WTM Travel Perspective: Day 3 sessions

November 6, 2014

By Steve Keenan and Mark Frary
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By Steve Keenan and Mark Frary

12.50pm: Running late again but hey, it’s the final session and worth waiting a little while for. It’s future social and we have Joakim Everston of Sabre Travel Network, Ruth Haffenden of Mindshare and Nigel Camp of Devil Boy Productions.

A live demo from Joakim of Google Glass, and a video of FlyNixie from Nigel kicks it off (you’ve got to watch this). Ruth highlights two new social media channels - Ello and Tsu. Tsu says it will share ad revenue but to Ruth, it sounds, well, she’ll see.

Joakim says battery life of Google Glass is only 50 minutes, and the glasses heat up. But he thinks Google has put the product out there to a lot of people in order to iron our problems and hear about issues. When it goes commercial, they will be 10 times better, he says. “The technical shortcomings are the smallest problem because there are forums already on how much they hate Glass. Focus on privacy. Also unless you speak American, Glass can’t understand you.” Outrageous!

With drones, only seven commercial licences have been awarded so far in the US. Private use is exempt below 700ft. It’s just such an interesting time re: privacy, says Nigel. You sense legislation is going to catch up drones, says moderator Kevin May of Tnooz, and ruining everybody’s fun. What if too many flying around tho, and bump into each other, adds Nigel?

And you should check rules in countries you’re flying too, he says. Make sure you have the rights to use it. Fines of £10k are common in the US, as happened recently when someone flew one into Yellowstone National Park (I guess they can make their own rules if it’s their land?)

Social networks - it’s coming down to a exchange, says Ruth. I’ll give you details for a better experience in my newsfeed. Has to be valuable to us tho. What’s the next thing? A lot to do with data, she adds, but being reactive to live events. Netflix adverts in Paris this week change depending on the weather. What’s happening right now?

12.00: Get what you pay for? Now that social networks like Facebook and Twitter are increasingly focussed on advertising, what does your money buy you? Is it worth it or can we just follows a free content marketing strategy…

We’ve got Ruth Haffenden, Mindshare UK; Iain Martin, Skipedia and Florence Ospici from We Are Social. That Facebook move to reduce what goes into anybody’s newsfeed, based on its own algorithms. Iain: “It’s evident to me that organic reach has decreased. The larger the fan base, the lower the organic reach overall.”

A woman in the audience from LowCost Holidays: “Anyone working in social, if you’re not thinking of using, you are missing a trick. You can’t rely on organic any more.”

Ruth endorses LowCost’s use of research. And mentions Facebook partner clusters, so you can target (for example) people who want to buy a sports car but who also love technology. Is it expensive to do that? It can be £100 or £100,000 - it depends on who you want to reach.”

Flo - are you using customer audiences and lookalikes? If you want to make media as effective as possible, then absolutely.” A quest from Amazing Lofoten has 33,000 likes and gets 50 comments to each daily photo posted - is it a tool to lead to online booking? Yes, absolutely says Ruth - but also depends on what else you’re doing.” There are tools like Radion and Axis to measure - and make sure every piece of marketing is talking to each other.

Interestingly, Flo says Pinterest shows “absolute return” and one we should be looking at - but compared to FB…. it’s back to that platform again.

Enough about Facebook. What about Twitter and Instagram? Hasn’t been much of a success, says Flo. Instagram yes, absolutely - has shown some great value and those who have advertised on there say there is better recall of the brand than other channels.

What about the Buy button that’s rolling out on Twitter? It takes some time for those kind of consumer behaviours to change, says Flo.

Back to FB! If you’re starting out, where would you spend? Says Iain: “If you have a FB fan base, then definitely money on there. FB delivers exceptionally good return when compared to PPC. If new business, there’s value in acquiring likes.”

Ruth: “What do you want from this campaign? Love? That’s easy. Aquisition and purchase? That’s more complicated and convoluted.”

10.50am It’s our second session of the day: Social media in 2014, a view of the landscape in DMOs, tour operators and hotels. Our speakers are Catharina Fischer from the German National Tourist Board, Marco Fanton of Melia Hotels International and Amy Brix, e-commerce manager Europe for TUI.

GNTB’s Catharina Fischer says targeting niches is a good idea and says blogger video is one way to do this. Catharina shows the video below of the Hainich National Park as part of the 25 Years campaign marking the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was commissioned from video bloggers StoryTravelers.

“Blogger relations is a marketing thing, not a public relations thing,” she advises. “As a DMO, we have to go further in the travel cycle. Our task is to entice and be present when it comes to information and planning on different platforms. SOcila media, with all the possibilities to share, to be your own publisher, this is a great opportunity for us. As a DMO, we always look for good ways to handle it.”

Germany launched the Youth HotSpots campaign to gather user-generated content from visitors to the country. “We do have to prove to our partners that this works, generating traffic for them,” she says.

Marco Fanton of Melia Hotels International now. He says customers are changing. “We did a little pilot to target Millennials. We decided to launch the @SolWaveHouse as a Tweet Experience Hotel on Majorca.”

The hotel has a customer service hashtag. “If you want to have your minibar filled, you tweet us with the hashtag #fillmyfridge,” he says.

He says one of the innovations was the introduction of wifi hotspots to get people to check in. “We asked people to check in using their social media log-ins,” he says. “This allows you to interact with them in the hotel.” Very interesting.

The company’s ME London allows guests to check in using social log-in and find out which of their friends are in the hotel and where they are. “They might be upon the rooftop bar,” says Marco.

Last but not least, it’s TUI’s Amy Brix.

She is showing this video about how they are working with social marketing agency Socialbakers.

The company, an enormous umbrella brand, now has a centralised policy on social media and has integrated sharing into the company’s travel app.

She shares some statistics: 72% post photos while on holiday, 84% trust recommendations over advertising, 52% search social media for holiday ideas.

TUI has a three-pronged social strategy - social marketing, social service (24/7 listening) and social workforce (trained and engaged employees).

She is now showing details of one recent successful campaign - the UK’s first crowdsourced wedding. The wedding was organised by TUI’s social media community in the UK. The social media followers chose the wedding dress and more. The campaign got 49,000 likes.

10.10amWelcome back to our final day of sessions at WTM. First up is Matt Eames, sales director at Feefo, who is talking about the power of reviews. His presentation is facsinating - showing the uplift in conversion you can get by having reviews on your site.

See Matt Eames of Feefo’s presentation here.