The importance of understanding the new socially enabled ‘Visual Web’

The number of photos shared on the web is exploding.  On Facebook alone, the average number of photos uploaded per day is 300 million (and with their acquisition of Instagram, this is only set to increase!).

What does this mean for travel brands?  Well, people love taking photos of their travel experiences and as travel becomes ever-more social, they are now instantly sharing images of the every element of their travel experience across their social networks.

So what’s driving this key trend?

You may have recently seen that a recent Mintel report found Digital camera sales to have decreased by 29% over the past five years.  But as Dirk Singer, Founder of TheRabbit Agency, told listeners in a recent EyeforTravel webinar, this is due to the fact that the cameras now found on most smartphones are (arguably) just as good as entry level digital cameras.

Travellers are of course by nature on the move so the rise in smartphone cameras combined with the growth of photo sharing networks such as Instagram (80 million users), Pinterest (over 11 million unique users per week) and Flickr (500 million registered users) is fuelling the phenomenon of the new ‘visual web’ or ‘imagesphere’.

The socially-enabled visual web provides a fantastic opportunity for travel brands to reach, inspire and engage new customers.   

As the old adage says ‘a picture tells a 1,000 words’.  Images enable the new time poor travel consumer to absorb a large amount of data about your destination/hotel/airline in a short amount of time.   Combine this with the social reach – and, let’s face it, we’ve all been sat in the office and seen that dreamy image of a sun drenched pool pop-up in your friends latest status update - and you are onto a winner. 

Dirk identified this key opportunity for visual engagement early on and led both the BMI and bmibaby social media campaigns on Pinterest and Instagram respectively.

For the budget airline bmibaby, they facilitated a series of ‘instameets’ exchange programmes where Instagram community members were invited to destinations  to participate in a photo walk around their city and post and share their experiences from the day with other members of the network, producing inspiring content from cities around the world.

The representatives live photo blogged from the exchange whilst the bmibaby team reported directly from the bmibaby Instagram feed, Twitter and Facebook throughout the weekend.

The result was 50,000 unique pieces of visual content, extensive media coverage and a number of awards for the campaigns.   Not bad!

To find out more about the visual web and how you can get involved with it, you can watch Dirk’s presentation here

In addition, I’m really looking forward to Naomi Bustin’s (Senior Communication Executive at bmibaby) presentation on how to get the most out of Instagram and other emerging social networks at EyeforTravel’s Online Marketing, Mobile & Social Media in Travel Summit, 3-4 October in Amsterdam.

The visual web looks set to continue grow in importance for travel brands so get involved now!  There are a number of ways in which you can encourage your customers to share their travel experiences – especially on-site during their stay.  Ushuaia Ibiza Beach hotel is a great example 

 As usual, we’ll be keeping you up-to-date with further case studies on www.eyefortravel.com

What’s Apple Plotting?

It’s been an interesting week of power plays, Machiavellian manoeuvring and plot twists for the travel and tech world; Yahoo! pilfers a top Google exec, Apple ‘friends’ Facebook, turns its back on Google and plants a firm flag into the online travel business,  leaving many wondering just what are they up to?

After much speculation, fanfare and good ol’ fashioned rumour mongering, it now seems that Apple has crystalized their intentions towards the online travel industry by unveiling its Passbook app. This app will be built-in to the iOS 6 for next-gen Apple devices and is the latest in a series of patents linked to Apple’s much vaunted iTravel system. In essence, both enable iPhones and iPads to store all necessary travel information (identity, e-tickets, flight info & notifications) manage their trips (check-in, track luggage, receipts, frequent flyer and loyalty accounts) as well as will utilize NFC technology iWallet to purchase flights, hotels and upgrades. With all this functionality housed in a single pre-installed app in devices which command roughly 60% of the overall smartphone and tablet market, it’s easy to envisage how Apple could steal a massive chunk of the online travel pie.

In a move that mirrors Google’s 2011 dive into the online travel industry, this is a statement of intent that leaves little doubt that Apple is eager to follow suit and leap-frog Google’s hotel finder and flight search. Apple is yet to comment or even announce the iTravel project but it is safe to say this blueprint will have many a fat cat scrambling to the war room. What is less certain is exactly how Apple will pull this off and who is standing in their way.

Here are few fanciful / ill thought-out scenarios;

A company with a market cap of $600 billion could simply buy its way into the market by acquiring a major OTA, GDS or metasearch player to power search and booking capabilities or it could partner with selected suppliers and TMCs who would be eager to tap into Apple’s enormous global consumer base. Providing inventory to iTravel would earn brands unprecedented visibility and allow them to slash their app development and marketing costs as well as reduce dependency on the big G and other intermediaries. But at what cost? iTravel would essentially be akin to partnering with Priceline or Expedia and will likely come with a hefty commission fees and stringent pricing terms and conditions. 

Any airline or Hotelier would also be loath to surrender their hard earned/bought customers to yet another intermediary but they might not have the choice as iTravel is a far more elegant ‘all-in-one’ travel tool which will be pre-loaded into all iOS devices, starting with the launch of the iPhone 5 this autumn. Even more brilliant is the fact that Passbook will be available by download on all ipads and from iPhone 3s onwards. That means that in one fell swoop, Apple will be able to launch the app service to it’s 370 million iOS customers, most of who’s payment details they will already own.

Another interesting turn is Apple collaborating with popular consumer websites such as Yelp and OpenTable for the next version of Siri Search. This in effect will provide a socially contextualized alternative to Google search and Voice Search and reinforce Siri as a trusted concierge and go-to resource for ‘casual search’.

Perhaps more indicative of the growing cold war between the former allies is the exclusion of Google maps and Streetview from iOS 6. Apple has taken great pains to replace this with its own cartography and geo-location technology called Flyover view (allegedly powered by TomTom) which boasts turn by turn directions as well as traffic warnings, weather notifications and travel advice. With the iPhone 5 Apple has not just kicked Google out the party, it has also jumped into bed with mutual rival Facebook, presumably to cosy up with the company’s 800 million active users. The iPhone 5 will be heavily integrated with Facebook to make it easier to share contacts, photos, calendars, music via Spotify and all the other social bells and whistles. With the budding NFC and mobile advertising industries poised for huge growth, the stakes could not be higher, or more lucrative.

What is clear is that under new CEO Tim Cook, Apple is headed in a bold and ambitious new direction that will have many travel companies rubbing their palms, scratching their heads - or banging them on a the nearest wall. I’d be very interested to hear some industry perspectives of this so do please weigh-in and let us know - Apple: Friend of Foe?

By Marco Saio

Director of International Research & Projects

EyeforTravel Ltd

Direct Line London (GMT): 0044 20 7375 7219

Connect on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/Msaio

Why is big data such a big deal for travel?

The term “big data” has been thrown around the travel industry like a dark shadow of woe for the last twelve months. So what exactly is so super-size about the “Voldemort” of the digital age, he who shall not be named or spoken about openly?  I have been researching Big Data for the last few weeks, with specific regard to travel. The purpose of this blog post is to break it down for those of you who, like me, have never crunched a number in their working life.

So. Big Data. First port of call, the glittering star of the internet: Wikipedia, which describes the term as: “ In information technology, big data is a loosely-defined term used to describe data sets so large and complex that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. Difficulties include capture, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and visualization.”

First and foremost- an understanding of the basic premise is required and a good way to showcase this is through a sample:

Company X in 1995	Records simple transactional data only (offline and online) Approx 0.5 TB data stored.
Company X in 2012	Records social media, transactional, CRM, search, profiling and multiple types of data, over 95% of which is online. Approx 1 PB data.

So how does company X cope with such astounding levels of data and how can it be better managed? Well. Back in the 90’s, 1 TB of data was vast. Having data of that size automatically made you a member of the Terabyte Club (and that club was very small and very elite indeed). Now, you can buy a 1 TB data storage device for around $100 USD at a local retailer. In the meantime, even small data warehouses have exceeded data storage levels of 1 Petabyte (that is 1 quadrillion bytes if you’re wondering).  According to reports, big data is a game changer for all industries because having such enormous quantities of stored data can enable a company to better analyse and better forecast. These assumptions are based on (of course), if you can manage the data properly: Here are the exciting prospects of the big data phenomenon:

1.       Big data introduces large scale data diversity, complexity and velocity. Accuracy is the key contender as to why Big Data rules all. This isn’t singular or grouped transactional data. This is every piece of data you have ever had, at your fingertips. Patterns will be more obvious and more precise.

2.       Forecasting: Reporting, analysis and ground-breaking evaluations to help you step ahead of your competitors.

3.       Integrating your singular pricing, CRM and social systems into a super-system: where you know your hotel visitor has a Klout score of 83%, has stayed with you once since 2007, and complained about you on TripAdvisor. You know they searched for you on Travelsupermarket.com and which of your competitors they turned down. You also have the capacity to group together customers with similar behavioural patterns and target them with specific, tailored marketing.

4.       Real-time opportunities: Big Data structuring offers a user the chance to export data by the millions in a miniscule timeframe making it near-enough real-time. This is particularly relevant for picking out unusual patterns in landscapes such as casinos and entertainment parks and dealing with them immediately on-site.

So- you now see the opportunities when it comes to utilizing Big Data, but why is it so hard to implement and get our heads around?

1.       Storage and organisation: To accurately use Big Data requires different set up and different mechanics. You don’t need an analyst, you need what is fondly known in the data world as a “power user.” Someone who knows absolutely everything there is to know about data. Someone who data crunches all day but understands business functions better than your C level executives. Forget rows in excel, this is planning on a huge scale.

2.       Security & Architecture: How do you keep information of this size safe from competitors and hackers? How do you house it safely and securely whilst keeping immediate, constant access for yourself or your power user?

3.       Personnel – breeding a data culture. To utilize Big Data you need championed data-related executives who truly understand it, and they should be the one(s) making fact-based decisions for the company.  This is a rarity in most industries at this time.

4.       Understanding- The Economist Intelligence Unit gauges that the majority of profitable companies are only utilizing 50-75% of their current data to sell to, report on and analyse about. So even in the realm of small sized databases, companies aren’t seeing the full potential.  

So where are we at today? Research indicates that only 38% of the relevant companies interviewed (not just travel bear in mind) are practicing advanced analytics, whether it be Big or Small scale. Seems slight, doesn’t it? Especially considering how much of what we talk about as an industry is analytics driven- RM, CRM, Social, Transactional. As such, there are clearly a number of distinct challenges in this space: a) the sheer quantity of data b) poor organisation c) poor internal sharing processes and d) technical challenges. I am new to understanding the basics of Big Data and its scalable opportunities. So, how do I, as a newcomer, see it panning out for travel as an industry? I see it progressing inevitably, at an alarming rate. Data can only get bigger as we store more and more information as companies. Working out how to manage it better is something we are all talking about, but how many people are working on the strategy to actually implement a faultless data set-up which makes use of all data, and quick?  

Big Food for Big Thoughts, certainly. Feedback welcome, Take a Byte. Trademark Pun. 

Free Webinar: How to Drive Meaningful Engagement via Social Media

Last Autumn, an EyeforTravel survey of 550 travel brands found that 100% had a company Facebook profile and 75% had a Twitter profile, but I wonder how many of these brands can say that their social media presence is really working for them?  Are most of their social media efforts languishing unread?

In the 5 years that I have been charting the rise and rise of social media in travel space, I’ve come across a number of examples whereby travel brands have sought to tick the social media box, set up a profile and then have not fully worked out how to optimally engage their target audience.

And, this perhaps, is no surprise given 1) how difficult it can be to secure the budget to set up the right resources internally to continuously manage social media 2) how difficult brands seem to find it to talk to their customers via social media in the most optimal manner and 3) how fast social media is evolving.  Every couple of months there is a new ‘must-have’ social media platform and it can be confusing to try and work out what’s right for your brand’s target audience.

When done well however, social media has been proven to increase customer satisfaction, reduce PR costs (by as much as 27%) and significantly increase brand awareness.  Quite a few travel brands have managed to achieve this (and they are not just the brands with big budgets!).  I’ve invited a number of them to present at EyeforTravel’s upcoming Online Marketing, Mobile & Social Media in Travel Summit, 3-4 October in Amsterdam.

I’ve also put together an hour long free webinar which will take place on Tuesday 10^th July at 3pm GMT.   The webinar will showcase best-practices and top tips for successful social media engagement including: -

•   How to implement content that works – tone, personality, timing, language
• Know when to take the opportunity to reach out to your customers
• Competitions, giveaways, special offers – what works?
•  Internal structure - How do you manage who represents your brand voice?
•  Hear the top social media mistakes to avoid

All registrants will be able to tune in on the day and also download the full webinar video to listen back to at their leisure.  The webinar will feature 3 insightful case studies from:

• Lara Solomon, Head of Communications, Responsibletravel.com
•  Frederick Buhr, VP e-Commerce, RailEurope
• Dirk Singer, Head Rabbit, The Rabbit Agency

We will also be carrying out a number of live polls along with plenty of time for Q&A.

You can register for the webinar via this link - https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/821174382

How to use social media to humanize your business

By Gina Baillie

There are a number of key opportunities to engage customers via social media which many travel brands seem to miss.  Why is this?

In a recently spoke to Josiah MacKenzie, he explained that offering exceptional service via is the cornerstone of social media success.   This sounds good in theory but how does it work in practice? How do you reach out to the customer in the most appropriate way?   How can you create a remarkable customer experience?

He explained that remarkable social media engagement doesn’t have to be hugely original.  A simple recognition of a customers’ intent to stay at your hotel or intent to travel with your airline can add real value to the customer experience and perception of your brand.   

Actively listening and responding to customers via social media is essential.  It can however be complicated to organise internally.  Encouraging support from top executives along with putting the right processes in place to ensure that staff know where, when and how to respond is vital. 

For Josiah, it’s a question of sifting through the noise to find the music.  For more details, listen to the 10 minute podcast below*

*I apologise that the sound quality is a little poor but if you turn the volume to maximum, you should be able to hear Josiah adequately.

The Rise and Rise of the Social Dragon

This years’ TDS Asia summit, held two weeks ago in Singapore, was the first to incorporate a conference track dedicated to social media so I thought it would be fitting (and yes, much quicker) to round up the most salient trends and topics of the summit by looking at what caused the greatest flurries of twitter activity that we had displayed throughout the summit.

As a proud adversary of tweeting, trending, retwooting etc, I was nonetheless impressed by the scale and sheer potential of the technology for instantaneous information sharing.  Using our summit #tag and a neat twitter analytics tool called Storify we managed to amass over 1000 tweets from 200+ individuals over the 2 days and from 16 different countries. When you consider the multiplier effect of Twitter big-wigs sharing this info with their thousands of followers, and this being retweeted many times over – The implications from a brand PR perspective can be staggeringly beneficial or damaging in equal measure.

The following are just a small selection of the stats and trends that caused the biggest spikes in twitter activity:

Analyse this! Data acquisition and analysis is crucial in an increasingly promiscuous online world. The brands that intelligently leverage customer data can grow both market share, marketing ROI, customer loyalty and reduce price elasticity

Make data available to everyone in your company- The Priceline Group #tdsasia

Can't wait for airlines to do it! RT @faithyoong: Wyndham's conversions up 30% after integrating TripAdvisor reviews on their site #tdsasia

Geek is good! The big theme from #TDSasia is we need more "geeks who can speak"...understand tech, and communicate it well

Make publishing decisions based on social analytics to stay relevant with your audience. - Barbara Pezzi #TDSasia

Don't measure activities, but results." - Barbara Pezzi #TDSasia

"What is the business problem am I trying to solve? How can social media analytics give me answers to solve it?" - Kelly McGuire #TDSasia

"Number of social conversations about travel is doubling every 6 months." #TDSasia

The beautiful thing about social analytics is that you're working with public data. Huge opportunity for competitive insight. #TDSasia

Focus on integrating your technology platforms to see all data in one place." Prashanth Radhakrishnan, Starwood #TDSasia

Use online customer reviews to understand where your brand sits in the competitive landscape. - Kelly McGuire, SAS Institute #TDSasia

#Travel businesses that will succeed will be the ones that use data the best. - Adrian Currie #TDSasia

Big data is very important. Make sure you filter that and put it into the hands of your employees to make decisions. #TDSasia

Effective use of data requires processes, systems and a culture of using data for decision making. #TDSasia

Beyond Mobile Mania: Have a focused mobile strategy and clear goals!

Wow - 95% of mobile apps do not get opened a second time? #TDSasia #mtravel

"Be crystal clear on what your brand/product stands for." #TDSasia (Also know what you are NOT)

Paypal predicts $7bn worth of mobile payments in 2012 #tdsasia

Google Q1 2012 Singapore & Australia travel queries on tablet three times bigger as queries via mobile phones #tdsasia

 @simpliflying at #tdsasia focus on the business goal, not on the medium. It's not about the fan or the follower.

Focus on and reposition the customer at the heart of everything you do

Consistent theme so far at #TDSasia - create a customer-centric organization. How are you using new technology to do this?

Love this: Webjet brings a life-size cutout of a customer saying "What's in it for me?" to all meetings. #TDSasia

Tips from Lufthansa - be authentic and be where your customers are. Be relevant and build sustainable relationships.

Personalize and Humanize your brand to become more relevant

Understand the "Internet Culture" of your audience to guide #content marketing strategy. - Sam Flemming #TDSasia #smtravel

Lufthansa now among Top 5 airline FB pages, with over 1mn fans. Impressed with @flying_emirates, which is in Top 15 in a month! #TDSasia

"I am Roger Smith" video campaign @RSHotel used as a great example of humanizing your brand by @edwardperry #TDSasia #hotelmarketing

 @HiltonHotels welcome program includes chinese speaking concierge, translated welcome letters, 'local' food #TDSasia #custserv

"When mistakes happen, be human. Relationships matter." - @simpliflying #TDSasia

Social listening and real-time service can resolve issues, keep guests happy and prevent negative online reviews. - @edwardperry #TDSasia

Make publishing decisions based on social analytics to stay relevant with your audience. - Barbara Pezzi #TDSasia

Engage Target and Monetize your consumer when they are in ‘spending mode’

Guests more likely to spend when they're traveling. At the booking stage, they try to save. Implications on mobile strat ...

 @edwardperry suggests hotels could learn from airlines and innovate with "social lounges" to help travelers meet each other #trends

China and its travellers are only going to become more commercially important – Develop a diverse strategy to tap into this huge and growing market

Chinese millionaires are 15 years younger (on average) than their counterparts in the west. #tdsasia #luxury

Your ability to tap in to the China travel market is partially dependent on the receiving destination to market itself #tdsasia

What are you doing to assist Chinese travelers in using your products/coming to your destination?

However don’t discount India:

Over $1B pumped into internet start ups in India last year - English is India's 1st language! - Himanshu Singh

Indian market is V price sensitive and Chinese market is tough to enter without the right JV partner/product flexibility...& vice-versa

Hottest new emerging trends

I learned a new term from Flocations: Flashpacker. Apparently its is a traveler that has the time but a limited budget #tdsasia

RT @simpliflying: Wow! Singapore has the highest % of Smartphones in Asia, at 62%! #tdsasia

Japan- 97% 3G penetration. Not surprised! #tdsasia

According to Google, hotel mobile searches have increased by 3000% from 2010 to 2011 #tdsasia

What's happening today in Japan in terms of mobile is possibly a peep into future for other countries :) #tdsasia

Wow - interesting. RT @msaio: #tdsasia Air Asia gets up to 14% inbound traffic from Facebook in Malaysia - More than from Google! #comscore

For any of you who missed our social media and mobile videographic, you can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stnFeBHfU44

And here is a mash-up of all the conference tweets showing the most salient trends and topics that were ‘trending’: http://www.eyefortravel.com/tds-asia-2012-twitter-highlights

Following Facebook’s relatively disappointing IPO it's worth remembering that globally social media and mobile drive travel sales

It’s that simple, forget PR stunts or the amount of friends your company has, our research (Eyefortravel Marketing Barometer) shows that half the travel industry sees social media providing them with real measured sales.  The same research shows that 27% see mobile growing as a sales channel.  At our recent shows the debate and interest has been around this sweet spot ….where mobile and social combine to give you a real time communication channel you can use to inspire and convert and so produce the cash rewards and market share that your hard pressed company needs. We will have fresh data in July and it will be great to see if this trend continues.

The trouble for Facebook is that unlike Google, who effectively forced us to advertise to build its huge revenues, Facebook delivers an awesome way to communicate for free with our customers and can’t really change that without damaging their core product.  Mobile Social networking which is Facebook’s fastest growing area makes it doubly hard to monetise.

Finally Facebook is not an awesome way for some of the world’s fastest growing and biggest markets.  Asia is a different world, Facebook and Google may be an effective way to communicate with your customers in The USA, Europe, India, Africa and South East Asia but they fall flat on their faces in the world’s fastest growing market - China and the regions 2 heavy weight markets of Korea and Japan; here you need to work with Mixi, Cyworld, Baidu, Renren, Sina, Weibo and others to make an effective social media campaign.  The region also has the highest and lowest 3G and smart phone penetration rates.  China will have a predicted 1 billion mobile web users but in Vietnam it is a different story. How you create and drive your social media and mobile channel in such different markets will be key to your market share and future success.

If you are interested in finding out more about opportunities for Social Media and Mobile in Asia, we have a show where Facebook, Renren and a whole heap of innovators will be debating the future of this fascinating trend in Hong Kong this November 20-21. http://events.eyefortravel.com/social-media-and-mobile-asia/index.php

By Tim Gunstone