Meeting Britain’s best parent bloggers

by Steve Keenan

Eight parent bloggers from BritMums met myself and Mark Frary from Travel Perspective at a one-day seminar in central London to launch a new co-operative project to find the best of Britain’s parent bloggers.

BritMums’s co-founders Jen Howze and Susanna Scott were there, and they invited along six parent bloggers they had highlighted as excellent writers with a strong interest in travel writing. Our role was to help with insights and tips about the travel industry and how it is harnessing social and digital media.

The aim is to held regular training seminars with this growing group of parent travel bloggers - and to invite guests to share best practise. The first meeting included an illuminating talk of self-publishing by Terry Lee of LiveShareTravel and Jaume Marin, marketing director of the Costa Brava Tourist Board.

Travel Perspective has been helping Jaume plan his first trip for parent bloggers, and he has plans to invite music, wine bloggers and other niche writers to Spain in 2013. He told the parent bloggers that he is interested in storytellers, and that the trips will include ‘experiences’ such as gastronomy that provides plenty of food for articles. “Stories come from natural people - don’t show bloggers castles and churches..”

Talking of ROI, he said: “It is a long-term thing - from bloggers through to influencers to digital ambassadors.”

The bloggers included Lucy Campbell, Kirstie Pelling, Selena Jones, Trish Burgess, Gretta Schifano and Sarah Ebner, who writes the Schoolgate education blog for The Times and who has, since the seminar, set up her own travel blog. Lucy wrote about the day here.

Last year, I chose Trish as the winner of BritMum’s 2012 Brilliance in Blogging (Bib) awards when I was asked to judge the travel category and she, and the others, all gave valuable insights into their ambitions and abilities to expand their travel portfolio.

One of the lovely things about tutoring the group is their diversity of interests and travels. As Trish said: “Parenting ties us together but we all write about different subjects.”

And the seminar went well, with a pile of ideas from the bloggers on future subjects they would like us to cover, including video, creating media packs, creative writing, blogger collaboratives and tech-on-the road.

Said Selena in a follow-up email: “What a great day! I went home buzzing with ideas. I really appreciated all of the information and found it to be very helpful. The format was terrific, relaxed and comfortable. So thank you very much for including me. I was proud to be part of such a talented group of bloggers.”

Update: March 12 - Trish Burgess also wrote a post about the day.

Thanks Selena and Trish, and all the other bloggers and guests. Jaume seemed to have enjoyed it too….!

We’re aiming to stage our next TP/BritMums seminar in June, with more guest speakers and sessions drawn from the list above - this is the first step towards working with the bloggers and BritMums on many more collaborative projects in future.

Finally, huge thanks to the Royal Horseguards Hotel which hosted the seminar wonderfully. We chose the venue as it bends over backwards for families staying at the hotel, including connecting rooms and high teas for kids (at £12), which include games packs and these rather wonderful gingerbread men. They went down very well with the bloggers… Also thanks to Ed Maule of Siren Communications, who very effectively greased the wheels to make the day work well. Pic courtesy: Jen Howze, BritMums.

Google gobbles up geolocation in travel

By Steve Keenan

If anyone were in any doubt over Google’s intent on owning the travel information space, along come two announcements this week. It would be no surprise if they come in threes, like buses.

The company last year committed vast resources into creating Hotel Finder and Flight Search for websites and tablets. Its maps are best in class, and Hangouts are well suited to travel chats.

Google Now puts live travel information in one place, and it has moved into the hotel and restaurant review space while buying guidebook publisher Frommer’s and integrating its information. Oh, and it owns YouTube.

All well and good. These were big land-grabbing projects, designed to put Google at the heart of travel.

But now comes the clever stuff, travel information on your smartphone. Google Now will already tell you the time of the next train, or news of a flight delay, while Google Goggles takes, say, a photo of a landmark, wine lable or painting and provides information. Or it can translate a menu.

And this week, Google expanded its Android app Field Trip (shortly to come to iOS) by adding a smorgasbord of local information and tips from Spotted by Locals, a network of travel bloggers in 46 cities in Europe and America.

The latest in Google’s evolving travel stable, Field Trip uses geolocation to run in the background and pops up information on passing landmarks or restaurants. You can choose which information you want and, using a headset, have the information read to you. Augmented reality is finally getting a bit, well, real.

Talking of real, the second Google announcement this week is the launch of Arts Talks on Google+ It’s a series of Hangouts with experts from galleries and museums, with the first from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The second is from the National Gallery in London on March 20 - and if you miss them, you can of course watch later on YouTube.

You can see how geolocation and information is a key combination in future travel planning. We already make 25% of travel searches on mobile devices, and the trend towards booking a hotel on mobile within 24 hours of arrival is well established (have you got Hotel Tonight on your phone?)

You can search for a hotel on a number of apps by location, price and information - not just reviews, but info about the area, proximity to transport, restaurants and nightlife etc.,

We begin to expect geolocation as standard - and expect more ways of bringing our travels to life with useful stuff. In an excellent article from the Mediashift Idea Lab, author JD Lasica highlights dozens of travel start-ups now based on location information.

“We’re seeing geolocation begin to splinter into niches and verticals. And, within a couple of years, geolocation capabilities will simply be baked into our everyday on-the-go lives,” he says.

As Karen Carpenter foretold in 1970, we’ve only just begun.

What makes a video go viral?

By Mark Frary

The headline is a question that many in marketing ask themselves. As video grows in importance and the number of videos out there increases.

If you look at the top trending videos on YouTube in 2012, it is quite difficult to work out what connects them? Is it catchy music? Certainly, Gangnam Style has a hook that has grabbed the attention of 1.4 billion people and counting around the world.

Could it be a wow factor? Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the edge of space certainly had that and brought millions of eyeballs to the brand of energy drink Red Bull.

Or it is just a bit of fun to waste time in a busy day? The clip of Why you asking all them questions?> certainly had its comedic moments.

YouTube itself is better placed than many to answer the question. Its trends manager Kevin Allocca has addressed just that in a talk at a TED forum late in 2011. Allocca says that three things are required for a video to go viral. They need tastemakers, communities and the video itself needs unexpectedness.

A tastemaker is someone well connected who discovers the original video. The famous double rainbow clip has now been seen more than 36 million times but was on the video platform for a long time before it was discovered by a popular comedian and unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

The only thing about the video itself, says Allocca, is that it should contain unexpectedness. One of the greatest videos of 2012 is called A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square (below). It is an orchestrated flashmob designed to promote the launch of a television channel and is as unexpected as it is humorous.

A new app might help making viral videos a bit easier. TubeRank lets you get inspiration from existing video content.

You set various triggers (e.g. topical, referential, WTF) and then choose a sector (travel is one) and it suggests a video that you might get inspiration from. Rather than simply stealing someone else’s idea, this should help in the creative process.

TubeRank’s creators carried out extensive research among creative agencies into what makes videos viral before setting up the app. Videos that were one or more of: funny, entertaining, shocking, sad, topical and well-crafted stood more chance of going viral. Being quick to deliver was also considered vital

Hotel reviews: why consumers lose out

By Steve Keenan

I’ve been thinking a lot about reviews recently, particularly those of hotels.

Having spent years in consumer travel media, the only hotel review story was always Tripadvisor - mainly taking them to task over the fact that people could post reviews without having proven they stayed there.

It wasn’t about Tripadvisor per se (although it was the only site around) - it was a story about transparency. Personally, I have always liked Tripadvisor. I use it a lot for research and reckon I can tell a fake review a mile off. The good, or real ones, have always trampled over the dodgy and common sense prevailed.

But we move on. Now there is a plethora of other sites that have muscled into reviews, notably online travel agents like Hotels.com or laterooms.com. This makes sense: if you’re selling rooms, reviews are the lifesblood. And, more recently, Google has moved into the space.

So what? More reviews, the better, surely? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

There is still no aggregator that I can see, an independent site that pulls together all the reviews available and allows the consumer to make sense of the disparate sites.

Take the Balmer Lawn Hotel in the New Forest, for example. Tap the name in to Google and the first page of results includes six paid-for links, then the official site followed by dozens more booking sites - with Google’s results on the right.

It’s not ideal. The consumer has to move on, looking to escape commercial links in search of one site for independent reviews - but it is not likely to improve.

Newspaper and magazine reviews of an hotel get swamped down to the third or fourth pages of Google (and traditonal media is far too competitive to aggregate). New review sites like @triptease, which launches on March 4, will only add to the broad coverage.

Because essentially, there is no desire to serve the consumer - each site is out to capture browsers into their own site. The internet is working perversely in their interests.

Little wonder, then, 61% of European hoteliers spend between one to three hours per week reading and responding to online travel reviews, according to Choice Hotels. Because there so may platforms to respond to.

Choice, a franchise operation with 500 hotels in Europe, has responded by offering members Medallia, which scans blogs and social networking sites for mentions of Choice brand hotels. It’s about saving time when responding to comments.

But that’s a service for hoteliers. When will consumers see a platform that also scans all sites and gives an aggregation of comments in one place? It’s what consumers want - who will deliver?