Tracking Tourism: The Tourism Research Blog Archive for the ‘Social media measurement’ Category

I’ve noticed that when you mention the name Tripadvisor to accommodation providers, the vast majority give an involuntary shudder.

Due to some genuine bad experiences, there seems to be a widespread assumption amongst businesses that Tripadvisor reviews accentuate the negative.

Yet I am an avowed Tripadvisor user and I have only ever given two negative reviews. I have chosen accommodation I wouldn’t have otherwise heard of based on the glowing reviews of other users - and I’m sure I am not alone.

So is there more than my anecdotal experience to demonstrate that the user reviews on Tripadvisor are not bad news for good businesses? It just so happens there is!

I’ve done some quick research for this post by looking at the user ratings of 108 local Inverness area accommodation providers reviewed on Tripadvisor. Where available, I cross-referenced these user-generated scores with the Scottish industry quality assurance/star ratings for those same businesses, using other data sources.

What I found is that Tripadvisor reviewers are not only far more generous than you might think (the most common score is four out of five) – but fewer than 20% of accommodation providers are rated lower by visitors than their quality assurance rating would suggest.

Not only that, but it’s the little guys that fare best of all.

I sliced and diced the user ratings by accommodation type and discovered that it is actually the B&Bs of Inverness who score highest on Tripadvisor.

The trends are far more positive than negative

More than 50% of accommodation businesses I looked at are rated 4 out of five or above by Tripadvisor reviewers. The average (mean) is a little lower at 3.8, pulled down by the handful of very poor performers.

More than 50% of businesses also receive a rating from user reviewers that is higher than their Quality Assurance rating. Yes, the QA rating is looking at different and very specific factors, but it is a sign of a very positive visitor experience when a two star establishment can get a 4.0 Tripadvisor rating because it delivers that 2 star experience extremely well indeed.

Whether it is a reflection on the wisdom of crowds or wisdom of the QA assessors, fewer than 20% of accommodation providers are rated lower by visitors than their star rating would suggest. So who are those establishments with Tripadvisor ratings lower than their QA scores? They were almost exclusively 5 or 4 star B&Bs. Their visitors rated them either 0.5 points or 1 point lower than the QA rating and while I haven’t done a full text analysis of comments, I suspect that poor warmth of welcome/friendliness may have been a factor in some of these cases.

So to conclude - don’t bury your head in the sand. If you have a good product and good people, have faith that the majority of Tripadvisor reviewers are not out to get you. In fact, they’re likely to be pretty generous!

Let me know if you’d like to see more of this data and I’ll do a follow up post.

Ben Vinod, Chief Scientist at Sabre Holdings (the global powerhouse Travelocity and the Sabre Travel Network) today informed the tourism industry businesses attending Scotland’s Tourism Innovation Day that user generated content is now a fact of life.

He explained that 2008 is the year that user generated content has become mainstream to travel consumers. Mainstream to the extent that many consumers now demand and expect to consult the opinions and reviews of other users and are looking to businesses to be prepared to share that information.

What does that mean for tourism businesses? As we have already discussed on the blog (for example here and here) consumers are already having conversations about your business online. The challenge is how do you use that for competitive advantage?

Sabre Holdings itself is addressing this question on many levels, because they are determined maintain their position as undisputed leader in travel and transportation and recognise that a culture of innovation is critical to that.

Ben explains: “Innovation is not an event, it needs to be in your mind at all times - you need to out-think the competition”

Looking for keywords in Haystacks

Sabre is now intensively mining consumer generated content - included that generated in their community igougo - to spot the words and themes that people use. Afterall, the community aspect is critical to travel planning and user generated content and destination/product selection is critically connected. What is being said in those communities clearly has the power to convert into travel purchases.

So Sabre Holdings is using technology to mine this content. They then use what they find to inform their key word bidding optimisation strategy. By understanding which words people use and respond to, they can match this buy buying paid search on terms that will deliver a good return at the best price.

Their whole premise behind user generated content is that you want to intercept the potential customer well ahead of the purchase chain. Ben comments “What Tripadvisor does for Expedia is drive site traffic, where Expedia can then convert that into bookings. Consumer generated media has become expected”. Integrated effectively into the shopping process.

Ben’s key reminder to businesses large and small?

“The most important thing we have to do is remain competitive in the marketplace and the landscape is changing on a daily basis”.

Innovation, technology and the themes covered today at the Tourism Innovation Day are a critical, not an optional, part of that.

Authentic, beautiful, current: why Flickr could be the destination marketers dream

I wish that every tourist considering a visit to Scotland could have their taste buds tickled by the Scotland group on Flickr.

Its stunning images, a selection are shown here in its group blog, represent the best visualisations of Scotland - both in terms of traditionally “postcard” imagery, but also of the daily life of a modern country.

Unlike photographs commissioned in advance for print, these images emerge in near real time, reflecting the changes in seasons and highlighting exceptional events and sights. As a result, I believe they reflect the heartbeat of the country.

But its not just tourists who should be paying serious attention to these destination groups on Flickr.

The people contributing photos to the Scotland group (and other destination groups like it) are producing an authetic, passionate commentary about a tourism destination, that is there for the world to read. It’s because of this that I think destination marketers and researchers should be paying more attention to Flickr than they currently are.

Using the example of the Scotland group, it is participative in a way that reinforces the attractiveness of the destination to the visitor. In the discussion threads, the comments and images of residents are combined with the reminiscences of ex-pats, former students and previous visitors. They are interspersed with comments from people expressing anticipation, excitement and desire to visit Scotland.

In a quick analysis of an 85 post discussion thread entitled “Who are you and where are you from?” I found that while around 60% of participants currently live in Scotland, around 10% are from England or elsewhere in the UK and 30% are from outside the UK.

The non-Scotland based members have an opportunity to maintain and even strengthen their bond with the country by sustaining the interaction with the place, despite the distance.

Having removed any personal identifiers, I ran the words in the discussion thread through a tag cloud generator, in order to identify some of the most frequent terms used:

The results are not just about traditional imagery, castles and scenery. Instead very dynamic, emotional terms emerge - living, love, beautiful, family, best, originally. This is a vocabulary that embodies connection and engagement.

And the Scotland group is not some lone exception. I’ve run similar threads from other destination groups through the same process and the themes are the same: “Love, living, enjoy, moved, feels, visit”

This is engagement and it is real. And it’s what potential visitors trust, often to a greater extent than the formal marketing messages a destination produces.

So how do destinations embrace the Flickr effect?

Firstly, I think it is important to recognise critical mass when you see it and not try to go head to head in competition with a force like Flickr. But I also think it can be used far more effectively than it currently is.

For market insight, yes.

But perhaps more importantly as an embodiment of the pulse of a place.

As an example, two weeks ago the city of Inverness where I live celebrated the end of its year of Highland Culture with an almighty fireworks display by the team behind the Sydney Olympics fireworks. Less than an hour after the event, the first very high quality pictures were on Flickr. The picture used by the BBC website was from a local Flickr star.

By the next day a dozen or more people had posted pictures - many of which attracted hundreds of views from people worldwide. I suspect the PR for the destination functioned more effectively in this Flickr context than it did in the traditional offline and online media, where grumbles about costs soured the coverage.

A destination’s marketing team can’t be everywhere, all the time. It can’t afford to constantly produce a high quality, real-time visualisation of what being there is really like. But on a site like Flickr, there are passionate individuals that can and will achieve this. This is an incredible opportunity as long as destinations can find a way to engage with these individuals, rather than expolit them.

Perhaps one answer is a destination endorsed “access all areas” pass for key Flickrites?

Why might a tourism business want to engage with blogging and how can it possibly help with marketing and customer research?

Yesterday I joined tourism industry bloggers from around the world as part of the first ever travel industry bloggers summit, at the PhoCusWright Conference, Orlando.

The bloggers summit was an opportunity for those currently blogging and those destinations (and tourism businesses thinking about beginning blogging) to participate in workshops and discussions.

Tourism industry blogging is beginning to take off and can have powerful benefits for businesses. The well attended workshop sessions explored what those benefits are.

As Kevin May, blogger and editor of Travolution explained to workshop participants, “A blog is incredibly cheap to set up, if not free. If you are trying to differentiate yourself, for example with a niche or unique product, a blog becomes search engine friendly very quickly.”

Steven Joyce of the Travel & Tourism Technology Trends blog highlighted the communication opportunity that blogs offer for businesses. “Blogs are really story books. For small operators that do something unique, it is an opportunity for them to tell their story the way they want to tell it. A blog post is an individual’s perspective on their experience and a reader shares in that. Things that are interesting and engaging when they pull people in.”

There were some great examples of destinations and businesses that are really getting this right. William Bakker of HelloBC.com, British Columbia’s marketing board, gave a fascinating example of how they as destination marketers are tapping into the long tail of tourism experiences through blogs and user generated content.

William’s team has integrated first staff blogs and then public blogs into the main destination site, highlighting appropriate (moderated) blog content alongside their main site, as you can see in the example here.

William explains the benefits of the approach, “Now we can really tap into the tourism experiences that we don’t have the resources to cover ourselves. Incorporating the blog content alongside our site content gives a nice balance of official and user generated content and it allows us to really to represent tourism experiences that are off the beaten track.”

The way HelloBC has effectively recruited an army of unpaid fans to extend their content and marketing messages beyond the scope they could possibly deliver alone is a terrific example of the harnessing user generated content as part of an authentic marketing conversation.

A major concern from the travel industry audience was how do you manage the potential negative aspects, such as those that appear on review sites – do you really want unfavourable comments or feedback appearing on your blog? The panel of bloggers agreed that transparency and authenticity is essential and that complaints have always existed and been managed in the hospitality industry.

Jens Thraenhart of the Canadian Tourism Commission and the Tourism Internet Marketing blog explained , “Every bad review is an opportunity. It’s the art of turning it around. If you have your blindfold on that is lost for ever. The same as you would manage a complaint at the desk, you manage it online and you commit resources to that.”

Steve Joyce agreed, adding, “Every comment is the start of a conversation. Every positive comment I thank the commenter. Negative, I thank the commenter and continue the conversation. It is an extension of the customer service that already happened in the travel industry”.

A final benefit about tourism industry business blogging (and this extends to engaging in social networks) is the free market research opportunities it offers. Ram Badrinathan, travel analyst with PhoCusWright in India commented that, “blogs are proving consumer to business feedback without conducting research. You get feedback direct to you. You can integrate that into your product.”

This is an interesting point. Blogging and activity in social networks is not going to replace the need for research, but it can enhance it, because it offers a direct opportunity to hear and participate in conversations about your business that previously happened behind closed doors. Encouraging these conversations into the open means you will learn more about your customer’s thoughts and their experiences of your brand and product than ever before. This knowledge gives you power to act as appropriate.

Do you have to blog yourself for your business to benefit?

Blogging takes time, requires passion and isn’t for everyone. How can tourism companies use bloggers without blogging themselves?

HelloBC shows that you can incorporate the blogs of others. It was also suggested that you encourage those taking press and familiarity trips to blog about their experiences, thereby dramatically increasing the content online about your business.

There is also clearly opportunity to engage with existing bloggers, though this has to be done with sensitivity due to the transparent and usually unpaid nature of blogs.

As Steven Joyce explains, “Integrity has to be a part of it. There are different way of approaching bloggers and leveraging coverage, compared to traditional travel press. How do you invite bloggers and get them involved? In most cases they’re looking to be appreciated for what they do. They’re looking for acknowledgment that its valuable.” Just like the press, they’re looking for original content, but press releases simply don’t cut it. Blogging is about genuine stories, not PR releases.

Understand what others are saying about you

To conclude this quick post from sunny Orlando. The way customers are consuming information and marketing messages is changing. Again and again at this conference, marketing is being described as a conversation, rather than the old one-way process of pushing information out.

Blogging and engaging with social media can enable tourism businesses to hear the conversation (market research), participate in the conversation (marketing strategy) and act on the conversation when required (customer service and general management). Powerful stuff.

At the Emetrics Summit a couple of weeks back one of the speakers posed the question: “Is the long tail the antithesis of social networking or is it the place that will feed social networking?”

In other words, does being low volume and niche mean that a community lacks the quantity of interactions to sustain an active social network? Or will the long tail spawn small, tightly focussed communities where quality, not quantity of interactions matter?

And the question has been rattling around in my head ever since, albeit infused with a tourism flavour.

So my question behind this post (and I must say at the beginning that I don’t have a proper answer!) is:

“Is a potential visitor, and the tourism businesses trying to engage with that potential visitor, likely to be served better by a long tail of niche travel communities and social networks, or by two or three “full service” players whose very scale means they have achieved the critical mass to serve niche interests?”

So, by implication, is it better for a hotel in Kinross to communicate primarily through say a Kinross orientated online community, or through a high volume, global player like TripAdvisor or Facebook.

And what will this mean for the potential visitor’s experience as they research their travel plans? Will they use their existing Trout fishing network to find out whether a B&B in Kinross is worth staying in, or will they attempt to negotiate a series of niche communities that they do not yet belong to? Would they prefer to default to Facebook or TripAdvisor if it met their information needs (or if even more significantly, they trust the opinions and share similar interests and experiences with the people in those communities)?

To build or take residence?

One of the reasons why I think this question matters, is because it relates to the strategic business question of how to engage in a marketing conversation with a consumer who trusts user generated content far ahead of any commercial content you can develop. (Put bluntly, potential visitors trust each other for a truthful view, rather than you).

So, should destinations and travel firms be looking to create their own niche social networks, or would they instead be better to identify and creatively reside in the most appropriate and influential platforms where they can meet and engage potential customers in two-way conversations on “neutral ground”.

And what of individual small business? Fiscal and time constraints mean that participation in existing communities is likely to be more practical for most businesses than opting for social network development. But where does a business choose to invest its time in its two-way conversations with potential customers? Can it realistically do this beyond two or three well chosen communities? Carefully identifying those networks that represent prospects with a high propensity to undertake the desired outcome is even more important when there is only time to partake in a couple of networks.

So, what travel online communities are out there already?

I’ve included some examples of travel sector online communities, covering a broad range of intents and scale. If I’ve missed what you’re doing, or you know of some excellent examples, please feel free to comment at the end of this post and highlight the online community/project.

The airline: Flying Blue Golf Club offers its members an on-line community which has golf networking as its primary focus. KLM has developed a robust, niche social network all about golfing where travellers can enter their destinations and scores, use miles to purchase golf related merchandise and book golf get-togethers with other travellers that happen to be in the same location.

The destination: GoSeeOregon bills itself as “Travel information from people you can trust”. The site lets users find other travellers who share their interests and travel preferences and generates recommendations from other members.

Travel 2.0 community: VIAmigo’s remit is to help global travellers find authentic, local experiences and insider adventures - by connecting them with personal guides from everywhere. As Jeff Goldsmith of VIAmigo explains “We’re working on a new iteration of the site based on user feedback, and we expect many more guides on the site in the coming months.”

The accommodation sector: TripAdvisor has truly achieved critical mass in the sector, with 10,000,000+ traveller reviews and opinions of hotels/holidays.

Marc Charron, General Manager for TripAdvisor Europe, explains in this Travolution article:

“Our success hinges on participation by our community. Content contributed by them is at the heart of our proposition, and it’s their reviews and recommendations, the total scope of their collective wisdom, that enables people to venture down the Long Tail of destinations, hotels, of all the possibilities and experiences to be had through travel.

What’s exciting about the trend of demand moving towards fringe destinations or niche properties or services is that we can help people “move from the world they know… to the world they do not via a route that is both comfortable and tailored to their tastes”. Many of us aim to inspire travellers, and that is as good a definition as any I’ve heard.”

The Facebook applications: Facebook has thousands of small travel or destination focused groups and communities. Yet despite more than 180 new applications being added each week, I could find only around 60 travel applications on Facebook, most of these with a tiny number of users.

By far the largest is the TripAdvisor application, Cities I Have Visited, with more than 100,000 active daily users. Users create an interactive travel map to share with friends and help them plan their trips.

Trips by Sidester.inc, is an application is for planning trips with friends and finding others planning trips to the same place at the same time. It also lets users share past travel adventures on your profile.

Another tool is Resturant Wars, a ratings application from Travature. Jeremy Almond of Travature recently commented on another post in this blog that:

“Travature.com is one of the few new breed travel startups that are actively pursuing the merging of traditional travel services like flight metasearching with new social concepts like wiki travel guides, community driven restaurant reviews, flickr photostreams, etc. There is definitely a need for the Tourism Industry needs to shift its focus off themselves and onto the travellers. Hopefully the supposed “travel 2.0″ platform, that startup companies like ourselves are working on can be the catalyst.”

Any conclusions?

So, is a potential visitor, and the tourism businesses that visitor engages with, likely to be served better by a long tail of niche travel communities and social networks, or by two or three “full service” players whose very scale means they have achieved the critical mass to serve the long tail of niche interests?

I’m not sure I know the answer, but I do think that for an industry like tourism - where there are millions of consumers, thousands of different types of desired visitor experiences, hundreds of thousands of destinations, millions of different businesses from restaurants to attractions - there is scope for several bigger players to amass a broad, user generated content rich social platform. Just as Tripadvisor notes, their very scale lets them serve the long tail reasonably efficiently within their platform.

And yet, the power of online communities is in the people within them – their shared interests, participation levels and trustworthiness. Ultimately, the people make the choice of what suits them best.

We recently conducted online research for an organisation to examine what websites and social networks their target markets use and which of those might be most significant in spreading awareness, shaping opinion and stimulating a desired outcome. One of the most interesting things in this specific scenario was that it was the bigger niche players that were most influential in the eyes of the customer – most of them traditional websites and online communities based on interest lines – rather than the online social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Look at a different scenario, sector or context and I’m sure the results would be different – but I think what is significant is looking at the particular platforms and communities that work best for the potential customer. Because from the tourism business perspective, what works best for your target market is likely to be the best place for you to be interacting too.

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There is always the suspicion that when you stumble upon an insight from a different discipline to your own, you wonder whether it is something that is actually common knowledge and you’re arriving a little late to the party…That’s how I felt when I suddenly realised there was a whole body of literature dedicated to communication theories. But I was also excited as it opened up new ways of looking at dealing with online customers and communities as well as confirming the importance of identifying the key players in the communications process.

So, if you are like me and new to this area, read on for a quick overview of something that should be familiar to those working in PR but maybe less so to the rest of us.

Communications Theory 101

My journey started when I was reading an unrelated article about the US political writer Russell Kirk and I came across the following paragraph:

“Downs followed an hypothesis of Elmo Roper, which held that great ideas emerge from a small group of “great thinkers” and are then brought to public awareness by the efforts of five concentric groups: “Great disciples” (learned individuals who do not themselves originate the ideas) place the ideas before the “great disseminators” (often teachers and journalists), who are followed by “lesser disseminators,” the “politically active,” and finally the “politically inert.”’Following Roper’s theory of communications, Kirk belongs among the “great disciples” who at a high level of articulation begin the work of dissemination.”

Despite the political framework of the paragraph above this is perhaps something that many of us instinctively know but haven’t really considered in such a formal way. It led me to go off and see whether I could discover more about Roper’s work or about communication theories in general.

It’s a generalization but communication theories up to roughly around the 1940s saw communication as being something that was unmediated between communicator and audience.The main theories either stated (broadly speaking) that people understand messages in a like manner or that they respond according to their circumstances to the time. In the latter case, this led to the following formula:

“Some kinds of communication on some kinds of issues, brought to the attention of some kinds of people under some kinds of conditions, have some kinds of effects”

The point about these theories though is that (to quote Margaret Thatcher out of context), “there is no such thing as society” - the relationship between disseminator and audience is a one-to-one relationship.

However, work by people like Lazarsfeld and Roper stressed the importance of mediating influences in the reception of the message.

Roper’s example illustrated above is what is known as the concentric circle theory and Lazarsfeld’s theory is a variant known as the Two-Step Flow of Communication Theory.  In Roper’s structure, you can see the importance given to ‘trusted’ disseminators at various stages of the propogation of the message - these might be teachers, journalists or, at a lower level, trusted ‘local’ experts or activists.

Chains of Coomunication and Influence 

I find this fascinating for a number of reasons. Firstly, it fits in very well with the whole way we can see user-generated content influencing decisions on the web. Indeed, Vicky’s recent post on the Six Degrees of Separation is a simplified variant of Roper’s structure above - she cites influencers, connectors , endorsers for example.

Roper’s model I also find interesting because of the role of the ‘lesser’ communicators in the structure - we all know that mammoth blogs can make the running in terms of thought but Roper’s model also seems to imply that there is room for the ‘little guy’ as well. As an suspect, I guess there is pobably a tipping point in a blog’s existence where it either splits or becomes so rowdy that people leave anyway - which is where the smaller blogs pick up the ‘fallout.’

I also find this interesting because I think it might not be a long tail model either. The communication theories cited above are mass communication theories and this might suggest that while a recommendation to visit a destination by a trusted blogger will affect decision at a micro-level, it could also be contributing to a larger macro level picture over time.

What’s this got to do with Tourism?

In conclusion, it is probably good to raise the perennial question of this site: “what’s this got to do with tourism?” Well, it confirms the importance of the intermediaries identified in other posts - a mass information campaign can raise awareness but personal views can shape the final decisions. I think it also stresses the importance of identifying who those influencers are - potentially a hard slog in some cases (and we speak from experience!) but ultimately delivering considerable bang for your buck.

Much of this post was inspired by some good entry level documents I found at Wesleyan University-Philippines Mass Communication e-Classroom.

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Six degrees of separation….  Its not just a party game – research has shown that we’re all connected to each other by no more than six other individuals. Analysis of these connections, in the form of social networks analysis, lets us understand how people in a community (online or offline networks) are connected.

And what emerges from this process of analysis is that not all members of a network are connected equally. In fact, just a small handful of people connect the majority of people in a community.

So, what does this have to do with tourism?

It is rare that a tourism destination or organisation has the budget for indiscriminate mass marketing. Even online, the challenge of reaching your target market through a scatter-shot approach is precarious and costly.

So, as you can’t realistically market to everyone in your target market, is there a way to identify the most promising prospects with a broad range of communities? Is it possible to identify the small handful of people within a given network who are connected to everyone else, so you focus efforts initially on them?

Yes it is – particularly when looking at the connections within groups, networks and communities online.

For example, at a simplistic level, there are tools that let you visualize the interconnections between friends in an online social network like Facebook:

These visualisations of a social network (my Facebook friends as it happens!) hint at the fact that there are multiple levels of connections between different subgroups of people, with some people densely connected, and others sitting in potentially influential positions between several different networks.

But it is not always the people with the most connections that are the most influential. Within a social network, there are specific people who form and influence opinion and people effective at communicating those opinions or messages to many others. There are the connectors, the endorsed, the influencers and also the critics – and you may be interested in identifying one or all of these types.

The online environment means that with careful data collection and measurement, there are ways to measure the six degrees of separation in order reduce the number of prospects you are targeting from the very many “unknowns”, to the few “knowns” with extensive connections.

Digging deeper to find the best prospects for communication

Identifying the best prospects for spreading your message requires some deep digging into the data and there is not one process that suits all contexts.

However extensive your database, it is likely that often you just see the consequences of the influencer or connector at work. So when conducting social network analysis, we look at the wider online environment (eg blogs, webmasters, interconnected websites, social media communities and niche portals) to complete the dataset.

In the context of tourism social network analysis, we have found it useful to examine inbound and outbound links between online groups and networks. We also tie the data back to a range of other factors, such as the likelihood of the wider network to actually engage in our target goals (eg travel to a specific destination) and the likely extent of their interest in our marketing messages.

We run social network analysis software (for example UCINET, with origins in offline social research) across the online data to highlight those highly connected, or highly influential individuals that marketers can then begin a relationship with.

Using online social network analysis to target influencers, connectors and critics

Once the influencers or connectors have been found, you (or your marketers, if you have them) can focus efforts upon engaging with them. For example, it is now common practice within the movie and tech industries for key influencers such as bloggers or web forum managers to get the same levels of access and attention that were once reserved for the mainstream press. Travel and tourism seems a prime sector to follow this lead.

The key to making this process of engagement useful and effective for both parties is in understanding and matching interests a within a social network, as permission, authenticity and trust is key. (There are critics in these groups, and they are significant as they keep balance and keep the influencers and connectors on their toes!)

When you find an influencer or connector, you need to ensure your goals can be very closely aligned to theirs. They must see value for their network, beyond your self-interest, as they risk the disapproval of their peers if they try to blatantly sell on your behalf or feed inappropriate information to their community.

The process of social network analysis, which began decades ago in anthropological and social research, is incredibly appropriate to the new communities of the Internet. It offers tourism destinations and organisations the opportunity to have a new style of marketing relationship.

By identifying, then engaging with a small number of connected individuals online and supporting them in their interactions with their wider network, tourism organisations can use the concept of six degrees of separation to extend their marketing reach. It offers the potential to reach your target market across the world, without having to spend the earth.

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Some thoughts from the Emetrics Summit in Washington DC, October 2007

I’ve just returned from the Emetrics Summit where I was honoured to be presenting about some of the techniques our company uses to research online networks and global segments of tourism customers.

The Emetrics Summit is a global conference aimed at those working in web measurement and marketing optimisation and has a reputation for bringing together some great thinkers and industry practitioners.

While I was one of the few speakers covering the tourism industry directly, the themes of many of the presentations had strong resonance for those in any industry trying to understand their customers and their web interactions.

So this post highlights four things I took from Emetrics that I think would be of particular interest to those working in the travel and tourism industry.

First Think Different

Jim Sterne, first keynote speaker of the summit, urged attendees to learn to think different and to sharpen our cognitive processes in order to “think like a detective and can act like a scientist”.

Thinking different means tapping into your inner five year old and asking some great questions. Recapturing a childlike state is therefore a prerequisite in order to approach the process of analysis and research with curiosity and wonder, rather than with the jaded or prejudiced views of an adult.

Jim used the great analogy of your company or website being a house with windows and you’re inside looking out. Customers are flying by in helicopters, peering in windows and skylights in the roof, trying to decide whether to come in. And most of the time, as an organisation, we have no concept what that brief glimpse in through the window actually looks like.

Our role (as business owners, web analysts, researchers etc) is to find ways to capture evidence of that customer experience as they peer in through the window of our organisation or website. Our role is to analyze that experience in order to understand how that fits with the customer’s desires and expectations. And finally, our role is then to optimise that customer experience by adapting our website, products and services in order to deliver on those desires and expectations.

So what can thinking like a child possibly mean for tourism businesses? I think it means getting over what you haven’t got - whether that be full data sets, complete customer records or access to expensive tools. As fellow keynote speaker Avinash Kaushik so eloquently put it: “embrace incompleteness”. Once you get over what you haven’t got, you can use your imagination, your curiosity and your intelligence to find the right questions to solve.

And once you have the questions, from then on you can improvise. (Call it den building for grown-ups!) And believe me, if you can tap into your imagination, you can measure the whole world with free tools – I’ve done it.

Measuring multi-language content and campaigns

In a great presentation about robots (non-human web traffic), aliens (international web traffic) and false assumptions, Alex Langshur of Public Insite demonstrated some valuable examples of why it is essential to dig deeper into geographic or language based segments when analysing the success of websites and keyword campaigns.

In examples from Canadian public sector sites, he demonstrated how dramatically the behaviour of visitors to the French and English versions of the same website differed. For example, his research found differences not just in the type of content consumed by French speakers compared to English speakers, but differences in the time of year of content consumption. French and English speakers also visited different content areas of the same site, downloaded different pdfs and clearly had different preferences and concerns.

There were differences in promotional campaign response rates and differences in the specific keywords that successfully attracted people to the site. In an example particularly relevant to tourism, Alex demonstrated how they had promoted the same site (translated in French and English) with the same buckets of 50 or so keywords in French and English.

Although the same words were used in both languages for the paid search campaigns, the French words achieved a higher overall click through rate – a factor that would have been otherwise masked, given that 75% of the market speaks English. Additionally, the top 5 performing keywords were completely different between the two languages, with the French responses coming from a smaller concentration of terms than the English responses.

By realising that the need to not only translate their sites, but promote the different sites using different terms for the different market segments, the team behind the project can now make far more effective use of their budget. Additionally, they are better able to serve the needs of two different segments of web visitors now they understand those groups have different priorities and concerns.

Managing Social media the right way

Carie Lewis, from The Humane Society of the United States, provided one of the best examples I have seen on the right way to engage with customers using social media and online social networks.

It is her role to maintain an ongoing (ie an all day, every day) conversation with supporters of the charity, for example in MySpace and in blogs. With over 30,000 friends in MySpace, Carie gives a “face” to the organisation by sustaining a continued online conversation with supporters and potential supporters (and yes, she answers their emails, chats with them online and follows up when they point out things that she should be aware of).

She works hard in the online social media space to turn friends in MySpace and elsewhere into online advocates and donors. She uses the same communication tools her market uses, such as blogs and instant messaging and she engages with them in a manner for which the primary cost is time.

How can she possibly do this? Well, it is her job and it is clearly her passion. She does this full-time, funded by money removed from expenditure on printed marketing elsewhere in the organisation.

And it’s not about collecting online friends for friends sake. Her success has been in maintaining a marketing conversation that has allowed her to influence what these friends do and to be able to measure these using appropriate metrics for the organisation.

As a result, she has been able to demonstrate how her efforts have led to increased membership, donorship and campaign activism for The Humane Society.

Additionally, she also now has a string of volunteers to help her with the charities cause and finds that increasingly she no longer has to wade into arguments on blogs, because her MySpace friends have already got there first to advocate on The Humane Society’s behalf.

The Humane Society of the United States is a large organisation with many staff and interns. Nevertheless, I think it is highly enlightened that it has chosen to fund a conversational style of marketing via online social networks in the form of a person to shape and undertake those conversations, rather than simply by pushing out flashy content. As Carie puts it “you have to get over the fear of losing control of your message”.

Social butterfly metrics

Joe Pagano, of the Library of Congress, coined a fantastic term that relates to the effect of social media traffic on your website – butterfly metrics.

The term reflects the sight of Monarch butterflies ascending en mass – first just a handful, then hundreds, then thousands at a time – then in no time at all, they are all gone.

Joe described how like butterflies, people flit around the web, making a conscious decision on whether to land on content and perhaps integrate it their lives. And as he rightly points out “it only takes a small group of conscious people to transform collective awareness”.

The Library of Congress is a massive website and photo library and it sees dramatic (if fleeting) spikes in traffic when its content is rated highly on social media sites like Digg. Joe described how in a matter of days, thousands descended to consume content promoted from Digg, all to be gone in a matter of weeks. (His data comes from sources that includes page content view and referrer data from his web analytics tool).

So, why butterfly metrics? As I understand it, Joe is identifying a need to further understand the where, when and why of this traffic descends, where it goes next and the value of it when it occurs. He is also looking for better ways of understanding the distribution of this traffic, for example in terms of time spent on site and content consumed.

Personally speaking, from a tourism site perspective I would want to better understand what triggered the interest, where that trigger occurred and what form the escalation of interest takes, so I could understand whether I should be trying to stimulate this activity again in the future.

In tourism terms, I believe the Incredible India campaign described in an earlier post, really gets this concept too. I think they are putting out their beautiful content in places like You Tube to attract the very social media butterflies that Joe describes.

And finally…

What a long post – and this is the short version. My original list had eight things to report on!

I hope I have conveyed something useful from my experience at the most recent Emetrics Summit and I would heartily recommend attending if you ever have the chance. (Emetrics takes place in London, San Francisco, Stockholm and Munich – and next year in Toronto too).

I will be posting based on my presentation in the coming days.

Stephen also conducted a fascinating industry interview with fellow Emetrics attendee Jeremy Cooker, online marketing consultant and hotel liaison for the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation - this will be posted later next week.

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Research released by comScore yesterday finds that more than half the European online population now uses social networking sites.

The UK has the highest usage in Europe, with almost 80% of the online populations using social networking sites and the average user racking up more than 800 page views a month.

ComScore’s key findings include:

• The European social networking community stood at 127.3 million unique visitors in August – reaching 56 percent of the European online population
• European users average 3.0 hours per month on Social Networking Sites and made 15.8 visits in the course of the month, viewing 523 pages
• U.K. Social Networking Site Usage is the highest in Europe with 24.9 million unique visitors in August 2007
• 78% of the total U.K. online population now belongs to the country’s social networking community, compared to 62% in Spain, 50% in France, 49% in Italy and 47% in Germany
• U.K. Users Average 5.8 Hours per Month on Social Networking Sites and made 23.3 visits in the course of the month, viewing 839 pages
• Heavy social network site users spend 22 hours per month on their favourite sites, visiting 71 times and viewing over 3,000 pages

The data about these heavy social network site users are a great example of why it is important to beware of averages when looking at any form of research data. Their intense usage effectively lifts the average point, masking the lower engagement of the bulk of lighter users who account for 50% of users.

The comScore research finds that these light users (defined as being the least active 50 percent of the social networking community) spent significantly less time engaged with social networking sites’ content, making just 4.6 visits per person and consuming only 47 pages of social networking content over the course of the month.

Its an example of the 80/20 rule again rearing its head. As Bob Ivins, EVP of International Markets at comScore, explains:

“about eighty percent of all online activity at Social Networking sites can be attributed to only 20 percent of visitors.”

Clearly that has to have significance to tourism businesses advertising to and otherwise engaging with customers within the online social network space.

It will be a significant challenge to ensure that your message gets beyond the 20% of heavy users and into the bulk of the online population who are far less heavily engaged.

Related Tracking Tourism posts

How social media like Flickr and YouTube has become an influence on destination selection

To read Highland Business Research’s free Introduction to Online Social Networks, download the PDF here

Online newspaper discussion forums can be places of great insight as well as leaving you feeling queasy. They are the meeting point between research and PR and this article expresses some of my thoughts and frustrations about one of the more prominent ones in Scotland.

Sometimes I really despair and get angry at the public level of debate on tourism in Scotland. A particular source of my ire lies in the comments section of online versions of our mainstream national newspapers.

As has been discussed recently on this site, it is likely that people research their destination in more than one way online. And, if they anything like me, they might well look at local and national newspapers to get a flavour of what’s going on.

So why in God’s name do people seek to perform the online equivalent of fouling their own nests by exposing these would-be tourists to insults?

Anyone unfortunate enough to have clicked on the perfectly reasonable story last Friday about the recent Scottish Tourism Fourum conference would have been greeted with a reader comment section that contained, amongst other gems:

[In pole position as comment #1]“WE DON’T WANT ALL THOSE TOURISTS, THANKS!!”

” I have been to Scotland three times and have enjoyed every minute. I plan on coming back. However, I have to say that a lot of the anti-American sentiment I read on these threads makes me wonder whether I am making the right decision. I do not want to be an unwelcome visitor.”

“Don’t be misled by the anti-American sentiment…The anti bit is anti your government…not anti the American people. You cannot help it if your leaders are war criminals and totalitarian nutters”

” Tourism is morons catering for morons, all at huge environmental cost.”

“Stay in Alaska. You have no idea what Scotland is like except through stereotype.”

“Americans, like no other nationality that visits Scotland, are uniquly single-out for behind-your-back comments, jokes, gossip, ridicule and plain old fashioned hate”

It really is as though someone decided it made good business sense to erect a poster outside their shop that said “F*** off, we hate you and your stinking money.” And, as some (brave) would-be tourists pointed out in the thread, they are at liberty to take their money elsewhere and do just that.

So, two thoughts come out of this.

1. Scotland’s image is being tarnished by the trolls inhabiting these kind of pages. As Torchil Chrichton put it in a different context in the Sunday Herald:

Try catching up with the future of Scotland on any newspaper readers’ forum and you’ll end up wanting to take a shower. The flipside [of online interactive conversations] is like wading through slurry on a foot-and-mouth infected farm yard.

So what can we do about it? Well, there’s obviously a conflict here between free speech and using that freedom to (figuratively) crap on your own doorstep. Personally, if guests did that in my house I would throw them out.

There is also the argument that these trolls are merely partaking in acts of vandalism and industrial sabotage.

Any suggestions from readers?

2. Amidst the slurry, there is genuine insight. Want to know what North Americans think of Scotland and hear what some of their objections/obstacles to visiting are? There’s plenty in there to give you a good idea:

“First the prices for Scottish accommodation, hotels, restaurants, and service must be made more comp