Sharing The Travel Industry's latest Technology
Marketing 2.0
The End Of Ad Based Revenue?
Feb 16th
A recent study by Click Forensics has revealed a frightening trend for sites that generate revenue through advertising: fraud is on the rise!
“The overall industry average click fraud rate grew to 17.1 percent for the fourth quarter of 2008. That’s up from 16.0 percent in the third quarter of 2008 and from the 16.6 percent rate reported for the fourth quarter of 2007,”
One of the main sources of this type of fraud is BotNet traffic generators. These little programs are often embedded in viruses, trojans, and backdoor vulnerabilities. They basically give some control over your computer to a third party that will use your PC as a money generating machine for their ads.
So what does this mean for the Travel Industry?
If you use Google Ad Words to market your product / website, the likelyhood is that your ad dollars are going to these scammers. In the long run if this issue continues to grow, your budget will have to grow in order to attract the qualified leads that you require to grow your business.
In the meta perspective, the faith in online advertising may begin to diminish. The number of scammers is on the rise, and they are constantly looking for new ways to cheat people for money (I was personally on the receiving end of a sophisticated BotNet virus last week). As the reliability of leads begins to deteriorate, companies may start to feel that the Internet is not necessarily providing the most trackable advertising model.
If online advertising is a major focus of your ad spend, you may want to consider using a traffic quality service like Click Forensics or see what Google is doing with the Ad Traffic Quality Centre.
Social Media For SME Tourism Businesses
Dec 17th
Well aside from my less than sexy title, this is a great find! Hubspot has just posted their webinar that shows companies how to combine SEO, Blogs, and social media (which I would argue includes blogs) to gain marketing results.
Check it out the webinar:
http://www.hubspot.com/archive/sbsm-webinar/
What the Tweet is going on?
Dec 8th
Twitter, the next wave of social media microblogging is sweeping the net. This post tracks the history of the application, its current uses, and what the future may hold for this little app.
If you are not familiar with Twitter, think of it as a mix of a mini blog and an instant messenger program like MS Messenger or ICQ. Users create an account and are given 140 characters to express their thoughts, their finds, and respond to conversation. After users create an account they can connect with friends and business associates around the world to stay in touch, share links and have a conversation.
So who uses Twitter and WHY???
Recently at the PhoCusWright Conference in Hollywood, I was the “silent panelist” for a panel on social media and blogging. My responsibility was to ‘tweet’ or post to Twitter during the presentation, and the audience was able to follow the conversation during the workshop. This usage of Twitter brought a new level of interaction during the workshop, and allowed those at home to follow some of the themes of the discussion.
Kevin May recommended that everyone using Twitter ‘tag’ each post with #phocus08, as a group we were able to generate buzz, and were the 6th most popular topic using Twitter at the time, which generated interest and additional traffic for the conference.
If you are looking to start using Twitter, here are some good recommendations from Social Media Today. If you are interested in the Travel industry, and are looking for some people to follow, you should check out Elliott Ng’s blog post at Uptake. He introduces a number of great travel Twitter users and companies.
Real Value, or Really Distracting?
During the social media conference, a great question was sked from the audience, “Is there any real value in using Twitter? Are you sure that you are not just distracting yourself, and wasting time?” This question becomes more relavant as your friend list grows, (mine is at 522) and you are constantly inundated with updates that range from the mundane, “on train an hour after leaving the office” to the inspirational. One tool that William Bakker recommended to me was TweetDeck, it allows you to layout your twitter feed, all direct replies, and direct messages. This really help to keep any relevant conversations accessible.
What does the future hold?
Well despite how much we may all love Twitter, one fact remains, they don’t have a business model. Their service has been scaled back; not more sms notifications in Europe and in Canada, and shakeups at their headquarters. These facts don’t give me great confidence that we will have Twitter in its current form for much longer, but with the amount of interest and users, we may see some future iterations of the service.
Just my two cents..
If you want to follow me, just add: PhilCaines
Update
Twitter was just described as “a crowd sourced information dissemination system.” Could this be the future of news? Worth the read.
Interesting findings from PCW and Ypartnership
Aug 29th
Ypartnership has released an expanded summary of the findings that they and PhoCusWright have found on the “Next Generation Traveler”
These findings are really inline with the projections of current online usage, here is a summary of the key stats for the next gen traveler:
- They are smart (30% with a 4-year college degree; 20% with at least one year of graduate school)
- Affluent (30% of households with an annual income in excess of $100,000)
- Multi Generational (50% Echo Boomers (18-28 years) and 50% Baby Boomers (43 to 61 years)
- 71% use the Internet to search for travel information
- 41% have taken a virtual tour of a destination
- 38% have built a trip itinerary online
- 58% cite the “ability to check the best fares/rates” as the most important feature in a travel web site
- 37% report being influenced by personal comments read on social networking or travel advisory web sites, but they frequent social networking sites such as MySpace.com (56%) and Facebook (30%) more than travel advisory or review sites such as TripAdvisor (14%);
- 33% have authored and posted a travel review online.
The summary goes on to state that these consumers are less likely to be influenced by advertising messages. With all of these stats taken into consideration, it is no surprise that the travel industry is in a battle against comoditization.
As Jeremiah Owyang points out with Facebook’s new advertising model, there are new attempts to engage this demographic, and advertisers are striving to penetrate this attention lacking group. These trends are leading me to believe that travel has to really engage the senses and imagination of this new market in order to prompt buying action. A recent interview with Jess Butcher, head of partnerships at online travel experiences company isango!, shed some light into this area.
She was asked what was on the horizon for travel, here is what she said:
“The marriage of ‘where-to-go’ inspiration and commerce functionality is still one that no one’s quite nailed online just yet and we really believe the opportunity here could be immense. There are an increasing number of inspiration-style tools that take activity preference and demographic-detail into consideration, but they tend to culminate in standard flight/ hotel/ car booking engines. There’s a proliferation of new community style-sites, technologies, widgets and trip planning tools emerging right now – from which we expect to see a bit of boom and bust cycle – but looking forward to seeing the winners.”
I agree, there is an ever increasing decline in what hotel, which airline, and which car rental company consumers choose, and more of a focus on “I did the most crazy tour when I was in ____________, check out this amazing tour website!”
The Top 27 Free Press Release Sites
Jun 20th
The Internet has changed how the press looks for and finds news stories. While the conservative news industry is slowly warming up to this fancy thing call the Internet, there are a number of Press Release sites that allow you electronically submit articles and even embed links!!
The fact is, the written press seams to have more credibility then online news and media distributors (for now ;) ) and having your company featured in an official press article is still great, free publicity. So for now you have to play their game.
Here are a number of Free Press Release Sites that I use to help promote Rezgo, and hopefully get picked up by official news agencies. If you don’t get featured by a large news agency, at least these sites will help your rank with Google. They are geared for the Tour and Travel industry and some may require payment, but most are free and generalized enough to help any company promote their press releases. Enjoy, and let me know if you have any others.
- http://prcompass.com/
- http://www.press-base.com/
- http://www.clickpress.com/releases/index.shtml
- http://ecommwire.com/
- http://free-press-release.com/
- http://www.prlog.org/
- http://pressabout.com/
- http://i-newswire.com/
- http://free-press-release-center.info/
- http://www.pr9.net/
- http://www.pr-inside.com/
- http://www.newyork-press-release.com/nationwide.php
- http://www.newswiretoday.com/index.php
- http://www.prleap.com/
- http://prurgent.com/
- http://www.pr.com/
- http://prbuzz.com/
- http://www.1888pressrelease.com/
- http://pressmethod.com/
- http://24-7pressrelease.com/
- http://www.pressbox.co.uk/cgi-bin/links/add.cgi
- http://www.prnuke.com/index.php?name=News&file=submit
- http://www.prweb.com/
- http://www.corporate.canada.travel/corp/media/app/en/ca/contributeNews.do
- http://theopenpress.com/
- http://travelindustrywire.com/
- http://www.wireservice.ca/index.php?name=Submit_News
What to do when selling to VCs?
Jun 16th
I have been out of the blogosphere lately, and for good reason (read excuse ;). I have been working to promote the latest edition of Rezgo.com, the online tour and activity booking solution, and I have had some success! We were recently notified that we were selected for PhoCusWright’s Travel Innovation Summit and in B.C. we are one of 30 companies to make it to the third round of the New Ventures B.C. innovation competition. So great news all around!
Being thrown to the mercy of of lawyers, VCs and CEOs can be a tad intimidating, so a bit of research into VCs, Angel Investors and the like was needed, and here are some of my favorite resources:
- http://www.vcfodder.com/
- A straightforward look at the world of entrepreneurship and venture capital.
- http://www.sfentrepreneur.com/how-to-guides/
- Great how-to guides on legal, marketing, presenting etc
- Great how-to guides on legal, marketing, presenting etc
- http://www.thefunded.com/
- An online community of entrepreneurs to research, rate, and review funding sources worldwide.
- http://fundfindr.com/
- The elevator speech meets YouTube, also a NVBC competitor.
If you know of any others, let me kow, but I hope this list can help all of you out there that are in a similar situation.
Is there life for traditional marketing?
May 20th
With the level of directly traceable and testable configurations that are available with online advertising, does traditional media stand a chance?
TravelMole just brought this interesting article to light. It turns out that for the first time ever, online ad spend has ‘outpaced’ traditional spending at $8 billion last year. It is projected that this will continue to increase to $22.8 Billion by 2012.
While this article does not contrast these findings with the dollar amount spent on traditional media over the past few years, it does raise an interesting point, where does traditional media fit in?
I found an interesting article on the IAB site that displays advertising spending trends over a 13 year period. As no surprise, internet has been adapted much more rapidly than either broadcast or cable advertising. Definitely worth checking out. In 2007 Internet advertising has surpassed both Radio and Cable network ad spend.
So what will the future look like for the remaining top media providers? Here are some trends that I feel will negatively effect the penetration of traditional advertisers in the next 10-15 years:
- The Attention Economy – Gone are the passive zombies media bystanders. With TV on demand, video websites and Tevo, consumers now get what they what when they want, and commercials are not part of it!
- Newspapers – Great for regionalized penetration, but with no instant feedback, and a low traceableness, not to mention the lowing of readership, the skies look gray for the traditional printed newspaper.
What do you think the future of news paper and TV distribution is? Is is a good complement, or will it eventually disappear?
The long tail of travel – Niche tour operators can now unite
Apr 30th
The longtail concept has been around for a long time. Chris Anderson popularized it in his creatively name book “The Long Tail“. The Wikipedia definition is that “The distribution and inventory costs of these [longtail] businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or “non-hit” items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail.”
This concept has been applied to the tourism industry, and there is quite a fit. PhoCusWright brought this to our attention at the Sept 2007 conference in Florida, and Alan A Lew wrote a great article on it in 2006.
In Mr. Lews article he makes some claims about the long tail market. “The long tail market has huge potential. However it is highly distributed and highly individualized. Therefore, accessing it requires marketing and distribution channels that are both broad and deep. To sell relatively less popular products requires being able to store smaller inventories and being able to minimize distribution costs.”
Being in a business that is attempting to help small and niche tour and activity operators, these books and articles have influenced my business development. In an attempt to provide a solution that encompasses all of the many facets and challenges for marketing and distributing a long tail tour providers product, we have revamped our product, Rezgo.
We are releasing Rezgo Free on June 1st, and are confident that this solution will consolidate the long tail of tour and activities.
We recognized that suppliers needed more than simple book-now functionality; we found that they need a tour management and distribution suite that centralized all of their sales channels. We found that tour operators were more concerned with power and simplicity then with a “feature rich, function less” system.
Rezgo Free eliminates all of the traditional barriers that tour operators face when trying to adapt a new technology. It is intuitive, 100% free to sell products through their website, and it also has the capabilities to increase distribution and consolidate all of their sales channels. This will help ease companies into structuring their products for online sales, and will give them a platform to grow their business with expanded Internet distribution and marketing.
Offering this solution for free is a challenging proposition for the business stake holders, but empowering tour operators to standardize their products will help the long tail of tourism flourish. What do you think? You can find more information on www.rezgo.com.
What are the latest buzz words?
Apr 25th
I am not sure if it is a case of, once you hear it once you notice it more often, but I have noticed an increased frequency of Travel Industry buzz words that have been popping up everywhere. Do you know what I am talking about?
Here are a couple of terms that are really circulating on the news and at conferences. I will also give a brief definition to their intended meaning:
Perfect Storm – It now seams that everything is a perfect storm. Travel agencies needing help, airlines collapsing you name it. Here is the Wikipedia definition:
“The phrase refers to the simultaneous occurrence of events which, taken individually, would be far less powerful than the result of their chance combination. Such occurrences are rare by their very nature, so that even a slight change in any one event contributing to the perfect storm would lessen its overall impact. “
Walled Garden -Â This term is of particular interest to me, I am all for breaking down the walls (I recently bought a piece of the Berlin wall :) This term is popping up in the context of media restrictions, inter-industry collaboration and especially the Tele-Com industry. Breaking down restrictions on collaboration is a trend that next generation businesses are going to have to adapt to. As Don Tapscott points out in Wikinomics “If you don’t stay current with customers, they invent around you”. This is in reference to restrictions on products that don’t allow for collaboration and modification.
Here is the Widipedia definition of Walled Garden:
“A walled garden, with regards to media content, refers to a closed set or exclusive set of information services provided for users (a method of creating a monopoly or securing an information system).”
So I hand it over to you, what BUZZ terms have you been hearing lately? Any interesting new ones?
Alexa Rank Spank?
Apr 18th
Recently Alexa made a “big change” to their ranking algorithm. They now “aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.”
I know this sounds like a better way of calculating an accurate rank, however, there is no knowing what “additional sources” they are using. You used to be able to calculate their bias based on the fact that you knew that their rankings came from users with the Alexa toolbar. You were able to gage the type of user that would have such a device, and have a better understanding of your ranking amongst those users.
Where do these new sources of user information come from?
Most of the sites that I work with have dropped significantly:
|
Alexa Rankings |
Before |
After |
|
http://www.tourismtide.com |
460,000 |
1,972,759 |
|
http://www.rezgo.com |
180,000 |
201,794 |
|
http://www.sentias.com |
320,000 |
304,776 |
|
http://www.tipsfromthetlist.com |
260,000 |
314,818 |
Conclusions:
- Where ever Alexa is getting their Internet usage stats from now, I can tell that they have less of an interest in Tourism Technology then the former data pool.
- Changing your domain (tourismtide.blogspot.com to tourismtide.com) can be painful. Both my Alexa and my Technorati were destroyed.
Have you noticed a change in your rank? Do you know where Alexa is getting their new user statistics from?