Over the coming weeks I will be publishing a number of Social Media Q&A interviews with a wide range of people within travel. It would be great if readers could add their thoughts and opinions on the questions asked. Thank you to Tim Hughes who was my first interviewee.
Please introduce yourself and your blog
I work for Orbitz and have a personal blog about the online travel world at the Business Of Online Travel. On the BOOT I look at trends in the industry, make comments on company behaviour and throw in a little about my experiences as a business and leisure traveller.
What is your opinion of Twitter and do you think it is having a negative impact on blogs?
I have not yet figured out twitter (anyone who tells you have is lying). But a couple of trends are clear. First – Twitter is a much more powerful a means of generating buzz about a story that email forwarding. If a post I do is a hit on twitter (ie gets RTed a lot) then the traffic I receive will be much greater than any “pre-twitter” story.
Second – Twitter lets me participate and share in information around an event unlike anything else. The use of hashtags for sharing information and commentary around a conference or event (whether you are there or not) has added a new dimension for interaction (and site traffic generation). Third – If you use Twitter a lot then you blog less and you reach a different audience.
It gives me a means for making very short pieces of commentary and distribute information that I used to translate into a longer blog post
What advice would you give a company who is thinking about creating a blog?
Same advice I would give anyone planning to start a blog. If you are going to do it, be serious about it. That does not mean you have to pay someone to do it (but it helps) but is does mean that you need to invest time, infrastructure and long term planning. Writing a blog for three months with no direction then wondering why it doesn’t work is the classic reason why companies abandon blogging efforts.
In conversations I have had with people at the once mighty Techorati I have heard that the average number of readers of a blog is one. That is, on average the only person reading a blog is the writer. That plus the huge number of dormant blogs (with no readers) means that it is only a small percentage of blogs that will generate any level of readership.
The trick to being one of them is persistence (write often), targeting (write about a particular area), share (find others who write on your area, give them links and join their discussions) and professionalism (write well).
What are your thoughts on social media?
Is it just hype or are consumers and companies really wanting to interact with each other
We don’t understand social media yet but that does not make it hype. Consumers have always wanted to interact with each other. Marketeers used to call it word of mouth and always acknowledged that it was the most powerful marketing channel. Now word of mouth has a means for instantaneous electronic distribution.
We can collect data on what people and saying and what they are doing when they say it. At a recent conference and in a blog post I talked about this new ability we have through the concept of individuation. I have been developing a version of Individuation for marketing and targeting (in and outside travel) called EveryYou.
That is our ability to develop a specific and targeted recommendation of one based on the unique combination of desires, needs and interests of each individual at any moment in time. We could not do that without the commitment of individuals to and usage of social media. I am going to write more about this on the BOOT overtime.
Great commets, especially about going into any online endeavour with a plan or strategy. And give it time to see results – instantaneous distribution doesn’t mean instantaneous results.