do and see them all in. We sorted out our accommodation online ahead of time using a combination of TripAdvisor recommendations for Venice and Rome, and a superbly useful B&B website which uses a searchable Google map to help you find a B&B exactly where you want one – in my case the tiny village of Manarola.

Then we turned our thoughts to planning our holiday activities. Despite both being web-savvy types, we headed straight to the book shop – because in our experience online travel content of this kind is still poorly lacking.

Guidebooks, ebooks, maps or apps?
We went to the lovely Waterstones in Brighton and sat down in the travel section to work out what we needed. My husband had youthful brand loyalties to Lonely Planet while I had fond memories of a week in Paris when I was 18 with the Rough Guide as my companion - so we knew we wanted a guide book. But should we buy one each for Venice and Rome, or just buy one for the whole of Italy?

As we browsed the bookshelves we also searched the Android Marketplace for apps. These were much cheaper than the printed guidebooks.  But we wanted to balance cost with having enough detail to help us get the best out of our holiday.

And then there were maps. We definitely needed a good map of Venice, and one of Rome.

In the end we bought the following:
Rome Compass (Lonely Planet app) – 49p
The Rough Guide to Italy (10^th edition, March 2011) - £15.99
Pocket Rough Guide to Venice (Including large map) written and researched by Jonathan Buckley - £7.99

We were relying on the app to be our map in Rome, and the pull-out large scale map in the Venice guidebook to help us there.

How good were our guides?

App: Lonely Planet Rome Compass
I downloaded this app for 49p while we were still browsing in Waterstones because it was published by Lonely Planet. In fact, it was the only relevant app that I could find on the Android Marketplace from a publisher I trusted.  I was surprised how important this issue of trust was. My phone is an important tool – and I felt nervous about downloading an app from a publisher  I didn’t know. I felt even more nervous about giving my credit card details to them. So I rejected unknown publishers immediately.

I was excited by the Rome app because the blurb said you could use your phone’s camera function to display an “augmented reality” map giving you directions to the places you wanted to go to in Rome, a bit like a SatNav display from your phone. As I fired it up in Waterstones, I realised that, durrr, I was going to have to wait until I was in Rome itself to see how this actually worked from a usability point of view! There was also static content in short guidebook-style sections – Eat, Drink, Sleep etc. But the content in here wasn’t very detailed and didn’t provide indications of things like price range – something that was a critical factor for us. We were holidaying on a budget.  And it was also clunky to search for things and there didn’t seem to be a way to search by location or type of restaurant without using the map function.

So before I even got to Rome I was feeling a bit nervous about using this app.

Once there, things got worse. I had been receiving regular text messages from my provider (Vodafone) about my data usage reminding me that I had a “passport” and so would pay a fixed fee for a certain amount of data usage – but then an astronomical amount per MB once I passed my limit. It meant that I got worried about using data services on my phone. And without data services, the app was next to useless. On the couple of occasions I turned it on, it was so slow to load that my husband had already found what we needed to know in our print edition Rough Guide To Italy.

After our first afternoon of failing to find our way around with the app, I switched it off. We got a great map from the reception of our B&B – complete with the receptionist’s recommendations on how to get to the major sites, and we used the Rough Guide for everything else.

In short, the app was crap. This was partly because it was so hard to search for stuff, and partly because with roaming costs for mobiles still so high, I was just too worried about my mobile bill to use it.

Lonely Planet need to give users a clear indication of the amount of data the app is likely to use. They also need to add content and make it much more easy to search and bookmark for future reference. For me one of the advantages of a digital guidebook should be that I can carry around lots and lots of information without having to carry around a weighty book. Having less detail than the print version just doesn’t make sense.

Rough Guide to Italy
This rocked in comparison to the app. Easy to find stuff (just use the index), quick to flick through, simple to bookmark (just fold the corner), fun to browse in more detail on train journeys (no batteries or mobile signal required), jam-packed with reliable and important detail, it absolutely trounced the app. We used it for Venice, Rome and Cinque Terre and also had fun reading up about the parts of Italy that we just glanced fleetingly through the window of our train. Yes it was 30 times more expensive than the app, but it was worth every penny.

But – as with my previous experiences of Rough Guides – the small maps included alongside the fantastic detail were consistently pretty useless and often completely wrong. We would have got lost many times if we had relied on them. So it wasn’t completely perfect.

Pocket Rough Guide to Venice
We bought this because of the pull out map, and because we were worried the Rough Guide To Italy wouldn’t have enough detail. Actually, we could have lived without it. And the pull out map was a little bit inaccurate when it came to locating recommended cafes and gelateria. The best map we found to Venice was (like the one used in Rome) the one that was provided to us by our fabulous B&B; it was clear, easy to understand, accurate and free. We brought one home with us to use next time we visit Venice.

So what?
As a content geek, I’ve been reading for years now about how mobile phones are becoming our favourite way to access content of all types. I was really excited about the idea of an app that would fuse Google Maps data and guidebook content into a new format right there in the palm of my hand. But practicalities got in the way. There are a few people who will take their phones on holiday with them and not worry about the cost of use. But there are a lot more people like me who really worry about that expenditure. I might just take the risk if the content in the app was more detailed, more up to date and easier to access. But it wasn’t.  There was less detail than the guidebook. And on top of that, you just can’t flick through an app the way you can flick through a book. These are both critical flaws in my opinion.

For me, the bottom line is that the new medium isn’t enough. The content and the experience have to be top notch too. Based on the Compass experience, I think travel apps still have a way to go.

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