This Argophilia post by Phillip Butler starts the conversation: Who is the big bad wolf of hotel marketing?  Simply put, there isn’t just one –  OTA’s, Franchise Fees, Internet Marketing Fees, Booking Engine Fees.  This is one leaky ship.

Here is my response, but I am more interested in what all of you have to say?
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Great read. Thank you much. =)

I always thought of the OTA’s as something that filled the gap during the off line to online distribution evolution. They were a stopgap solution. They are now becoming unnecessary, and getting in the way of commerce because they are becoming obsolete, where they used to promote some level of commerce for our industry. Distribution has changed… and their role will phase out. It won’t be in the next 5, maybe 10…. but this will all change. I adore how people revile when you suggest the guy on top won’t be there forever.  The fact is, nothing is forever, and new paradigms unfold.

Another big bad wolf, on top of franchise fees? Ridiculous internet consulting firm charges by hourly consulting model.  Buuteeq is doing some good with simple pricing plans… it makes a lot more sense, and you aren’t nickel and dimed for the internet marketing group’s mistakes or on the job training.

Lastly…. commissions to booking engines. Including the franchise fees, as well… Engines like Synexis get promoted by franchise and flag brands, which then take a cut. It’s incredible how much money is lost to an engine that simply helps facilitate online booking. Eventually, the hotels will realize the money lost can be recouped quickly by building and designing a proprietary engine of your own, off a template, for the hotel to own, outright. That can save 20K – 100K+ a year.  I imagine a management group could justify the development fees to an owner group, based solely off the last 3 years of annual or commissionable fees that the property made to the booking engine company.

Would anyone have any idea how much it would cost for development of a competent template, and simple engine with solid UI – that includes a mobile component? Is that $100k or more?  I know… you can always spend more. =)

This is something I have done in the past – talking about the history of hotel systems and amenities, and where we are today.  It’s likely horribly self indulgent, as well as terribly boring…. but coffe is such an afterthought, in so many situations, it deserves, at least, it’s own post.

We can start with my background in coffee:  I drink it. I drink quite a lot of it. I quite enjoy it.  I have a burr grinder. The burr grinder changed my coffee life.  As counter-intuitive as it is, I now understand why artisan roasters refuse to sell ground beans.  ”But the market is there for it”, my simplistic free market capitalist economy mindset cajoles my caffeine addled nerves… but self respecting roasters know their bean isn’t honored by letting it die a slow and lonely death as a tired ground in a depressing bag.

So… this is where we engage my hospitality mind, and wrestle with my pragmatic operations side, vs. my guest experience and brand equity side.

My last installment about the history of hotel minutia rambled on about hotel telephony: from PBX to modern software in place of hardware, and how it went from revenue stream to bungled system, all the way to how it exists today – a glorified in-house intercom (which marketers try to dress up with LCD screens, ad nauseum).  The story of coffee, however, might not be as interesting… especially to those tech & social fans who follow me (other than the giddy, amped ones who just placed another order for more caffeine related products from think geek).  To those fans – hopefully my rollicking, coffee fueled post will be the little bouncing ball over the karaoke lyrics.  Have fun.

I)  Thoughts from Paul Burditch, owner of an excellent Luxury Hospitality PR & Marketing company, Burditch Marketing Communications, in regards to hotels in San Francisco, and a decision *not* to allow dogs at a property:

Travelers who come from all over the world know San Francisco to be a dog paradise – it should be given certain treatment so that it is welcoming, & visibly warm & fuzzy feeling.  If dogs are not allowed, we will have a responsibility for a fair explanation of *why* we do not allow dogs, especially in light of the entire industry moving that direction.  Most San Francisco hotels allow dogs, and the national parks and Golden Gate National Recreation Area are one of the most popular places for dog walkers & dog fans in the city.  Dog owners who stay nearby will see many dogs on the trails, or at Crissy Field, and throughout the park system.  This might not only have negative PR implications, but it will be a negative impact on those that see dogs throughout the city, parks, and out our back door.  Almost all hotels in San Francisco allow dogs including the top boutique companies Joie de Vivre (ed note: kaput), Kimpton and luxury properties like Ritz Carlton, Four Seasons, St. Regis and others.  San Francisco is one of the most dog friendly cities in the country, with the parks being a perfect place for dogs and owners to enjoy. To not allow dogs is going against the bigger trend in dog policies here in San Francisco.  A no pet policy is antithetical to the prevailing opinion of most Americans and pet owners in the country today.  There are 78 million dogs in the U.S. and 39% of U.S. households own at least one dog. With the abundance of dogs throughout SF and the parks, a decision to disallow pets will have obvious negative PR implications.  At this point, it’s almost assumed that they are allowed, and “no” is never part of a good guest experience.

II)           FINANCIAL DATA:

At one unnamed property: “We’re at $24,475 in dog fees through October YTD.  It’s a one-time $75.00 fee (most fees are much less, but balanced against the full cost of dog sitter or kennel if guest were to leave them at home), regardless of length of stay.  The audit report only gives posting totals, so no way to track Room Night production.  I’d make an educated guess of 550 – 600 total Room Nights YTD.  The total doesn’t breakdown evenly when divided by $75 because we had a few in there we only charged $50 because their res was already OTB when we changed the fee and a few we charged $100 because they had more than 2 dogs. It is our opinion that these guests would have stayed elsewhere with their pets, and we would have lost the room nights.  This does not account for incremental revenues. [ed note: this is from a peer who doesn't know I am posting this. It's anonymous, but if ANYONE has ANY concern at all re: financial disclosure, I will take this down].

Incrememental revenues = selling branded or logo’d hotel merchandise to dog owners – whether homemade local treats or a rubber ball with your brand stamped on it.

III)          Articles, info, data:

a)    Tripadvisor Pet Travel report.

“In a TripAdvisor survey of more than 1,100 pet owners in the United States, nearly half said they plan to travel with their animal within the next 12 months.”

b)   Pet Friendly Travel  – via Bella Dog magazine, also talks about airline fee frustrations, and more:

The majority of pet owners surveyed (61 percent) said they travel more than 50 mi. (80 km.) with their pets at least once a year, with 38 percent of those pet owners stating that they travel as often as once a month with their pets.  Pet friendly travel still is almost exclusively for dogs, with over half of the pet owners (61 percent) saying that they choose to travel with their dogs (33 percent of pet owners travel with their cats).  (Source:  Bella Dog magazine)

c)    According to the U.S. Travel Association:  “Pets make great travel companions. Over 49 percent of U.S. adult leisure travelers consider their pet to be part of the family and 18 percent of U.S. adult leisure travelers usually take their pets with them when they travel. (Source: travelhorizons^TM, July 2009”)

d)   Forbes: pet friendly hotels were due to market forces demanding it -

Why the change of heart? Travelers with pets are a huge market, and one that is untapped at the luxury level. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Travel Industry Association of America, there are 62 million dog owners in the U.S., and 29 million of those hit the road with their dogs in tow. The latest American Express Leisure Travel survey, released in October 2003, found that 13% of its respondents described an ideal vacation as one that is “pet-friendly.”

e)    Hotels Dogs Travel (via HotelMarketing.com) -

The nation’s pet boarding industry has figured out it doesn’t take much persuasion to get pet owners, often guilty about dropping their dog or cat off at a kennel while they head off on vacation, to pay extra for pampering: In the last five years, spending on pet services including boarding and grooming has more than doubled to $2.5 billion, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association in Greenwich, Conn.

f)     Hotels renting pooches to guests without dogs via Time.com

These days, the coziest hotel trend has nothing to do with plush mattresses or comfy slippers. It’s about catering to guests who had to leave their furry, feathered or finned family members at home. This spring the Fairmont in Sonoma, Calif., added a dog to its staff, a chocolate Labrador named Zeus who is tasked with such things as welcoming guests in the lobby and going on hikes with them — or what is referred to, in corporate jargon, as “interactive guest appreciation.” (I have seen this in many JDV hotels as well. This trend started after studies showed that petting a dog or having a pet around reduces stress and increases health)

g)    Fairmont’s doggy ambassador delights guests (same as above, but more info)

h)   “Top Dog Hotels” via USA Today (same Tripadvisor rankings from above, but a little more about the hotels and amenities)

i)     Recent press release for Bernardus in Carmel Valley via SF Gate PRWire (the fact that someone does a press release is typically because the new amenity has relative strength or equity to the brand and bottom line)

j)      Kimpton’s Argonaut with their “Howl-O-Ween” dog costume contest (something that drives room nights and community around Kimpton property)

k) 15% of people are allergic to dogs (not including the 30% of asthma sufferers who are allergic), while 40% of people own dogs. With stringent cleaning methods (or just normal ones), i have yet to hear of an allergic person with a problem inside a room, let alone ever knowing whether they had been place in a room previously occupied by a dog.  For those truly allergic, they usually mention it, and it’s never an issue to accommodate all those concerned.  What’s more, hotels have been dealing with chemical sensitivity and allergies to things like down, etc, for years.  One more thing won’t be a major impact or operational issue.

l) Dogs that travel with people are typically incredibly well behaved, and often better and more quiet than children.  We also know weight limits are not necessary, because a) most large breed owners don’t travel with their pets, and b) a chihuaha can do as much, if not more, damage as a larger breed.  But if that rare bark is a concern to owners, remember  that acoustics won’t be an issue – a crying baby is louder than a dog in most acoustic tests: http://www.controlnoise.com/storage/dBSoundproofingChart.pdf

IV)         Conclusion

We have seen a lot more conversation on an internal industry level and an external marketing level because it has become so much more popular in recent years.   Opening without a pet-friendly policy, only to allow it later, would create PR issues because it is difficult to recapture initial interest after telling people that you are not dog friendly.

Observing and mulling all the above data and information, it seems pretty obvious what the right choice is for your guests, and your hotel.  Any complications, of which there are few and it’s very rare, is what needs to be discussed further.  I have a couple dog policies I can share, if you need them…. but overall, we feel strongly that a pet friendly policy should be approved for any hotel looking to drive revenues and capture new markets.

Hope this helps guide the decision making process.

Here’s an article on Room Key, the hotel brand search engine.

Upshot (summary via TNOOZ):

Choice Hotels International, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels, InterContinental Hotels, Marriott International and Wyndham Hotel Group have combined to establish the joint venture under the leadership of CEO John Davis, founder of the Pegasus hotel distribution and technology service.”

And here is Barb Delollis from USA Today with a Facebook post that sparked some awesome conversation.

This is my commentary from that Facebook post (which, as it happens, is by far the most interesting post I have seen on Facebook in years, and no… not because of my response).

I am excited about Room Key for many reasons…. I hope the below is succinct but helpful in understanding why this is an exciting move forward…..

It’s not a better solution, but that’s okay. It’s a flawed solution that has monopolistic traction – and this entry from Room Key is simply the start of their traction. It’s like Google Plus vs Facebook….. just because Facebook has more traction doesn’t mean it’s a better option.

It’s all new tech, and layered diversification coupled with competition in the early decades of online travel distribution means that the booking process is exhausting and varied…. one site has not, and will not, *EVER* serve *every* single on of your needs.

If you can honestly say you book solely on one site, and one site alone… more power to you, and that’s a rare thing – a branded OTA travel consumer. Travelers that use OTA’s are deal shoppers, so the idea that they would use one site and stick with that due to loyalty is odd, when it’s myopic only to consider one site with the scores of other’s available. A real travel consumer isn’t going to stick to one OTA, and that process of shopping around has become somewhat of a liability…. and an exhausting one. In the last 5 years, the only thing that OTA’s have done is to train the smart revenue managers to yield such that the best available rate is *ALWAYS* directly on the brand website…. in this, you maintain as much rate integrity and control of inventory as possible. That being said, the gestapo like extortion and bullying from OTA’s like Expedia has backfired, and savvy travel consumers are starting to be trained that the best deal is ALWAYS on the hotel website. OTA’s know this, and they are losing consumers due to it.

Room Key is a brand new product that is put together by some of the biggest players in the hotel industry ( Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Wyndham Worldwide, Choice Hotels, Marriott Hotel, InterContinental, Hyatt Hotels as well as Pegasus), and it’s a new product that is *BRILLIANTLY* devised, the UI is quite easily the best online booking product that exists, currently (although KAYAK’s mobile app is stellar). It is filling a sorely needed gap in a crowded space – a simple, concise, uncluttered way to easily find hotel rates and book without the pain of being upsold on value ads and overwhelming options. The OTA’s like Expedia or Travelocity are dinosaurs, and this new option is filling the space that travelers are clamoring for.

I understand your comments about being a consumer, and wanting the simplest option – what you are forgetting is that OTA’s had a chance to offer the simplest options for booking, but have failed in an overarching attempt to increase revenues by destroying any functionality or user experience on their sites. This is all new technology, so the best travel experience hasn’t even been developed yet. Just because one of the OTA’s has a monopoly doesn’t mean it’s the best thing for the consumer. This is the first attempt at our hotel industry to create that experience.

Room Key is coming at the right time – it mimics Google in a light user interface that is concise, simple, and clean.

The other side of this is how Google will lay waste to the uneven and disjointed online travel world -

Google Search + Google Travel + Google Flight + Google Hotel + Google Plus (in searches) = dominance & sheer terror for the existing landscape of online distribution.

WHAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaT did you say???

The power of Groupon’s success has surely been due to the happy consumers rambling on about the score they just made.  You can’t go anywhere and not see it.  The crisis of perception is that everyone is beside themselves with how “cool” coupon sites are, but only regard them from the perspective of being a consumer. Stop being selfish, and think about these poor businesses. Everyone seems to be in a mindless consumer mindset when they consider them, and especially when they sign on to participate in them; all the proselytizers are consumer advocates or discounters. I don’t know one thoughtful business person that finds them to be anything but frightening, even if deemed necessary (and in hospitality, they never are necessary). They can surely bring business into an operation with low to no overhead, huge margins, or zero variable operational costs…. but to businesses like hotels, it’s a losing proposition.  Please, check your giddiness at the door – and hope these coupon publishers are a fad, because if they are not we are in big trouble. Whether you scored a good deal on Living Social is moot, so put on your business acumen hat… and let’s explore!  This post is meant to be a simple, accessible cautionary tale to Hoteliers and the like.  I am not covering entirely new ground.  But, I rather have something for us to refer to than having to explain my dour skepticism to each person incredulous as to how I am “missing the biggest thing ever”.

In fact, I wouldn’t mind being known as that one guy that stopped the entire hospitality industry from participating in any form of online coupon site.  At least, realize the impacts.

Search “Is Groupon Killing” in Google, or simply click this link.

Do you here a ticking sound? Is that for us or for Groupon?

[Leafing through pages of Google results] Leeeet’s seeeeeee….

They are killing brands, retailing, local food, restaurants, photography, and more. Whether this is hyperbolic is beside the point… the issue is that you can see significant duress about the long term efficacy of these coupon sites.  People are talking about the drawbacks of coupon sites much more often, and deeply considering the short term gain versus long term costs.  In fact, I don’t have to wax endlessly, for once, because a gentleman and scholar from DAVIDID Blog…. nailed it succinctly.

“But if marketing is defined as increasing perceived consumer value in service of increasing sales at a profit, we need to look beyond Groupon’s short-term sales impact, and ask how it might be influencing perceived brand value.

On this matter, we have serious concerns.  Groupon, and its ilk, unfortunately is training people to expect a coupon on most anything.  And that means that unless people find a deal, they’re less likely to buy at full price, preferring to wait until the next coupon cycle.  This applies to current customers who are used to paying full price, and new customers who would now never dream of paying full price.  The result:  More and more people will be trained to only buy on deal, which, of course, diminishes the perceived value of a brand both short and long-term.”

In fact, it can be even simpler when you consider this article about Groupon becoming the online Walmart that kills small business.  ”The ratio of consumer savings vs business profit can kill small business“.  Math, of course, is known to be frustratingly honest.  This has been quite apparent with Groupon’s expansion into Europe, damaging small brands.  The New York times also comments on Groupon altering and destroying proper retailing, while other people muse about the crush of business that they can’t manage (more Groupon vs restaurants commentary here and here) - but I don’t want to stray too far from my original point:

A discount seeking non-branded consumer is not your guest.

If you ask me, it's not that uncertain, but it is surely a dead end.

If you are considering doing an online coupon, please do some research and find out if any of your competitors or professional peers have information regarding how their coupon went. In fact, the buzz and excitement is leaving us blind, so that a “successful” groupon customer might not realize all the associated costs. A restaurateur breaks down the costs in this article, “5,772 new customers — how can I not love Groupon?”, and the results are unnerving.  I do not understand how we were able to become this intoxicated with the shiny new toy, but the long term costs are even more problematic than the short term costs, which are, funny enough, also problematic.

The one thing for sure is this: someone looking for a deal will not become branded as they are already branded for the deal. Post stay, they won’t come back to the hotel, because they will be disgusted with normal rates. Groupon, Living Social, and other coupon advocates will claim that standard rates are a barrier to entry, and the coupon will allow for someone to experiment prior to committing to a brand or standard rates.  If this demographic exists, the onus is on the coupon sites to demonstrate newfound brand loyalty due to original Groupon-style sales.  That is a very meaningful measurement that equals equity for coupon sites, and would, in all likelihood, sell a hotel on a deal like these coupons. But it’s simply not likely, and I haven’t heard of these scenarios. I think it’s more selling and wishful thinking than careful logic on the part of Groupon and their clones.  But these Coupon Sites were never about the business side of things.

A consumer using any of these coupons will simply go back to the branded coupon site and buy the *next* hotel deal. Brand doesn’t matter to them, which is why they are shopping via a coupon site.  The deal is the brand. They won’t be your guests.

In fact, this article suggests a few ways that Groupon is going to kill your business, and one aspect is that you will become branded as a discounter.  Is that healthy for your year end?  How about 5 years from now as the economy strengthens? Will you get the rate back you gave up during the 2008 recession by discounting to no end?  So you don’t have to continually jump off to new links, I will repost the 4 concerns from the prior linked article:

1. You may always be fishing for customers.

2. You may be branded as a discounter.

3. You will get finicky and demanding customers who suck.

4. It conditions people that price is the only benefit.

The fourth comment is also vital.  It alters your pricing model, and suggests that your brand experience has no equity. Coupons destroy perceived value in your rooms. It immediately destroys the original value of the room to the Groupon user (would you pay 2x the rate you paid for your last stay?  No. No one will.), and it will confuse a branded guest, as well.  If a guest is branded and paying rack rate, then a coupon either means i) they are angry that their brand would distill their hotel stay by allowing a specific demographic water down the experience (in a way, it’s subsidizing rates so that rack rate guests pay more for a lesser experience… please explain how that might be fair?), or, possibly worse – ii) the branded guest who would have booked at full rate is, literally, given free money by the hotel.  I have friends who were planning a reunion at a specific property who found a coupon for the hotel they planned to book.  That’s 2 for 1 that was going to pay rack rate.  Smart business?

In summation – Coupon Sites like Groupon, Living Social, and the others impact your business by:

a) attracting non branded deal seekers who don’t know you, that won’t be back at full rate, which then may re-establish your brand as a budget, discount brand.

and / or

b) handing out your profits to branded people that would have paid rack rate who stumbled upon the deal.

On the right path.

Pro coupon site people ruffle at these comments, but I haven’t seen any meaningful metric from Groupon or clone sites that suggest a decent percentage of guests become branded, loyal fans. In fact, what I *have* seen are relaxing, healing spas with cooler toting cheapskates, or deal seekers causing endless headaches and complexity for well positioned, established brands. Your rack rate paying guests don’t take half the energy than these critical, troublesome deal seekers. A generalization perhaps, but often seen in practice.  Just ask the desk or prop level ops people how they feel about it.

Yes there are plenty of wonderful coupon site users – I can be one of them at times.  In fact, the only way I use these sites now is to wait for a deal of a brand I already patronize.  I am simply waiting for a business to give me free money.  That’s nothing but damaging to a brand.

I leave you with these cautionary words:

It’s not a good investment. For some businesses, it may work short term, but it can also hurt long term.  For hotels, it simply doesn’t make any sense.  I hope it’s a fad, but stay far away – because if the coupon craze is here to stay, it’s going to redefine the economy of your business.

Lot of sleepless nights ahead for Groupon

Thanks for reading, now go tell your GM or DOSM.  Do it now!  If you still don’t get it… good luck out there.

A ghostly voice:

Consumer privacy issues are a “red herring.” — “‘You have zero privacy anyway,’ Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company’s new Jini technology. Get over it.’”

That was in 1999.

Subsquently…. resultingly….. These privacy conversations kill me. If one wishes for privacy, one shouldn’t leave the house, nor ever go online.

It is completely within the best interests of a hotel to protect a guest’s privacy… we go to significant lengths to do so. To suggest otherwise is misinformed and ignorant.  It is the hallmark of our success, among other things.

This issue isn’t about a hotel’s sensitivity to privacy. The issue is our current preoccupation with the concept of privacy. No one has any idea what “privacy” means. We have relative freedom, and our lives are relatively unobstructed and we are able to do as we please. But leaving the house – you are subjected to the largest shift in communication history, coupled with modern technological achievements that have, together, completely negated the concept of privacy. It doesn’t exist anymore. In fact… younger generations shed it as a by-product of the lifestyle they seek… a reminder that, shortly, it simply isn’t going to be an issue for people that will be controlling the world soon. How can we really expect any privacy, anyway?

It’s a fun conversation about a word few people really understand…. but whether or not we need to be sensitive (hotels, in fact, are sensitive) is moot. The point is that privacy is ending, and to some extent we are willfully giving it up as a biproduct of being able to access these amazing tools of the internet age.

Think about apps…. how much did you think about all the permissions you granted those people to access your app for free? Sorry to say, that app isn’t free:  you are releasing your privacy as payment. It’s happening at an increasing rate, and it’s soon going to be an arcane conversation for future pondering. It really makes me laugh that these people are on Facebook, posting constant information, and worried about privacy. They worry some professional acquaintance will see something off color, when they have completely given their entire lives worth of information to facebook…. talk about a crisis of perception.

Hello Nero, your fiddle is lovely. I think it’s a lyre, but history is vague. Also, Rome is burning.

Facebook isn’t free. Privacy doesn’t exist there… there’s equity in your information. Why else would it be valued at 50B? So we give up privacy constantly. In exchange for ESP like connection to friends and supercomputer like access to facts and answers…. I give up much, happily.

When the concept of privacy was far more quaint.

But if I can go to a website and spend $30 and know someone’s address, info, etc… I just can’t imagine anyone really taking privacy seriously. Mcnealy was right in 1999. It’s the nature of our culture cannibalizing itself. It’s not a hotel that people have to worry about.

It’s not big brother. It’s us. We are what we fear. Big Brother is every single one of us with a camera and being in the right place at the right time. What reasonable expectation of privacy would one have when everyone is connected to a camera that immediately uploads online? Our police cameras can’t compete with the aggregate real world social net that is taking down people, and corporations, and governments and nations.

Hotels, arguably, are among the most sensitive organizations in the world when it comes to respecting all levels of it’s guest’s / patron’s privacy. It’s not our responsibility, however, to be blamed for the growing pains involved with the greatest shift in human communication’s history.  Unfortunately, until we resolve these issues…. everyone will grimly fantasize about being important enough to be stalked. It’s not that I am that cynical, it’s just that I know we may not be *that* interesting.

It's not big brother, it's us - the sea of anonymous watchers.

Until we realize this, we impede the advancement of a more ethical, and humane, human population.  I am sorry your petty, arrogant privacies feel threatened.  I already mentioned, unfortunately, that in the grand scheme of things… none of us really matter. In light of that, let’s celebrate our connections and stop babbling about meaningless issues of ego.  Let’s advance….  see you there.  Until then, you are stuck arguing about lost concepts from vestiges past.  Evolve.

Hello friends, travel and hospitality people.. I have abandoned you for too long!  Well, my mind has been racing, and I am trying to put all these pieces together… how will it all fit?  How will interaction by the brand influence, connect, or impact the future of the social graph legitimizing and strengthening search?  *That’s* not even the important question – The real question will be how will a search built off network science control and influence brands?  Will there, finally, be a thwarting of the spam through human powered relevance ranking?  Will poor management styles, lack of interaction, or opaque manipulation of the consumer made to be transparent in regards to the brand?  These are small beans compared to the impact of wikileaks on the future of human government.  If you want to catch up on the *REALLY* important stuff, listen to this NPR Fresh Air episode with Bill Keller, from the NY Times, on the impact of Assange and Wikileaks.  But back to our silly little vertical.

Google search is inundated by spam – even their CEO Eric Schmidt admitted that “The Internet is a Cesspool“, and at the time 2 1/2 years ago, he insisted it would be brands that sorted out those murky waters.  I think that’s part of it, such as a brand interacting with the social graph, while publishing meanginful content to an interested audience that actively supports or bolsters the brand’s online relevance and presence.  But where Schmidt agreed the future of meaningful editorialism or content was in question, I think it’s the tapping into of the social graph that will sort all this out.  People will always try to game search, but the amalgam of a human powered network will wield sorting relevance like a skilled warrior, making antiquated algorithms look clumsy and slow.

The spam problem for Google is multi-layered.  First is the obvious gaming with SEO keyword spoofing.  For those that get brand related Google Alerts, you will recognize these as those random blogs republishing old content, press releases, interviews, etc, often misquoting it or ramming it into other, unrelated nonsense.  It’s a scam where you automate the publishing of online content to try to game search engines to appear more relevant than they are.  They are called content farms. Here is a BRILLIANT article on the “pollution of google” and an impending tragedy in relation to this. Another aspect of this pollution are the legitimate sites that aren’t out and out farms, but still try to game search engines into becoming relevant.  So it’s not just the egregious ones that are obviously spam, but you have sites like Huffington Post doing anything to appear at the top of search results – like their infamous “What time does the Super Bowl start” post.  In fact, it was this post about “Classic books we’ve seen being read” that made me swear off of Huffington Post.  One or two are classics, maybe, but it’s just shameless gaming of SEO.  It’s sloppy, and it’s sort of pathetic.  What I loathe more than anything else are the content laden sites that immediately populate every search, but are insipid and cluttering up of *legitimate* search.  You will quickly understand what I am talking about when I mention all the arbitrary wiki’s with stub pages that lead to nowhere, or worse yet E-How and their littering of irrelevant search the net over.  Oh, How I HATE EHOW (search that line and you get ehow articles on how to accept hate)!

So basically, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc are starting to realize the algorithm is not bulletproof, and it won’t carry the internet into the more semantic stage that is coming up.  The entire landscape of the internet will change in the next couple years, and it will be this innocuous (which is up for argument) layering of the social graph into your experience.  The algorithm can’t work and you *MUST* use human power to create meaning and relevance online and with searches.  Otherwise the ad model will fall apart, and no one will trust the search engines, and we won’t be able to catalogue or find anything*.  So now the “social search” is on the horizon (or – here).  It means that the internet will be consistent and familiar.  An article from wired explains Google’s social search here, but the best bet is to watch this video from Matt Cutts, famed google search guru:

“Privacy”

Basically, advertising is always going to be around.  While people talk about privacy, I realize I rather have a relevant ad than one that has nothing to do with me.  This is a step towards that.

For example, Facebook is now “personalizing your experience” as you move from site to site, aka Facebook is trying to monetize their product by creating a more seamless social experience in regards to marketing. You can turn it off…. But honestly, there’s always going to be ads or irrelevant and non topical spam in your face. Wouldn’t you rather know what your friends reviewed on yelp rather than random strangers in random areas, or when you visit CNN or BBC you can see what a colleague read, instead of the scattershot “most popular” stories. Even better (for the consumer, not just the advertiser), an advertisement becomes relevant. Banner ads are targeted to your likely interests. Instead of seeing an irrelevant baby diaper ads (if you are young and single), maybe it shows you a link to a cool wine bar you might like.  Maybe it shows a concert a friend is going to.  It’s a much more intuitive way to facilitate the online experience, and where end users find inefficiency and frustration, it is this precise movement towards open browsing that has people screaming “Privacy”.  Frankly, I don’t think people even understand what privacy means.

This issue of Scientific American deals with some fairly amazing thoughts on modern privacy – whether social networks bring around the demise of privacy, among many other topics.  I always harken back to 1999, when Scott McNealy, from Sun Microsystems, said “Privacy is over. We haven’t had it for years. It’s a red herring”.  In my opinion, it’s completely misunderstood.  While most online people, especially the younger audience, are cultivating attention to the best of their ability, there’s an obvious exchange of privacy for constant information about our network.  It is something that seems to be developing naturally, and the benefits have been happily accepted, regardless of people’s concerns about privacy.

If you want privacy, stay off a computer, don’t get on a router, and don’t sign into any sites.  Even going online from an IP through a router will divulge information about you.  If you think privacy is the issue here, you shouldn’t turn anything on. Period. It’s the only way. Otherwise, might as well unfurl to the future. Now I am not saying that you should wantonly ignore your right to your own private lives, but be aware part of the internet improving is a slight exchange of your personal information.  All things being equal, I think it’s an exchange I am more than happy to make.  What’s more, the thing buffering my idealogy or indignity of civil rights is this one thing: by in large, 99.9% of us are beyond dull, irrelevent, and completely uninteresting.  Privacy is only a concern for those that need it.  the majority of us will never be relevant enough for privacy to be an issue.  We need to have some perspective and stop thinking *anyone* in the world cares if you checked in on foursquare, or commented how nice your vacation is.  I happily inform you (happy in that it’s freeing) that you simply… are not.. that big of a deal.

This is simply how it’s going to work.  It won’t be big brother silently judging you, although countless eyes will be aware of you – friendly ones crinkling into a smile as they effortlessly share their lives with you.  Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t discuss and worry about privacy, but it’s a fact of life there will be a trade off – a tiny bit of inconsequential information about yourself for the ability to plug into “the matrix” and access the entirety of human information that has ever been documented, in a meaningful, relevant, and efficient manner.  Of course, we are sorry your ex saw a picture of you and your current beau on vacation.

Measuring Interaction

It’s great to be at this point.  It means the web will become more meaningful, but my issue is that there is still no way of really figuring out the impact.  It’s coming, and it will sort itself out.  But some of us ask questions, and keep busy with helping to understand the phenomenon.  For example, a property I am involved with had a few minor mentions on Facebook.  These are open profiles without privacy restrictions, so it is on public record and no issues of being prying or invasive.  I thought about it for a bit, and cannot see any issue with posting these link.  Look at these posts on Facebook, then consider the reactions, the conversation, about the brand, etc.

A jazz musician with 1300 friends mentions playing at the Allison.

Local Mom with a few friends passively mentions lunch at the Allison

Local Dad takes pics of dessert, and positive community reaction

The Future Starts Now (& has been happening for some time)

The “social search” side of this conversation is simply to lead us here… where I have my real questions, and where I would love your input.

I want to know what the value of those Facebook posts are, right there.  It’s obvious that social has massive equity, because they are beginning to dismantle the typical SEO methodologies like algorithms and static keywords in lieu of fresh content legitimized by the interaction of the social graph.  It’s pleasing to know we have taken the right direction with engaging the social network and building our brands while attempting to participate in and control our image and the conversation (in a modern sense, as best we can).  These 3 social Facebook interactions are undeniably more meaningful than a cold impression, but until there is some better method of tracking and measuring these comments, all we can do is be aware of them.  Twitter has a few tools, but nothing that leads the charge out of the impression model.  I am hoping we can eventually create something that would be able to track people as nodes or hubs or weak ties in geographic regions instead of simply looking at ip’s or url’s.  I am not looking to the old world marketing of finding an “influencer” so much as understanding the natural interactions as they ebb and flow in relation to your brand.  For more on Network Science, please read this informative and important article, “How Network Science Can Speed Up Your Success 10 to 20 times.”  It’s way ahead of it’s time, and it’s the next step in letting the argument of privacy jump the shark.

Our level of engagement is going to be more important in the future in a way that we can’t measure or perceive right now, and we are laying the groundwork to be heads and shoulders above other hotels in revelance and footprint.  Just as some hotels are *still* reeling from missing out on the SEO boom, some hotels & brands that think social is a joke will be in the same boat when the semantic web gains a stronger foothold.  It’s just – *how* will a brand’s engagement alter or impact a socially engaged search?

How Can You Learn More?

Next month, in San Francisco, there is a conference regarding Social Media Strategies for North America.  It is put on by Eye for Travel, one of the most respected Hospitality & Travel conference planner in the business.  It’s the 2nd & 3rd of March at Hotel Nikko.  There will be some of the best in the hospitality and travel business talking about these sort of issues and more.  It’s a chance to surround yourself with incredibly experienced and smart people about all these pressing issues.  I am really excited, and thought I would alert anyone about it who may come across this.  Sign ups are still going on *HERE*.

*One final thought if you actually have a little extra time.  This is a fascinating presentation (slow to start) on everything being cataloged as “miscellaneous”, because the established order of ordering is failing. It’s down here all the way at the bottom because it’s about an hour, and not completely relevant.  Fascinating, nonetheless.  It’s about relevance, which is obviously relevant in a discussion about relevance.  But who am I to assume it’s relevant to you?  Well, that was the social search graph is going to take care of.

This is from a wonderful book called “The Meaning of It All; Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist“.  He is a hero of mine, and a brilliant, engaging, multi-faceted man that I miss.  I have many of these people that I miss.. Carl Sagan is another.

This quote is so important right now…

Whether it’s your dissatisfaction of current tech and desire to switch to something new, or it is one’s eagerness to participate in and exploit new, cutting edge, communication tools – you need to get all the information before acting in a knee jerk manner.

I see this so often…. a brimming excitement to participate erases skepticism or the patience needed to compile the right information with the right data and take the time to analyze it.  We all want simple answers, but sometimes it takes time to arrive at the correct ones.  In our effort to engage our brand with consumers, we may be damaging it.

I am afraid a lot of modern tech and social communication doesn’t include this maxim. It is my opinion that we will look back on this time and regret there weren’t more fencesitters and skeptics.

As some of you were made aware in my interview of Shana from Tourism Queensland, I am chatting with some of the EyeForTravel speakers for the upcoming Travel Distribution Summit North America in Chicago this October 2010. The interviews are not only meant to be insight into the world of social media, mobile, and modern technology’s impact on the ever-changing landscape of the hospitality and travel business – but a dialog to help one another answer questions, as well as help get new ones asked.  These interviews aren’t necessarily light reading – these are the people at the top of our profession taking the rare chance to go in depth into some very heady and complex issues.

EyeForTravel has long been the go to source for travel news, events, and analysis, and are experts at bringing some of the most intelligent and thoughtful minds, as well as conversation, into the overall discussion of hospitality & travel. Hopefully, this conversation between Susan and I will add to that pool of information.  In fact, I don’t see how it cannot because if there is one true, legitimate and *bona-fide* professional who can use the word “guru” without sounding like a spammy internet marketer…. it’s going to be Susan Black.

Of course, many of you know Susan, of Black & Wright.  She is tireless, relevant, and, if you have been following the world of travel news and discussion, a name that is, and should be, hard to miss.  Her twitter account, @SusanTravels aggregates some of the best information in the industry, all the while working with clients on long and short term projects, planning and attending conferences, keeping up to date on current events, managing a hectic but rewarding professional and personal life…. as well as even taking time out for the likes of me.

That’s unbelievable, and it’s quite the honor to have her time and bend her ear. Our interview was incredibly casual, friendly, and meandering, while still focused on the issue at hand – What in the heck is going on with travel, tech, social media, and our industry! Susan had a lot to say… now it’s up to all of you to listen!  If you aren’t sure who she is, the picture, after the jump, should remind you!

Susan Travels

Robert Cole called you “The Ubiquitous Susan Black”, in that you are, literally, in as many places as your name is.  You are a rare gem in our world – in that you have a solid professional history in travel, so within social media, you aren’t just some newcomer with no perspective (all too common nowadays).  It’s refreshing to have learned, long time industry pros using social media instead of just another “guru” spouting noise. Tell us a little about your history in travel, prior to being engaged in this new world communication.

“I have been in the industry for a very long time – and I always hesitate when I give how long long because people immediately begin to think I am Methusleah.  But I have been in travel, starting in travel publishing, since back in the early 80s. So it’s been a really long time, almost 30 years; I didn’t spring from this ‘full blown and fully grown’.  I went through the more traditional travel route of working as a publisher for travel trade publications for many years, and getting to know the travel industry and their issues and their challenges, particularly with distribution, both on b2b [business to business] and b2c [business to consumer] side, from a number of different clients’ perspective.  First it was the corporate travel arena, I worked in news  magazine and corporate travel magazine.”

That is about when you entered into the online world?

“I switched over in the early 90′s to the leisure side, that was going through tremendous changes at that time, mainly the shift over from travel agents and more traditional types of distribution to the very, very early days of online. As a matter of fact, my first website was launched in 1994, which was called VacationPackager.com, right after the floppy discs and all that stuff. I was like, ‘WOW the internet, that’s kind of cool’.”

“Vacation packager took the database from the official tour directory that I was publishing, and took this relational database, and if you wanted to know about vacation packages like golf tours in Scotland or fishing tours in Costa Rica, it would tell you about the company, and give you all sorts of background info on the company – it was early, early search, pre-everything.  We sat on the homepage of  Travelocity – we actually preceded that site – but we sat on their homepage as a vacation package button for about 2 years, and did about 6 or 7 iterations of vacationpackager because we finished one we would say ‘No NO!.. what they really want to know is the itinerary.  No NO! They want they really want to know is comparisons, pricing, can you book it?’  We would do partnerships with a lot of tour operators and things, so it was quite a learning experience in a very short period of time.  From coming up with my first flying GIF thing ‘ooh look at that, the plane flies! How cool is that?’, to user, early days of usability and we started off as an advertising vehicle. There was no such thing as performance based, there was no such thing as search, there was no such thing as CPC, there was no such thing as anything.  I know I sound like the dark ages.”

Why did you get online so quickly, so early in the game?  Why were you so ahead of the curve?

“I loved it. I saw so much promise there. Remember, I worked for a relational database, a directory. You can’t get really sexy with a directory, but their really useful. And then to have all that information and sorted online, it was exciting. But yes… it was the day of the dialups, and it was the day of.. we had bandwidth issues.  I remember we had conversation about disabling the “back button” [We both laugh]

Sounds like you were a voracious “sponge”?

“I learned about it early on, and I learned it from someone who knew quite a bit in travel [professional friend of Susan's to remain anonymous].  I went to every single early show at the time; there weren’t many –  Jupiter had something, and Forrester had something. Whatever was around, I went to, I read *EVERYTHING*.  I kind of ran in circles like Rich Barton and Terry Jones, and all the early pioneers – it was a small circle…. A tiny little cirle.  We all kind of banded together – mainly the OTAs; the hotels weren’t really on board at this point.  PCTravel, BizTravel; just a lot of people that aren’t around anymore.  But it was a really interesting and exciting period.  Now, I was interested, not so much in the e-commerce point of view, but the power of an advertising point of view – that it was very targeted, that there was a lot of intent.  Again this was pre google, pre search, pre everything.”

“So that is kind of my background on all of this.  At the same time Eye For Travel started, back in 1999, I started my consulting practice, and started “E-Travel World” as part of a larger vision of intersecting industry and the internet, part of adtech, e-healthcare world, e-auto world, e-b2b – you kind of get the picture. That is when I first started with Forrester Research – first with Mari Moto, then with Henry Harteveldt and it’s when I first got to know the significant players and all the new applications in online travel in an intimate way because I needed to program them, and really needed to understand the differentiators and understand what they did.”

Hotels have always gotten beat up with tech. We are always 10 years behind: from updating property management or telecom systems (remember installing wifi, everyone?), to the early online days where most of us missed the boat with SEO; and now in our current state where we  struggle with branding and messaging in a climate that has the consumer model flipped.  Even some Travel Agent Publications are still trying to figure out how they missed that boat that sailed so long ago.  It seems more and more that knowing about the tech isn’t enough, and how to handle and integrate the tech is just as important as understanding the technology’s importance or existence.  Did you find that immersing yourself in this world of new contacts and applications, as well as being able to immediately practically apply them, sped up your understanding of their impact?

“Because I had a consulting practice at the same time, I was able to integrate and apply the new fangled applications to the needs of my clients.  It really was a terrific platform, and a way to learn about all these new things, crazy things like “search”.  I mean, as I said I read everything, went to a tremendous amount of conferences – I drank the Kool Aid. I mean – this will really date me – I remember when I saw the first business fax that came through. I was like “Oh my God it’s Star Trek, it’s Buck Rogers, it’s everything’.  So I always believed in what was next – that there will be a next, and that there were applications out there that would be exciting – even if it wasn’t adapted completely at the time, but that this is such a powerful tool – especially as bandwidth grew and it became easier.  At first, I saw that people were going on online chat rooms, and AOL chat. I was like ‘damn, everyone is going to these places’.  People were spending hours and hours abandoning TV and bars to sit online and participate in this interactive content.  That interactive content got me excited… I couldn’t believe I could chat with someone about a topic that was interesting to me with someone around the world.”

“Now, with the transition and movement to more transparent social media – I know now who these people are, I have met them person to person, face to face, or met them through someone trustworthy, it takes on a whole new dimension. I know who I am getting my information from, and I won’t end up quoting some oddball.”

And you don’t always need to know them, because some of these sites hold these transparent profiles that provide a little veracity and relevancy. Not as scary as the old anonymous days of the web…

“This comes with more of a linkedin, and more of a contextual conversation.  If within LinkedIn there is a conversation about distribution, or revenue management, that is relevent.  They may be people I don’t know, but when we belong to the same group and talk about contextually relevant information – I don’t necessarily need to know them, but if they belong to the same group or membership but we’re talking the same contextually relevant information.”

“With Twitter, again, the last word there is contextual and relevant. You look for the relevancy – I use it as an uber editing force.  Here’s a whole bunch of people who are interested in the same thing, in this case online travel, as I am, and they have the time to edit things so to say, ‘You may be interested in reading this, or you may want to see this you may have missed’,  and it may be someone you may not know personally, but it’s someone big in the industry.  So I find it as one big ole whopping editing opportunity for me, and that’s the value I see there.  And the value of conversation, but again I use it more in terms of ‘I would have missed that, thank you for bringing it to my attention.”

“Let’s say I have a subject like the recent acquisition of ITA by Google.   I can read what’s in the press, everyone can.  But there are some industry leaders who’s point of view I might specifically like.   I have a choice – I can call them up, that will take about 16 years if i could ever get them.  I could send an email; equally — they are busy, so am I.  I can maybe google them and maybe they have written something, or not.  And how many am I going to do for that.. 10, 20 30? Well that’s going to take all day, or year, or forever?  Or maybe I can join a conversation by putting in “ITA Software”, see what pundits have put something there, links to their blog and pick and choose what to look at, all in about 3 1/2 minutes.  I find it useful to get relevant, contextual information from sources I may or may not now that I do trust that have things to say that I may have missed.”

“Really, the strongest application to my world with Twitter is in relation to conferences.”

I have been blown away by twitter and conference usage.  You have people live reporting, you have other people commenting, contrarians yammering (like myself), even light hearted banter as people get slap happy near the end of the day.  It adds so many dimensions to conferences.

“It forges new relationships and contextual relationships.  How many times have you been at conferences and … sitting next to someone at lunch you *may* talk to someone, or sitting next to someone you *may* chat, or find the badge of a company you really want to engage with – but what are the chances that you could really form a deeper understanding of someone’s views?  Things you very probably would have missed from people you probably didn’t know you needed to know.  It helps connect people that I need to know.  This is how I morphed into it – it’s not linear. It’s a whole amalgam of different experiences of the travel industry, past present and future.”

How do you think the traditional travel background has faciliated your understanding of the online channel?

“What’s unique about where I am in the industry and with my development, is that – and there aren’t many of us, and I’m not bragging, but it’s just kind of an observation – there aren’t that many that came from a traditional travel background. There are almost no more suppliers, or in my case publishers, who dealt B2B in travel that knew *that* world pre-internet – pre-1995 – as intimately and played in that area *and* as actively as the “post beginning of internet” group. They *may* have just been in a different place early on – online advertising, etc. Not specifically tied to travel, just in a different place. There are few people who have come from traditional travel backgrounds who have immersed themselves as I have in this “online space”.  I am in this very bizarre position where I know people, and I maintain my contacts very actively with people from.. you know.. the 80′s, the 90′s; then I have this whole new group of folks I have known from the late 1990′s to today.  The first 15 and the last 15!”

It’s old world versus new world.  There is an obvious crisis of experience with modern travel professionals.  There are so many people saying they have experience in travel and the industry, marketing or hospitality, when they don’t really have a frame of reference to the industry, how it works, etc.  Sitting on twitter doesn’t necessarily make someone an expert.  So we need people like you to stand out. I hope I help.

I had the social media bug in me before the tools were around.  It was something called a rolodex.

Hey, I remember those.  I remember management hiring people they didn’t like just because of their Rolodex.  It’s still fairly powerful.

“Yeah I had a pretty powerful Rolodex – I even remember using the early Plaxo tech, and tools so you could scan business cards in, and leverage as much as you could off of those cards.  But yes, I have been a big, BIG believer of true, I will call it applied, networking. It isn’t enough to have a Rolodex, but it’s what you do with those connections – how you monetize it, how you use it, how do you partner with it, and understand and leverage those relationships.  It’s ‘who I know and what can those networks do.’”

Which is absolutely what the travel business *is*, or *should* be.  Those real world business connections are the strongest and most reliable, because you trust one another’s accountability and have experienced one another’s  professionalism, rather than something more passive like “liking” a tweeted story from Facebook.  I assume most of that rolodex was earned in tried and true professional relationships rather than the looser connections of social media?

“It’s a kind of an interesting background where I was a publisher primarily dealing with marketing distribution challenges from traditional travel companies.  It was mainly leisure, but again, before that, with hotels through meetings and corporate travel magazines, then through consulting and putting together conferences.  I was learning about a lot of new applications and applied intelligence – ‘how this works for everyone else’ – up to becoming a practitioner and seeing the fundamentals and day to day and how it really works and translates to the bottom line, and how people actually make money from it (or not) – back to running conferences and being a consultant.”

“That’s what I like to do; I like the diversity, I like to be out there, and cutting edge and seeing the next big thing.  You know, when you are in operations or operating within a company, it’s very hard, especially if you have 17 direct reports, everything falls on you, and life gets in the way.  I am in, out, back and forth – but have been consulting the last 6 years. Most clients are short term, but a few are long enough term where I am able to see something from beginning, middle, to the end.. and through execution.  So it’s been sort of a wild ride in this field – starting in the early days when you would place a print ad and hope for the best.”

I am an operator, and so I have always been skeptical of marketing.  It’s weird because of the way the social media sort of laid waste to the traditional marketing model. I get that “new world” model – and, of course, it’s not going to replace the old world of marketing – but I was always like “Impressions??!?! I know a guy who had a paper route – 200 houses or one dumpster.” [Ed note: joke attributed to Mitch Hedberg].  But now, the kind of data you get with analytics and the reports you can pry out, you can gauge your success in a much more concrete way.

“We have always talked about CRM, segmentation, performance – for years we have been talking about that.  It gets easier and easier with these new additions to the marketing arsenal.  I agree – it doesn’t replace things; it works better in an integrated way, in tandem *with*.  Social media doesn’t replace traditional online advertising, it works better *with*. If you are combining it with an email program, you will have better outcomes.  We have been talking integration since the 1980′s, as long as I have been in this.  Now we have the tools and we now really have the opportunity through our tracking and performance base to see how everything works together.  The intelligence and reporting is getting so much better and easier, we can really optimize different areas of our program based on what effects we see.  I think that’s the future.. it’s not social media over mobile over traditional over *this*, the answer is ‘YES’ – it’s everything.  But it is everything that is measurable and optimized working in tandem with one another.

“Seeing how these companies are segmented, the real challenge is to help them work with the tools so that it is optimized so everything becomes integrated. It isn’t marketing vs distribution vs operations; it really becomes part and parcel to each departments.  Those are, kind of, the issues today – sorting out the internal structure and breaking down the walls; it’s where the challenge and opportunity is today.”

“We’ve got all these tools, but who uses social – is it marketing, is it operations, is it customer service? Who is it?  And the answer should be ‘Yes’, but also ‘How?’, and ‘who’s in charge, and what happens’? And that’s just one teeny tiny aspect. And you can put that to *everything* – to email, to mobile, etc.  But figuring that out is the challenge, or ‘opportunity’.”

“When I first started putting conferences together, we always separated tracks by marketing and distribution.  I would argue, today, that it so archaic and irrelevant, it’s ridiculous… They are one in the same.  Marketing is distribution, distribution is marketing. Yes.  Is “search” distribution or marketing? YES! Of course it’s distribution.  Is “Google” media or commerce? YES! Is “Expedia” media, or commerce? Yes!  So all of these distinctions of what’s marketing, what’s advertising, and even branding has morphed with performance based distribution.  That also translates to offline distribution.  A lot of traditional distribution folks or marketers, it’s a very confusing or challenging world. The lines were very clear… ‘this is my world, this is your world.’  Now the lines are blurring, and it creates opportunity of course, as well as deep, deep challenges.  30 years in the same industry, it is remarkable to be active in the transformation of this arena.

Like these challenges with Social Media and Marketing.

“When travel companies are disappointed in social media, they have taken it on its own, and kind of left it in left field. They haven’t integrated it with everything else, and haven’t taken a look at their distribution and marketing goals, and are left trying to figure out how to measure it or understand the true value of these initiatives. The same thing happens with mobile.”

I see that with hotels – quite desperate to be part of the “shiny new toy” and use the hep buzz words. “Oh we need to get social media going – let’s do it!”, but overall, most really don’t get it.  It’s frustrating to the new entries into this new world.  You can get something up and running cheap and easy, but traditional marketers don’t understand it or can’t get parity between normal campaigns and the social realm.  It’s obviously effecting traditional campaigns, but it’s still a challenge to measure.  What should these old world marketing people be asking as they try to comprehend this very new world of social marketing?

“I think it’s based on marketers saying, “How does this fit in with my overall goals”. Here are my goals – it’s being clear with everything else they do with marketing and distribution.  ’Now that I have taken the time to say what our brand is, what our differentiator is, what our goals are, how I am measuring them, what I am doing – where does everything fit in with this ecosystem that I can measure and know what’s supporting it.’”

You wouldn’t randomly start to use Marketing or PR.

“No one would say, ‘I am not going to do PR because it doesn’t fit in,’, you ask ‘How do I do PR to support this?’.  You wouldn’t just do PR for the sake of it and see what happens.  Unfortunately, social and mobile and others are not yet reviewed this way, which is really unfortunate.  They are often measured at a totally inappropriate, and abstract, type of measurement.  You wouldn’t do that with anything else – why would you do it with social media?  You need it to be inline with goals.”

How do you think this will evolve? What is the future for us?

“I think the future is that we will finally learn to integrate all these things once we feel more comfortable with social, or mobile, or online marketing.  We will see new impacts and aspects with the Google / ITA merger, more new transitions and mergers, and new big players will enter the market like Facebook / Tripadvisor and Apple with Itravel.”

“Once we learn more about the power of that, I think the big opportunity will be integrating all of these lessons and tools, and creating them to be workable strategies that anyone – from the smallest hotel to global companies – will be able to utilize and leverage for their best use.  First we need to understand them, play with them, try them out, and have early successes and failures – then integrate them into what we understand in terms of both distribution and marketing.”

“In that, it doesn’t really matter what the next new big thing is, because we have a process in place to help it exist in the current ecosystem.  The greatest opportunities will be if marketers keep their minds open, and know that there will be blips on the way.  The whole integration helps with obtaining the goals.”

Since you mentioned them, who do you think will be the big players in the next five years.

“I think the big players are going to be different from the big players of “before”.  I don’t think it will be the traditional OTA’s, because they haven’t changed all that much.  Especially if you listen to Phocuswright and Forrester, it’s still ‘when you wanna go, where you wanna go’? –  It all looks the same.  I think it’s going to be, truly, a more intimate look at how people want to get their travel, and I think it’s going to be Google, Facebook, Apple that will now come onto the scene in a really focused way, with the resources and power behind them to find out a different way of distribution.”

Facebook partnering with Tripadvisor is interesting. Tripadvisor seems to be giving up on “native content” vs allowing Facebook users to contribute.  I think it hurt Yelp, and I have seen a huge jump in restaurant reviews on TA – but it’s all really fluid at this point.

“With the like button, with Tripadvisor, and different applications… they will find their way.  You can’t just dismiss the powerhouses of today just because they don’t have the right applications. That would be like dismissing Google in the past because the algorithm was a little off.  You have got to understand that these companies have the bandwidth, the smarts, and the money – and travel is one of the largest if not *THE* largest online opportunity, vertical, and once they have their sights set on it, they will figure it out.”

In working with EyeForTravel, you always seem so enthusiastic and geared up for the events.  Why does it energize you the way it does?

“I think these conferences take you out of your everyday thoughts, and opens up a window to what other companies are doing.  It allows you to see case studies, it allows you to see what’s real versus what’s vaporware, or what’s not. It really allows you to have a dialog.  What we are doing on the phone right now is a dialogue.  It enables marketers and distributors to see what is working now, and what will work 6 months down the line.  It separates the ‘hype’ from the ‘happening’, particularly the newer things like mobile, social media.”

“It saves a lot of time, energy, and effort if you are going down the wrong path, like not taking advantages of current opportunities or believing in hype that isn’t actually working.  Especially with the changing landscape and how quickly this stuff morphs, and the importance of the players today… it helps you see what you should be looking at, and what you should ignore.  I mean, two days at a conference to get all of that –  to save hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, of investment time, of executive time, to really have this immersion & dialogue – I cannot imagine how people could afford *not* to come.”

It’s funny… you can study it all you want, but unless you are completely immersed in a culture, you aren’t going to learn the language.

“There’s a reason people have these off sites – in a normal business day there are too many interruptions, there’s too much going on in the day to day.  You need this time to focus, you need it for your business, you need it for yourself – It’s necessary, it’s mandatory!”

Susan Black will be Chairing at the Eye For Travel North American Travel Distribution Summit in Chicago, the 13^th & 14^th of October, 2010.  You can look at the agenda here, and a list of all the speakers here.  It includes 4 separate focuses within one conference:  Online Sales & Distribution, Revenue Management, Mobile Travel & Tech, and Social Media Strategies. Register here, or contact rosie@eyefortravel.com for more information