Searching deeper within Facebook

By Mark Frary

A new Facebook feature was released this week that will likely be of interest to travel brands.

Graph Search is far more interesting than it sounds and refers to the social graph, a term coined by Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. The social graph, if you don’t know, is the network of relationships that links people together. Imagine you have just ten Facebook friends. The social graph is what encompasses all of the potential relationships in that group of ten people.

The new Graph Search, currently in beta for uses of US English on the social network, taps into that network of connections and allows you to search within that graph.

Graph Search appears as a new search bar at the top of your Facebook page and uses natural language. You can type things into it such as “friends who live in my city”, “photos of cats”, “music my friends like” or, perhaps more interestingly for those working in travel, “people who like skiing”, “friends who like beach holidays” or “photos of Paris”.

This search will return a list of friends as well as anything shared with you relating to that search and currently finds, in the words of Zuckerberg himself in the video announcing the launch of Graph Search, “people, photos, places, pages for businesses”.

It is this latter point that will make lightbulbs go off in the heads of many reading this post. If you search for something, your brand page will be displayed in the search results if a person has liked your page or a friend of yours has liked the page. Indeed, the search will return any content whose which is Public for the purposes of Facebook’s privacy settings.

This is Facebook’s amplification effect coupled with search. Zuckerberg says that Graph Search is going to be one of the “pillars” of Facebook henceforward, alongside things such as News Feed and Timeline.

He says in the video, “Most people today don’t think about Facebook as a place to discover places where they could go eat or things that they could go do…With this product, it’s so natural just to do that.”

Facebook already contains a vast amount of material that never makes its way onto search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! and it was only a matter of time before a more powerful search feature was added.

While the launch of Graph Search appears exciting it might add yet another thing onto the list for travel companies to remain on top of. Graph Search Engine Optimisation (GSEO) anyone?

2013: the year to hug a blogger

Bloggers mingle at the Tbex conference in Girona, Spain last autumn

by Steve Keenan

Two weeks into 2013 and it is already noticeable that this will be the year to hug a blogger and make them better people.

Not in any psychological way, of course, but in a warm, embracing way - helping them to fulfil potential, let’s say.

To this altruistic end, there has been an avalanche of new courses and conferences announced, all designed to give bloggers one-to-one advice and help from the experts.

No more standing on a stage and hectoring (ahem, lecturing) but being down on the floor. Talking. Encouraging. And, occasionally, asking for a small fee (to cover costs, you understand).

Travel Bloggers Unite started it in Manchester, in 2009, with workshops, How-to sessions and networking following. The conference has since visited Innsbruck, Umbria and Porto and plans a fifth conference in May. The site has nearly 2,000 members.

But inevitably in such a growth area as blogging, there have been rivals. American network Blogworld bought Tbex, staged a conference in Spain last autumn and will hold another in Dublin this October.

Behemoths ITB and World Travel Market have also embraced bloggers - the latter hosting our own conference, Social Travel Market, for the past two years.

These biggies have tended to be of the stand-up-and-talk variety, bringing big names to conferences to cover the whole gamut of social media. It works well for the travel industry, which is coming to terms with social media - indeed, we at Travel Perspective have launched a new series of seminars for 2013 covering different aspects including video, search and UGC.

But I have heard, and recognise, that bloggers feel they need more specific love and affection. And people are lining up to provide that.

There is a raft of initatives for 2013, specifically the announcement of a new conference, Traverse, in Brighton on April 19-21 (blogger tickets: £32). Its founders, Paul Dow and Michael Ball, are well known on the UK blogger circuit with Michael being a co-founder of regular social meet-ups at Travel Massive.

As they say: “Traverse aims to get travel bloggers learning by doing with interactive workshops and one-on-one help replacing many of the traditional talks and sales pitches.”

Now, disclaimer here as I will be speaking, but the conference feels right to me - it’s time to step away from general talks for bloggers and into specific help on specific subjects. In my case, writing critique.

Traverse is not alone, with another new hands-on conference for bloggers announced. Travel Bloggers Rally will be staged in The Algarve, Portugal from March 15-17 with well-respected UK bloggers Zoe Dawes and Andy Jarosz being two of the three speakers.

While they will do stand-up talks, the organisers say: “We’re committed to creating learning events designed to help travel bloggers and travel writers improve at their craft by interacting with a small group of other professionals, including a few well chosen, seasoned veteran speakers who represent the best there is in our chosen profession.”

See the recurring theme? And again, it is keenly priced, at £65.

The drive towards personalised help is spreading among individual bloggers. Widely respected rambler and blogger Paul Steele recently announced on Twitter his plans for travel blogging workshops, with the first in London in early March. No prices yet.

And emerging video company Travizeo is teaming up with bloggers Four Jandals to train up potential vloggers for free over a period of time in a ‘blogger to vlogger’ project. Why? Because video + travel are perfect partners, and through colloboration with their students, there is clearly potential to launch bigger joint projects in future.

It’s a fascinating period of individual growth, with an aim to mutually backscratch in future. And those that are involved will be well positioned to pass on their learning and create an income stream.

There is already growth in the experienced sector of blogging - with groups forming to tackle big travel projects such as iAmbassadors (Cape Town, Jordan, Edinburgh) and Navigate Media (Finland).

But there is clearly a demand for helping green bloggers get going and improve. Should all these plans come off, then there will be an army of ‘newly-qualified’ travel bloggers out there in 2014. It’s already a crowded market and it’s going to get a whole lot bigger.

Wi-Fi: a deal-breaker in holiday booking?

By Steve Keenan

This Sunday will be the busiest day of the year for online bookings, according to Thomson Holidays. And the next day will be the same for flights and packages, says British Airways Holidays.

Price is always paramount. Then school holidays and location. And, increasingly, internet connection.

Flagging up wi-fi availability is becoming big business in holidays. One report from networking provider Brocade last year said that 86% look for a hotel with wi-fi when it comes to making a choice.

And a second 2012 survey from Hotels.com reported that more than one-third of respondents said the availability of wi-fi played a part in the decision-making.

Little surprise, then, to see hotel giant Accor scrapping charges at 500 properties last year, followed by Guoman offering free wi-fi at its five London properties.

The commercial advantage has become so keen that the ability to offer free wi-fi is spreading across the holiday and travel sector. And the opportunity of having customers tweeting and posting about their holidays ‘live’ is another imperative to bite the bullet of cost in installing wi-fi.

Even on water.

Waterways Holidays will this year offer wi-fi aboard 35 narrowboats operating out of two UK bases. The company has been testing 3Mobile and, encouraged by results, will be installing free mi-fi on each of the boats each with 1GB usage for a week.

Mi-fi’s enables connection for up to five devices. There’s nothing like messin’ about on the river, goes the song - particularly if there is good wi-fi inside the cabin of your gently chugging narrowboat.

On land, Parkdean Holiday Parks is another holiday firm to climb onboard the trend, introducing free wi-fi at its 35 parks in the UK.

Which begs the question - when will free wi-fi become standard, rather than a marketing advantage? This year could well see the sea change.

Why your travel company needs retro

By Steve Keenan

Lovely fulfilment of our Erna Low project tonight, when BBC News featured my Travel Perspective co-founder Mark Frary on its Meet the Author weekly slot.

For those who missed our blog post last October, we started planning the 80th anniversary of ski operator Erna Low some 18 months previously.

There was a story to be told about a woman who pioneered ski holidays, but who was also at the forefront of country house holidays in the UK during the Second World War and summer package holidays in the 1950s.

Erna died in 2002 - but the company name lives on, and current MD Joanna Yellowlees-Bound wanted to enshrine the history of the firm in book and film - and that’s where the project became a whole lot easier, as Erna kept copious diaries and was also a keen 16mm film enthusiast.

I digitalised and edited the best of the films - you can see the results on our YouTube channel - while Mark set about writing Aiming High, his biography of Erna Low which was published by Troubador on January 1.

It was a labour of love for both of us, as the subject was fascinating and we had so much material to play with. And to get BBC coverage of the results was a real fillip.

But it’s also a tenet for both of us with Travel Perspective. It’s all about the story, not just PR - which is gratefully received.

And so many travel companies have such great stories to tell. While the social media goldrush is on, it’s always so worthwhile to curate your past and show travellers your history. Retro, digital and social - an unbeatable combination.