Smart Marketing on the Social Web

OK, web 2.0 is now officially part of the mainstream, as the Wall Street Journal reveals The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World!

So, the CMOs in companies of all sizes will now embrace social media, social networks, blogs etc. and know how to effectively deal with all things 2.0? Not so fast, I still have my doubts that this is the reality. There is still too much one way communication going on and attempts to control the message rather than enter the conversation, too many calls for traditional bottom line measurements of ROI and effectiveness when engaging in the social sphere. The recent stories about disappointing results of social media advertising have shown that the old yard sticks don’t apply in this new web 2.0 environment of customer empowerment, combine with low tolerance for marketing speak. One old marketing principle still applies – present the right message, to the right audience at the right moment. When people are engaged in social networks and social media that is usually not the right moment. Those are not secrets, just comment sense marketing.

The innovators have been using web 2.0 effectively for a number of years now and while the mainstream of corporate marketers are catching up, these companies, usually small and nimble, are already moving to the next phase of the web – the smart web, where semantics are added into the mix, data talks to data and the web becomes an ever more useful tool making it easier for the empowered and connected consumer to stay informed about products and services that are relevant to them and to make smart decisions about them. While web 2.0 is now established, welcome to web 3.0

is the title of this excellent article in AdvertisingAge by Marta Strickland. It outlines in non-tech terms what the next phase on web technology is about and how it will improve the relevance of marketing. We already see some of the semantic web in action in travel on sites like UpTake an innovator in the travel planning and research phase where 95% of the action happens prior to the actual transaction and where the industry needs to get a lot better to make a much improved process a reality for today’s web savvy online travel buyers.

There’s going to be a lot of action in this space and the Travel Innovation Summit at last week’s PhoCusWright conference featured a number of companies that are active in this arena with innovative approaches that deserve the attention of the industry at large.

and what an conference it was. Under the very appropriate theme,

The Perfect Storm

applicable not only for the travel industry but the global economy itself, which despite the turmoil it is undergoing now and for some time in the near future will produce innovative winners, close to one thousand participants gathered in Hollywood and it became clear right from Philip Wolf’s opening speech, that for the next few days this was the focal point of the global travel industry.

All the major players were there and as is custom, represented by their CEO or senior executives. The action and conversations were non-stop, the deal making permanent across the venue. Having myself participated in a dozen of these events, this set the new standard for travel conferences in terms of quality of production value, quality of attendees, session planning and overall organization and execution. I readily admit my bias, but my own opinion was confirmed time and again by other participants.

This year a new event was added,

with 32 companies, chosen from many more applicants, presenting their innovative ventures to a critical audience who voted on the presentations with hand held rating devices to decide the six finalists with the opportunity to present on Center Stage to the main audience later in the conference.

The presenting companies could roughly be categorized as providers of technology solutions for vacation rentals, mobile travel and trip planning tools. Of particular interest to me were the latter as this is an area of web based travel I am most interested in.

UpTake

Helps people to find out what to book not how to book which is the easy part. Statistics show that 35 sites are visited before booking. That can hardly be voluntary! There is too much content on the web to make a sensible, easy decision. There are 1000 reviews for the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel alone! They are a search and filter engine not a site that creates new UGC. Not flights based but any transport mode.

UpTake has Top Google ranking for many of their destinations. Very deep database for local attractions. Aggregate / Analyze / Filter based on semantics “sentiment extraction” from data based on ontology. This helps them to get the top ranking on the search engines.

Triporati

Discovery is not search! Every trip starts with the planning. Preference based selection, including rankings.
1200 destinations. Map based presentation of selections. Integration of external data like YouTube, photos etc.
Live feed for events. Travel reviews from TripAdviser. Facebook application for friend preferences and suitability of possible travel companions. Collaboration engine for different personal and group profiles. Ultimately it makes the user decide which destination is most suitable.

TravelMuse

95% happens before the booking! How true, and up to now most of the online travel industry has focused on the 5%.

Site looks like a magazine. Inspirational. Where & What. Excellent functionality for saving trip related information including external search results. They have added a travel widget for third party site placement. Uptake is one of these sites. Items can be drag&dropped into the travel plan and can be viewed by all trip participants. Friend’s input & research can be used and added as well. Excellent tool also for travel partners.

PlanetEye

This Canadian based venture is aggregating content and adding relevancy and personalization. Local travel experts are providing most of the content. Data display is based on ranking by reviews. Personal profile allows for differentiation in the results presented. Booking integration and restaurant reservations are another feature.

Your Tour.com (still in closed beta)

This is a preferences based system with a price calculation engine. Reality: Manual itinerary creation even in web 2.0. Their system is a “virtual travel agent” for mass-customization based on B2B licensing. It lists DMOs as partners with hotel chains Booking.com and content provider Lonely Planet.

Demo of beta version included multi-destination, dynamic packaging. Starts with a build me a tour screen. Includes activities for each day, maps based. Slider based preferences ranking. Reminds me of the EuroVacations model! True dynamic packaging.

NileGuide

Personalized travel recommendations. Customized destination guide with current and relevant information can be collected and printed as a PDF. Content, search, and booking are integrated. Lots of cool tools including reviews for accommodation and restaurants, all map based. Slider based activity selector. In addition to PDF they will have an iPhone delivered guide in Q1-09

These are all innovators in what TravelMuse correctly calls the 95% of the process that happens before a leisure trip that has largely been neglected up to now by the major online travel companies who are all focused on the remaining 5%, where the transaction takes place.

It remains to be seen how many will survive as the pressure to produce revenues is huge and at least the immediate prospects uncertain. What is certain, technology will continue to provide the tools essential to make the DREAM – LEARN – PLAN – GO process more integrated, less time consuming and even fun. It should be possible to monetize it to make these sites a commercial success.

In a later post I will discuss the issue of the effect these developments have on the role of DMOs in this process as they traditionally have played their role here and not in the transaction of travel. It’s clear that the industry moves in the direction of integrated services delivery to consumers. The perfect storm indeed!

might be a future reality according to this Real Time column in WSJ.com by Jason Fry. He raises a number of interesting points that will indeed make this a general reality as it is already for a fast increasing number of people who can easily be found on the web today. In the networked world we live in today, where radical transparency is another fact of life I can imagine this scenario.

I found this quote by Curt Monash particularly poignant: “The Internet WILL tell stories about you, true or otherwise. Make sure your own version is out there too.” It’s a necessity for companies today and might become one for everybody in future, who knows.

One thing seems obvious to me, this new reality will have a profound impact on how to market products and services effectively.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

This quote somehow reminds me how far we still are from making the travel planning – researching and buying process on the web truly an easy and enjoyable experience based on the technology understanding and correctly interpreting customer needs and preferences. It’s certainly far from being magic!

This is a great video by Nova Spivack of Radar Networks on this topic still often misunderstood. I agree with his definition of the terms web 1.0 / 2.0 / 3.0 being about time periods in the development of the web. We’re now just about at the end of the second decade (2.0) and will enter the next (3.0) around 2010.

There will be definite implications on travel and the customer experience of researching, planning and purchasing travel. Before there will be dramatic changes, however, the pendulum will have to swing back to the front end or user experience focus, which he predicts will be the case in web 4.0 or more than ten years out, as web 3.0 deals more with the back end or the data.

In the meantime there will be new initiatives that will introduce semantic web tools into travel as we have seen with Uptake and TripIt. The latter is actually shown in one of his slides.

One of his comments I liked a lot is that we should talk about “artificial stupidity” rather than “artificial intelligence” that is required to eliminate humans from having to deal with the mundane, or stupid tasks, and let us focus on the intelligent ones. Couldn’t agree more.

Nova Spivack at The Next Web Conference 2008 from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.

could be the subject line for this study quoted in Micro Persuasion stating that One Billion Dollars in Internet Advertising is Wasted by display ads visible to about 70% of web users but only seen by about 25% because the ads are displayed “below the fold” requiring people to scroll down a web page.

This doesn’t surprise me as these ads, like the original banners, are no different from interruption advertising in print or on TV without the relevancy of search ads. This tired approach is no longer effective in any media. We live in an age of permission based marketing and if the web is used as an interruption tool advertisers can’t really expect better results.

It’s one more indicator that web based marketing has become more complex and to be effective needs to consider the effect of social media and networking on the buying behavior of today’s audience. As this chart here shows, the growth in online advertising over the next five years will be considerable but to be effective it has to take advantage of what the web has to offer to increase effectiveness.

Just to slap more ads including rich media ads won’t bring the necessary ROI unless they are relevant to the content and compelling.

This is a key message traditional marketers need to understand as they shift more of their marketing budgets to the web.

Coming soon: superfast internet reports the Times Online in this eye opening article. It’s further proof that “we ain’t seen nothing yet” when it comes to the web and once the grid is accessible to all users the web experience will move to a whole other level from what we’re used to today. It’s too early to tell how this will specifically manifest itself in eCommerce but it doesn’t take too much imagination to see that it will be significant. Enjoy the ride!

Technorati Tags: grid, intelligent web

This is a great presentation of some of the key developments that have already arrived or are on the horizon. It’s clear that they will have an impact on the online travel industry, with search being one area in particular where innovation will happen based on what’s called the semantic, or intelligent web. Another area will be recommendation systems where things are moving ahead with improved results noticeable to users.

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reports MarketingVOX. This is further proof of improved search becoming a reality in the not too distant future and here’s a quote relevant to travel

For example, instead of searching for hotels in Miami and having to sift through results that include hotels, travel vendors and hotel deals, one could query for Miami hotels that allow pets, are five minutes from the beach and cost no more than $150 per night.

It will be interesting to observe how the travel meta-search companies will react to the major searchers offering more relevant results.