The demise of the general travel blogger?

By Steve Keenan

Bad news for generalists: the niche travel blogger is in demand for 2013.

It’s a trend that has been around for some months: now it is accelerating, with several manifestations at Tbex in Girona recently.

Jaume Marin, marketing director of the Costa Brava Girona Tourist Board, told me he is on the lookout for mummy travel bloggers for next year, amongst other specialist sectors.

“We are looking at wine, mums and fashion trips - We want engagement with their communities. It is the end of the general things.”

Whoah, Jaume. But he went on. “First, bloggers were not very well known. Then they got a profile. But not everyone is Gary Arndt who can make a living from that. Some of them are very young, they want to be independent but they have to learn that they have to be bloggers and marketeers.

But Jaume, a well-established social media authority among tourist boards, has some crumbs of comfort for general travel bloggers. “The good thing for them is that there are so many tourist boards that haven’t even started. They can talk to them.”

Gary Arndt has long argued that bloggers should stop looking to their community for self-help, but address their real audience - the travelling public. But even that isn’t enough, according to Jaume and other Tbex attendees.

Jill Lloyd of Expedia spoke about wanting to work with more bloggers but made a thinly-disguised plea for specialists. “People-shaped travel is what we talk about in Europe,” she said.

“People have different needs for different reasons, you leave a place with different set of ideas and stories…,” she added - or, in other words, there’s a lot of difference among travellers, and Expedia would like bloggers who represent those differing strands.

There are, of course, many successful general travel bloggers such as David Whitley, Andy Jarosz and Matthew Teller - but they tend to mix blogging with writing for established media and other paid work.

But those travel bloggers working almost purely off their blogs are the ones who stand to be marginalised. Ryan Levitt of Housetrip is not a man to mince words. And he didn’t either in Girona. He’s another after mummy travel bloggers, among other niche writers. His company doesn’t give, er, tuppence for Twitter and he expects a 3.6% ratio of Facebook people talking about a page to Likes.

Certainly, the number of Likes and Twitter followers has diminished in importance in 2012, with quality over quantity a common mantra. The demand for more qualified, more specialist ‘storyteller’ bloggers was something I first heard about in the summer from Flanders, when it looked for writers to attend festivals.

The region was helped in its search by Vancouver-based Think! Social Media, from where chief strategist William Bakker told TravelPerspective in May: “Flanders is the perfect client for us. By selecting bloggers based on their personal passion and matching them with an event they will love, the word will spread amongst people that care. And because of the diversity in festivals, you need a lot of bloggers to cover a lot of passions. Flanders wasn’t afraid to do that.”

Guardian: The future of digital media

By Steve Keenan

Just when you thought that it had all been said… another seminar to remind you of how fast the digital landscape is evolving.

The Guardian adopted a digital-first stance last year, and many look to the Guardian News & Media group to provide answers as to how to balance journalistic output and costs with digital revenues.

But at a @GdnMediaNetwork briefing this morning, CEO Andrew Miller said digital revenues will still only equate to 30% of revenues in 2012-13. What’s more, the figure will only have grown from 22% in two years.

While The Guardian and Observer newspapers lose money, GNM can still draw on cash reserves and 50% stakes in two other businesses to “fund the transition,” says Miller. “It’s not sustainable forever but we are working our way through it.”

Meanwhile, The Guardian is cutting another 100 editorial jobs in the latest round of cost-savings (although it is taking more and more digital and IT specialists). So, how long does to take to make a transition?

Step forward The Guardian’s head of media and technology, the indefatiguable @DanSabbagh: “We don’t have that advantage of time. We need to come up with business models reasonably quickly.”

The comments really brought home to me how social and digital media is in another ‘white-heat’ phase, with 2013 shaping up to be the mobile furnace - half a century after Prime Minister Harold Wilson made his ‘White Heat of Technology’ speech.

Mobile now accounts for 10% of all internet links; tablet sales are rocketing, YouTube TV channels are being launched and, says Sabbagh, the arrival of 4G later this year “will change everything. Everything will be coming at top speed to a device in your hand.”

GNM will also have launched responsive platforms by 2013, starting with mobile, then scaling in size to fit tablet and desktop.

New GNM figures also show that while desktop links still peak at between 1pm-3pm, mobile is at 7am and between 9-10pm. And iPad links also peak at around 10pm, either being used as a second screen while watching TV - or while in bed.

“It is the most exciting time. The world is full of possibilities - based on the number of developers and platforms you have - but there is a disconnect, a tremendous pessimism, with the value of media. Many are struggling to keep up.”

Fascinating stuff - and all travel-related companies and media will be painfully aware of the need to adapt. Even more so, as Sabbagh made perhaps the most telling point of all - that all producers of content are competing against each other for people’s time.

There are still only 24 hours in a day, and the choice of media (and how it is viewed) is expanding incredibly. We are all producing more and more content, but how much of it will ever be seen if a) it isn’t brilliant and b) distributed well?

The last word goes to Sabbagh. “We have to be competitive - and relevant. I come to you excited, and in despair. Which is my normal state of mind.”

10 lessons from Social Travel Market

by Steve Keenan

For those of you who don’t know, myself and Mark Frary created Travel Perspective as our trading name in 2011. And the first project we put together was to create Social Travel Market, a seminar programme covering all aspects of social media and travel, and to run at World Travel Market.
(Actually, we wanted to call it World Travel Fringe but the people at Reed Exhibitions finally baulked at the idea of promoting WTF!)
Reed went for the project and STM ran over two days at WTM’s South Gallery last November. The room was too small and the queues embarrassingly long. But after the keynote speaker, WTM brilliantly managed to double the size of the room to 180 spaces. This year, there will be room for 300+ on the Wednesday sessions in the South Gallery, and 200+ when we take STM on to the floor of WTM on Thursday.

You’ll find the complete rundown of seminars planned for Nov 7-8 this year below (No 10). But to give you an idea of what to expect, we’ve put together 10 links to reflect some of the highlights of 2011….

1. How Social Travel Market at WTM 2011 was born - Travelllll.com
The background to how STM came about, and was realised for the first time in 2011
2. The figures from Social Travel Market, 2011 - travelperspective.co.uk
The first year in numbers
3. All the sessions at STM 2011 on video
The sessions were filmed by World TravelMarket - and are still available to view. The most watched session has been Blighter v Wrogger: the new travel content providers
4. Supercharging your travel blog - Darren Cronian, Travelrants
Darren’s annual travel blogcamps were a inspiration for STM. So it was only right we should ask Darren to speak - here are his notes from his presentation How to Supercharge a Blog
5. Social Travel Market and The Silk Road Ch@llenge
The Ch@llenge was a tough task to organised in 2011 - but we’ll be tackling it again in 2012, with vastly more experience. Read the background here.
6. Social Travel Market proves to be a real draw - WTM London
Blogger Kathryn Bullock writes up the keynote address from KLM’s Catharine van Dijk
7. My day at Social Travel Market - Travelbug
Blogger Lynn Sheppard gives her take on the first day of STM in 2011
8. Frank opinions on bloggers and their clients - WTM London
Another excellent session report from Kathryn Bullock, this time reporting on the presentation by blogger Andy Jarosz and two of his clients, RTW Flights and Sunvil.
9. Seven takeaways from Social Travel Market 2011 - Travelllll.com
My take on the most salient points that stuck with me after two days of the show
10. The sessions at this year’s WTM Social Travel Market
OK, now to get ready for 2012. Our sessions run on Nov 7 and 8 - all are listed here with two caveats - the 1.30pm session listed on Wednesday (Travel Marketing is Dead) and the 12noon session on Thursday (Whitepaper) are extraneous sessions and not a part of STM.

We are very pleased to announce our partners for WTM Social Travel Market, Siren Communications and Gogobot:

#travelfail or #success?

by Mark Frary

One of things you hear frequently about social media is that you have to accept that things will go wrong from time to time but that you don’t need to worry about this. It is accepted that because of the immediacy of Twitter, Facebook and the like, the team or person handling social media will sometimes make a rash decision that proves fatal.

The world of travel is littered with the corpses of social media campaigns that #failed.

Take the Australian airline Qantas for example. Last November, it launched a Twitter competition for its followers to win “a First Class gift pack featuring a luxury amenity kit and our famous QF PJs.”

To win the pyjamas, followers had to tweet their own dream in-flight experience and use the hashtag #QantasLuxury.

Sadly for the airline, the campaign was quickly hijacked by disgruntled passengers who used the hashtag to complain about their nightmare experiences of the airline. Earlier that month, Qantas had had to ground its fleet. For the airline, the nightmare continues – the hashtag has taken on a life of its own and is still being used today to share and experiences.

Another example of social media going wrong is the #SunnySideofLife campaign. The tourism organisation of the Maldives encouraged travel businesses in the country as well as previous visitors to tweet their experiences of the destination. It was quickly hijacked by human rights protesters.

It is not just tourism businesses that are #failing either. Waitrose felt the full fury of the Twitterati when it launched its #waitrosereasons campaign which encouraged people to complete the phrase I shop at Waitrose because… There were thousands of reasons submitted, though very few of the type that the Waitrose marketing team wanted; “they have a better class of shoplifter” is an example of a typical response to the campaign.

Yet Twitter has been abuzz with speculation that Waitrose’s #fail was in fact a spectacular #success. Perhaps the campaign was a case of any publicity being good publicity. All three of these campaigns have certainly resulted in the brands in question being discussed exhaustively on social networks.

You could say that it was inevitable that these campaigns would be hijacked. Twitter users have now, arguably, become bored of these sorts of campaign and that they would always attract the internet trolls.

The question is where do tourism businesses go now with Twitter. It seems certain that the days of the tweet-nice-things-about-us-and-use-our-hashtag campaign are numbered and that social media managers are going to have to be far more creative in how to get their brands going viral. If these tourism organisations really did not care about whether tweets were positive or negative then they were very clever indeed.

• One of the sessions at WTM Social Travel Market this November will look at crisis management and social media. The session, run by 501places travel blogger Andy Jarosz and including travel industry consultant Jeremy Skidmore and Siren Communications, will look at how social media can instigate as well as help resolve a crisis.