Two destination blogs (re)launched last week that both integrate social media elements in a very nice way:

Travel Oregon Blog

Travel Oregon (full disclosure: we work with them and provide content to them) relaunched their blog last week.

The blog was already considered by many one of the nicest and most successful destinations blog around before the redesign. The new blog is – in my opinion – even more interesting.

Travel Oregon now integrates not only videos (from YouTube, Vimeo etc.) but also Flickr photos into the blog. The “Oregon Snapshots” come from the Travel Oregon Flickr group. The blog footer invites readers to follow Travel Oregon on Twitter, the sidebar now includes a polling module. All great social elements for a blog and best of all – they do not cost a lot. 

If you want to see best practices in action do not miss the RSS feeds offered for the blog – not only are different feeds for the different categories available, the feed page also explains how feeds work and offers good resources. We need more examples like this to drive RSS adoption to where it should be!

Experience Columbus

Experience Columbus launched their blog last week and while they are a little bit later to the party they for sure come in a nice dress. The blog includes several interesting social media elements.

In the sidebar all staff members (18!) who are on Twitter are shown with their Twitter icons.

Also listed are links to the Experience Columbus Facebook page, myspace page and Flickr group. Unique is the integrated delicious feed for websites bookmarked by staff on the social bookmarking site. This can turn into an interesting resource e.g. for journalists who are looking for background info on the city. The only thing I would like to see improved is an easier navigation back to the main ExperienceColumbus page, maybe in the top level navigation. 

While playing around with the main Experience Columbus site I found some great elements other destinations should have a look at. 

The individual listings for hotels, attractions etc. include nicely integrated Google maps. But other destinations offer that as well. What I have not seen anywhere else are events listings that are tied to the individual member listing and therefore tied to the map location. So if I look at the Motorcycle Hall of Fame I can see all events taking place at the Hall of Fame in an extra tab. 

The infrastructure should allow Experience Columbus to very easily do even more as the events data is tied now to geo-data. Example: A Google map that shows all events taking place during a certain time within a certain radius around a specific place: “Let’s see what events are taking place within a mile radius from our hotel for the weekend we will be in Columbus”. Events are also available via a different RSS feeds.

Oh, the possibilities …

Almost every session at the TIA Marketing Outlook Forum in Portland talked about social media. Luxury, millennial travelers, hotels, attractions, DMOs – it was mentioned in almost all presentations or panel discussions (and there were close to 30). This was not surprising given the fact that the conference deals with marketing trends and few would argue that social media is THE thing happening at the moment.

But another thing was very surprising: there seems to be a quickly widening gap between those that are involved in social media and those who are now trying to get on the train before it pulls out of the station.

When asked what they had the biggest success with in the last 12 months and what they would focus more on in the next 12 months those being already involved in social media said they would do even more. Those who are just getting started or have not even started to dabble in this space said they would focus on various other things.

The session about online marketing / social media for attractions was very interesting in that regard as well. While the presenters showed great examples for pretty sophisticated social media campaigns, the Q&A session revealed that many in the audience where feeling overwhelmed and close to panic. And who would not feel for them?

Imagine being a destination, attraction, hotel or organization that has no experience whatsoever in social media. No Facebook account, no photos on Flickr, no blog, no Twitter account. And at the same time you competitors have already thousands of followers, fans or subscribers. But even worse: they have already made their mistakes and (hopefully) learned from them. You still have this ahead of you while your “social” competitors are setting new benchmarks.

At Marketing Outlook Forum I saw a “social gap”. On the one side those who are already using social media to their advantage, on the other side those who look in awe and try to figure out a way into the game. The problem is that in social media there are no shortcuts. It takes time to build meaningful engagement. The longer you wait, the bigger this social gap will get.

Are you seeing this social gap too? Are there any good examples of organizations that started late and yet were quickly very successful? What should those do that are just getting started?

(Thanks to mwichary for the photo).

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!

We are the first ones to admit it – for being a company involved in social media we have done a bad job blogging. But there was just too much to do: grow the company, hire new people, meet more customers, speak at more conferences – all the usual excuses. No more!
Now that we have grown and have more key players on board we also have the resources to turn this blog into something more meaningful. We did some brainstorming what this blog should be about and almost everybody agreed that the sweet spot for this blog will be somewhere where technology, travel and social media meet or overlap. So hopefully over the next weeks we will start sharing thoughts on trends, developments, websites and more – all touching travel, technology and social media.

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.