Social Media, Technology and Transparency

My friend Everett Potter asked for a few predictions for 2010. Have a look at his post and what other industry folks think is ahead.

Kathy’s Travel Industry Predictions for 2010

Customer-centric: the customer will become the sales force, product developers, service centers and resolution managers for companies. Those companies who offer creative tools to enable this will see success. This will occur both online and offline.

Social Media: will be a game changer. Tour providers will invest in developing and implementing social media strategies. Those who embrace, interact, listen and share will see significant changes in customer retention, referral bookings, and resolution/customer satisfaction. Facebook will lead the consumer interaction, twitter will lead the pr, mobile devices will lead content sharing. Get Satisfaction and Trip Advsior will continue to navigate reviews and resolution.

Curators will Rule: too much noise, too much information, and too many people talking become increasingly overwhelming. In order to make decisions people will rely on people/sites they trust in the travel space (and in all decision making). Blogs, travel bloggers, twitter leaders and niche vertical sites will gain exposure and influence as they turn down the volume.

Technology will Enable: Live content, original, interesting, authentic content, interactive maps, new mobile apps, and rich media will be king.

The Sandbox will be broken: new technology and innovation will break the old sandbox where companies that do business in a certain way are thought of as leaders. Authentic, agile, innovative individuals will trump large companies and years in business.

Specialization vs Expansion: Niche Tour Operators will gain exposure and success. Consumers will be looking and able to find smaller companies who offer exactly what they are looking for.

Distribution: Niche Tour providers will increasingly distributed their products and content across new platforms and to new sites. The egocentric silos of personal websites and brochures will become only part of the real-estate content and data live on. There will be a consistent data structure and understanding of API and data feeds.

Collaboration vs Exclusivity: success will come through working together between multiple entities travelers, tour operators, destination management companies, tourism boards.

Transparency vs Selective Sharing: Information, links and reviews of hotels, routes, guides, restaurants will all be open. Consumers will know who is actually operating tours and what levels/values are involved. The line between incoming tour operators and outgoing will continue to blur.

Experiences will Drive Itineraries: Travelers will continue to search out authentic experience, unique/boutique accommodations, passionate personalities and cutting-edge destinations for new stories they can re-tell  for a lifetime.  Destinations will blur, people and community will become more memorable as we search out quality off-line engagement.

Having read “all marketers are liars” I love this suggestion…

Socialmedia100 | chrisbrogan.com

In a recent post, Seth Godin offers some storytelling suggestions:

Start with the truth. Identify the worldview of the people you need to reach. Describe the truth through their worldview. That’s your story. When you overreach, you always fail. Not today, but sooner or later, the truth wins out. Negative or positive, the challenge isn’t just to tell the truth. It’s to tell truth that resonates.

Newspapergrl writes on internet marketing, affiliate marketing, business blogging and social media

SEO Blogging – What it is and What it’s Not

I want to clear up a misconception about blogging. There are purists who only consider blogs as communities and who have certain ideas about what blogs are. For the small business owner, blogs are ideal tools for SEO. In other words, to get higher search engine rankings (and therefore traffic) for keyword phrases that relate to their business.

Choose a Few Specific Phrases that Relate to Your Business to Focus On
Small business owners may think they should go after general words – like “sunglasses” when what they really should do is go after much more specific phrases like “designer sunglasses.” Your chances of getting to the top of results if someone types in sunglasses are pretty remote. However, “designer sunglasses” may be easier because there’s less competition.

Blogs are Easier to Manage than Paid Search
Many times small businesses can’t afford to do a lot of paid search advertising or they simply lack the expertise. If you’re not careful, you could go on vacation and spend $4,000 without meaning to (like discussed in this video by Dr. Ralph Wilson and Catherine Seda). All because you set your budget thinking it was monthly, when it was actually daily.

Paid Search Costs Keep Going Up
As more people run ads on search engines, you pay more per click. Some keywords can cost $6 or more for each click. The price you pay depends on how many competitors there are at a given time and how well your ad is written. MarketingSherpa just released some data based on a survey of top Internet marketers that confirms this. Big brands increase budgets, small business look for ways to manage costs (like go after more specific keywords, write better ads, or simply spend less).
You can Outsource Blog Creation and Writing
My solution is to set up a blog where writers post daily and focus on a few keyword phrases relating to your business. Then you know how many posts you get per month for your budget. They are PERMANENT links, unlike paid ads that go away when you stop paying for the ad to run.

An SEO Blog has a Specific Purpose – to Help your Web Site Rank Higher in Search Engines
The blog is not intended to get comments or draw a lot of visitors to the blog itself. Think of the blog as the motor on your web site. It’s a quick way to add links to your web site. Those links help your web site appear higher in search results. The writing is more like articles than blog posts. The blog is simply a publishing platform to make it easy to get content up quickly.

SEO is a Long Term Investment that Pays Off Over Time
You don’t need to understand any more of that to use this technique. I’ve been helping clients who barely know what a blog is. One thing you must understand about SEO is that it is an INVESTMENT. It’s not overnight success. It builds up over time. You can do things to hopefully speed that up (such as using SEO plugins and optimizing your blog well).

This blog made no money at first and didn’t have much traffic. It took a good year before i saw results (but I wasn’t blogging for traffic or for business, I was simply writing about what I was passionate about – which is different than an SEO strategy). After a few years my blog has made some residual income and built a reputation.

Building Credibility and Trust by its Very Nature Takes Time
Think of it like moving into a new neighborhood where no one knows who you are. It takes time to build relationships, meet the neighbors, make friends, and get acclimated. If you don’t try at all you probably won’t make many friends. You certainly won’t become popular, unless you have a positive reputation already or if someone they know with high trust endorses you.

Each time you add a new link with a keyword phrase you are getting a vote and building credibility in search engines. Blogging is one way to do this. It’s a great strategy if you’re on a budget.

MOO’s Business Card API And The Mashups Made With It – ReadWriteWeb

MOO’s Business Card API And The Mashups Made With It
Written by Sarah Perez / October 14, 2008 6:00 AM / 1 Comments
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The popular and quirky MOO.com is a print shop providing stickers, postcards, business cards and personal introduction cards, which are narrower and longer cards. The products can feature artistic images you select from the site’s offerings or can be printed using photos you upload to the service. Notable for promoting the artwork of hip designers, the MOO service is a favorite among the young and hip as well as among those who want to stand out as being non-traditional.

Recently, MOO launched an API for their service and then ran a contest for developers to encourage the creation of unique and interesting applications.

The MOO contest wasn’t a big production, but rather a weekend-long project that was held at last month’s BarCampLondon5. According to Stefan Magdalinski, MOO CTO, the mashups are “a little rough and ready (knocked together in hours, in true barcamp spirit), but they do demonstrate the range of things one can do quite nicely.”
The Winner

The winning application built with the MOO API goes to Neil Crosby’s Ten Word MOO Card. With this mashup, the app takes the best rated reviews from the The Ten Word Review web site, which lets you review anything in exactly ten words, and then creates MOO cards from the reviews. To make cards featuring your reviews, you need only enter your username in the box provided and the app will generate the cards for you. Here’s an example:

However, if you’re not an active user of The Ten Word Review, you might be more interested in some of the other applications instead.

1) Make MOO postcards via MMS: This app from Sam Machin looks really handy as it solves the problem of getting images from phone to website by utilizing MMS to bypass the tedious the offloading and uploading process. The app receives an MMS sent to a shortcode and posts that to MOO. It then SMS’s you back with a URL from which you can visit the MOO.com web site to continue the design and complete the order. With this app, you could, for example, create MOO cards on the fly from the conference you’re attending. How fun!

2) Make MOO Postcards from Flickr Sunsets: Nathan O’Hanlon’s app lets you create MOO cards from Flickr photos of sunsets in your area. The mashup’s interface isn’t pretty, but hey, it was built in only 3 hours! All you have to do is enter in your location, and the app grabs photos from Flickr and sends them to MOO.com:

Isn’t Tampa pretty?

3) Make MOO minicards from Amazon book covers: Simon Willison’s app could be handy for published authors. With this app, you can create MOO minicards from Amazon book covers. The app lets you search for a book by any keyword – author, subject, title, etc.

4) Generate minicards with your Wii codes on them for sharing: Dominic Hodgson’s app will appeal to avid Wii gamers. This app has the most well-designed and developed front-end and lets you customize options like font, font size, front image color, etc. before creating the cards.