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.

The funniest meeting was with Michael Burnham from Tripmedia. Although we didn’t know each other previously he spotted my badge and came to talk as he’d heard of our company before. We ended up chatting for quite a while and at some point ended up talking about how old we are as we don’t really get twitter. The funniest part was that he guessed that I’m much younger than I actually am and once I told him the truth he said that it must be my Dolph Lundgren like looks that made him guess wrong. I found that hilarious as some of the guys in the office have mentioned the same thing. It must be the blond hair…

I like the TDS concept where there’s an expo hall, some free presentations and the paid seminar. As I spent my time in the expo hall I saw that many interesting companies had a stand on the expo floor. This year, a promiment number of companies were offering mobile solutions for travel companies. Let’s see if mobile finally starts getting some traction as the consultants keep telling us in these seminars. Quite a lot of companies were offering web2.0 features to third parties (pretty much as we do with the widgets and the api). Good to see that there are others, who believe in the same model as we do! All in all it was nice to see that despite of the economy there still are companies coming up with new ideas and technologies.

The TDS is a good event and definitely worth going to. There were even some free drinks at the end of the show’s first day making it even better. You can’t go wrong with free drinks. Thanks for the guys at CarTrawler for serving me the drinks whenever I ran out!

We also had a get-together with a small bunch of travel startups on one of the evenings. It was good to meet others trying to do something new in travel with scarce resources. The whole thing was organised by the nice guys at Tourdust. I hope that we’ll have more such meetings in the future! It’s great to share experiences with other entrepreneurs in the same business. Looking forward to our future meetings!

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.

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.

The conference itself unfortunately suffered from some serious hiccups. The wifi or the wired connection did not work for most part of the conference. This is not new, since wifi seldom works at a web conference (exception to the rule: Slush Helsinki), but the wired connection usually works. When the Internet connection for Slush was built, we were able to do it with zero budget thanks to sponsors at Nebula and Cisco and some hours put in by our selves and it just worked.

There’s plenty of bashing the conference on other blogs, so I will stop it here and say a few good words.  Even after all this, I think LeWeb 2008 was the greatest conference I’ve been to so far. The venue (LeCentQuatre) was great. It had everyone more or less in the same area with the main stage being the center of everyones attention. Networking and bumping into people was easier, since people were not divided into a hundred small rooms scattered around the area. The wifi being down also gave the opportunity to concentrate on networking . There were many friends there and I met a lot of cool new people as well. In the end, people make the conference.

The end party could have been arranged better though, music was way too loud to even try to conversate, it was too small and crowded and it took forever to get service at the bar. I’m not surprised most of the people left before midnight.

The startup competition had some very cool companies, including our friends at Zipipop and the winning face recognition service Viewdle. All in all it seemed like there are several promising startups coming from Europe.

Conferences are great for meeting people and this was no exception. We met a lot of people from the blogging scene like Robert Scoble, Mashable’s Kristen Nicole (great party guys , Venture Beat, GigaOM and of course the Next Web guys, who seem to be everywhere wearing their white suits.

There were a whole bunch of Finnish startups at the expo: Floobs, Xihalife and MoiPal to name a few we hooked up with. On Monday night before the conference, there was even a Finnish night at a restaurant called Foreign Cinema (they show foreign movies) with some media, some locals and some ex-Europeans now working in San Francisco. Jyri from Jaiku/Google was even nice enough to show us around Googleplex. As a sidenote and a bit of an advert for our Finnish friends, we used Scred to record our expenses throughout the trip, an incredibly useful mobile app.

We also got to meet people from some San Francisco based travel startups, like Elliot from travel review meta search site UpTake and Gregg and Scott, the founders of trip itinerary organizer TripIt (pic on the left), that has done quite well.

All in all, the trip was a success, San Francisco was mostly sunny and the Wi-Fi didn’t totally suck. We’ll be back next year! Meanwhile, be sure to check back on our blog and see how we are doing on our twitter feed.