At last year’s PhoCusWright Travel 2.0 conference the palpable excitement accompanying the mere mention of social networks, communities and user generated content suggested an industry gone slightly giddy for social media.
What the difference a year makes.
Europe’s Eye For Travel Social Media Strategies in Travel Summit, which kicked off today in Munich, revealed a sobered and distinctly more pragmatic industry view. Hugo Burge, Vice chairman of Cheapflights, set the tone when he opened the conference by asking “in economic uncertainty, where do we best spend our money?” Throughout the day there was a focus on tactics for maximising impact from efforts, strategies for evaluation and examination of tangible results.
“Good for the brand” was dismissed as bluster in leiu of real evidence of actual social media success and Blaise Fiedler, Head of e-Business at Amadeus offered strategies not only to “track, analyze and improve” but also “to control the hype”.
WAYN talked critical mass, the value of highly their targeted data and the need for systematic A/B testing to drive conversion and optimisation. Co-Founder Jerome Touze also ventured that if they had instead launched today’s saturated online communities market, his Where Are You Now community would have been unlikely to succeed – “It’s too late. The problem for a new community now is getting traction – it is at saturation point”.
Of course, no one was declaring social media dead or redundant – very far from it. Its role in the consumer travel research and purchase process grows, not diminishes. But the role of social media strategies that a travel business may develop were discussed in terms of core capabilities, deliverables to expectations and hard business data, rather than in vague hopefulness.
In my view the businesses presenting – from Royal Caribbean Cruises and Derag Hotel to the UGC sites like Tripadvisor, Trivago, Boo.com and Holidaycheck – were talking in the more appropriate language of strategy, options and insight, rather than mysterious web 2.0 miracles.
Blaise Fiedler of Amadeus argued “invest in your core competence – your own website – not in the properties/competencies of others such as Facebook.” And should you want to follow that advice, UGC content providers from Tripadvisor to WAYN are focussing on making it ever easier for businesses to pull in trusted content, rather than reinvent the wheel or get too lost in offsite activity.
I was speaking on the subject of applying metrics to user generated content in order to measure its business impact, with a case study I will post on this blog at a later date. My suggestions included:
- focussing efforts on measuring only things you can act on
- not trying to measure all user generated content at equal depth, but instead using web analytics metrics to understand what drives conversion and revenue
- analysing the qualitative customer feedback and PR wins/losses offered by UGC
Last year, I suspect I’d have been a minority voice. This year industry heavyweights from EasyHotel and Cheapflights to Amadeus and Trivago expressed similar sentiments with their own flavours of experiences and contexts.
Afterall, everyone measures their results more avidly in tough times, not least so they can stop wasting money. And, of course, that includes travel consumers as well as businesses.
I give the final quote of this post to Ron Kuhlmann of Unisys, who brought new data to backup the old truism “deliver on what you promise.” As his travel sector scorecards revealed, “if you leave a gap between expectations and delivery, that’s when the nasty reviews appear.”
Thanks to Gina and her team at Eye For Travel for the opportunity to participate in a thought provoking conference. It was also great to finally meet fellow blogger Karin Schmollgruber of FastenYourSeatbelts.at and Passion PR. Her German language post from the conference can be found here.
Finally, thanks to a great bunch of speakers and industry participants for bringing revenues, realism and solid results evaluation back into the travel industry’s social media discussion.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Conference learnings, Data, Marketing strategy, Social media measurement, 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.