Travel Industry

Elliott Ng will represent UpTake during  the PhocusWright 2009 Conference, Blogger Summit Town Hall on Wednesday, November 18th at 9:00 a.m. Ten topics were suggested by the panelists for discussion during a planning meeting a few weeks ago. We decided to collect the best posts and  examples about each subject and showcase them here. We hope this series lends itself to more insightful discussion during the Town Hall presentation. One of the topics suggested was “how to build community.”

The reooccuring directive I found across all the advice for building an online community sounds like something Lenin would say:

Community First. Always. 

Here are ten tips from ten experts to build a great online community:

A good community needs time.

1. Be clear about your strategy, the time needed and how the community will benefit.   Jordan Viator of  Convio  slideshare delivers the basics needed to create an online community.  She encourages an almost idealistic approach suggesting success depends on the community being open, trusting, and engaging. Oh yes, and you must  promote it using all forms of social media. I am still amazed at the amount of time needed to administrate much less grow a community.

2. You need a little wind, not a gale. In her interview, A Primer for Building Online Community, Nancy White from Full Circle, an online community consultancy firm, gives clear, basic advice to review before you draw your first wire frame.  She suggests a community organizer, “create just enough structure to create just enough comfort and navigability – don’t over build, over legislate or over formalize, especially at the start. It’s like making a wind break to get the fire going. You need a little wind, not a gale.”  I would like to make quite a few changes to Travel Insights based on this idea alone.

3.  Give up and give control to the participants.  Jeremiah Owyang in a Forester report suggests no one is in charge of an online community. He suggests the community organizers allow the participants to run the show and expect the results to be unpredictable.  I find the concept of giving up control strangely comforting and it makes me re-think the current design and features.

4.  Go offline to build the online group.  Pam Mandel of NerdsEyeView and travel editor at Blogher  encourages bloggers to meet their online friends in the real world.  I suggest you attend a Blogher conference to see the power of this advice. But it was also suggested by Tony Adams, instigator of San Francisco Geek Dinners. He said it well, there are commonalities between the two that can be important in building your online community like creating conversation, participation, etc.”  I too believe offline and online can work in tandem to create a cohesive community.

5.  Think community before technology suggests Cindy Waxer of IT Management.  She states that bells and whistles are more likely to frustate users rather than encourage them to come back.  Match technology to the community needs and desires.

6. Give people something they can be proud of. This is Matthew Haughey’s suggestion on Fortuito.us for generating good community content to encourage better communication and weed out the “cranky screeds,” as he calls them.

7. Conversations build communities. In the Wall Street Journal  article, The Fan Knows Best, the authors suggest the best communities foster multiple means of interacting. including the opportunity to chat in real time, on forums, ability to promote events, blog, etc.

8. Think small. A community of 100 active members delivers a better experience than thousands of members with nothing to say suggests Jeb Banner, CEO and co-founder of  SmallBox.

Be a Cheerleader

9. Become a cheerleader.  This tip is from the always helpful, Problogger.  Simply put, cheer your community along by sharing in milestones hit, traffic, editorial mentions, etc.  Share the success.

10. Get them engaged. Angela Connor states on her Online Community Strategist blog. Her ideas were straightforward:   interview them, find out what they want, help them, communicate with them. Sounds easy, but refer back to number one–how much time do you have to devote to the engagement?

Remember:  Community First. Always.

Photos courtesy of:

Clock image courtesy of: Mararie on Flickr

Cheerleader image courtesy of: DeusXFlorida

Elliott Ng will represent UpTake during  the PhocusWright 2009 Conference, Blogger Summit Town Hall on Wednesday, November 18th at 9:00 a.m. Ten topics were suggested by the panelists for discussion during a planning meeting a few weeks ago. We decided to collect the best posts and  examples about each subject and showcase them. We hope this series lends itself to more insightful discussion during the Town Hall presentation.–Patricia Jenkins, Editor

Why do people blog, or read blogs? If you restrict the discussion to travel blogs, it gets rather interesting. Here’s a breakup and some examples of the different types of travel blogs, which should offer some answers as to their utility for both consumers and the industry.

Bootsnall

UGC Blog Networks – Where every traveler and blogger is also the consumer. Examples include TravBuddy, Bootsnall and Real Travel. Members publish travelogues, and others read it. Provides authentic destination and attraction reviews for consumers, and this aggregated UGC database is what travel content providers are looking at as a source for travel guides.

Gadling

Company Owned Blogs – These blogs aim simply to inform and interact with visitors, and engage the community. Examples include Worldhum, Gadling and Jaunted. As far as consumers are concerned, they get the latest travel news, reviews and trends.

Worldhum belongs to the Travel Channel which Scripps is buying from Cox Communications, Gadling is part of the Weblogs Inc. Network which belongs to AOL, and Jaunted is part of SFO Media which in turn is a part of Conde Nast. Inspite of the tangled corporate web, these blogs are stand-alone, in the sense that the business model is based on revenue from ads, and not as part of a larger strategy to promote the parent company.

UpTake

Travel Company Blogs – Where the blog is part of an overall corporate strategy for brand promotion and marketing. Examples include UpTake’s blog network (more details here), and the Oyster Hotel Reviews blog.

 Of special note is the photo fake-out section on the Oyster blog, where they show side-by-side pictures of promotional images put out by a hotel, and the real ones taken by Oyster’s own reviewers. This section on their blog has gained Oyster lots of free publicity and media references.

Travel Rants

Consumer Travel Blogs – Focused on issues important to real travelers – complaints, problems with service, solutions to make travel easier, etc. Examples include Christopher Elliott’s Elliott.org and Darren Cronian’s Travel Rants.

These blogs form a bridge between consumers and the industry, and offer an outlet for consumers to voice their complaints and get some response from an errant company. 

Marriott on the Move

Corporate Blogs – Blogs run by corporate executives of a travel company as part of a marketing strategy to improve brand visibility, put forward a human face as a representative of the company, and aid traffic acquisition.

Best example is the Marriott on the Move blog authored by Bill Marriott, which has accounted for $5 million in sales for Marriott International.

More examples include  Arthur Frommer Online, which is providing a whole new level of visibility to Frommer’s Travel Guides; and Royal Caribbean CEO Adam Goldstein’s Why Not blog, which aims to take visitors into a behind-the-scenes look at Royal Caribbean’s ships. 

Goldstein has been providing running commentary on the progress of ‘Oasis of the Seas’ – the world’s biggest cruise ship which set sail from Finland on its maiden voyage, and is expected to berth in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. on Nov 13.

These corporate blogs also provide an excellent platform for the company to convey its vision to, and communicate with, the company’s own employees.

Visit Florida blog network

DMO Blogs – For blogs run by Destination Management Organizations (DMOs), the main objective is to introduce the destination to prospective visitors.

When the information comes via a blog with an individualistic voice and offers something more than the usual boiler-plate, it makes the DMO – and the destination, seem that much more attractive.

Examples include Visit Florida’s Travel Insiders blog network, GoPhila’s uwishunu.com and San Francisco’s Foodie411 blog.

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Elliott Ng will represent UpTake during the PhocusWright 2009 Conference, Blogger Summit Town Hall on Wednesday, November 18th at 9:00 a.m. Ten topics were suggested by the panelists for discussion during a planning meeting a few weeks ago. We decided to collect the best posts and examples about each subject and showcase them. We hope this series lends itself to more insightful discussion during the Town Hall presentation.–Patricia Jenkins, Editor

The battle of bloggers vs journalists ended a long time ago. Simply put, journalism got taken to the woodshed. Which is why we’re talking about the blending of blogging and journalism. The MSM (mainstream media magazines) have since taken to blogging with a passion, backed up by massive resources, big brand names and the reporting and writing skills that journalists possess.

On the other hand, individual bloggers who have never seen an AP-stylebook or a grumpy editor in their life are increasingly being considered as respectable sources for breaking news and analysis, aided by the viral nature of social networking which heavily favors the voice, passion and timely news offered by bloggers and citizen journalists.

The two sides are heading towards a convergence which is still a work in progress, the rules for which are being made up along the way. A few examples from the travel industry which throw some light on this ongoing convergence:-

LA Times

Jen Leo (Los Angeles Times) – Jen Leo is the star of the LA Times’ Daily Deal blog, which offers a mix of breaking travel news, deals and special offers, and reviews of hotels and destinations.

For LAT readers and other travel media professionals, Jen Leo is a blogger. But as far as travel companies who are the subject of the news are concerned, Jen Leo is a journalist and a reporter for the LA Times.

NY Times

New York Times – Probably the best example of how the MSM has co-opted blogging and turned it into a cocktail of traditional journalism on a blog platform. When you read a post by Matt Gross – The Frugal Traveler, or on Globespotters, In Transit or The Times Traveler, you wouldn’t be wrong in saying that the Times has some amazing bloggers. But it’s not as simple as that.

This excellent Venturebeat piece explains how a blog post published on an NYT blog is a team affair – “Times bloggers don’t work on their own. They don’t handle every aspect of their blogs. Who does what is divided up to bring specific expertise to bear on different parts of each post.” And the team effort continues even after the blog post is published, with promotional efforts on the site and on social networks being divvied up.

TSA Scanning

Nicole White – Freelance writer who runs a personal blog got embroiled in a massive controversy last month, when she accused the TSA of ‘taking her child.’ The blogosphere piled on the TSA in support of Ms. White, and the story quickly went viral. Then the TSA released video which categorically disproved most of the accusations.

Fact remains that no one checked the facts, and almost every major travel blog picked up the story and hit the TSA hard, accepting Ms. White’s version of events on face value. This wouldn’t have happened back in the days when the MSM didn’t publish anything until it got cross-checked and the sources verified.

Press Trips, Freebies & Junkets – Should a blogger accept freebies & junkets? If not, then it becomes virtually impossible to make an in-person visit to a destination before writing a review. Jeremy Head, Tnooz, laments the fact that he was “recently offered $300 to write a 1,500-word feature about El Salvador by a major UK national newspaper. Not just to write it, but to go there, do the trip, take the notes, come home, write it up. And no expenses either.”

Basically, journalists from major magazines and lowly freelance bloggers are now on an almost equal footing, as far as freebies are concerned. And if it is ok to accept freebies as a necessary evil, should there be a disclosure about it included in the post? As per a recent FTC ruling, “the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement” and needs to be disclosed, or face a $11,000 violation.

Offbeat Guides

Travel Guidebooks based on Blogs – Books and reviews in big magazines published by well-known writers who travel the world are now giving way to travel content sourced from local blogs.

David Sifry’s OffbeatGuides, which allows you to create custom travel guides, sources its information from the internet, and combines it “with information from established authors and thousands of locals who are always updating the information about where they live.”

Tnooz

Blog Networks hiring Journalists – Until recently, popular bloggers were snapped by the MSM and put to work as journalists. But nowadays, with newspapers everywhere shutting down or downsizing, it is the blog networks that are doing the hiring.

Tnooz editor Kevin May, with a 16 year background in journalism, says that Tnooz has “a mixture of professional journalists and a range of industry bloggers and other experts in the sector. And, for me, there is no distinction between them all. They all produce unique content for Tnooz and in turn reach a wider and global audience.”

La Times Building photo by Omar Omar; NY Times building photo by alextorrenegra; TSA photo by hughelectronic; Logos courtesy Offbeat Guides & Tnooz.

Elliott Ng will represent  UpTake during the PhocusWright 2009 Conference, Blogger Summit Town Hall on Wednesday, November 18th at 9:00 a.m. Ten topics were suggested by the panelists for discussion during a planning meeting a few weeks ago. We decided to collect the best posts and examples about each subject and showcase them. We hope this series lends itself to more insightful discussion during the Town Hall presentation.–Patricia Jenkins, Editor

How does social media marketing fit into your overall marketing plan? How to get corporate execs to buy into social media as part of your strategy? Some of the examples provided below demonstrate how corporate execs are warming up to social media marketing and factoring it into an overall strategy.

Lonelyplanet

Lonely Planet (www.lonelyplanet.com/) – The dominant publisher of travel guide books is rapidly shifting from books written by LP writers to digital content partly aggregated from the community.  As a result, Lonely Planet has been ramping up their Thorn Tree Community Forum, factoring it into the future development of their main business, and encouraging their website visitors, guide book readers and purchasers to become contributors.

Lonely Planet CEO Matt Goldberg says the shift in focus towards the community and digital content is part of a plan to provide solutions to consumers’ needs, instead of being only a content provider.

Carnival

Carnival (www.carnival.com) – The Carnival Cruise Line, as mentioned here, is aggregating UGC on Twitter and Flickr published by cruise passengers while on-board Carnival’s ships, and keeping up the engagement via John Heald’s blog, and CarnivalConnect.com - an in-house social media platform for their community, and FunShipIsland.com – an interactive virtual tour. All three sites now routinely bring in over 1 million visitors each, and are being used by Carnival for strategic brand positioning.

But it didn’t start like that. John Heald started blogging to create buzz for the launch of a new ship. CarnivalConnect was launched to encourage guests to send invitations to their friends and family. Carnival saw the potential across these platforms, and merged it all into an overall strategy of showing new visitors what’s happening on board, and allowing new and prospective visitors to engage with loyal customers via social media.

Banff

Banff Lake Louise Tourism (www.banfflakelouise.com/) – BLLT was chugging along like most other tourism organizations in Canada, when the Banff Crasher Squirrel popped into a photo and triggered a viral tsunami wave on social media platforms – over 300 blog-posts, 5,000+ tweets, and 650+ facebook posts.

BLLT understood the potential early, and set up a YouTube video, a twitter account for the squirrel, and a Facebook page, along with a search-engine marketing campaign with keyword “squirrel.” End result – $3 million in ad value, reaching out to 80 million people in North America and Europe via online channels, print and TV. The squirrel is now on billboards marketing Banff, and has established a permanent presence on social media platforms.

Affinia

Affinia Hotels (www.affinia.com/) – For hotels wanting to wade into social media marketing, Affinia offers a valuable lesson – It’s all about listening, and responding on time. They’re all over Twitter, talking to their guests, offering assistance and answering queries.  Their My Affinia program allows guests to customize and pre-select in-room amenities – from pillows to iPods. Items are added on to this list or modified based on the feedback that the Affinia reps get from the social media chatter. 

Another good example of a hotel implementing social media marketing as part of an overall strategy is the Roger Smith hotel – details here. The fact that Chris Brogan gives them high marks for listening to their customers and being social-media savvy is a testament to their success at playing the game.

Southwest

Southwest (www.southwest.com/) – Southwest Airlines looks at social media as an extension of their customer engagement offline. Their ‘Nuts About Southwest’ blog is a lot more popular than any blog owned or run by any other airline. The Blog-o-spondent video contest run on the blog went massively viral last year. The blog is updated constantly by a team of Southwest employees.

Newly uploaded videos can be seen every week on Southwest’s  youtube channel. Thousands of networked Southwest employees form a web that stretches into every corner of Linkedin. Jeremy Jameson, Corporate Strategist,  Strategic Planning for Southwest Airlines, says that the social media success is simply an online extension of their corporate culture of engaging in authentic relations and conversations with customers.

Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic (www.virgin-atlantic.com/) – Richard Branson’s mothership offers a valuable lesson in course correction. After taking flak last year over the firing of 13 employees who posted derogatory remarks about customers on Virgin’s corporate Facebook page, Virgin seems to have retooled their approach.

The airline now has a cross-functional Social Spaces Forum group comprised of personnel from eCommerce, PR, customer relations, product and service, marketing etc. The team works closely to understand the social marketplace, shape the direction for activity in social spaces and develop a framework for the business in this area, according to Allison Wightman, Head of Marketing Systems, Virgin Atlantic Airways.    

United

United (www.united.com/) – Again, a lesson in how to turn around a bad situation on the social media networks. Only, United hasn’t done it yet. I’m sure you’ve heard the viral Dave Carroll video on Youtube, which the Canadian singer created after United broke his guitar and refused to pay for it.

In a similar situation, Electronic Arts was hit with a user-uploaded video of a glitch in their game which showed Tiger Woods walking on water. EA promptly responded to this with a professional ad video featuring  Tiger walking on water, which in turn again went viral and nullified all the negative impact of the first video.

As Julie Sturgeon notes, the right approach for United would have been to co-opt Dave Carroll and turn it into an ad, or put out a video of their own in response. 

AA

American Airlines (www.aa.com) – American isn’t usually counted amongst the savvy kids on the social media block, but they have taken a right step with the creation of BlackAtlas.com – a community site offering travel insights from an African-American perspective. No other airline has a brand community like this, and it should go a long way towards helping AA score some much needed social media creds.

According to Roger Frizell, American’s vice president of corporate communications, they’re planning a site in 2010 which would collect in one place all the social media videos and chatter about AA. American, he says, intends to be a part of the conversation, instead of just letting it happen without them. 

Wyndham

Wyndham (www.wyndham.com/) – Again, Wyndham is probably the only hotel group to offer a community site – Womenontheirway.com – which aims simply to foster a sense of community among female travelers.

This community goes a long way towards humanizing Wyndham and adds a touch of gentleness  to the corporate image.

Elliott Ng will represent UpTake during the PhocusWright 2009 Conference, Blogger Summit Town Hall on Wednesday, November 18th at 9:00 a.m. Ten topics were suggested by the panelists for discussion during a planning meeting a few weeks ago. We decided to collect the best posts and  examples about each subject and showcase them. We hope this series lends itself to more insightful discussion during the Town Hall presentation.–Patricia Jenkins, Editor

It’s hard to overstate the importance of being able to game the media and keep your company in the news. But at the end of the day, this is a losing proposition - there’s a limit to the number of press releases, interviews and travel columns you can  squeeze out of the media before they get tired of your PR pitches.

To get past the traditional media barriers, some travel companies are straddling the divide between making the news and breaking it – by becoming a part of the media. The travel companies listed below are the ones who are stealing the media’s mojo and beating them at their own game.

Cheapflights

CheapFlights (www.cheapflights.com/) – CheapFlights has a news section where you’ll find plenty of breaking news. It’s not just about air travel - they write about all things travel – hotels, vacations, legislation, destinations, etc. Even more important – the news really is breaking news, and they consistently publish it before everyone starts weighing in.

Bing

Bing (www.bing.com/) – Microsoft’s Bing Travel hosts a community travel blog with some big-name contributors, including Pauline Frommer, Peter Greenberg, Joel Grus and Rick Steves.

  Entries from this blog are getting a lot of exposure in discussions of hot topics in the news, and it’s quite safe to say that this is one of the things that Bing is doing right. 

Uptake

UpTake (www.uptake.com/) – The sum of it is that the traditional media approach was found lacking, so UpTake took a large part of its PR budget, and launched a blog network with 7 blogs and 50 bloggers, as part of a plan to inflict lethal generosity on the travel industry.

UpTake co-founder Elliott Ng explains it in this Businessweek piece – “Now we’re breaking industry stories… covering other companies’ launches… getting invited to cover conferences as bloggers. We’ve built real relationships with people in the media rather than just pitching stories.”

CarRentals, UK

CarRentals, UK (www.carrentals.co.uk/) – Has a news section, entries from which have started turning up in breaking news alerts of late. The news section features stories from a wide range of subjects, most of which have something to do with either travel or the UK or both.

Rogersmith

Roger Smith Hotel (rogersmith.com/) – Take a look at Roger Smith Life and Roger Smith News and you’ll find that everything – the news, the art and all the people – leads you right back to the hotel in New York. And the connections are a lot deeper than just plain talk.

Earlier this year, they ran an ‘experiment’ where a couple from the UK was put up in a storefront recreation of one of the hotel’s suites. Basically, the couple was living in a see-through glass room on the street in New York City, and it was an art experiment by Roger Smith Life covered by Roger Smith News which brought in huge publicity for the Roger Smith hotel. 

Hilton

Hilton (www1.hilton.com/) - Hilton’s Homewood Suites recently launched a family travel blog and community site named SuiteTrip.com. In their own words, “SuiteTrip.com is your go-to guide for everything family travel-inspired.” 

Another Hilton outreach is into Travelskoot’s Videos (www.travelskoot.com/hilton) - Hilton provides destination videos featuring concierges working at Hilton hotels in these destinations.

Starwood

Starwood (www.starwoodhotels.com/) - Starwood runs a blog for its SPG members, called The Lobby, which is more of a traditional travel blog talking about destinations and attractions from all over the world, rather than just a Starwood blog talking about Starwood hotels and resorts.

Related Posts:- Some Travel Companies Just Get It