TripSay blog

I was yesterday one of the many presenters at a very interesting seminar on social media and service business with a special focus in travel. There were a lot of interesting presentations on how different social media services have been used in marketing. Quite many people thought that the term social media is pretty bad as the different services serve very different purposes. To prove the point there were many questions by the audience on the subject like “what are the first steps to get into social media” and “should you build your own platform or use existing ones” etc. Such questions can’t be answered before first understanding what the company wants to achieve as the means depend totally on the goals. Starting to tweet is different from founding a fan page in Facebook or using TripAdvisor to boost your visibility or building your own community site like Aurinkomatkat, a large Finnish tour operator, has done for their customers when they built Paikka auringossa (in Finnish only). Interesting fact about that site by the way is that the average age of  users is 52 years, more proof on the fact that people of all ages use social media.

In my presentation I referred to an interesting study by Beresford research regarding social networking sites and their users. That definitely is worth reading to anyone interested in how people use social media. The results were pretty surprising, e.g. users spent on average 22 hours per week in social networking sites and social networking was regarded as third most important activity after email and going out with friends, leaving behind things like sports and watching TV. A bit scary I think!

There were a lot of people asking for concrete results for using social media in marketing, concrete results here meaning money and ROI. As a sales guy I totally understand the need for ROI that but still in some ways I found that strange. The same people who don’t see the ROI in social media (what ever that means) don’t hesitate to spend money on TV, radio or print ads. Those, after all, are much harder to measure than something done on the web. Perhaps this is partly explained by the feeling that if you do a campaign on TV you believe that a lot of people will see that whereas if you do it on the web you can keep count exactly how many (or few) people joined your Facebook group or fan page or what ever. Personally I haven’t seen any TV ads in years and a small poll amoung friends confirmed the same. Due to digital TV people are skipping TV ads completely. The only “radio ad” I remember is “this is Jonathan from Spotify…”. I don’t register print ads at all. Perhaps advertisers find it easier to believe that TV/radio/print works because of the big potential reach rather than to actually run a campaign that can be measured showing that their message or service doesn’t actually interest very many people. I don’t know of course, that just a thought.

On the other hand there are many other ways of using social media than creating a Facebook fan page or starting to tweet. Creating a community or working with an existing community like TripSay can offer several benefits from SEO to better understanding and segmentation of your customers. Not to mention the most important thing which is to offer your customers a service they like. You have to think of your customers first. What is it that you can offer them that helps them or otherwise interests them. You have to think about what you can do with the information you collect that honestly benefits your customers and at the same time helps you to get to your goal, like increased sales. It’s definitely harder than just running a one size fits all mass media campaign and hoping someone will notice.

I was in the Travolution Summit in London last week. An interesting day full of interesting presentations. Also the weather in London was fantastic - no, really!

The most interesting session was about user experience where both Google and Frommer’s had done a lot of interesting research. The Frommer’s study pointed out that the weakest link online today are recommendations both on the destination itself and the activities/things to do in the destinations before choosing where to go. According to Frommer’s that’s what consumers want but feel are not getting from travel agents or the web today. This is great news for us as recommendations are exactly what we are doing – trying to help our members to get new ideas and tips on the places they find or might find interesting answering the questions “Should I go there? If so what are the most interesting places for me to see?”.

There a lot of coverage from the event on the Travolution site. See especially the Frommer’s study. Interesting stuff.

I participated the panel discussion regarding innovations in online travel. The session focused on HomeAway that has been hugely successful in a relatively short period of time. The discussion was over too soon and I would have loved to hear more about how they made it and what we other startups can learn from their experiences. There’s only so much time in a conference like this, unfortunately.

Thanks for the Travolution guys for inviting me over! I look forward to the next time.

Last week I visited ITB in Berlin, the world’s biggest travel expo. Some other expos we’ve been to like Fitur in Madrid have been a bit slow as many companies had cancelled their participation just before the event due to the recession but ITB was very much alive and kicking. All the halls were full of companies and people.

Is travel in Europe a recession-proof industry?

Some said it was like previous years and some felt that there were a bit less visitors. I’m not sure which way it actually was but to me it at least looked pretty much like last year. It was good to see that the recession hadn’t hit ITB that hard.

It was impossible, as usual, to find a hotel room in Berlin with both decent quality and price, so I ended up traveling the startup way and living in a well located but otherwise terrible hotel. It was a big upgrade compared to last year though as then also the hotel location was terrible – the taxi driver taking me there was afraid for my safety when he dropped me off. The Casino restaurant at the expo grounds still offered bad food with even worse service but bratwurst was as good as ever. It’s good to know that some things never change, makes you feel safe when going to ITB. 

I had some very interesting meetings during the expo. Hopefully some of those end up as interesting partnerships later! I also spent a very interesting day at the PhoCusWright seminar. There were many very interesting topics covered like socially generated travel guides, semantic web and mobile applications to name a few, all of which naturally interest us at TripSay very much. The seminar content was good although I was missing the discussion on relevance of information – rather than having too much UGC or other content I’d like to see the relevant content for me. I don’t care if there’s a million reviews, photos or other content on a city, sight, activity, hotel or whatever. I just want the ones that I should care about based on what I like. Even the semantic web discussion was more about scanning the online discussions for your brand image rather than using semantic technology to actually help the consumer to find relevant information which to us is of course the more interesting application. Also even though mobile was talked about a lot still it was mostly about iPhone/Blackberry and business travelers. They are the heavy users, yes, but they don’t represent any true volume. We still haven’t seen any major breakthroughs in consumer mobile applications for travel and it might still be a long way to go before that happens. A lot needs to happen in terms of devices, roaming and other things before consumers will adopt mobile apps  in any significant amount.

All in all it was great to see that people were still thinking about the future and innovative solutions. ITB is a must expo for anyone interested in seeing the latest and greatest developments in the industry.

TripSay was nominated as a finalist in the Grand One competition. Yay!

We got nominated in three categories:

• The Best Infodesign. A category for websites that are designed with a special focus on user experience, intuitive user interface, and clear and logical layout.
• The Best Startup. For Finland-based Internet startups. The category is managed in co-operation with ArcticStartup, a blog writing about internet and mobile startups in the Nordic and Baltic countries.
• The Best B2C Service. A category for consumer sites, applies for e.g. web media, brand and company sites, and online shops.

Grand One is an annual contest for the Finnish digital media companies. The jury has selected the finalists among a number of websites and services. The main rule is that “most of the design and implementation work must be done in Finland”. This applies well to TripSay, as our roots are in Helsinki, Finland. That’s where the magic happens.

The word about TripSay is spreading quickly, thanks to you, TripSay members. In addition to the word of mouth also traditional media has been showing growing interest in TripSay. We were quite happy to answer ‘Yes!‘ when asked to visit Toronto, Canada for a couple of interviews. It was great fun to go tell the TripSay story in a TV studio.

Lights … Camera … Action … The first story to come out was a live Homepage show on CityPulse24 (CTV). And there’s more to come! Hopefully we’ll get the stories on Youtube as well!

Media’s interest and our growing userbase tell the same story: The time to go mass market with the next generation of online travel service is now! The advent of social media and travel business’s transition to online mean that people go to web to look for travel info. People appreciate the value of getting personalized travel tips from friends and likeminded travelers.

TripSay is constantly developing, both in terms of features (more about that in the near future) and userbase. The more members we have, the better we are able to distill the best travel tips and destinations from our huge database. We are glad to say that we have members from around the world already. Way to go!

We’re excited to welcome a new member to our board! Alfonso Castellano joins TripSay at a perfect time, a few months after our public launch. He brings a wealth of experience and insight in building successful online travel businesses and compelling features for both our users and partners. Alf is one of the pre-eminent authorities in the online travel industry and we are very happy to have him on board.

Alf has over 25 years experience in travel industry, including nine years at LastMinute.com where he was Managing Director of Southern Europe, head of Latin American expansion and Global Hotel contracting and procurement. Following Travelocity’s billion-dollar acquisition of LastMinute.com, Alf was appointed Travelocity’s Senior Vice President of consumer business in Europe. This year he will be launching two travel technology and innovation related companies.

We also look forward to have Alf’s travel tips on various types of outdoor sports, not least on his special interest, sailing. It’s always great to have new Tripsayers sharing their insider travel tips and see which places they recommend. Alf has been a TripSay user before joining the board. He says: “TripSay.com is ideally positioned to capitalize on this next wave in the online travel industry where members use the power of social networking and knowledge sharing to maximize their travel experiences.”

The official press release is here.