Here we go!

A professional acquaintance proudly showed me the TIG blog post on Hotel Marketing today.  Honestly, for a hotelier, being posted on Hotel Marketing.com is pretty much as famous as it gets.  Maybe that says a lot about our industry, but it’s like TMZ catching you being an idiot at a club.  I am not kidding.  You celebrate!

The full article, found here, is about Google Places Instant Search… and their domination and growth within the Travel Search market.  Well it just got me thinking how much is really going on… and what sort of trip we are going to go on to get us from “here” – archaic UI on horrid OTA sites – to “there” – the future of a semantically aware, capable, thoughtful web.

Something I don’t stress below is that I am talking mobile throughout the entire article, because at this point mobile is desktop search, and desktop search should basically be mobile & at the very least local (even with the grasping of an IP’s GPS to know where you are). The upshot being that they are one in the same.  If you aren’t mobile, you are going to fail, because we basically want to get to the point that both work equally, as efficiently, and interchangeably (there are already apps that let you “slide” your desktop’s browser tabs into your mobile phone for when you are on the go).  Hyperlocality is the future.. and if you don’t know where your user is coming from, and where they are – you are losing out on vital information that means lost revenues across the board.

In regards to TIG blog article about Places… they certainly have come a long way in a short time.  It used to be Local Business Center, “Google Local” to the consumer.  Then they changed it to “Places” to compete with mobile marketing like Yelp and Foursquare – and Facebook.  As Facebook partners with Tripadvisor, I think you are going to see google move into it’s own generated content – reviews, etc.  The Yelp deal with Google failed, while Facebook users are generating content from the for Tripadvisor reviews.  That means Google has very little native content while Expedia waits in the wings to partner with Facebook.

But Google just bought ITA for their travel plans, and they have all these small apps like Google City Tours and their labs in the “Maps” and Google Earth….  there is so much independent development throughout Google that deals with Travel, the vertical they establish will immediately make them the industry leader.

The OTA’s are dinosaurs at this point… they’re going to get blown away in the next couple years.  I see Facebook positioning, but don’t get their plan. Even with a smart plan, and the likes of Expedia / Tripadvisor, I don’t think people use Facebook with the thought of commerce or being a consumer… so I am not sure where that’s going.  They have some big hurdles.

But Google Places + Maps + ITA + their travel sector with their grasp of mobile and domination of search…. something amazing is going to come out of that.  Google is launching a “stratified” social network that will be less insular and more open than Facebook, crossing websites evenly instead of being a closed system…. that comes sometime next year.  It is true they could keep aggregating content, which falls in line with their plan to store the world’s data – but I imagine they get more serious about their own content because of it’s value.

The changes happening online right now are fascinating – if you have any thoughts or opinion I want to hear it.  It’s time to be a Futurist – be Nostradamus.  Anything can happen at this point… we’re simply pontificating on eventualities.  It won’t be until the end of our trip we can see the destination. =)

Another trend that seems obvious is that most successful social media programs are not operated by these fabled “gurus”, but by industry veterans who have worked incredibly hard and somewhat tirelessly garnering the knowledge and connections that they now have at their disposal.  Gregg is in this category as well – orchestrating countless bloggers and travel industry experts / agents from all over the world, all from an office in Canada.

FLIGHT CENTRE

First, before we jump into the interview, let’s give a background to those unfamiliar with Flight Centre.  Andre Sammartino said it most concise:

“Flight Centre revolutionised the retailing of international air-travel in Australia by shifting to a model where profitability was driven by volume rather than margins. Initially they built a price advantage by bypassing ticketing wholesalers, seeking out less well-known airlines, and also by arbitraging price differentials across markets.”

A complex and somewhat topsy turvy history, Flight Centre has had multiple periods of growth and contraction since its 1981 inception.  It is now focusing on globalization of the brand, something you can safely suggest they will be successful with – they are already the #1 travel agency in Australia, as well as the largest Australian brand on Twitter.  All is not simple in travel, the online world, and brand evaluation, however – and disintermediation is effecting Flight Centre’s entire model of business.  There has even been a tumbling stock price since it’s 2002 peak; but rumors of their demise have been greatly exaggerated – they have scored quite well in recent months, however, showing profits that have been (forgive my pun) soaring.

MR. TILSTON

Some of these efforts and successes can be attributed to Gregg Tilston, who has a targeted, thoughtful plan to help with the further globalization of Flight Centre.  Gregg is the implementation & standardization gent for the overall social strategy for Flight Centre, and then loosely organizes and controls real world travel agents and gives them the ability to market themselves on different internet channels.

“We direct front line staff with the education that ‘once its online, it’s there forever’ – but we really want them to have the tools to promote themselves. These agents have their own business, and speak on behalf of their personal brand and physical storefront, but don’t speak on behalf of the corporation.”

It’s a very interesting model – Flight Centre can source viable content at their leisure, while still having endless entities providing meaningful content that can be used whenever they want, as well as allowing linking opportunities, and more.  It ends up being very powerful, because they are a content publisher, on some levels.

“We have multiple forms of distribution – Corporate, Brick and Mortar storefronts, as well as home based associates that work from within their communities, in their areas of travel expertise.  This has been the model in Canada, and now we are really opening it up worldwide.  What’s most exciting to me is that we are in that “cloud”, and that it is decentralized.  Taking from recent events, if a volcano blows up, the show still goes on.  Even in a worst case scenario, we will still exist in the real world, and because we are decentralized, we will also exist online.  At Flight Centre, we do not have one server room.”

By mandating that the worldwide network of travel consultants affiliated with Flight Centre use their personal voices to blog, engage, and expound the virtues of the company, it’s people, and simplicity of booking – they garner endless content, attention, and availability to get the upper hand in this rapidly altering field.  By being everywhere at once (be it Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and the peripheral “voices” worldwide), they create an accessibility heretofore unknown in the travel world, and garner an almost “hyperlocality” when it comes to being able to find experts for any region or vacation destination.  Going global means rooting yourself locally, a powerful lesson to carry with you into the future of your company.

Gregg started his professional career in Sales & Marketing IT solutions, but overtime felt detached from the field.  After reading about crowdsourcing, he stepped outside of his comfort zone to engage himself in something very fresh, cutting edge, and exciting – and took a job with a start up, where he learned about online content and messaging.

“I was tried in the fire”, admits Gregg.  ”But it ultimately prepared me to deal with the fluid and changing world of social media.”

“I really owe a lot to Sean – we all do.  He is an amazing man,” meaning Sean Sutherland, Global E-Commerce Leader for Flight Centre [Twitter].  I had a conversation with him about Flight Centre; about the way they were moving the company forward, and about these very specific challenges that a brick and mortar company faced when trying to become this ubiquitous social company.  Every one from Flight Centre had worked in the front lines of travel, so it is a smart, experienced group of professionals.”

Gregg was brought on in March of 2009, where he rapidly developed [read that: sank or swim] and implemented an intriguing, efficient model for their social media program.

“We use a ‘hub-and-spoke’ strategy.  There are the hubs, like the Flightcentre.ca website, or our blog.  The spokes are about all the content hosting sites all around the world.  It is incredibly helpful with linking, and getting more eyeballs on Flight Centre – without any cost for server space.  My mandate, because we were originally a brick and mortar business model, is to show the value and presence of the front line staff.  It’s obvious that we need to demonstrate precisely *why* someone should use a brick and mortar business –  we are a group of front line travel agents that really exist, and we are building a base that doesn’t always understand that benefit.”

By utilizing Flight Centre’s legions of travel agents throughout the world, the sheer volume of generated content greatly helps to bolster their online presence.  Some businesses are still incredibly concerned about allowing employees to represent the brand in an online space, while Flight Centre mandates that all agents must blog about their vacations.   By utilizing the powerful techniques of blogging, or social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and video services like Youtube, Flight Centre anchors itself firmly into an online space, while still representing what makes the brick and mortar brand so powerful – it’s travel specialists.

“When this new user base comes to us from a blog, youtube videos, etc., they start to realize that this real world business has real people that really care and are really *available*.   Our competitors are OTA’s, but we’re real and human.  There is also Carlson’s and Amex, but they don’t “get it”.  I am surprised they haven’t put more of an effort in this. It’s really surprising.  But our people work hard to “get found” on Google, and we have really smart ways of engaging our audience. The blog is split into many parts, which shows relevance, both online and how we exist locally offline, which garners solid SEO and content that generates interest and accessibility to Flight Centre. We have been proving the validity of this model all over Canada.  Now as the global social media manager we take stalk of other channels and see how to leverage these regions and begin our implementation.”

This model is very exciting, because it has been built, tested, and proven.  As they expand globally, Flight Centre will have a relatively simple implementation, especially in that it’s flexible enough to enter the complexity of working with multiple languages and cultures.

“We can lay a framework down, but there are so many nuances and idiosyncrasies it becomes important to engage the micro level because you have cultural and linguistic differences that can create a big disconnect when people are implementing top level strategy without understanding these issues.  Sometimes the “z” is “zed”, just to point out an obvious example.  You need to make sure to connect with your potential clients in a way that’s familiar to them, that’s obvious.  It also is an issue for SEO, when you have words that are used or understood differently.”

One key to Gregg’s success has been the dynamic between him and the executive team above him.  We see this in social media, quite often.  Part of social media is opening yourself up, becoming transparent, and letting go of control.  It’s not for everyone.  Conversely, the more you try to manage social media like it’s traditional marketing, the less genuine and earnest the brand appears.  Social Media is not a print ad.  The most successful businesses have been ones that allow a relative amount of freedom and fluidity in managing the “social hemisphere”, so to speak.

“The day to day at Flight Centre is a lot about improvisation, as well as being trusted. Without Sean, this couldn’t work. He trusted me enough to give up control – and it’s important to know I haven’t taken some controlled voice or impersonal brand persona.  In fact, I am cheeky and really having fun with it, while just being myself.   It seems to work very well. It’s fairly simple; don’t overpost, annoy, or frustrate people.  Simply engage them and act like a professional.”

THE BEST TRAVEL JOB EVER

In developing this job and contest for their social media channels, Gregg found endless lessons to pass on to other businesses, and he is currently working on wrangling a case study out of their findings.  For those that don’t know, The 
Best Travel Job Ever was a contest to engage social networkers into competing for a job as a travel blogger.  Some of the content that came out of it was AMAZING, as you will see with their contest homepage.

“We had a number of surprises.  The original concept for the contest was “The Faces of Flight Centre”, and simply trying to find people to create Flight Centre branded content with their blogs, etc.  I was in web development when I started – again this was all Sean; it wasn’t marketing, it wasn’t sales – it was just an idea.  It came together really quick – from brainstorming in December to our launch on the first of March this year.  We were looking at different contesting platforms – and nothing had what we needed, so we built what we needed on our own.  It was actually quite funny, because the contesting platform CEO’s would try to sell their product, and instead of being upset that we didn’t buy from them, they were curious and engaged because of what we did.  They were like, ‘oh wow that’s a great idea, and so’s that’, etc.  It was fun to watch happen.  Right after our launch, we were credited with doing a great job, and got a lot of positive feedback.  But we went up “against” a Doritos contest that was launched at about the same time.  Their contest was to upload a video to youtube in which they “named a chip” — and it was the bane of my existence.  Doritos knocked it out of the park, and I was left —  waiting  – asking ‘when are my people going to upload?’. I was incredibly nervous. But all the people I work with were saying, ’Doritos is looking for people to submit a video to name a chip, we are looking for travel bloggers, people that wanted to travel and video blog their adventures’. It was different.”

Of course, this powerful new tool of social, and engaging your branded audience, isn’t apart from, or polar to, traditional marketing tactics.  In fact, it’s vital to create parity between the two.  They might be two entirely different things, but as we have seen time and time again, they buttress one another, and enhance each respective goal.  Not only that, even social media can be “made” by traditional media – there are many ways to get something to go viral.  In this case, a print ad led to a TV spot:

“In the end, it was the traditional 6 pm and 11pm news.  We got the spot from the news guys at global because, on what I assume was a slow news day, they saw a print ad with a “blurb” about the Best Job in the World.  They contacted Henry’s Camera, who suggested they contact me at Flight Centre.  That became the tipping point, and catalyst, to jump start our campaign. We got a TV spot that gave us endless press that we didn’t expect, then we spread the news content and shared it with everyone. Our goal was 100 contestants, and we thought we would get around 35 who would opt-in.  Well, we had 110 contestants, there were 178,000 google searches, and we ended up with a page rank of four out of ten on a net new zero site.  Contestant’s friends and networks were promoting their friends content that was also *us*. We obviously did our best to offer viral components – when people saw uploaded travel videos, the egotistic element of ‘I can do that so much better‘ came into play.”

But again, it comes down to the community pushing the content, and that viral component of a meme – the idea that a good idea simply spreads organically because it is a good idea – took off.  It’s often that social media “gurus” take credit for what is simply the network effect – but there’s a certain aspect of the momentum completely out of your control. It’s vital to understand it’s not your plan, your interactions, or your implementation that is responsible for your success…. it’s the network.

“I give the community, the community contestants, the followers, and the friends all of the credit — they did it. It wasn’t [Flight Centre] at all.  Our demographic – we knew it was going to be 18-25 year olds – that was our target.  When we went to look at the database, 50 % of opt-ins in the database were 30 year old and plus, meaning that we actually got the aunts and uncles and families – the actual, “viable” consumers – per the more “traditional market thinking”.  For us, all these groups are vital!  Our initial thought was that we would brand these 18-25 year old contestants for life –  and then we ended up with this HUGE database of REALLY important consumers.  The overall contest has some fantastic hard numbers – we have the ROI for the skeptics and it was of obvious benefit.  But it was more about the ‘magic’ for lack of a better word. The ‘je ne sais quoi’ – about why these new communication tools are so powerful. The tools aren’t always perfect, but it’s huge.”

One of the exciting aspects in experimenting with social media’s online channels is that sheer immensity and overwhelming, awesome humbling that happens as it takes off.  For Flight Centre, everyone in the organization felt it – you realize you are part of something much, much bigger than your brand, or your idea.  The other curious bi-product of social media campaigns, and all of social media, is that people utilize it in ways that are never to be expected, and connections happen in the least probable of ways.  It’s the nature, and strength, of weak ties.

“We actually got three new hires for Flight Centre – because of the engagement these people identified with us more than the contest, and actually connected with us, our culture, and our ideas.  They got excited to be part of our company, and they came to us.  ’Backchannel’ connections and conversations among contestants and the public were happening, and ‘connecting’ happened, not because of their entries or the contest, but because everyone was excited about the common interest of travel.  Even though she didn’t make our final selections, one of the entrants, Alicia Taggio, became a brand advocate and hosted a tweet up in Ontario, and we skyped our official selection of the winners.  The community was way, way bigger than we ever could have hoped, and they all had endless depth.  It was humbling, and it denoted that we were doing things right. It’s really moving, and very exciting to think about. It’s the cheapest tool we never realized we had.”

CHALLENGES IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Even now, Gregg is dealing with the complexity of the power of social media.  In a recent PR opportunity / experience, social media demonstrated it’s dark side (also proving most internet users are panicky and reactive without needing any real information).  In this case, complaints about the treatment of elephants in Thailand created collateral damage to Flight Centre when it was mistakingly attributed that they had something to do with the treatment of the elephants (marketing collateral depicted some people riding Elephants on vacation, which is apparently a “no no” in that elephants are not treated very well by those business owners). You can read more about that situation here: Flight Centre fends off social media attacks.  It was exceptionally well handled, to the extent that the petition that was started became moot within a couple days of Flight Centre’s response to the concerns, even getting the Executive GM to add a response on their Facebook Page. It gave Gregg an opportunity to show how Flight Centre is listening, and was a fantastic moment of brand management and perception.  They were able to recover from that problem with grace, accountability (even if it’s not supposed to be yours to take), and interactivity.  By being engaged, it changes your corporate culture, but it also, humbly, carries you into the future of business.  A little less heavy is this quaint example from our interview,

“Recently, a popular “mommy blogger” in Australia, commented on our logo “Captain”, and his hat.  She said something like, ‘I don’t know if he really is the captain, but I think he’s drunk, and the passengers are screwed’.  The cap on his head was at some ‘jaunty’ angle, and it was a harmless comment that did negatively associate our brand with drunkenness and lack of safety.  Harmless, but serious. So we photoshopped a jaunty cap on top of her avatar on Twitter, and sent the picture to her, saying ‘We promise we’re not drunk, but the hat is fun at that angle.. see?’.  She thought it was adorable, made it her profile picture, and did a whole blog post on the engagement we had.  Her blog is “Not drowning, Mothering“, so through our legitimate, interested, earnest – and a bit cheeky – engagement, she’s a life long fan.  One of my favorite things, earlier in my career, was cold calling, because you take this potentially annoying, negative relationship or expectation, and change it – and own it – and control it.  That Mommy Blogger is an honest evangelist, and it’s created new relationships; what started as a somewhat harmless, humorous knock on the brand is now a friendly, positive relationship.  Again, this is Sean giving up control, and giving up control is not easy. One thing I love about it  - first in Canada, now in this global role – there are endless opportunities to take something and really run with it. It’s Sean, but it’s also baked into the culture of Flight Centre.”

GOING GLOBAL

“We spent last year building and testing this model, and now it’s mature enough that we are evangelizing about what we are doing, and how it can work for other people.  We are starting to put case studies together, with Hootsuite, and I am getting ready for my world tour! [laughs]  We are getting ready to deploy what we built in Canada and implement with every region across the world, looking to get the support from, and connect with, the staff – it obviously benefits them as well. Scaling is vital, and it will be interesting to see this template layered into place after having practiced it and standardized it from Canada.  The regions need someone in place that supports it, and I am getting a great response so far.  The challenge of building a global strategy is about the speed of the internet, to some extent; we can be incredibly nimble as soon as something begins to trend, but a big part of “nimble” is having this global team in place – which means we can be online 24 hours, you have to be online 24 hours.  Now we have Australia that gets 8 hours, U.S. 8 hours, Canada, etc, so we can cover the entire net, engage people, and never lose a beat without losing our sanity.  Brand Nirvana is 24 hours by 7 days around the clock monitoring so that we can pick up on these trends and manage them the best we can.  Right now, we are monitoring twitter out of Canada, and that gives us a lag time; it’s sort of funny being the Top Australian brand on twitter – in Canada – and 12 hours out.  Next on our plate is our “2nd honeymoon” contest; we are reaching out to an older demographic this time.  It’s been a challenge to reverse engineer the best travel job. Part of it came together in the last few months, end of May. I was looking at “Zoomer” mag on my parents table, a baby-boomer magazine.  The idea is engaging, and creates a small partnership between families – kids and extended family vie for their own family – it’s a natural network to tap into.  The challenge is still, ‘How am I going to help these ‘zoomers’ go out and crowdsource the 18-30 olds’, but it may happen naturally.  The biggest challenge is that I have had to build a lot of the strategy on a shoestring budget. I haven’t done *one ad*, at all.”

Gregg Tilston will be a speaker at the the Eye For Travel North American Travel Distribution Summit in Chicago, the 13^th& 14^th of October (next month), 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 contactrosie@eyefortravel.com for more information.

In ending these interviews, I am always intrigued why people take the time to connect, network, and share the information that ends up at these conferences.  As busy as Gregg is, I am sure there are other ways he could efficiently use his time…. so I asked him about the draw of Eye for Travel’s conference:

“What I like about Eye for Travel? It’s a great mix. I have nothing but love for these other conferences, but a lot are consultants simply pitching their wares. But this event is a mix of panelists that are really implementing and DOING IT and working in it. It’s very legitimate, and it’s a lot of do-ers.”

Well said – See you there!

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

I don’t always have stuff hit me, but it hit me today.

So I hadn’t figured out why Tripadvisor’s Restaurant Reviews had recently, so vigorously, taken off.  For those of us in hospitality who are aware of our brands online, it was hard to miss.  It is vital to stay on top of all conversation, reviews, and mentions, and whether through Google Alerts, or a random internet search… you noticed restaurants began to get reviews on Tripadvisor. It’s not really a surprise, and it is a completely natural direction for a travel site like TA.  But, where there wasn’t even an option to review or add restaurants until a couple months ago, the frequency of seeing reviews pop up is gaining momentum. MASSIVE momentum… and it seemed like it had to be larger than the Tripadvisor user base. I really noticed when some of our restaurants were ending up with as many, if not more, reviews than Yelp. I hadn’t been able to figure it out, but when I just added one of our newly opened restaurants to the Tripadvisor database, it used *FACEBOOK CONNECT* to populate the information about the restaurant, meaning the database lives both in Tripadvisor, where people can review it natively from that site, as well as inside Facebook as an application called “Tripadvisor Local Picks”.

Uh oh Yelp.

Yelpers can be attention seekers, but the platform of Facebook is the mecca of ME ME ME. If there is one thing a Facebooker is going to enjoy doing, it’s share their opinion – *ESPECIALLY* to their real live network of people who may be affected (or forewarned) by a review. It is obviously a natural part of networking, community, and connecting.  Oh.. it also vests itself in ego, and the desire to establish equity in social status. Go figure… but it never hurt, that while recommending a nice romantic restaurant to a friend, an ex fling sees your exciting life.  I am certainly not claiming this to be me, but the fact that studies have been done on detecting narcissism through facebook profiles, it’s certainly something that exists.  Here is another article that goes a bit deeper into social media and ego.

This means that, alongside the Tripadvisor user base populating restaurant reviews, we now have unwitting Facebook users contributing content to that database. You have a 400 million person population casually being redirected to Tripadvisor to help add content.  But this content generation is happening *from within Facebook*. This app makes it so that FB users are not leaving the site.  This reinforces the travel industry understanding that we can no longer create community when competing with communities like Facebook.  If Tripadvisor is learning this, and allowing off-site content generation, what do you think of your small community?  You need to congregate where people already exist, and reach out to them where they are online, not where you wish them to be (cue $100,000 website laden with bulky flash and slow load times).

In the meantime, you may have noticed Facebook searches being populated with hotel listings, and other brand names in wider internet searches. If a 400 million user population gets used to searching brand names and businesses for reviews, and information… that is the beginning of some powerful commerce. What’s more, Yelp could quickly become irrelevant under the crushing weight of Facebook’s population eager to add content for Tripadvisor, whether they know what they are doing or not.  It has been suggested that Facebook users don’t always know what they are doing (warning: hilarity ensues. Yes I know I have posted that a couple times.  It is too funny).

The way these two are dancing, I could see a marriage in the future. I think they want to date for a bit, but they might become a bit more popular than some of the other options out there. I am not saying Facebook could acquire Tripadvisor, but I am wondering what Google is going to do now that Yelp is off the table, or if that is something that might be revisited? Facebook and Tripadvisor paired could become a brutal force against Google’s plans, not to mention OTA’s like Expedia.  As for Yelp… they might not even see it coming.  Opentable reviews have already legitimized the review process in a way that Yelp has not been capable of.  Reviewing for friends, family, and network in a Facebook model creates more legitimacy still.

As always, I might be missing something. I know FB Connect works with Yelp in some ways, but I don’t think you can generate content from within a Facebook app?  There is so much to consider, I might be off.  But it’s always fun to watch this stuff develop. As always I promise to keep you posted. =)

The below words are basically a mashup of every single tweet (processed & filtered) from the #smtravel conference (blended with my commentary in the parentheses).  I arranged the information best I could, however *completely* subjective said arrangement is. I hope it makes some form of sense – or at least you can potentially peer into the chasm that is my logic.  At the least I hope I didn’t misquote or misrepresent anyone.  Speaking of transparency – I left some fairly meaty and helpful implementation/action ideas at the end that were not necessarily even part of the conference… I figure if you can find them and actually read that far down, well.. you deserve them.

I will go out on a limb saying that 100% of the data is accurate, because I basically copy and pasted from the tweet stream. I am sad to say the nature of making the “tweety casserole” of our conference helped it to lose much in the reference & citations arena, but if you need to see the authority and professionalism of those involved, please refer to list of speakers at the conference. For those that don’t know me – I am a big skeptic, and vigilant about data and non skewed statistics, as well as generally skeptical about enthusiastic marketing. If anyone would like to challenge any of the information or data below, please do! I am always up for conversation and learning…. and if incorrect data was given out at this conference I assume we would all like to know (this is highly unlikely)! So let’s have at it – Eye For Travel’s Social Media Conference #smtravel 2010!  (Boy I hope this makes sense)

My attempt at organizing the concepts throughout the conference:

1. Social Media (general)
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. Geolocation / Mobile / Augmented Reality
   
5. ROI
6. User Generated Reviews / Content
7. Takeaway / Important Thoughts
   
8. Action / Implementation

You will note a lot of information on Geolocation/Mobile & User Generated Reviews/Content.  I think that’s because there is real data, opportunity, and engagement in those areas.  The other areas are more guesswork and hoping.  Twitter provides ROI, to be sure… but I think we should focus on what provides results, vs. what we like to think *may* work.  In that, I personally suggest you alot some of your Facebook time to understanding and interacting with Geolocation, as well as becoming more involved in the review sites.

I) Social Media

Stats:

• 83% of adults use social media
• 70% of participants in Social Media are spectators (lurkers – we know you are out there eating our posts)
• 18% of US online leisure travelers do not have a destination in mind when they start their trip planning
• For every 1/2 sec improvement in landing page download speed, you can increase page views 1-3% (I know.. this is SEOweb design. Sue me)
• 58% of travelers use Facebook monthly, 40% use YouTube, 32% to Wikipedia, but 1 in 4 don’t visit any social media sites (this is in tune with understanding traditional marketing vital, still important, and should be integrated and aware of SM plan)
• Email marketing still important but not as effective as it used to be. (I don’t think I need a stat for that, but 1) it still seems to be effective for some people & 2) it’s amazing how others simply won’t let it go when it is no longer effective. It used to be a cure all salve to some marketers)
• Consumers follow and fan brands on FB and Twitter to learn about discounts (32%). Learn about new products (19%)
• 35 Million LinkedIn updates/week, 600 tweets per second, 5 billion pieces of facebook content a week
• An angry customer can lose you more customers than a happy customer can bring you new ones
• Social networking is the new “morning coffee” – 4 in 10 people wake up to their social circles
• 4 in 10 people recommend products on social media
• eMarketer reports 81% of marketers say social media significantly extends their e-mail to new markets

Commentary/Conversation:

• You can choose not to participate in social media conversation but….. that is *probably* not a good thing.
• Most social media /generated content is crap. (This reminded me of a very relevant talk by Google CEO Schmidt, and the resulting piece The Cesspool We Call The Internet)
• Social media is about relinquishing control
• Social media/user generated content is the new brochure, and you have no say in how that brochure is made or what it looks like (I like the sentiment but mildly disagree… I think you be accountable of everything in your control and offer a worthwhile product and the brochure will be to your liking).
• Transparency is not for the faint of heart, and it may not work for everyone. When people get an update, they want more on a regular basis. (IMHO, It doesn’t just happen, you have to fight culture of secrecy that most business cultivates).
• Top 5 trends in Web 2.0 – 1) Semantic Web 2) SMO (social media optimization) 3) SGO (social graph optimization) 4) Affinity Graph (feel free to elaborate on this one) 5) HyperLocal
• It is about the quality, not quantity, of followers. 500 committed followers is worth 10,000 non brand interested ones (what sort of followers do contests breed?)
  
• Soc Media is a communication TOOL – not a PLATFORM – “do you ask for ROI on your telephone?”
• Social Media is not a campaign, it’s a commitment.
• How do you measure the value of a relationship? Lifetime value = more than the sum of transactions.
• It’s amplified word of mouth, right? It’s been happening for years. It’s about creating community again – SM just a new channel for old-fashioned business sense.
• Social Media let’s your customers do the talking for you.
• Social media shares elements w/journalism: Who, what, where, why, how. Formula for getting the full story on a subject.
• World has moved form 6 degrees of separation to 2 thanks to social media
• Conversation about your brand will happen without you being aware or taking part…. you might as well listen.
• Whoever earns trust, wins

Best Practices:

• SOCIAL MEDIA DOES NOT EQUAL DIGITAL MARKETING – Social Media is 2 way communication (interactivity, conversation, dynamic growth), marketing is one way communication (forced/push marketing, print, billboards)
• Good social media is about the 4 E’s: Educate, Excite, Engage and Evangelize.
• Monitor, Engage, Respond.
• Have a clear plan – where do you fit and how can you add value to your guests and social media. But you have to be prepared to manage the conversation. It’s not a campaign, it’s a commitment.
• Bake social media DNA into everyone in the organization
• You wouldn’t put someone behind the front desk without training. Don’t put someone in social media without training
• Guest services should respond to social media just like email or phone calls.
• Real time recovery is vital to hospitality’s use of & engagement w/social media – the internet is fast and speed is key.
• It’s not about you the brand, it’s about them – about being available & listening
• Non participation is akin to ignoring customers – a lost opportunity to engage, learn and make amends.
• Social should live across departments like PR, cust svc, marketing, etc. It becomes “something everyone does” like email.
• You can become pen pals with some of your customers thru social media. good way to build relationships, brand ambassadors (time consuming)
• Using persona’s to identify your average customers is useful – but be real, be earnest, be transparent, and have fun.
• Utilize effective management to maintain productivity, instead of limiting massively effective tools for business (social media being banned in the workplace)
• Social media can be a very powerful recruiting tool
• Use analytics & monitoring tools: Omniture, Cision, ReviewAnalyst, eBuzz, Revinate, Radian6
• Social Media should be fun with the appropriate tone of conversation.
• Manage Social Media both from corporate and property level – “Speak in the tone of the medium”
• Blogs bring value to SEO efforts
• Best ideas are often driven from the bottom up. Always listen to your front line people!
• Experimentation is the key to social media success. Fail cheap, fail fast.
• Social media is not free. Someone has to own, monitor, track, analyze etc.
• The Return is on customer engagement, and ROI may take some time.

II. Facebook

Stats:

• 100 million people now using Facebook mobile app at least once a month (how many are exploring brand pages?).
• 56% users check Facebook each day
• 48% of people talk about products on Facebook
• 5 billion posts of content from Facebook per week

Commentary/Conversation:

• “Facebook will remain relevant because of its privacy controls” (- My rant: I wholeheartedly disagree – twitter inherently allows the user to opt out of privacy, so the user is quite aware of what they are entering into.  Buzz is similar in this respect.  Conversely, Flickr VIGOROUSLY champions the right of privacy & ownership, so does Tribe.net.  Facebook is constantly altering their architecture so as to potentially generate constant cash flow.  These attempts at creation of revenue wholly disregard the individual users’ privacy & bungles the process constantly, while adding layers to a flawed structure/network that is based off of non-meaningful geo-connections.  Connections, of course, should include *immediate* social circles, but the strongest connections are based off interest, not educational institution – which pits classmates across broad socioeconomic and political backgrounds into similar social circles.  The preceding line is precisely why Facebook *could* eventually fail. The sky is not falling, and the landscape is changing constantly… but until Facebook figures this out, their dominance is tenuous.  You cannot create a solid network based off of “loose interests”.  Topics/Subject matter drive content creation, and content creation drives social networks.  There can be no meaningful brand interaction in “loose interest” networks – there is limited opportunity to get the network effect started around brands if one user who likes you suggests your brand to a user completely foreign to it’s necessity or disinterested in it’s existence).
  
• I voice constant concern about Facebook – is the conversation meaningful? Do they book?
• Facebook pages for brands as a “fad” was brought up, many disagreed with the concept.

Best practices:

• Instead of attempting to create a new social network, connect with an existing one: FB connect picks up that slack – interactivity is at leisure of user. Facebook connect allows published content and comments on both your website and Facebook. Helps build engagement in both places. Travelmuse received a 30% increase in membership from using Facebook Connect. One of the best ideas was this – “It’s easier to buy access to someone else’s audience than to try to build up your own in order to market to them”
• Add a booking widget, customize the tabs and cross-integrate your Social Media channels (connect but do not auto-post – remain native)
• Tag FB pages w/Omniture(Analytic) tags to help measure ROI
• “5 Essential Apps for Your Business’s Facebook Page”
• Competitors’  followers should be at the top of your list of who to find & target
• The Facebook ads that work best to grow a fan base show the user their “friends” that are fans, and has a “Become A Fan button” on it.
• FB doesn’t always grab people not coming to your hotel, so it is often better used locally. FB pages work GREAT for F&B, spa (incremental revenue).
• FB apps can best be seen as complimenting a good FB marketing campaign instead of the center of it
• (I just started realizing the mapped network of facebook pages creates a tighter community online if you connect – try to get as many local businesses to highlight your page, and vice versa. Creates a stronger local presence overall.)
• Create “status questions” (what are you doing today?) so you can check engagement and how often guests interact/check-in with you.
  

III) Twitter

Stats:

• Michael Perhaes with MGM Grand said Twitter is 5x more effective than email for us, & GM Grand’s Twitter customers have higher ADR than email customers (someone suggested this as savvy, but honestly I would imagine a savvy consumer to find a lower price?)
• 600 tweets per second

Commentary/Conversation:

• If you’re going to make money, Twitter must become a transactional platform at some point
• Twitter is the new flight attendant call button
• Twitter drives revenue, no doubt about it.  Twitter = ROI, Facebook = idle brand chit chat.
  
• Young kids don’t trust it, and think it’s for old people or fame seekers

Best practices:

• Twitter is not a direct marketing platform
• Twitter can be used as an R&D tool
• Uses “extended” shelf space by having multiple twitter accounts to represent brand :chef pages, nightclubs, hotel, spa, etc. Multiple Twitter accounts for multiple audiences
• Consider integration with API to expose what is tweeted about your brand (like highlighting reviews, it does suggest letting go of message)
• Even if you do have a group of people working on social media, don’t forget to tweet (fb/blog) with personality – be a real human voice & be real – but be transparent, be consistent,
• Separate conversation – promotions, customer service, etc should be separate Twitter accounts so as not to confuse (this is debatable depending on your brand)
• competitors’  followers should be at the top of your list

IV) Geolocation / Mobile

Stats:

• Google estimates 50% of web traffic to come thru mobile devices w/in 5 years (if that doesn’t blow your mind, re-read it slowly, twice).
• 240 million people mobile browsers in 2010, surpassing PCs for first time
• 100 million people now using Facebook mobile app at least once a month
• According to a recent comScore report, 30.8% of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5% one year ago.
• Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112% in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347% jump.
• 1 in 3 mobile search queries have local intent
• Mobile Shopping to balloon to $119 Billion by 2015

Commentary:

• Morgans Hotels tagged NYC airport codes on Foursquare during recent blizzards, ran ads, & generated some sales.
  
• Are iPhone apps a “flavor of the month”? Or should you just develop a good mobile-optimized Web site?
• Geolocation tools like Foursquare mark a significant shift in social-real time interaction – it’s valid, useful information
  
• hyper local = search + social graph + mobile + your location
• Impressive: Morgans Hotel leverages themed twitter hashtags, 4Sq hotel checkins, Artist Generated Content and analytics tools
• Location-based marketing will be a trend. “It’s clearly good.”
• Adding hotel rates to Google search results enhances relevancy of listing – mobile access & booking to skyrocket. One thing, however, is that rates in Google maps is customer friendly, but maybe not so great for suppliers (link to maps blog post here: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/03/experiment-to-show-hotel-prices-on.html)

Best Practices:

• You got me. I think, again, I defer to Del Ross from ICH – “Experimentation is the key to social media success. Fail cheap, fail fast.” But frankly, FOCUS ON IT. I would be willing to bet my name that it’s worth limiting some Facebook time to interacting with Foursquare.

V) ROI:

Stats:

• What we are after (and trying to define)! *or* “No clear, easy way to track back social media ROI” says panel, “An attribution model has yet to be developed.”
• Forrester Research says it is a way to enhance relationships with customers, build brand, help hiring & recruitment, engage in customer service, and helps to build employee morale.

Conversation:

• If social media goals are not clearly communicated, how do u know what “good” looks like?
• If you aren’t paying attention to conversation about your brand, who is? A different ROI – Return on Ignorance
• Interesting perspective on generating demand vs conversion in social media. Examples: FB = demand, Yelp = conversion
• Will virtual cash become taxable? (It apparently already is, in some places.)

Best Practices:

• Social media is not free. Someone has to own, monitor, track, analyze etc. It is ROCS – a return on customer satisfaction in early stages
• Measurement involves many different goals, not just sales. Overall revenue, room nights (Hilton’s ROI measurement) are just two of them.
• Southwest measures SM ROI by: employee satisfaction; ratio of cust compliments to complaints; new signups; conversions.

VI) User Generated Reviews / Content

Stats:

• Their data shows that people believe online strangers to friends and family in regards to reviews, user generated content. Expedia
• Travelers search 20 different sites when planning a trip
• 44% of online travelers trust other travelers before commercial advertising
• 32% of Yelp reviews are 5-stars. Only 15% are 1- or 2-stars
• TripAdvisor has 32 million reviews and gets 16 new contributions every minute.
• TripAdvisor gives less weight to older reviews than newer in terms of ranking
• Content submitted to TripAdvisor at its start 10 years ago is still on the site. There are no plans to remove those.
• Management response to critical reviews more important than review content according to Tripadvisor research
• TripAdvisor says an average traveler reads about 30 reviews
• Only 4% of hotels respond to tripadvisor reviews

Commentary:

• By being confident, taking ownership, & being enthusiastic, authors have altered or taken bad reviews.
• Immediacy of customer feedback on mobile posed to change how companies use social media
• Online Reviews allow satisfied customers play “ambassadors” of your business
• Negative reviews play an important role too, you can’t please 100% of the people 100% of the time
• it’s better to join the conversation than not. Reviews can go from 3 to 5 stars because of this

Best Practices

• Be humble, be swift, be specific – How a hotel property responds to criticism says more about them than the criticism itself
• By replying to reviews, you humanize the brand – it’s less of a place to complain & more about commerce
• Every negative comment is an opportunity to turn around the relationship, and create a long term brand centric consumer.
• Bad reviews are exciting to highlight, celebrate, and learn from. Great marketing opportunity. Your reaction is vital.
• responding is never a knee jerk reaction #smtravel they take a LOT of thought, editing attention. Good impulse control – required quality for persons chosen to respond to customer comments on social media

VII) Takeaway & Important Thoughts

Stats/”Subjective Facts” :

• Social media is about relinquishing control
• Google estimates 50% of web traffic to come through mobile devices w/in 5 years
• Investing money in search visibility reduces need to spend money elsewhere.
• If anyone says they are a social media expert, they are lying to you. We are all learning and failing constantly.
• For every 1/2 sec improvement in landing page download speed, you can increase page views 1-3% (content heavy, uber-marketed sites are going bye bye)
• User Generated Content (UGC) is the 21st century’s word of mouth, and your new brochure – and you’re not the one writing it. your customers are your new copywriters (Jennifer Davies, Expedia)
• Virgin will soon have 3 FTE people handling SM. Hilton has 1. Southwest has 6.
• The new big three in travel = Brazil, China, and India. New travel up 50% in recent years.
  
• People under 30 use email only to talk to you if you are over 30, or to talk to brands/companies (suggests the data… there are exceptions to these facts)
  
• Social media matters, but does not replace traditional channels. One in four travelers are not on social networks
• People want to connect, people want to share: this is what drives social media growth

Commentary:

• Ignoring social media today is like ignoring Google in 1999.
• Customers no longer search for news & deals — they want the deals to find them
• It’s a conversation, not a broadcast. Be authentic, honest, transparent.
  
• Think about shaping conversation, not controlling it
• When social media relationships become “real” they become private & go offline
• Social Media is most powerful when integrated directly with the product
• Work with your competitors to create a “trend” for media coverage
• Social media is not a “nice to have” anymore. It now must be a part of an integrated marketing strategy (but it isn’t just marketing, and it isn’t just a strategy)
• It’s easier to buy access to someone else’s audience than to try to build up your own in order to market to them
• Consumers want you to engage with them in social media, but only when and where they want to hear from you.
• Not sure contests are meaningful so much as getting endless non brand centric people following you for free “stuff”. Free stuff followers are not as useful as brand followers.
  
• “Social Media builds employee morale” was a concept that came up a couple times during the conference.
• You don’t market what you want to say. You market what your customers want to hear.

Best practices:

• Social operates on a shoestring at most brands – requires empowerment, education and training to succeed
• Not all social media programs are the same.
• It’s important not to isolate social media for the organization; you need to immerse your business in it. It’s everyone’s job…. it shouldn’t be just one person.
  
• Make conscious choice for structure – do not do the easy thing and lump it with PR or Marketing
• Use everything as an opportunity for learning – Don’t overreact to customer comments
• Flickr, YouTube good social media for hotels to use for customer engagement. Visual content very importnat for hotels (and has SEO value too)
  
• Leverage existing social networks and influencers – go to existing communities instead of wasting time and money building one (Facebook Connect, for example, expanding between brand site and “vibrant” community).
• Consider a dedicated page on your website for social media – Hard Rock Hotel has one full page dedicated to all social media & review sites. To shatter industry benchmarks, it’s essential to bake your SM strategy into your site. Consider your market – go to where they are and engage them. Morgans Hotels has whole website section dedicated to music
• Employees can take brand message, localize it, and put their personality behind it. – participation FUN for employees! Don’t just throw a bunch of rules at them.
• The days of content heavy & marketed website are changing – they go to review sites and then go to the hotel site for booking. Consumers don’t trust pretty, over the top, content laden sites.
• By utilizing closed loop promotions you maintain parity with OTA’s.

VIII) HHOTELCONSULT’S Action / Implementation

For FB:

• Add booking widget, customize the tabs and cross-integrate your social media channels.
• Add analytics tracking wherever you can to gauge success in raw data form
• virtual gifts/money (First 10 to post get a comp glass of wine, and then after posts say the deal is the free glass has to be for a close friend… be tricky, have fun, get creative)
• Leverage Facebook Connect when possible.
• allow management to post changes, updates, pics
• Birthday related offer?

For Twitter

• compartmentalize social media campaign by having smaller departments reach out – multiple twitter accounts across all hotels for different reasons – chef, F&B, sales/banquets, spa (whichever works or would be viable)
• add analytics tracking
• integrate/allow management to post changes, updates, pics
• Reached out to influencers at smaller groups – 500-700% ROI from inviting “influentials” to a tasting
• Twestival?
• Birthday related offers?

For Geolocation:

• Research about Gowalla, Twhrrl, others we can possibly interact with?
• Create Foursquare Mayoral Advisory Board
• Foursquare deals/offers
• Flash mob or Swarm Badge opportunity?
  

Website

• local tweet map on site mashing up tweets with brand mentions, associated conversations
  
• have one dedicated social media page per hotel
• If you offer discounts, info, events, etc online, make them “Facebookable” and “Twitterable”

Misc:

• Be creative – Morgan’s printed QR codes on cocktail napkins
• showing OK Go on YouTube $100,000 spend to sponsor video – less than 3 weeks 10 million views on YouTube. Press exposure
• Fairmont launched dedicated Presidents Club forum on FlyerTalk in July ’09. Now has 412 threads; page views >200,000

Follow Up Questions (endless, frankly – and I WANT TO HEAR YOURS! What didn’t we talk about that you wanted to talk about?):

• I would like to chat more about HOW, & not WHAT: how to integrate API’s, how to interact w/mobile-geolocation, how to implement facebook connect, etc. Check out mobile hotel app – Smart Stay
  
• Contact morgans about themed hashtags – Morgans Hotels tagged NYC airport codes on Foursquare during recent blizzards, ran ads, & generated some sales.
  
• Live streaming video & webcam opportunities?
  
• Is creating a list of your hotel’s followers on twitter necessary?
• How do you use FB connect for one small hotel?

The rest that is cut off (hey I am a hotel guy, not a HTML guy) says “($42/month), would you?”  You can take the survey yourself right here: TripAdvisor Survey for Owners.

I will let the pic speak for itself.  I know it’s just a survey, but I assume some people might have a concern in regards to this?  How about: mom and pops, small innkeepers, non branded or flagged properties that don’t have a mega-marketing budget to leverage every site, and I could go on.  I know it’s only $500, but it adds up…. and if they were to really go through with this I assume it would be irrevocably damaging to their long term credibility.  Even Yelp has tiptoed around ethics issues with business owners, review manipulation, etc – but haven’t done something this obvious.  Of course, the question is:  In their quest to monetize, will TripAdvisor risk their credibility to do so?

Any thoughts?  Is it that big a deal?  Would it create an unfair gap between “haves” and “have nots”, or is TripAdvisor supplying link and phone info moot, because guests will call the hotel directly anyway?