Sabre Holdings announced yesterday that they plan to roll out a social networking product for the corporate marketplace. American Express Travel will use the product and I assume this is what Charles Petruccelli referred to at the last PhocusWright conference.

It will be interesting to see what the tool looks like when it is rolled-out, screenshots for the cubeless product from Sabre are available at cubeless.com.

As we have said for quite a while: getting recommendations from colleagues and other trusted sources can make business travel a lot easier. There is no doubt that companies will embrace tools that have been available for leisure travelers as a way to increase service, lower costs and drive compliance. It will be interesting to see how the concept of “openness” and “sharing” that is the heart of Web 2.0 will look like in an enterprise environment.

We may be the last blog to post this video about the current state of Web 2.0 but better be last than not post this important document at all.

And I do not know why so many are complaining that it is not funny or the lyrics don’t rhyme - go and make a better video! We promise to post it here!

Comscore published a new report which highlights again what most of us already know: positive reviews from consumers are very, very good for business. That is because consumers are willing to pay more for products recommended by peers. People are most influenced for hotels, travel products and restaurants and they are willing to pay 20% and more for an excellent service or product.

That is pretty powerful stuff. Image an airline being able to achieve 20% higher yields or a hotel being able to get a 20% higher RevPAR for offering consistently superior service. And yet when I look at ads or booking engines it is all about price, price, price ….

The PhocusWright session about blogging in the tourism industry was a good reminder to be more diligent about this blog. So from now on we will try to blog on a weekly, or - even better - daily basis.

One of the biggest news - at least in my eyes - at PhocusWright was the announcement by the CEO of American Express Travel that Amex would roll out a social networking site for corporate travel soon.

Here are some excerpts of what he had to say:

“Imagine the power of the wealth of expertise of our 14,000 travel counselors around the world, our 1,000 sales client managers and consulting experts … and employees of 20,000 corporate customers around the world that the new technology would allow us to harness in. What we will see soon emerging is the advent of consumer-like behavior in the managed corporate travel world … the end user being more informed, more information-equipped and hence being more global.”

“For example, our dynamic traveler marketing concept, which we plan to launch in 2008, is a pure social software technology-based solution,” he added. “Social software technology platforms will be more and more used to accelerate the base of new product development by incorporating more
strategic partners and customers into the [research and development] process. This will be further accelerated with the 2.0 concept.”

Now that even Amex is getting onto the social networking bandwagon, does anybody still not believe that social networking in travel will go corporate soon?

But how disappointing was the roll-out of another Amex social networking site a couple of days later. Membersknow.com allows Amex card members to share travel related information. However for a site built in 2007 it lacks a lot of features. If you are info user-generated-content, web 2.0 and social networking, read the terms and conditions for the program. Talk about being restrictive …

Although the sheer number Amex card holder will bring a lot of traffic to the site I doubt it will create real stickiness. But at least one big consumer brand is getting it and is starting to utilize (and maybe also monetize) all these consumer relations in a new way.

Every day new studies and whitepapers are published that predict the further rise of user-generated-content (UGC). A key theme is that people are more likely to trust other consumers than marketers.

A recent example from Hotelmarketing.com:

Quite simply, people believe people who are like themselves. People want to hear the opinions and unbiased critiques of like-minded individuals (classic word of mouth). This is the trust component of the decision process being satisfied.

With social networks and consumer content being so readily accessible, satisfying trust is the new industry standard – not marketers spin. The implications of which are enormous now that over 60% of European online consumers take part in social computing activities such as blogging, reading and writing reviews, or taking part in social networking sites.

What most studies fail to mention is that in the world of UGC not all people are created equal. People are different and as a consequence content created by users varies greatly in quality and relevance. UGC has to be relevant and has to come from a trusted source in order to carry more weight than an expert opinion or even a marketing message. In the long run tools and filters will be needed to weed out bad and irrelevant UGC.

Consumers who participate in travel sites that offer user generated content want suppliers to interact with them.

Compete, Inc. today announced findings from its latest study, “Consumer Generated Content in Travel”, which finds that a majority of consumers support a brand responding to consumer generated reviews. Travelers are increasingly turning to their peers as a valued research source and encourage travel marketers to join them in this dialogue.

So you hotels, attractions, restaurants and other suppliers out there: your customers - and potential customers want to hear from you!

Give them what they want, because a lot of money is at stake:

Compete estimates that consumer generated content (CGC) influences over $10 billion a year in online travel. With consumers finding CGC more credible than they do professional reviews or information from travel companies, CGC has emerged as a critical source of travel information.

More on the study at Hotelmarketing.com.

While I did not have a chance to attend the Travolution Summit last week I found a very nice video from the conference.
In it several industry insiders give their perspective of the challenges that the travel industry is facing for the next 12 months.

While the perspectives are for sure tilted towards trends and issues in the online segment some themes emerged across the board:
- UCG, UCG, UCG, UCG - do we need to say more?
- The issue of trust and authority in an online environment
- The impact the whole environmental footprint debate will have
- Rise of video in an online environment
- Creating loyalty

Find the video here.

Maybe we are on to something. Just a hunch. Gut feeling.

PhoCusWright announced today the theme for their next conference and it will be - tata - The Long Tail.

According to PhoCusWright:

Customers communicating with other customers has triggered an unprecedented social networking phenomenon and a resurgence in the Long Tail economy. The Long Tail debunks the old 80/20 rule or Pareto principle. Defending an 80/20 strategy is getting risky. So is automatically dismissing the value of low volume products, under-the-radar channels, small customer groups and obscure key words.

In the Long Tail, embracing niches wins because they cumulatively outnumber or outweigh higher frequency plays. Big companies are successfully harvesting lots of little things while “Davids” are beating “Goliaths” because the size of a reputation matters more than the size of a marketing budget. The alleged “leveling of the playing field” that was supposed to have occurred in the 1.0 world has finally come into its own. Little guys compete on the merits of the products and services, not the size of their marketing budgets. Big guys are all of a sudden at increased risk if they ignore too many little things.

Why do we like to hear this? Well, at GoSeeTell we are betting on the long tail. Instead of building on website we are creating a network of multiple sites that are interlinked while serving different communities.

Niche + network effects = GoSeeTell Network

Brandweek recently had an article about how DMOs are trying to get their arms around user generated content.

“Ad speak and market speak are dead,” said Dale Brill, CMO at Visit Florida, the Sunshine State’s official tourism unit. “Consumers don’t want to hear ad copy. They want to hear first-person from people who are out there.”

It will be interesting to see who the “people who are out there” will be once more DMOs start offering social networking tool. Who will deliver content: consumers or journalists paid by the DMO? Will users be able to share their opinions? Will user generated content be filtered and edited? Time will tell …

Click here to see the Brandweek article.