Travel Perspective at WTM: live

November 5, 2013

By Steve Keenan and Mark Frary

Coverage of the first day of our social media seminars at WTM.
Seminars for Wednesday and Thursday can be found here.
Hashtag: #WTMTP13

4.45pm: Last one of the day and it’s a good’un, with three companies talking about disruption and innovation. The moderator is Kevin May, editor of Tnooz and an old friend of Travel Perspective.

Charlie Osmond of Triptease is first up. “Very few brands are getting most out of social media,” he says. “Reviews work – but people don’t hang out on review sites for fun.” And they love Instagram, he says - all those filters make people “feel like a photographer, and they are proud to share it.”

So Triptease took the three elements of a photo, a review and sharing in creating its model. The iPad is is its best medium and his disruption is aimed at online travel agents (OTAs) “because hotels should fight back. We believe in direct bookings.”

As with a common theme of the age, he argued the best way to sustain a competitive edge in social media is by “having the right sort of content.” There is lots of content out there, he said, but little of value.”

Tim Loonen spoke about Tripbod, which has 1,500 members worldwide who provide visitors with an insight into their city. “A lot of start ups don’t see what’s going in traditional industry, which still needs to be shaken up. We need more innovators who focus on just doing one thing. There is an immense amount of information - and the travel industry is shocked by it. It is no longer the industry that dictates what the traveller is going to do.” Strong stuff. Good input.

Finally, Troy Collins who set up Secret Escapes, which sells 40,000 room nights in a month. It’s for consumers, who join his private members’ club (4m of them have) and who in return get up to 70% off every luxury deal. “We don’t sell coupons or vouchers – they know what they are buying.”

It’s a flashsale model - hotels sell rooms while protecting brand. “Bookings that otherwise wouldn’t have been made,” he said, claiming that 85% of buyers had no plan to stay until they saw the deal. It’s based on commission. “Even the best hotels have empty rooms. It’s a safe environment – Abta bonded, sales only last seven days. And we are making the pie bigger. Only 80 live offers at any one time.” It’s another model that has disrupted OTAs.

Read coverage of earlier sessions below…

3.45pm: Our third session of the day begins, looking at marketing Britain through the use of social media, video and other digital marketing. We start by watching a video from our partners Siren Communications showing how the community of Holy Island raised money for a new village hall using this video.

Melanie Sensicle, chief executive of Visit County Durham, is first up and is talking about their new app Virtual Lumiere.

The app lets people use images and soundtracks and project them onto a 3D model of one of Britain’s best loved icons – Durham Cathedral – and create a video of the results. Since its launch, some 200 videos have been created, according to Sensicle. She says that a big boost to the project came when University of Durham graduate Jeremy Vine tweeted about the project.

Visit Cornwall’s Malcolm Bell is on next, talking about the power of online video. Bell says his goal is to get on people’s initial shortlist of three or four destinations otherwise all is lost. So how do you get people’s attention?

At the moment Visit Cornwall has 27 videos and spent around £80,000 (including partner spend) over the past 18 months on creating it – resulting in around three quarters of a million views of its YouTube channel. Bell says the important thing is to create high quality content about Cornwall and make it interesting and shareable.

Video, says Bell, allows customers to “really experience what they’re purchasing – the destination”. The county has a 12 month rolling calendar for planning video content and holds regular planning meetings with experienced journalists to decide on content. One key point is that the video they create is free of branding and URLs in order to make it more usable by online new outlets such as the Mail and Times websites.

“We make it content rather than advertising. If people are searching for Cornwall, this is what comes up in YouTube regardless of whether we have branded it,” says Bell.

Jeremy Head of digital agency iCrossing is now up and talking about Visit Wales, the tourism board’s new website. Visit Wales is influencing £150 million of additional spend each year, says Head. Visit Wales is encouraging those people who have not yet considered Wales for a holiday. In July 2013, Visit Wales ran a blogger campaign called #blogwales aimed at raising awareness of five key cities/towns among target demographics – older couples, families and independent travellers.

iCrossing worked with five bloggers – Family Adventure Project, Budget Traveller, Mammasaurus, Inside the Travel Lab, Baldhiker - and identified them by looking at things such as Twitter and Facebook followers as well as two measures of the value of links from their site.

Each blogger went to one of the five destinations in the project for a weekend but was also involved in a Twitter chat before the trip to seek trip inspiration. iCrossing then curated a Storify bringing together content from all five bloggers.

The project generated 151 web referrals, 10 conversions on the Visit Wales website and 7,737 social referrals, 10 high quality links and 262 social mentions and, crucially, generated a good return on investment.

Rebecca Holloway, head of PR at Visit England, now.

“We are targeting Brits – it’s all about the staycation,” says Holloway. “It’s not in the British psyche to boast about where they are from. If you consider Facebook has replaced the holiday photo album for a large portion of the population. All of our activity since the Olympics has been about heightening a sense of pride in the country.”

Earlier this year, the organisation curated a top list of 101 things to do before you go abroad earlier this year which was driven by social media. The list was put together by a panel of experts and then voted on through various social media channels including a Facebook app.

“We launched the list on St George’s Day as we wanted it to be a celebration of all things English. My proudest moment is that it helped the hashtag #englandandproud trend on Twitter,” says Holloway.

11.25am: Lee McCabe, Head of Travel at Facebook is up now talking about ‘Find the People that Matter to you’. Those 10% of free seats just disappeared. It’s standing room only now.

“It’s been fascinating to watch the the travel industry evolve… But with sophistication comes many more challenges.” Number one question I get is how can Facebook help me convert? Well, find the people that matter to your business.

The buzzword is multi-channels, targeting people across different devices. And then you can target your people on different devices. “People are omnichannel,” says McCabe. (First soundbite of the day!). “Multi-screeening is the new normal.”

Scary stats - By 2016, more than 45% of the world’s population will have a smartphone. Digital has overtaken TV. Digital will only increase, driven by mobile. “Facebook is now a mobile first company.” FB has 874m mobile daily active users, spending 30 minutes a day online.

“Landscape is becoming more challenging, people searching more sites before making a transaction.” And he re-iterates Sabre’s point about knowing more about your customers, neatly segwaying into FB’s knowledge of its customers. Take your CRM database - and match it with Facebook’s to find the same people, he suggests.

A narrowly targeted ad campaign then has 38% better results, he said. Well he would, but it’s unarguable. Knowledge of customers and targeting them has to be better than a broad ad campaign…

He continues: if looking for a hotel in New York, how FB can find out where your friends have stayed, and did they take a photo or leave a review? “This is just the start…”

It’s a constant balance between ad needs and user experience,” he says. “But if people are targetting their ads well, then you’ll want to see them.”

Good stuff - thanks Lee. Loads of questions from the floor spanning a whole range of FB subjects (no date yet for Graph Search release).

We now hand over to TBU - we’ll be back at 3.50pm with a Marketing Britain session. And apologies to those who have asked - WTM has decided not to film our sessions this year, so no recording of the talks. We will ask FB and Sabre for copies of their presentations and post. Many thanks.

10.30am: We have room for 350 people today and I’d say we’re 90% full. Good start.

Two decades ago, there were 130 websites in the world. And three years ago, Travel Perspective didn’t exist! Extraordinary times…

OK, the first (and possibly more interesting) fact came from Sarah Kennedy Ellis from Sabre Labs in kicking off her presentation ‘Social Media’s Dirty Little Secret’ which is looking at how we miss out on the most valuable part of social media - the massive data it generates.

Social data, such as… Emojitracker shows real-time stream of what emoticons people are using on Twitter. Or finding out where delegates are at a conference through geo-tagging.

She’s talking about data created or shared by people in social channels, willingly. It requires huge processing power to capture and analyse - but it’s one of the biggest drivers of Big Data Movement. “The future potential of social data is all around us. But it’s not just the data that’s the issue, it’s the storage.”

“Social has always been around - they just haven’t been recorded, stored or analysed. Big Data is still in nascent stage so nobody doing it properly - which is why topic is so fascinating to me.”

How do we move from vanity to substance? Start small, get your hands dirty - dig in to the data. Ambitions? To match traveller profiles to social ones. To create structured data.

Some of Sabre’s research includes:
* Instagram users are 40 times more engaged on brands than on Twitter, and 20 times more than Facebook
* Checked a quarter of a million hotel check-ins on foursquare. Two-thirds were from men. One in 20 check-ins included a smiley face (mostly from women).
* Social data is where social media was three years ago.

Interesting start to the sessions - so much more to come