I’ve presented two eMarketing workshops in as many days this week (do feel free to peruse the slides here) and a head spinning seven in the last four weeks.
In those sessions I have talked about Web 2.0, blogging, web measurement, Travel 2.0 (click for a definition), engaging in the conversation with your customer and that fact that there has been a monumental shift in how potential consumers seek, evaluate and trust information.
But from San Francisco to the Scottish Highlands, London to Swansea - as businesses absorb the implications of what this means, they generally express with some horror the exact same question. “Just how long does all this stuff take?”
And of course, it’s an absolutely killer question, right at the heart of how successfully Travel 2.0 techniques are adopted by businesses. “Just how do I blog, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tripadvisor etc etc and still run my business…. How do I commit enough time to make this work, but not so much time that every other aspect of my business stops?”
Like any other marketing or business function, you should invest time according to how important the results are likely to be to your business. The Travel 2.0 space is a perfect one in which to experiment and keep experimenting as you maximise results. Yes it is time consuming, but that isn’t reason enough to not get involved. The internet is now absolutely critical to travel - it is mainstream, not niche as these statistics show:
In terms of specific advice, I can only answer from my personal experience:
1) Narrow down the options:
Start with research (this post tells you how). You can’t be everywhere, nor do you need to be. Are there certain sites, communities, blogs or Flickr groups etc where your business, sector, interests or competitiors are already being actively discussed. Are there places where the key thinkers/players in your field are already meeting. Are there places you simply like to be?
You do not have to do this completely manually, as the above post shows, there are free technologies that will bring this information to you.
2) Understand your target market online:
Don’t assume that Travel 2.0 is only about young, trendy advance adopters of technology. Participation in social networking, for example, mirrors the age spread of the online population as a whole. Tripadvisor and to some extent Flickr are becoming a mainstream part of the travel selection process.
However, different sites, tools and communities do attract different profiles of people. Just as its worth paying attention to whether other people in your field are spending their time online, its also worth thinking carefully about where your potential customers are too. Hitwise, comScore and Alexa are provide some free information that help answer this.
3) Know why you’re there:
Are you there in order to create awareness of your business, demonstrate your expertise, deliver better customer service, spot opportunities and threats, learn from your peers, network, spy on the competition?
Understand the point of why you’re investing your time and just how important that is to the business. If you are driving new business and delivering better customer service, you may even be able to see quite quickly that this is so important an activity and delivery such results that you should shift resources (say a marketing assistant) away from off-line activity and into the Travel 2.0 space.
I am increasing coming across young marketing assistants for whom blogging, being active in MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc is a large part of their job. (Travel, public sector and charities are sectors where I have seen examples of this).
4) Assign a cash value to your time:
Engaging with the Travel 2.0 consumer is far higher in time costs than actual marketing spend. Whereas it easy to understand that a marketing campaign that cost £10,000 and drove £1,000 of business was not successful, you can’t make that correlation for time spent on MySpace until you understand the cost of what you invested.
I know, for example, how much running this blog costs me as a cash equivalent to my time - I also know that it represents a worthwhile use of my time (because I join up the dots and where possible track where new opportunities originated from).
5) Review regularly what is and isn’t working:
Web 2.0. Travel 2.0, social media - call it what you will, remains incredibly faddy at an individual site/community level. Facebook saw its first dip in traffic earlier this year and us travel bloggers, who move from community to community in pursuit of the best place to really interact with each other, are examples of how fickle visitors to individual communities can be.
There is no single best place to spend your energies - it should and probably will be a least a few sites/activities at any one time. But finding the optimum combination for you will be an ongoing experiment and will change regularly. Review frequently (using web analytics, research or good old fashioned talking to your customers and peers) and adapt!
This is my strategy and it perhaps sounds excessively calculated. In fact, I enjoy investing my time and energy in the communities I participate in. I find it personally rewarding as well as good for business and I have made many friends and travelled to wonderful places (for real, not just virtually).
The reason I need a strategy to manage my Web 2.0 efforts is simply because the opportunities are endless whereas time and energy are not.
Calling those juggling champions
I know for a fact that there are a number of people out there who successfully juggle running travel and tourism businesses with maintaining blogs, leading great industry discussions online, while answering the needs of their own and a broader swathe of potential customers in a range of communities. Guido, the Happy Hotelier is one, Rene at Greater Speyside another, so is Claude Bernard and Don at Get a Room.
There are more of you than I can mention and most of the blogs I link to on the right of this page provide examples of fantastic time and Travel 2.0 gymnastics.
Perhaps you will share with us how you do it?
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Business research, Tourism blogging, Travel 2.0, Web analytics and 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.
