Time to stop searching and start finding
Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, online user reviews are influential and they’re everywhere.
There’s no doubt that many tourism businesses realise the potential importance of user generated reviews. Increasingly, the evidence shows that travellers are influenced by the comments of others and most of tourism the businesses I speak to do want to manage and respond to this challenge.
But it can be an incredible struggle just to keep up with, yet alone act on, the information contained within these reviews. The sheer mass of information online means that many businesses either concentrate only on Tripadvisor, or give up on effective monitoring altogether.
For example, a survey conducted by Avalon Report showed over 90% of hoteliers think it is important to monitor reviews online, yet also found the majority of hotels monitor comments less than once every two weeks. Avalon suggest that since 87% monitor reviews manually by surfing site to site, “many of these hotel professionals appear overwhelmed by the scope of the issue, commenting they are lost in the prioritization of endless sites and searches.”
However, given the amount of effort that goes into capturing customer feedback in other aspects of the business, these freely given comments must surely have some value. Especially as unlike internally gathered comments, they are out there influencing the purchase decisions of others.
So how do tourism businesses turn online user reviews into useful research and meaningful development? I believe the answer is in tracking and monitoring online comments and reviews more effectively.
Monitoring more efficiently
There is so much potential information out there, that going site to site looking for it is simply too overwhelming. The answer is to stop surfing manually and start automating so the information comes to you.
Here are some tips how tourism businesses small and large can better grip on the online discussion that is taking place about them. Monitoring the data more effectively means you can then integrate what you find into any existing customer comment analysis process you may have. (See this previous post)
1. RSS (really simple syndication) is your friend
RSS brings your chosen web content to you through feeds as it is updated, instead of you having to visit individual sites. You can check your feedreader once a day and glance at what’s new, rather than trawl site to site, getting distracted on the way.
If you’re not already using RSS, I strongly recommend you give it a go - you’ll find you waste far less time online without missing out on the things you need to know.
Plus Tripadvisor, for example, providers feeds relating to specific properties, so you can monitor comments and respond.
Tripadvisor also produces owner feeds, which property owners can republish directly on their sites if they choose. This Travolution post explains how unedited user reviews have been welcomed by the businesses using them.
Additionally, most bloggers publish their posts as RSS feeds too (that’s what all the stuff at the top right of this blog page relates to), so you can keep an eye on key influencers in your market.
2. Set up free Google Alerts
Google alerts will email you with daily updates each time the specific terms, names and phrases of your choice are used. You can select if your alert is triggered from blogs, news, general web content etc and the frequency with which you require updating.
Personally, I find this a really handy tool and I have about 25 different alert terms running at any one time - including alerts that trigger when this blog or my name is mentioned online.
The downside is false positives, but your terms are easy to edit and amend so you can experiment to get the combination of alerts that best meet your needs.
3. Third party tools to track buzz, comments and online word of mouth
There are a number of free tools, such as the following, that let you monitor the key phases, company names or specific terms that matter to your business.
- Blogpulse’s Trend Search tracks buzz over time for certain key words, phrases or links
- Blogpulse’s Conversation Tracker assembles a snapshot of blog conversations
You can also find more tools at this Smashing Magazine post on Web 2.0 buzz monitoring.
And of course, there are also the paid tools you can also buy in to monitor and aggregate your online reviews and comments.
I’m not in a position to recommend specific paid tools as I have always found the freely available and open source tools meet my needs just fine - but I appreciate there are contexts in which paid tools fit the bill. So do feel free to tell me if you have a paid solution you couldn’t live without (no direct selling though please).
4. Build your own custom solution
For the larger business, or the somewhat technically minded, it is surprisingly easy to build yourself an in house, customer system to monitor want you want and format data how you need it.
Yahoo Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create and combine feeds to make them more powerful, useful and relevant. This Lifehacker post shows you how.
On a larger scale, if you’re running your own servers and dealing with really high volumes of online comments and conversations, I’d suggest checking out the BuzzMonitor developed by the World Bank.
As Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski of the World Bank explains:
“Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple platforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it. At the time, no solution (either commercial or open source) met those requirements so we decided to build our own.”
BuzzMonitor is an open source application that “listens in” to what people are saying across blogs and other sites in order to help the organisation understand and engage in social media. It is available as packaged, open source application. While it was developed for Linux-compatible platforms, it should be possible to install it on a Windows system, as well. (So time to call your techies!)
Moving from searching to researching
So from tracking a few terms through Google Alerts, to the monitoring the whole world from your own server - there are some great tools out there to help you automate the collection of online user generated content, comments and word of mouth.
Instead of wasting your time gathering information manually, automating the process will leave you in a position where you can start constructively responding to what you hear. That way you can get past being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of online noise, and start reacting quickly and strategically as required.
Do you find this process overwhelming? Are you using tools I haven’t mentioned here? Do let me know!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Business research, Online customer behaviour, Research tools, Tourism market research, Web measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
