Travelblather

I've been doing quite a lot of research around social media in the last few weeks - in particular because I was presenting at WTM. If you're interested, my presentation Social Media for Travel Marketers: Unpicking the 2.0 hype is available to view on Slideshare with detailed notes too.

One of the issues that I find particularly interesting is the way that whilst brands are desparate to engage with social media - social media is making brands increasingly redundant.

Marketers see social media as the next great opportunity to grow their businesses. And it's not hard to see why when you consider that Facebook now has 350 million accounts worldwide and Twitter is growing exponentially too. Some 40% of online sales are influenced by social media already (McKinsey stats -  more of this kind of stuff in the presentation).

But these very tools that travel marketers want to embrace are in some ways killing the brands they sought to build up - with vast expenditure and effort - over previous decades. Back in the old days pre the social web, big companies couldn't
communicate with all their customers on an individual basis. So they
sought to create 'personalities' - to put a friendly face on the front
of their products and companies so people could 'relate' to them. Sounds weirdly ridiculous doesn't it? But it kind of worked. The
whole discipline of brand marketing was born - humanising a faceless
company. Often they'd use 'brand personalities' - so Michael Jackson
endorsed Pepsi, Rutger Hauer came to personify Guinness and Nicole Kidman is the face of Channel No.5. Here were
real people - people like us (remember the Bisto family?) or else people we'd like to be like.
Absolutely tons of cash was pumped into this kind of marketing. (Interestingly I can think of no examples of travel brands that did this.
Can you?)

But
it was all broadcast. "This is what we want you to believe about our
company and its products" was the message. And your could control the medium so it was no problem - TV, print ads, advertising billboards. But social media isn't one-way... customers can talk back, customers can broadcast for themselves. It's a multi-channel conversation and anyone can join in.

I often think of social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter) as being a bit like the pub. There's chat going on about all kinds of stuff. It's between like minded people and friends usually, it's relaxed and informal. They could well be discussing how cheap their new mortgage deal is or where the best resort for family holidays in Spain is. But can you imagine some bloke in a suit from say Halifax suddenly intervening with a sales pitch for his mortgages or a travel agent jumping into the conversation to suggest their latest deals for family holidays to Mallorca? (Despite the fact that the information they have to offer could actually be of genuine interest.)

Absolutely not. And that's the problem.

The old days of broadcast marketing, building a brand and pumping out your message could well be over.

So how does say First Choice or Thomas Cook get themselves into that chat in the pub about everyone's next family holiday? Could you ever see a place for a big travel brand to engage in these far more conversational and personal on-line environments?

(I have a few ideas which I'll share... but I'd be fascinated to hear what other people think!)

I’m speaking at WTM (World Travel Market in London) on Wednesday 11th November.

If you’re there... drop by! Whether you’ll be there or not... how about participating now?

The seminar is called Social Media for Marketers: Unpicking the 2.0 hype. Seeing as it’s all about social networks, why not share my thoughts ahead of the seminar with my own network (ie you guys!) and see what people have to say...

I’ve got some basic ideas... but stuff people say here can and almost certainly will influence what I present. (Of course I will attribute where necessary!) Speaking with me will be Jane Nicholson one of the PR people who ran the ‘Best Job In The World’ campaign (BJitW) for Visit Queensland – a competition which went viral and was much talked about. I’ve not seen her deck yet, buy I imagine she will discuss how they went about organising the campaign and why it worked. (Feel free to let me know what you thought about it – but for my bit I will focus on other examples.)

A few thoughts - this is probably the way I will structure the presentation too:

1) Hype (or brands that maybe get it wrong?)
I didn’t choose the title. But clearly those who did, feel that there is ‘hype’ here. Is there? And if so, what forms does it take? Any examples of travel sector (or other) brands that have engaged in hype-ish activity and been caught out?

2) Brands that get it right (at least most of the time)
Look at examples of travel sector brands that use social media really well to drive marketing campaigns and/or to interact with customers. Any suggestions?

3) People are still people
A pause for breath before we get theoretical... It’s fine to get excited about ‘the power of social media’ but making a big noise doesn’t necessarily bring you more business. Most of the old principles of marketing absolutely still apply on-line (don’t they?). People still make purchasing decisions about flights and holidays according to similar principles. (Or do they?)

4) Some suggested ‘rules’ of social media
Taken from the great work the social media team at iCrossing has been doing.
- Be useful – the most important point. No one will be interested unless what you are offering is valuable to them – ie it fulfils a need. (This might be something quite trivial like make them laugh when they are bored at work.)
- Be findable – no point doing stuff if no-one knows you are doing it. SEO needs to be in the mix (along with some careful promotion?)
- Be live – the whole point of social media is that it allows 2-way interaction. You need to respond in a timely and useful manner to comments and requests. And that takes commitment.
- Be real – you simply can’t afford to try and game the sysyem. (cf 1) above and ‘hype’) You will be found out and then the network will eat you up and spit you out!

5) It’s about networks and communities
Fine to make a big noise about a campaign... but what happens next? Is ‘little and often’ a better strategy? Can you ‘build’ communities on-line? If so what do you need to do? Been reading Rachel Happe’s fascinating posts on the social organisation.

6) The importance of reputation
Participants in communities – whether on or off-line – are not all equal. Key people influence and drive them. Will the influencers in these communities ultimately mean PR is a dead profession? As communities become more and more transparent, trying to influence opinion (ie push products) within them will become impossible.

7) Privacy – and Facebook connect
I’m fascinated and terrified by Facebook Connect – and the idea of portable personal data (people talk about portable social graphs... but I find that a bit of an odd name). Basically, FB Connect (and other similar concepts like Google Friend Connect) allows you to log in to any site that adopts it using your FB login and password. How convenient! No more forgetting which password you used for what site. What it also does is carry all your personal data along too and feeds back your activity on the participating website to your status/wall updates on your Facebook profile. What FB Connect also does is share your Facebook data with that website and Facebook also gets to learn about all your activity there as well as on Facebook itself. A phenomenally powerful tool for marketers - a whole feast of rich user data - but it's shot through with privacy issues for the individual in my opinion. The link above shows some ways FB Connect could be used in the future - potentially very very interesting.

I increasingly feel the days of the big bang PR campaign like Best Job in the World could be pretty numbered. Do you?

I had a really interesting chat across the office with a couple of colleagues this afternoon. Both were bemoaning the fact that they are trying to get organised and book summer holidays for next year after leaving it to the last minute this year and not having very good experiences.

Neither of them had the first idea where to go to online to find inspiration.

As the resident travel 'expert' (their words not mine!) I was duly consulted about the ideal place for a really sunny beach holiday in Europe in mid-summer that would work well for kids and wouldn't be too resort-like and would be pretty cheap.

Simonseeks, vtravelled, travelmuse, thetraveleditor, tripbase, tripwolf - there are a good number of contenders for the content crown for travel holiday research, but the guys in my team (who work for a web and social media company!) hadn't heard of any of them. And frankly they wouldn't trust them if they did. And having tinkered with all of them I wouldn't either.

How about Trip Advisor? "No way... can't trust the reviews on there" I was told. One of my colleagues uses The Guardian's travel pages - he reads the Guardian on a regular basis and feels he can trust it. The other uses Flickr at the moment as her best research tool for holiday destinations. "At least that way you get a real idea of what a place looks like" she said.

I'm sure that the problem right now is that what sites there are out there online that are trying to provide inspiration for the research phase of booking a holiday are still way too general and way too new to be much use to anyone. Just to see I tried Travelmuse's inspiration tool. It suggested Lisbon, Nice and Naples as beach holidays for a family. Pretty hopeless. 

I'm doing some more detailed reviewing of research and inspiration tools which I'll share on another post soon.

In the meantime, the thing that we kept coming back to is Amazon's tool that tells you 'people who bought this book also liked....' There's some interesting discussion about the problems of creating a tool like this for travel on Stephen Joyce's excellent T4 blog. As he points out... it's just not that straight forward with an infrequent and complex purchase like travel:

'People who booked the Fairmont Vancouver also booked... 'another hotel in Vancouver'  - What do I need another hotel for!?

'People who booked a flight to Amsterdam also booked... a flight to Berlin' -
Yes, but I'm going to Amsterdam, so what's the use of that?

He has his own technical suggestions which you can read about on his post, but for me it's all about people like me.

Both the Travel Editor and vtravelled attempt to profile users to match them to other users or specific content, but for now neither has enough content or users to really make this work.

Now... if Trip Advisor could tell me not just which hotel was the most popular in a place, but which hotel was most popular amongst married, adventurous travellers with no kids yet who don't mind spending a bit for something genuinely different... (ie people like me!) THAT would be useful. Interestingly for Trip Advisor it's probably too late now... I doubt the demographic information the site holds for its many millions of reviewers is anymore detailed than what sex they are.

Where would you suggest for my colleague who wants a good value beach break that's hot and sunny in summer, couple of hours flying time, Ok for kids but not a huge beach resort? (I suggested Mallorca.)

Related link: Timesonline: Is the perfect travel website out there?
PIC:by Flickr user Dano

You have to admire Conde Nast - launching new magazines in the midst of a recession. So far I've been impressed with the UK version of Wired magazine launched a few months back. The August edition carried two almost contradictory features.

One was an extract from Chris
Anderson's much lauded recent book Free: The Future of a Radical Price

"The web has become the biggest store in history and everything is 100 per cent off." According to the reviews Anderson suggests that we've arrived at a new paradigm. Old models of price and value are being overturned.

Anderson is not saying everything will be free... more that we will value things in different ways. Whilst some things will be given
away, entrepreneurs will find new business models to make money in other ways. So a new band will give its music away for free as it will get pirated anyway. It will charge people to get a limited edition CD case, for tickets to a concert (which they will be keener to see having heard the music
already), a T-shirt etc. 

A few pages earlier in the magazine, a feature about Rupert Murdoch's plans to start charging for content online. Follow the link to read the full story but to summarise;

Evaporating print advertising means income in the newspaper segment of Murdoch's Newscorp empire has plummeted. Obviously Murdoch isn't happy about the way all that 'free' content on-line makes it necessary for him to make his on-line offerings free too. But guess what. Murdoch sees readers taking up the slack by subscribing. No clever new business models... just old school subscriptions. Why? Well, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has been quietly charging customers for access to some content since 1996. And:

- WSJ has around 90 per cent of the traffic it had before it started charging
"You don’t lose traffic when you charge, if you continue a rigorous effort to let people sample, let some content be free on any given day. You can keep up the same traffic, but your core readers – 10 per cent – will buy it so they never hit a paywall. So it’s not like you flip a switch and either you have [digital] ad revenue or circulation. WSJ has both."

- The cost of getting a print subscriber has gone down
"If you’re giving something away [online], it’s harder to get people to buy the print version. But if you attach a value to the online version then it’s easier to sell the print version and, most importantly, it’s much easier to sell the print version if you bundle the print subscription with an online subscription, which is what the WSJ and FT do."

So... will the on-line future be 'free'? I hope not.

Twitter and Facebook have yet to make any real money. And there are few examples of revolutionary methods of making money on-line. For most of the 'free' gang it's...  advertising... which isn't providing anywhere near enough income to run solid businesses. Yep. I'm on Murdoch's side. I don't believe all the smoke and mirrors.
Ultimately a business has to make money and I think age old business principles will still apply. I'm tired of the hidden
catches, the headline rates and amazing FREE deals that are
meaningless when you read the small print.

Indeed, its obession with 'FREE' means the internet encourages sleight of hand.

I HATE 'free'.

As consumers we need to wake up and realise that 'free' is rarely best. 'Free' usually means:

- You'll get hit for a charge somewhere else along the line
- You'll find the product isn't that great. If someone is giving something away for free, surely that means they can't convince anyone to pay for it?
- You won't appreciate it. Price defines something's worth in surprisingly subtle ways.

Maybe it's a bit generational. There's lots of talk of the current generation of students and schoolkids expecting stuff to be free. As if there's a quantum shift going on. But I'm not sure. (Maybe it's because at that age you have limited cash but plenty of time. So you can sift through the bum stuff and find the genuinely good stuff. As we get older we have more money but far less time. So we are prepared to pay for stuff to save time.)

Personally I don't want something 'free' with a hidden catch or that doesn't work all that well. I'd rather pay a nominal amount to use Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail, Gtalk and the rest and be sure it will work... all the time. Then I won't have to put up with stupid ads which get in the way and slow down the load times of pages. And if something goes wrong, someone will actually be motivated to fix it.

Wouldn't you?

It's been years since I spent serious time just being a tourist - particularly a backpacker. But I find myself now in Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo where I recently stayed in a really well set up hostel called Singgahsana Lodge in Kuching. It felt pretty weird mixing with a bunch of significantly younger backpackers. 

The vibe wasn't that different, the clothes pretty much the same, but one thing had changed immensely.

The moment we walked into reception I could here the tones of a rather poshing sounding girl chatting on her mobile. I couldn't help ear-wigging the conversation. I sounded like she was talking to her mum about how much someone or other was winding her up and what to do about it. Over in the corner a couple of people were using their laptops and netbooks to surf the net wirelessly. There were mobile phones everywhere and I counted 5 PCS for internet access.

12 years back when I was backpacking properly, I still used Post Restante. There was an incredible sense of excitement about pitching up in say Bangkok and finding my way to the central post office. Asking if there was anything for 'Head'. The guy behind the counter would rummage through umpteen boxes and, just sometimes, crumpled and grubby, there'd be an envelope for me from home. Often I'd not read the letter it contained straight away, but would take it somewhere like a cafe or bar and pore over the pages... fantastically self indulgent... a momentary reminder that whilst the place I was visiting might feel like home now I'd been there so long, I was actually a foreignor still very much in a strange land. I had roots elsewhere.

But I'd go pick up mail maybe once a fortnight. And that was it... no more contact with the world outside my immediate environment. And I loved it that way - the sense of almost losing yourself in another place, another culture - the possibilities for being someone else, living a different existence for just a short while were immensely exciting.

Today I visited a cultural village where they put on a show of traditional tribal dances. I was again struck by the technology. One guy was playing golf on his iPhone. Another bloke was videoing the whole show - watching the real world through barrier of the LCD screen of his camera.

Technology is of course so empowering and enabling, but I'm becoming slightly smug about the fact that my mobile phone provider hasn't enabled roaming (despite my request to them to do so). I think I'm going to just call the voicemail and change the message to say I'm not in the country, don't leave me a message.

Travel for me is much about making connections with people - other travellers, locals, people in the travel industry. It's about lots of other things too - but ultimately it's people, what they do differently, what they think differently from me. And wondering what it would be like if I could be them for a day and live in their world for just a while. A sense of detachment, or otherness - I know I'm beginning to sound a bit overblown here... but what the heck... you could almost call it existential.

These days every hotel or guesthouse - no matter how far flung - is wired for email... so tempting to 'just check' and see if anything new has dropped into the in-tray.

But it's so distracting, so unnecessary. I have limited time here in a fascinating place...

Is technology killing the reality of travelling? Does a more connected world mean fewer real connections? I think so. Do you?

(Of course the ultimate irony is that to post this I've used the very technology I'm criticising)