Key summary points from the wrap-up session:

1. The economy is not in a depression, just a recession
- The current environment is bad and the next months will be bad, possibly worse
- In the last quarter, quarterly consumer spending fell for the first time since 1991
- Things should get better 2nd half of 09

2. Consumers are pessimistic
- Consumers are “on pause”
- Everybody is waiting for the financial markets to calm down
- Hope is that after the election consumer confidence will start picking up

3. Leisure travel proves resilient to the downturn
- But: shorter trips, closer to home
- Consumers spend less; value and deals really important
- Many consumers are open-minded about where to travel, they just want a deal

4. Business travel is the weakest link
- 35% of trips are for company internal reasons
- 81% think that technology can replace travel

5. Airline industry has a huge problem
- 72% of US travelers said they decided not to took at least one trip less last year because of air travel being such a hassle
- These not taken trips cost the travel industry 26 billion in lost revenue.

6. Hotels begin to feel the impact
- While rates are still holding up, occupancy levels have started to fall
- Markets that have new rooms come online and a reduction in air service are facing difficult times
- Markets impacted most are Las Vegas, Phoenix, Nashville, Detroit

7. Look at new market opportunities
- Latinos (spend 60 billion in the US on travel in 2007)
- Millennials (now 18-28)

8. Chicken come home to roost
- Negative short-term outlook for travel from Europe and the rest of the world to the US

9. NextGenTraveler is defined more by attitude toward and use of technology than demogaphics
- NextGen travelers represent 26% of travel spend
- Travelers that read online reviews spend 85% more on travel than those who write online reviews
- People who are on MySpace spend less on travel than those who are not
- People on LinkedIn spend 50% more on travel than those who are not
- 37% of travelers are influenced by personal comments / reviews on social networking sites

10. Need to take a long view with regards to sustainable travel
- The push for green travel seems to loose momentum as few consumers are willing to pay more for greener products

I will try and post some summaries for some of the individual sessions. There were some really interesting insights on social media as well as green travel. Follow me on Twitter to get the updates.

Thanks to apokrisis, Jamber, RhiRhi, astrobdw, mikerosenberg, ariannap for twittering about #mof08.

A question on everybody’s mind in travel is the impact the slowing economy will have on the industry. At the TIA Marketing Outlook Forum in Portland this week it will be on of the central questions to be discussed.

Not everybody thinks a slowing economy will be bad for business. Travel Weekly last week had an article about Crystal Cruises which thinks it will benefit from a slowing economy as it might lead to people being “less focused on the material world”. It gets even better:

“People will come to realize that the most important things in life are experiences, not possessions. In other words, the shift in societal values plays to travel’s strengths: We are in the business of providing experiences and are thus perfectly positioned to take advantage of the postcorrection environment. [….] I’m sure one could make a convincing parallel argument that, rather than portraying travel as catharsis, it’s time to play to another of travel’s strengths: escapism. This winter could be the perfect time to flee one’s problems by taking a cruise or hitting the beaches of Cancun or the Caribbean (or, if one can afford it, indulge at the Oberoi Udaivilas in India or the Four Seasons Tented Camp Golden Triangle in Thailand) …”

This perspective is not shared by some of the shrewdest business people around – the Venture Capital folks in Silicon Valley. They are predicting thought times ahead of us. Sequoia, on of the leading VC companies, put together a really great presentation outlining the current economic challenges and the drivers behind it.

As a background: Sequoia has funded companies like Apple, Cisco, Oracle, invested in Yahoo and a company you might have heard of called Google. Take a look at the presentation; see their arguments and what they think about the future. Not a lot of talk about cruises, beaches and massages there.

It would be nice if all of us could escape more, travel more and focus less on the material world – alas it will not happen. I see a bigger focus on deals and value as well as an increased push for marketing that can be clearly measured in our future. Or am I wrong? What are your thoughts? Travel impacted? If so, how? What does it mean for travel and tourism marketing?
(Thanks to respres for the Foreclosure photo!)

A new, very neat tool allows users to analyze twitter patterns: day, time and frequency of posts for a particular user. Bubbles show the number of tweets for a particular time for each day of the week as well as replies by that user for that time.

I ran reports for some of the top twitter users in tourism with interesting results:

Experience Columbus uses an RSS feed to push content. Most Tweets are pushed shortly after midnight EST / 9pm PST. What this means is that many times when I check Twitter in the morning, I have a long list of Columbus tweets sitting on top of each other. And first thing in the morning I have to check email – no time to check tweets. And therefore not the best strategy to engage me.

Baltimore also pushes feeds via RSS but also engages consumers with replies and non-feed posts. The feeds are pushed in the morning (8am / 9am EST) which seems to be a better time to get clicks of tweets.

Philadelphia has truly some amazing engagement with Twitter users, activity on Twitter is spread out over the day. I recommend following some of the discussions that are taking place here as a best practice.

Arizona has great engagement as well but all Twitter activity takes place from Monday to Friday between 8am and 5pm.

So what are the learnings? If you push a RSS feed via Twitter, time it so the tweets go out during the day, not at night. Even better, find a way to spread the tweets out so users have time to digest them. But don’t limit your account to pushing feeds only, that is not what Twitter’s strength is. Reply, discuss, ask, reach out. And if you really want to engage and connect with consumers, you have to be there 7 days a week. Hey, nobody said this would not be a lot of work!

A new report by Forrester is causing some controversy by claiming that RSS usage has peaked at 11% of mainstream consumer adoption. If that were the case if would be a sad story for everybody in the content business.

I have to agree with those who say that the questionnaire was flawed. The vast majority of consumers on the web uses RSS feeds but have no clue that they are doing so. They just see and enjoy the results in form of personalized pages, widgets feeds and more.

At this point it is also no longer about RSS anymore. The point is that today as a web user I will decided which content I want, from whom I want it, when I want it and where I want it. RSS is of course the main vehicle for that allowing me for example to “blend” my own newspaper by getting local news from one source, business news from another, weather from a third etc. and looking at it on e.g. Netvibes or Pageflakes.

But the same principle applies to other feeds like Twitter (here we go again) where a user can decide who to follow, Friendfeed etc.

Smart content no longer lives on a website, it is mobile and gets pulled into the place where people want to consume it. If your content is not mobile and flexible it will die a lonely death.

Twitter usage by DMOs and tourism organizations is clearly growing with the number of DMOs using Twitter in the US we could find doubling from 30 to over 60 within the last 4 weeks. The number of followers for most of the DMOs is however still very small (we will have a more in depth analysis on growth rates for the top “Twitters” in US tourism later this week) with the most successful organizations attracting only a couple of hundred followers so far.

The numbers become even smaller when you take into consideration that a lot of DMOs are following each other. Even the poster-child of Twitter usage in the travel industry – Southwest Airlines – has only 4,000 followers. Not much for an airline that transports over 90 million passengers a year.

So what is the point of spending time on Twitter and reaching only a couple of hundred people when one can send an email to 100,000-150,000 people? Especially as Twitter does not give you the analytics email (if done right) can give or does not allow you to use rich media and limits you to only to 140 characters (TwitWall might change that a bit).

The point is that tools like Twitter cannot be compared to other marketing vehicles like email, radio, TV etc. It is not about blasting out a message to as many people as possible. It is about one-to-one or one-to-few interactions in a highly relevant context. This can not be done if you talk to thousands of people.

I am going to say it one more time: Twitter offers huge opportunities for the travel industry. Not because millions and millions of travelers are using Twitter already but because it is the perfect tool to learn how to deal with “micro-interactions” that will soon replace a good chuck of what we call today “marketing”.

If you cannot figure out how to interact with 200 people that are following you today, how are you going to handle 20,000? It will take time to learn this, to set up the structure needed to manage it and to develop the tools needed to measure it. Better start today. And better follow your peers to quickly learn what works and what does not.

With a worldwide community of over 100 million members, Facebook has nearly limitless potential and obvious benefits, which is why the Dine Out Vancouver campaign is so exciting.

Quick stats for the group:
Members: 6,684 (currently)
Established:  for the 2008 campaign
Comments: 414
Photos: 207

These numbers are especially significant because the campaign ended Feb 3, 2008, so the remaining members are so excited for the next installment that they have remained within the group and in many cases active.  The last post was October 3, 2008.

Why this matters:
Due to their group member’s profiles Vancouver now knows much more than they did before about the people that are invested in their marketing.  Vancouver provided their enthusiasts with a platform to interact and in turn created a viral marketing success story from a free Facebook account and the event information that was previously available, in static versions. Additionally, people are so engaged within this campaign that they take pictures of their meals and in many cases uploaded them to the group’s page, which caused them to return to the group post event.  The continued interactions among the group members are additional touch points for Vancouver to engage their market.

Keys to Success:
Vancouver knew that their customers loved this campaign, it sells out quickly, comments were showing up on blogs and other social communities, and perhaps the best indicator of all was that seats were being resold on Craigslist, much like coveted concert or sporting event tickets.  People were already discussing, planning and waiting for Dine Out 2008, so Vancouver merely provided them with a platform to express this passion with likeminded users.

Moral of the story:
In order to gain attention and spread virally within the fiercely competitive Facebook landscape the interest and excitement needs to exist.  If you create a group, members will come, but only if they are invested in the topic, passion will drive involvement.

Twitter is going more and more mainstream in the travel space with new Destination Marketing Organizations and Convention / Visitors Bureaus joining every day. Wondering which US destinations are already on Twitter? Here is a list of who we have found so far. We probably missed a few, please let us know which ones. Next week week we will publish our monthly update on how these destinations are doing on Twitter, whose following is growing the fastest etc.

So here is who we found on Twitter, sorted by date of first tweet:

Who did we miss? Let us know!

If you are just starting with Twitter have a look at what Chicagoland is doing on Twitter – they managed to get over 200 followers in less than 2 weeks due to a very clever “twitter recruitment” campaign. Very impressive!

Despite the many (emphasis on many) praises we at GoSeeTell sing for social media, search and ecommerce there is still no replacement getting out and into the real world.  Exploring, networking, conversing and socializing- while possible on the web do not produce the same levels of engagement and fulfillment that can be found offline.

Given the current popularity of sites that facilitate planning and organizing offline events online- I cannot possibly be the only person that enjoys getting out from behind the screen.

Upcoming is a localized community that allows users to search events by topic, date or popularity and even add their own to the mix.  This is Yahoo’s massive calendar of events, and if you have not yet checked it out I encourage you to browse around- as you will likely be surprised with how much fun is happening in your area.

Beyond the obvious social benefits of this site, it is also a great resource to share your destination or organization’s calendar of events.  By syndicating events across multiple sites (in addition to your own) a potentially new and previously untouched market is exposed to your content.

Other bells and whistles the site offers include the ability to choose to attend (RSVP) or watch events.  Placing an event on a watch list is in essence putting it on a short list of possibilities to be committed to at a later date. These features matter if you are the host because you will know about your guests before they arrive and how many you should expect. Also, you can keep track of members that watched your event but then did not actually attend- great for measurement.  As a guest, this is a great feature because it allows you to view fellow attendees prior to the event and remind yourself of events and activities of interest.

Upcoming, while the largest is not the only online event community, eventful is another leader and in addition to similar features as upcoming it also allows users to demand events in their area. Users demand bands that may have neglected a specific city on a current tour, speakers, specific shows or conventions and when enough members start demanding the same events they show up on the site’s homepage, which if nothing else allows users to connect with each other based upon similar interests and requests.

Likely you have already started to think about your weekend, so why not use one of these sites to plan your own fun while sharing your destination’s events with a new audience.

Let us know what you try and if you find anything fabulous – we love hearing great stories.

If you have not guessed it- we at GoSeeTell are pretty high on Twitter, but even if you have not been drinking our Kool-Aid there are some tools and resources worth checking out, if only for productivity and sanity’s sake.

Let’s face it, Twitter is a slippery slope to losing an entire afternoon if you allow yourself to wander into the depths of the twitterverse. The next time you want to know what the masses are linking to, a great way to remain on the forefront of internet trends and conversations, head to Twitturly.com.

Twitturly tracks the 100 most popular sites over a 24-hour sliding time scale, so content remains fresh and quality high. The site’s spiders count the votes in this popularity contest by following each link posted on Twitter, even those using tinyurl or Snipurl (snurl), to the final URL, so every link is counted.

While this site will help you find popular sites faster, I cannot promise that you won’t still lose track of time as you surf Twitter’s top 100– do not say we did not warn you.

Disclaimer: Given the impending election many of the most popular sites are politically influenced, so if this is not your cup of tea skip those links. Regardless you will learn about the sites that have received tweeple seal of approval.

We will start blogging more about Twitter tools and Twitter sites we like.
If you have been using Twitter for a while you will probably know many of these tools already.

Are you having a hard time finding the right people to follow?
Want to see who you should follow but are not following yet?

Try Twannabe.

Twannabe allows you to quickly compare your list of users who you are following to another user’s list.
So pick somebody you think know the area you are interested in very well and see who they are following. Simple as that. More difficult is managing the increased number of tweets resulting form this exercise.