« Are travel plans the first thing to be abandoned in hard times? Get more from Google Analytics by tomorrow morning »
Now, I appreciate that when you write for a blog with an emphasis on travel and technology, you’re supposed to be positively evangelical about new media and technology opportunities.
But I have a guilty secret. I think a lot of the online social networking phenomena are downright silly and I generally refuse to participate in some aspects of it.
Notice that I say ‘some aspects’ though. I have embraced blogging for example. I watch clips of ancient cricket matches on YouTube when I think no-one is looking. I have checked out my accommodation on trip advisor and I follow the debates on WIWIH as well as those on sites by my fellow bloggers.
But am I the one being silly? Heavens forfend but could some of your customers feel the same way as well?
So what’s my problem?
Well, here are three thoughts to start with:
- Just because a new 2.0 site is cool, it doesn’t mean it will remain that way. Mass migrations can render them useless in months.
- Because a site is cool, it doesn’t mean I have any use for it. My own dancing badger might be pretty cool to own but I don’t actually have a use for one.
- Anyway, I don’t care about cool, I want a site or technology to have proved itself and know that it will continue to prove itself.
Let’s take those in turn:
I find the propensity for rapid mass migrations from one ‘cool site’ to another a little unnerving. There are already signs that Twitter (the yet-to-come ‘next big thing’ for some people) is old hat and that people are really just gearing up to run off to their next watering hole. Myself, if I go somewhere I like to think that can at least catch my breath before my travelling companions decide that we have to sprint from location to the next…and to the next….and to the next. And if I’m left behind or told to make my own way there…well, there’s a certain pleasure in taking things at your own pace and looking before you leap.
I was a member of Facebook for a while but ultimately can’t see any purpose for it. Despite my penchant for wearing loud tweed, I’m quite a quiet fellow and don’t feel the need to broadcast my every move. I don’t think anyone beyond me would really give a hoot knowing that my current location was a bothy in Sutherland or that I had thrown a sheep at someone I vaguely know.
Putting those thoughts together means that I will invest my time in something if it will still exist meaningfully in six months and if it has a enhanced use beyond something I am currently using.
So what?
The lesson is that although you might be wrapped up in the latest tech developments, your audience might not. They might be creatures of habit who are slow to change. Developing a marketing strategy based on the latest NEW! IMPROVED! TWOOTA! TECHNOLOGY! might sound like a good idea but you are taking a risk and people like me will ignore you.
But the refusniks are obviously not all standing athwart the Web 2.0 yelling “stop!” I’m not reinstalling a fax machine in my office and I don’t intend hand writing a letter to a hotel to enquire if they have rooms. But neither am I going to be at the bleeding edge of the next cool thing.
Eternal Verities of the business mind
For me, a business idea works if it fits into the framework of The Five P’s (click here for an overview and explanation). I’m usually a little suspicious of seemingly glib frameworks like the Five Ps but I have found this to work time and again in my experience. I’ll expand on this framework in a later post but suffice to say, new solutions for me must fall within this framework – just because we have news ways of working doesn’t mean that we have become fundamentally different types of beings.
For those of you with hazy memories, the Five Ps are:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
- People
It is my conviction that your business decisions are all geared to getting these Ps right – Twitter, Facebook and so forth are just tools to achieving these aims. If they don’t do that, then they are irrelevant.
Now I expect some disagreement with my views – so what are you waiting for?
(Disclaimer: unlike me, Vicky is a very happy Twitter/Facebook/Xing/LinkedIn user. Luddites have not yet completely taken over TrackingTourism.com)
This entry was posted
on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 10:45 am and is filed under Marketing strategy, Opinion, Travel 2.0.
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.
21st April, 2008 at 12:15 pm
seems you miss another Ps
PARTICIPATION
we need to handle 6 Ps in our Internet / Conversation World.
But I agree with you, sometimes Twitter and Facebook are realy boring and seems bla, bla, bla
21st April, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Thanks Claude - I think that’s a really good point about ‘the internet P’ of participation - the ‘old’ Ps can lure people into thinking about a business from a supply-side perspective primarily and ‘participation’ raises the demand side as a consideration as well.
Personally, I work on the basis of ‘People, Product, Promotion and Access’ but that’s not as snappy as the 5 (or 6!) P’s! ‘In that model, ‘access’ would include ‘participation.’
21st April, 2008 at 12:50 pm
As the twittering facebooking linkedin-ing part of the duo, I do nevertheless agree that strategy can be forgotten in the pursuit of ever changing online fads.
When the only reason for participating is “should we be on Second Life, Twitterr, XXX ad infinitum” then chances are it isn’t serving the customer or the business strategy.
However, in defence of some of the networks I participate in, some of the time they have led to the formation and sustainment of meaning relationships that occupy a fuzzy personal/business space. This fuzziness is both the strength and weakness of a lot of online social networking.
I have made friends online, that have led to offline business. The T List contacts, the web analytics contactat and the travel bloggers I keep in touch with are all relationships that started online and in some cases have matured to face to face meetings and actual business too.
At the same time I am aware that potential business contacts are exposed the often boring and odd comments that me, my friends or family have made in the same space, or that I have made in a non work context. I know many people have different personas in different places as ways of dealing with this (and its why I still have a LinkedIn account).
So I do agree, many of my clients or potential clients do not share my attitude to online social networks and I would be foolish to only focus my business marketing efforts only here. It is also true (witness the Linked in to Facebook to Twitter movements) that these things can be very fleeting.
Ultimately though, I like them. I guess I just find them more enjoyable and distracting than you do!
21st April, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I think I’d agree that you don’t need to be a switcher to every new platform.
I think one of the things with Web 2.0 is that often the adoption costs are so low. When a simple RSS feed from tweetscan can find any mention of your company/organisation on Twitter - and give you an easy way to build *a relationship* that can’t hurt. Nor can it hurt to give an easy path to your content - I take this blog on RSS - but I’d probably read it more often if postings were on Twitter via Twitterfeed.
Location based services are probably useful if you’re a networking professional in London or San Diego - as a homeworker in Cromarty, it’s of academic interest to me - unless I’m working in London.
” I don’t think anyone beyond me would really give a hoot knowing that my current location was a bothy in Sutherland”… No, I agree - but knowing you were in Cromarty might encourage me to ping you and ask a pertinent question or try for a brief chat…
At work, I use a presence system [Microsoft Office Communicator] which lets me know if someone’s logged in, in a meeting, off line… that’s useful since it increases your chance of communicating with them - rather than playing email/voicemail tag.
I follow these things with a semi-professional interest, but for most, the key is to work out how *you* need to spend your time. It would be easy to fritter away time you could better spend on building a compelling offer to your customers.
21st April, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Now, I deliberately left myself enough wiggle room on this one and I’m glad I did…!
Vicky and Steve: what you both write reminds me in different ways of the way that ‘hot money’ can move rapidly around the world’s financial systems - some bodies have an appetite for this and others don’t. Likewise, some of us need the technology to ‘prove itself’ whereas others are happy to migrate often to the next big thing.
You’ll note that I am not dismissing these technologies completely - I might well become a twitter convert at a later point but it’s not a high priority at the moment. As Steve rightly says, “It would be easy to fritter away time you could better spend on building a compelling offer to your customers.”
21st April, 2008 at 6:05 pm
I agree on some fronts and disagree on others. Twitter I find to be a waste of time…for me. However, I’m sure for Perez Hilton it is a wondrously useful tool (which makes me not want to use it even more). Truemors finds it very useful. I have yet to see for me how it is valuable…but I’m keeping at open mind.
But the convergence of useful social networking sites and business has seen value (i.e. LinkedIn) and new sites are popping up that will improve on this concept (”dopplr” and “who’s in town” are two possible good ones).
Facebook is working hard to move past the vertical market of students and into the horizontal mainstream market of professionals, and succeeding in a few areas. Market share will be difficult because of a generation gap and ease of use. Facebook at it’s core is a good tool for students. It becomes a somewhat useful tool for professionals only if you know how to use it well and spend the time to add-on the useful plug-ins. But that also assumes others like you will do the same, which I think at the moment is Facebook’s biggest obstacle.
But Facebook is slowing working on it and taking market share. Already there are many professional networking organizations that are taking advantage of the social shared calendar function of Facebook with the benefit of showing who will be there and who won’t (think of how this could change the conference and expo world). “IF” Facebook can keep the teen and twenty-something group involved, that group will find the necessity and add more VERY cool application add-ons to Facebook…hence migrating the slow adopter to it.
Facebook has already added all the profile stuff that you can have on LinkedIn, with the advantage that the new work force already knows how to use it and uses it well.
As for the propensity for rapid mass migrations from one platform to another, it is a requirement of the beast. Without that new Web 2.0 solutions would not survive. It is more important now to show that next big thing can make money, but it’s still important to show that you can get traffic. If you live in the space where this fact is a requirement of survival you love it…and need it.
If you live in the space where it is annoying to try and keep up you hate it. I think living in the middle where you keep an eye on it and decide what can be valuable to you personally ensures you get to be an early adopter if you want to be or a late adopter if it becomes a requirement. Personally I think you need to live in that space if you expect to capitalize on the opportunities when they arrive.
21st April, 2008 at 8:07 pm
I like Twitter. I wish you would use it more often.
21st April, 2008 at 8:34 pm
David, I’m not past Twitter self consciousness, which is why I don’t use it more. I kind of feel if I’m writing something that everyone will see, it should have some value to others greater than if I hadn’t said it. And I don’t feel I’ve cracked that in Twitter just yet. Maybe I need to practice Haiku or verbal minimalism. Do you feed your blog through Twitter?
22nd April, 2008 at 8:47 am
I agree with you Stephen, that you can get carried away with latest fad which may be of dubious benefit to your business.
It’s time consuming to maintain a presence on all thes esocial network sites. For example you if you receive a message through Facebook you can’t just hit reply and start composing your response, you have to look into Facebook.
I am a Twitterer but I try to only write updates relevant to my business. I have added the RSS for my Europe a la Carte blog and Wandalust to my Twitter updates.
22nd April, 2008 at 10:06 am
Kevin, I think there are some interesting points suggested in your post.
I think one of the them was to actually say the term ’slow adopter’. Another thing I picked up on was that although rapid migration is not for me, the people who do this perform a useful function as a kind of ‘advance party’ to check out the surroundings. If they like what they see, then the rest of us get to hear about it in due course when it has been established that this new watering hole is a safe and useful place to visit.
I also liked your point about Facebook needing to break out from being a ‘student’ application. I appreciate that I’ve rendered your observation a little crudely but I think it is interesting that you have put some perspective on this and seen that it has the potential to ‘grow up.’ To expect social network sites to remain in their present form is as unrealistic as expecting the PC on your desktop to be the pinnacle of technology from this point forward and to never change or advance from how it is now.
And the point about traffic is also well made – it is the currency of survival and I guess there is a balance between encouraging the early adopters to visit but then retaining making sure that it is still habitable for occupancy when the slow adopters turn up, thereby replacing the lost early adopter traffic and maintining the site’s viability.
As an aside, I came across my old copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds recently and have just now wondered whether the migrations we see from hot sites are actually the net’s equivalent of Bubbles!
Karen, do you find yourself abandoning some sites after a while or do you think that previously indispensable sites just whither away?
22nd April, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Stephen…thanks for the response. I do think that some of these migrations are the equivalent of Bubbles in a way. But the evolution of this “hot sites” is different than the traditional “bubble” in that they are much more malleable I think. Take Second Life for example. I cannot for my life figure out why someone would spend time living a second life online…but it was hugely popular and drew a huge crowd immediately. Then people started criticizing it because it was basically a waste of Internet space. Lots of people were making fake money but there was no real money being made.
I heard (I do not know if this is 100% true) that Second Life came up with an advertising concept similar to that of the real world. Create items that you need to purchase to get but are low supply, thus creating a huge demand and making it a game to try and have one. The story I heard was with Pepsi, and that Pepsi paid well to have this marketing spot and that Pepsi sales increased.
That was in no way possible in the previous world of consumer…you just couldn’t get the product to market that fast. If a site listens to the users they can maintain user presence by quickly meeting the needs of the user.
This is one of the ways Facebook and MySpace (and Google obviously) have been so uber successful. Feature content is generated and release practically weekly. The trouble with Facebook is the content at the moment is not easy enough to find and implement.
23rd April, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Kevin, I think that at some level, there are people making real money in Second Life (the victim of griefer attacks on page 3 of this Wired article seems to be one such person). But I think that it in most cases, companies need to be ‘cute’ about how they monetize something like Second Life and your Pepsi example would fall into that category.
You’ve introduced another interesting concept as well - the role of scarcity in social networking sites.
I appreciate that I am wandering waaay off my original topic here but it seems that a founding principle of the online social network is that supply and demand are in equilibrium. That’s to say, there is always room for one more person to join in.
Now, whether a site is still desirable when you have just anyone turning up is another pertinent issue and generally I suspect the demand side of the market makes the decision about whether to move on to somewhere else. If you are a Hillary Clinton Democrat supporter, for example, I understand that the Daily Kos has ceased to be something enjoyable because of the prevalence of Obama supporters and so you might be tempted to move on.
However, the management of demand by the supply side is something different and, of course, it’s ultimately the model on ‘pay for’ sites. But I suspect that lowering the level of supply within the site itself (rather like restricting a particular toy in a toy shop) has the effect of increasing both the level of desirability of the scare items and the emotional investment made when it is bought. This in turn can enhance ‘real life’ investment or make the user less likely to defect so quickly.
Where’s an economist when you need one?
29th April, 2008 at 2:46 pm
I don’t think I’ve really found a web 2.0 tool that suits me with my business hat on. LinkedIn feels horribly clunky, twitter sounds like a pain in the neck, and Facebook just doesn’t seem to be capable of keeping conversations going, plus it pushes your personal/work identities too close together. (But I ‘met’ Vicky on Facebook, so that’s all good!).
I use Livejournal (which is rather like Bebo) for my personal blog and have made a lot of friends through it. I’d love to use Livejournal-style technology in a business setting, but it needs to be a separate network, i think.
29th April, 2008 at 3:31 pm
HI Alison - as you rightly point out, we “met” on Facebook and have subsequently spoken and almost met face to face.
I too haven’t quite found the optimum channel to do
this for business, though have had success with Facebook, even though as you say, it pushes work and personal together.
Some of the private communities I use in specific contexts, such as the Web Analytics Association, work - but then you lose out on the opportunity of meeting new people in the way I did with you.
I think it will become easier when it becomes increasingly common to aggregate/manage all your different communities and online social networks into one place - then you can really benefit from the cross network analysis of “other people like me”. But still, the work/personal thing will remain an issue I think.
7th May, 2008 at 9:53 pm
I think Twitter is good for networking more than for regular Web site visitors — though I can see a few types of sites where Twitter would be especially useful.
I think Twitter will be increasingly useful for networking as more people in the travel industry start using it.
7th May, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Josh, I think you have a great point there - that networking is the key and the value of any networking tool (including I would say offline networking) depends on the presence of likeminded industry members.
The benefit comes from the people in the network, not the tool itself. I know of people who have been on Twitter a while who are only seeing its value now others from the industry that are using it.
I think that it is the pulling power of people that make people fly half way across the world for a conference, and also that pulls people into an online network too.
Leave a Reply
