2012 Predictions: Part 3 - The promise of social media and the rise of the ecosystem

Third and final part in my three part “Predictions for 2012” post. Part 1 here, part 2 here.

Part 3 - The promise of social media

Good News: We know where to go to find people in social

The good news is that where to find people on social is known. There might be a 1,001 social media sites but as Om Malik confirms in this recent piece on some comScore data Facebook is dominant followed by well known names like Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ and Tumblr. [as an interesting side note, it looks like MySpace still has a decent amount of traffic (more than Googe+ though no activity or time on site to speak of) and the hot to trot pinterest is gaining followers fast.]

Marketing platforms are emerging for each of the leading sites. Meaning the marketing departments at travel companies (suppliers and intermediaries) have suites of tools to work with in attracting social audiences. There maybe a lot of debate around whether or not social is a fad or meaningful (underhyped, overhyped or somewhere in the middle) but the tools to take advantage are known. The easy prediction (and good news for the large social media companies) is that advertising dollars will flood into social media in 2012.

The more detailed good news, I predict that money can actually be made with smart advertising on social media. It was thought in 2011 that social media was just for brand building and customer engagement. In 2012 we will see the first hints of sales and direct marketing activity on social media. Get ready and prepared to see and buy ads on Facebook, Linkedin etc that look like ads on Google.

[side note – here is a link to my 5 tips for launching a social media strategy]

Bad news: four eco-systems, four business models

While the growth of social means more opportunities for brand building, customer engagement and (I predict) sales, it has also been part of fracturing of the web media and content worlds into a series of different ecosystems with different content and revenue models. Google, Facebook, Youtube, Apple and maybe even Amazon. In each ecosystem the means of gaining prominence and then generating revenue is very different – so different that it takes more than just an adjustment or tweak to do it properly. Instead it takes a full-scale effort.

In Google you get prominence from inbound links, quality of content, site structure, bidding capability and dollars spent. The reward is traffic that may or may not results in sales depending on how good you are at monetisation. The ecosystem is completely open. Content is created or published on web pages, open for the world to see and search.

On Facebook prominence comes from customer engagement. Getting customers to like you, use your app and then continue to read you and hopefully comment. To stay engaged for a very long time. The potential rewards are a long spectrum of possibilities from the warm and fuzzy (customers engaging with the brand) to direct response (clicks onto booking engines). But the big money inside the ecosystem is restricted to Facebook and some gaming companies. Everyone else is at the warm and fuzzy side of the spectrum. The ecosystem is closed. Consumers may screw up and put public content intended to be private but inside social media there are terabytes of content excluded from the Google and the general public.

For Apple prominence comes from developing an app. A good app is very very different to a good website (or a good Facebook page). Not only does an app need to work on a smaller screen, in a perfect world it should work offline and online. The best are purpose built and targeted to people in different states of mind. But the rewards can be more immediate. Customers are happy to pay money upfront for apps and content from Apple. Less so in travel than in pure entertainment and games worlds but there is money being spent on Apple for language guides, local transport planners, destination guides and more. The ecosystem is closed.

Finally inside Youtube prominence comes from video content. The production quality does not have to be expert but the content needs to be entertaining. Great videos can generate numbers that make TV executives want to cry. Viral hits can out-rate the best of Hollywood. But - there is no formula or rule book (yet if ever) for a YouTube hit. The rewards are…..not sure. There is some advertising and there maybe some brand improvements but the dollars are small and outside of a megahit the brand benefits low. For a travel company there is no answer yet to either “how to make money on YouTube?” or even “how to build a brand on YouTube?”. In short there is an ecosystem in YouTube with monstrous amounts of traffic but no one knows how to use it other than to post and hope for a viral hit.

The bad news here is that for now you need to pick. Need to pick which ecosystem you are in and hit it hard. You can flirt with others (ie hit Google hard and flirt with Facebook). But you need to pick the main one and double down efforts. I predict that a lot of money is going to be spent and wasted by companies trying to play in all four to the same level.

[for more on this see these articles. Interview with Phil Simon on the “Age of the Platform”, post by Jason Calacanis on “Founders defining reality” and Nigam Arora’s post on the recent Google earnings announcement for the stock consequences]

Thanks to jooyoung.kim from Flickr for the image

2012 Predictions: the BOOT has good news and bad news. Part 1 - the recovery

2011. 2011. 2011. I have to type it three times, to remind myself how big year it was. So big, it has taken me almost a month to get over the end of it and publish my predictions for 2012. I turned 40, which makes me about 100 in Internet years. I started a new job and launched a new business. Meanwhile the online travel world ignored my aging and changing - it just kept powering on. Smashing through a world economy that can’t decide if it is in boom or bust. But what of 2012? Here is what a 40 year BOOT thinks will happen in 2012. There are three exciting things about 2012: the promise of economic recovery, the promise of the mobile web and the promise of social media growth. Like all wizened old grouches, I have good news and bad news about these three promises. And.. like those aging bloggers who are writing less than they used to I have split these predictions into 3 parts.

Part 1 - The promise of recovery

The Good news - another wave of online demand is coming online

Next year will mark the year that everyone born in 1994 turns 18. This is more insightful that it sounds. It is significant because 1994 marks the year the world wide web was born, meaning 2012 is the year the first true 100% internet generation comes of age.

By coming of age they become economic entities that get jobs and make their own decisions on where to spend money and when to go on holidays. This generation and those three to five years older than them will fuel another burst of growth in online travel spending.

Combined with the growth of middle classes in China and India, 2012 will see a greater shift in offline to online than we saw in 2011. I predict products will continue emerge/grow online to catch this wave (ie P2P travel such as Airbnb).

The Bad new - It is 2008/2009 all over again

2012 will not deliver the economic growth and renewal that has been hoped and predicted. As a result we will see a general drop in travel demand even as online share increases.

This drop will not be as bad as – but will be a reminder of – the declines in 2008/9. I expect this to drive a drop in travel supply prices (hotel, air, cruise).

Unfortunately I predict that we will see some further announcements by suppliers in the areas of bankruptcy, closing of brands and disbanding of joint ventures.

It will however give deals a big push – both for dedicated deals sites and for the general online travel agent market. Watch the deal market and businesses grow (even if we lose some players along the way).

[FYI - here are my 2011 predictions]

Thanks to merwing on Flickr for the photo

Revinate Sessions - talking social media monitoring with Revinates Michelle Wohl

In my annual predictions I called 2011 as the year in which social goes from an internet media platform to a core part of retail decision making through becoming part of the revolution in search and discovery.

I have published a series of posts around this theme. I published 5 tips for suppliers looking for an online social media strategy (via Tnooz), the role that social and other factors will play in the future of the Google search algorithm (also via Tnooz) and a PhoCusWright Innovation Summit piece on competition between start-ups Revinate and Trustyou to help companies search and monitor social media.

That post led me to virtual meeting with Michele Wohl (photo top left), Revinate’s VP of marketing. Michelle gave me a demonstration of the Revinate social media monitoring tool for hotels and we discussed social media, semantic reasoning, klout and more. Here is what we discussed

The Revinate Product

At first Wohl and I discussed the product. I like it. It needs a few more elements to be the complete package (see below) but I saw a very useful product for a hotel to understand what is going on in social media and user generated content around the hotel brand.

The product allows a hotel to track, monitor and respond to user generated content on site and social media platforms. Wohl spent 30 minutes taking me through what a typical hotel client (pty level or chain) can do with the tool. Basic tasks in the tool include:

• Monitoring and responding to reviews;
• Tracking commentary/updates through twitter; and
• Track consumer sentiment about a property and competing properties.

That is – an aggregation, tracking and social media monitoring tool.

It was some of the higher end features that impressed me including:

• “Add a ticket” and respond feature: A workflow management process that allows hotel to operationalise the information/review by assigning it to someone within the hotel and track the response. For example if the review or comment is about the restaurant it can be “ticketed” to the F&B manager to address. Very useful at bringing all elements of the property into the social media environment without over burdening staff;
• Filter and compare: The ability to filter commentary/reviews by various categories and themes. For example to see how often the “pool” at a particular property is mentioned compared to the pool at a competitor property. Allows the hotel to be able to see how they rate against a competitor at a feature and facility level, not just overall;
• Scorecard systems: Allowing data and trends to be compiled overtime and compared to competitors. Different time periods can be mapped against different competitors and different social media point. Creating the ability to set targets for staff members against measurable goals;
• Chains can roll up and deep dive: Chains can see whole of chain level and then rankings between individual properties helping to drive internal competition and improvements; and
• Pricing: The price of the product is based around the number of rooms and hotel ADR. It ranges from 1-3 times ADR per month. I like how Revinate have targeted the price of the product to be clearly measurable against a potential gain.

General Social media tips

Wohl and I also discussed some general tips and concepts around social media. Here were her tips:

1. Monitor before you create: much like the recommendations from my 5 tips for a hotel building a social media strategy Wohl says “First thing to do is the monitoring – find out what people are saying about you. Only then do let people know you are listening. Don’t sign up for Facebook or Twitter if there is no one there at the property to look after it”;
2. Respond to all reviews as long as the responses can be unique: On the question of responding to reviews, Wohl said it was critical that hotels reply to all reviews with unique responses. Even those from clearly contradictory (read mad but incoherent) consumers. She said “you are not responding to the person writing the review but the people reading it. Future bookers are making decisions to book based on management’s response to reviews and including that in their own post booking reviews.”; and
3. It is not all about TripAdvisor…but: Wohl was able to show me a series of real time client examples. In none of them was TripAdvisor responsible for more than 45% of the reviews out there on that property. Some as low as 23%. Put another way more than half of the reviews about those properties were on a site other than TripAdvisor.

More to do

As I say I like the product and it is useable right now against the volumes of UGC being created. However there is more that needs to be built to match the future quantity and iterations of content.

1. Authority/Klout measurement: There is nothing in the tool at present that prioritises one review/comment above another based on the authority/popularity/reach/klout of the creator. Wohl is aware of this and says this is one the product roadmap (update - Wohl has since told me that "Klout integration should be released in the next couple of weeks");
2. Sentiment analysis: Expanding the search, tagging and monitoring to determine whether or not the use of a word is in a positive or negative. For example is someone wrote “this hotel is the least romantic place” then being able to tell that this mention of the word “romantic” is a negative not a positive. Wohl says that volumes are manageable at present without semantic analysis ““Clients are not yet asking us for sentiment analysis as so far the review volume is manageable that they are focused on reading and responding to every review”. Clearly this volume management will not last for ever; and
3. Foreign languages: At the time we spoke the tool was tracking only English language reviews. Since we spoke - hotels can now request to have language reviews in their native (non-English) language fed into the system. The next step is the ability to combine information from foreign language and native language reviews. For example taking a foreign review that mentions the swimming pool and combining it with native language reviews in the aggregation tool. Wohl says this is "on the roadmap".

Wrap up

With social media there has to be a balance. Each dollar spent on social media is a dollar not spent on paid search. Each person hour spent on replying to a TripAdvisor review is an hour not spent on CRM analysis, on property client management, on managing an existing sales channel and other critical sale and customer retention activities. Now is the time for social media focus and work. But it is not the time for sacrificing online marketing and client management in favour of chasing every tweet down the endless social media rabbit hole. I like what I have seen in Revinate as a means for helping find that balance.

Any hoteliers out there with experience using Revinate or a competing product with any comments?

Search, Social and Mobile- pre Eyefortravel thoughts via eHotelier

I am speaking this year at Eyefortravel May 18-19 in Singapore

I have put together some pre-conference predictions for 2011 (based on by full 2011 predictions). They were picked up and published in a post on eHotelier along side predictions from Robert Bailey of Abacus and (Professor) Timothy O'Neil-Dunne of LUTE technologies (and so much more). Check out the full text here.

My predictions are:

• Search changes (again); Search already changed forever in 2010. There is more to come in 2011, especially in the measure of authority. The old measure of inbound links will be enhanced with input from social networks, context and location, expert advice, preference matching and more. Search marketing will have to change to encompass content, social, information syndication and data mining. All suppliers and all OTAs will need to ensure that their SEO experts and agents are on top of this change. In addition to the changes in authority, search will change in how results are displayed;
• Social media will challenge search and retail: the parallel rises of social media, customers asking more complicated (and open) questions online and consumers willingness to discuss and share everything openly and freely will drive through 2011 a change the way the industry attracts and retains customers. The traffic numbers of Facebook, Twitter, foursquare etc are all but unprecedented. But it is not their rise that is the story. The story is the consumer behaviour behind the rise of these products. Pick your metaphor - consumers have opened the kimono, dropped their pants or invited everyone in to their lives. Nothing is sacred. Everything can and will be shared. Marketing channels will need to be adjusted. Communications techniques changed. Customer care models and response times adjusted. Even sales channels will need to be reworked. Get ready for social search, book and buy; and
• Mobile becomes a distinction without meaning: iPhone did for the smart phones what diet coke did for soda. It created a category, lifted other categories with it and made people buy more of everything around it. The consequence is that people are using their phones (and now tablets) while they are on the move and as a replacement for laptops. Mobile no longer means mobile. By that I mean people will sit in meetings, on couches as home, at the desk...anywhere...everywhere...expecting to be connected. Not caring if a device is called a phone, tablet or netbook. Just caring that it gets them the content or experience they want. The result is device platform discussions will move from "which product is this built for" to "is this compatible for all displays". Much like we now say that a site has to be web ready rather than differentiating between its readiness on FireFox, Chrome, Safari, opera and IE. The type of the device and whether or not it is mobile is now irrelevant. Mobile/PC/Tablet will be the different "browsers" of 2011. All code will need to be written in preparation for this.
  

For a reminder of my thoughts on last year's Eyefortravel check out this post.

Social media is either overhyped, underhyped, or somewhere in the middle

Across two conferences two sets of travel executives have highlighted the challenges in figuring out how much to invest in social media for online travel companies. At last year's PhoCusWright Steve Hafner of Kayak called social media "overhyped". A session or two later former Expedia CEO Rich Barton called it "underhyped". At this year's No Vacancy Glenn Fogel of Priceline called social media experts "charlatans" while Toga Hospitality CEO Rachel Argaman said the future of the internet was pages inside Facebook. Meanwhile Wotif provided the perfect case study to test this debate by launching $11 rooms for 11 minutes via social media.

In my latest Tnooz post I discuss this debate and look in depth at the Wotif promotion. Check out the story here.

The BOOT in Travel Weekly - first on social then on search

The BOOT has appeared in a couple of Travel Weekly (Australia) online news pieces that might interest you.

Back in December they reported on my comments on social media at the ATEC conference (for my top five social media tips see here)

A week ago they carried by comments on how search is changing. For more on that see my predictions for 2011.

2011 Predictions: The BOOT on which trends live and which ones die in 2011

I loved 2010. So much happened in online travel that I have cricks in my neck from looking left and right, from scanning an RSS news feed on one side, tweets and r-tweets on the other, conference presentations filled with announcements, press releases filling up my inbox, posts to the left of me, news to the right...here we are stuck in the middle of the most exciting online industry in the world.

Don't slow down, 2011 is already here. The Boot has six predictions for 2010. Three things will live and thrive and three things will wither and die:

2011 - three things will thrive

1. Social lives: the parallel rises of social media, the open ended question and consumers willingness to discuss and share everything openly and freely will in 20011 continue to change the way the industry attracts and retains customers. The traffic numbers of Facebook, Twitter, foursquare etc are all but unprecedented. But it is not their rise that is the story. The story is the consumer behaviour behind the rise of these products. Pick your metaphor - consumers have opened the kimono, dropped their pants or invited everyone in to their lives. Nothing is sacred. Everything can and will be shared. In 2011 the online travel industry will continue to adjust marketing channels and communications techniques to match this trend. Five tips on how to do that are here.

2. Search lives: but not as you know it. Search has changed forever especially the measure of authority. The display changes we have seen in Google and Bing in 2010 are a precursor to the profound changes I expect to see in the measure of authority for content/sites in search in 2011.
The old measure of inbound links will be enhanced with input from social networks, context and location, expert advice, preference matching and more. Search marketing will have to change to encompass content, social, information syndication and data mining. I am predicting there will be as many six factors that drive authority in search.

In addition to the changes in authority, search will change in how results are displayed. Results will become multi-destinational and multi-dimensional.

3. Data lives: In 2010 the Economist introduced me to the yottabyte as a indicator of how much data is being collected every day on everything (yottabyte = 2 to the power of 80 bytes or 1000 Zettabyte). The online travel industry following suit - collecting data on a scale unimaginable five years ago and the quantity is rising exponentially by the day. The access to this level of data and the open and honest nature of this data gives the industry the chance to profile and market to consumers at a level of detail down to and below the level of the individual. In 2011 that data will be put to use. My EveryYou concept will take even further hold in online travel (more on EveryYou here). More and more you will hear of activities in online travel to develop specific and targeted recommendations of one based on the unique combination of desires, needs and interests of each individual at any moment in time. Micro-targeting at scale.

2011 - three things will die

1. Convergence dies: For the first decade and half of online travel and the last fifteen years of communications technology, the non-stop talk was around convergence. That devices would merge. That our phones, computers, TVs, game consoles, printers, fridges and more would all come together in one device. The opposite is true. Convergence is dead. Devices are becoming (at the same time) more specialised, more capable and more connected. As a result, in 2011 we will give up on the idea of convergence of devices and instead adopt a concept of multiple devices supporting a communications ecosystem. Activities will start on one device, continue on another and conclude on a third. Each device in the chain will have a main purpose different from the other but will be able to support activities spread across other devices. Our different devices will remain with separate functions (content creation devices, gaming and entertainment devices, communications devices) but each will connect and share with the other in a common network.

2. Mobile dies: Sure mobile is everywhere. Sure I ate humble pie and admitted that 2009 was the year of the mobile. But in 2011 the mobile/tablet/PC debate will change from building for devices to building for display preferences. Device distinction as a designator for what is or is not built will die. Device platform discussions will move from “which product is this built for” to “is this compatible for all displays”.

Much like we now say that a site has to be web ready rather than differentiating between its readiness on FireFox, Chrome, Safari, opera and IE. The type of the device and whether or not it is mobile is now irrelevant. Mobile/PC/Tablet will be the different “browsers” of 2011. All code will need to be written in preparation for this.

(OK that is not the death of mobile - more like the enlightenment or complete ubiquity of mobile - but you get the gist)

3. BAR dies: Best Available Rate has been a staple of the online travel industry since 2002. In response to the absolute transparency of the Internet, chain and independent hotels guaranteed common prices across each distribution channel. In 2011 we have reached a point where through a combination of dramatically improved IP address targeting, growth in closed user groups, private sale sites, group coupon sites and more there will be a myriad of ways in which hotels will put deals out there that are different to their BAR. Get ready for a move to a world of more and more targeting, more and more yield management and a wider variety of prices for the same property and product.

Close your tray tables and turn off your electronic devices. We are in for an amazing and 2011 and the BOOT is here to cover it for you.

If you are interested here are my 2010 predictions

Thanks to 1suisse1 for the image via flickr

Tnooz Post: Authority and Page Rank in Google is changing, are you ready?

New Tnooz post live titled "Is travel ready for the Google Page Rank overhaul?". In the post I discuss Google Places and speculate on what it means for new elements in the page rank alogrithm including the tastegraph, sociograph, memegraph, expertgraph, genomegraph, contextgraph and a lot of other made up words new media concepts. Read the full post here.

Stories from TRAVELtech: contemplating the parallel inter-verse

I was at TRAVELtech last week wondering if there is a parallel universe on the internet (inter-verse) that I am not part of. In the Internet that I live in the following rules apply:

• Search: Not all my searches start on Google;
• Starting: Portals are not a starting point but might be a destination (ie Yahoo Finance);
• Creating: I am creating more and more content very day – but writing less and less on my blog;
• Reading: Newspaper sites are fading from view in favour of RSS and news aggregators; and
• Accessing: I am accessing the internet all over place – via my computer, my Apple TV, my Xbox, my blackberry and more.

Three presentations at TRAVELtech reminded me that many people online who do not adhere to these rules and therefore exist in a parallel inter-verse:

• Mark Higginson of Neilsen Online reminded me that a third of Internet users do not use social networks. For these users (and there are a lot of them) the Internet is not a place for inspiration or interaction. It is a functional place. A place to consume content, check details and make purchases. A place to do things and find things out, not to engage, share and...well... just hang out;
• Rohan Lund of Yahoo!7 says that Yahoo! is continuing to expand world-wide as a place for people to start on the Internet. That the portal is still as strong and steady starting point on the Internet for hundreds of millions of users; and
• Warren Livingstone (founder of the Fanatics) proved that the secret to community was tents more than tweets. That communities did not need social media that much to grow and foster.
  

The obvious question upon re-discovering the parallel inter-verse is whether or not it is a place in itself or is it just a staging area. Is it a place where newer users start their internet experience – only to soon progress to the "real" Internet or do these users stay in the functional and controlled parallel inter-verse that is about more than outcomes that experience?

The reason why this is important to think about is that if the parallel inter-verse is a permanent place rather than a staging area then online travel companies need to plan for a different future. I keep talking about a future for online travel around moving from transaction engines to recommendation engines. Around helping consumers move from answering closed questions ("how much for a hotel in Melbourne?") to open ones ("where do I go next?"). A future where some combination of the tastegraph and sociograph combine to make online social interaction as (if not more) rewarding than off. If the functionally focused parallel inter-verse is a permanent place then there is more than one future. A long term functional internet means product people spending time on retail efficiency and on site content products rather than recommendations and syndication. It means more off-line marketing and brand based marketing. It will mean more in website design and less in apps, social media and under the hood data work. My guess is the parallel inter-verse is temporary. That functional only internet use will fade away to be replaced by rules like my rules. What do you think? Is there a parallel inter-verse (or I am making stuff up) and do we have to rewrite the future of the online travel business to take account?

BTW - thanks to Brianam on Flickr for the photo. The context behind the sign (which he says is real) is that Universe St was closed and traffic was being diverted to Rainbow st.

Tnooz: 5 tips for launching a social media strategy

My largest post ever is now live in four parts over at Tnooz. 2,500 words on "5 steps for a travel supplier looking to launch a social media strategy". 5 steps in four parts. Here they are with links to the individual pieces

Step 1 - Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say

Step 2 - Start monitoring social media. Make it a customer service and marketing priority

Step 3 - Collect data - all of it

Step 4 - Craft product and content plans

Step 5 - Start saying and stick to it

Critical to this analysis is that it is not until Step 5 that full blown social media content creation is recommended.

TripAdvisor Sessions: talking tastegraph and sociograph with TripAdvisor Product VP Adam Medros

In part 1 of my interview with TripAdvisor VP of Product Adam Medros we talked through the launch of the TripAdvisor Trip Friends product and the challenges/benefits of living in a Facebook world.

In this part 2 we review the sociograph vs the tastegraph as a means for recommending. Recommendation through the sociograph means drawing advice and responses from those in the same social network as a user. The tastegraph refers to basing recommendations and search results on the preferences of and feedback from people who like the same things as the user regardless of the existence or not of a social connection.

I asked Medros what he thought about these two trends and whether or not he thought the tastegraph was a better recommendation process than the sociograph. Here is what he had to say

Medros of TripAdvisor: When we talk recommendations at TripAdvisor we talk about a hierarchy of advice. The top of the hierarchy is the wisdom of friends and this is what Trip Friends enables. Trip Friends does more than allowing you to ask your friends, it lets you know which friends to ask. At the other end of the hierarchy is what TripAdvisor has been doing for 10 years – wisdom of crowds. [The crowd providing] A broader set of advice and opinions than available from a transaction provider. In the middle there is the tastegraph – we call it “people like me”. Where you can filter down the recommendations and wisdom of friends through “people like you” filters. The tastegraph is better than wisdom of crowd but not as good as wisdom of friends.

There are three approaches to collecting data for recommendation engines. Two don’t work.

1. Give to Get: Asking consumers to do a survey of who they are and use the results of the survey to show recommendations. It doesn't work and no one does it;
2. Black box: Take all of the click steam data – put it into the "black box" and produce an answer for the consumer. Does not work. No matter how much consumers tell you they want recommendations this way, they (the consumers) do not believe the results when they come out. This method is easier for a transaction site that has only transaction data to rely on. But for research site consumers are all over the site for many different reasons. Too noisy to trust the click data; and
3. People Like Me and Finger Printing: Try to finger print a hotel or travel experience by asking people to choose similar experiences. The best version of this is, "If you like this hotel in city X you will like hotel Z in city Y".

Almost all of these approaches have a scale component. The wisdom of friends needs the scale of a billion pins from the Cities I've Visited app. People like me need scale to aggregate up the different finger print characteristics.

My Take

I see the value in having access to friends to complement the crowd content on TripAdvisor. This is also a very good implementation by TripAdvisor. That said I feel that the path to recommendations is through the tastegraph/people like me approach more than the sociograph. I have lots of friends, close friends, that have very different interests to me and whose recommendations I won't take.

The first time I used Trip Friends it took a few clicks more than I expected to get logged in and up and running. Once in, I found the product easy to use and easy to integrate into a search. But looking down the list of friends connected for the destination I was interested in (Hong Kong) I was not convinced that any of them knew any more than I did. The one friend I do have that lives and grew up in Hong Kong did not have that in her profile so was missed.

I think the "like button" is going to rule the world one day. By that I mean that tools and products to allow content consumers (online or off) to positively or negatively vote for an item or content (including Facebook, Digg, StumbledUpon and more) will drive the future of content and transactional consumption. But I think this is more likely to happen in a "people like me" or tastegraph environment than an environment driven by "what do my friends think".

Now to you - tastegraph or sociograph - which one will rule?

TripAdvisor Sessions: Talking to TripAdvisor VP Adam Medros about Trip Friends and living in a Facebook world

It has taken me a while to type it up but I wanted to share with you my interview with TripAdvisor Product Vice President Adam Medros on their (now not so new) Trip Friends feature that allows review and destination surfing on TripAdvisor to be combined with Facebook social search features.

If you have not come across the Trip Friends product yet, it allows you to connect your TripAdvisor search to your Facebook network. Practical results are an ability to see who in your network may live, have visited or have knowledge about a destination. This data comes from Facebook friend's profiles and Cities I've Visited "pins". Targeted questions can be asked and answered combining the mass crowd input of Tripadvisor's UGC information and the sociograph responses of a user's Facebook friends (for more on the product see the Tnooz review).

The BOOT is full of stories from me about the evolution of online travel from a transactional activity to a recommendation and inspiration service. You will have seen my interviews with various inspiration and discovery start-up CEOs (Triporati, Joobili, Tripbase, LikeCube) as well as my general posts on the Travel Discovery & Inspiration sector. In part 1 of my discussion with Medros of Expedia's TripAdvisor we discussed discovery, inspiration, product development, lead generation and having to live in a world ruled by Facebook (part 2 here). Here are the details of the discussion

BOOT: How long did it take to build the feature?

Medros of TripAdvisor: TripAdvisor does weekly releases covering 10 or 12 different projects at any one time. We have a building and launching mentality. It helps that we are a content company, not not transactional based as transactional sites need to be much slower and more careful in their launches. This feature took 5 months of work. Some was working through the detail of how it would work – some rewriting code as Facebook changed their feed. 2 weeks before launch we had to rewrite the private messaging functionally because of changes on the Facebook side.

BOOT: What are the future plans for the feature?

Medros of TripAdvisor:There are a couple directions we want to take the product

1. Big Picture – pushing on working more closely with partners in the industry to talk to travellers and users that helps plan a better trip to add advice from experts to advice from Facebook friends;
   
2. Mobile - We re-launched our mobile site in Dec 2009. Want to add this feature to that platform. Currently getting more than 2 million users a month on mobile; and
   
3. Network effect – expanding the buckets of things consumers can share with each other.

BOOT: What is like being tied to Facebook? Must be hard and challenging to give up so much control to them?

Medros of TripAdvisor: Without a doubt (a challenge to be tied to the Facebook experience). The benefits are clear but also a number of dependencies we have to manage:

1. General dependency: What would we do if Facebook build their own travel Q&A product? We can't worry about it as we can't stop something like that happening and it would go against public claims by Facebook to be independent;
2. API dependencies: Facebook have a tendency to change features and the API often. For example app notification went away and was never replaced; and
   
3. Downtime dependency: What happens if the Facebook API has downtime? Figuring out how to message to users when there is latency coming from not you.

Despite this we need Facebook. We tried to build a version of Trip Friends on our own a few years ago – did not take off because consumers did not want to maintain another social network.

BOOT: Do you think Facebook is or will become a place for consumers to do transactions?

Medros of TripAdvisor: Facebook (the platform) is ready but users do not think that way just yet. Have yet to see any real interest in transacting on Facebook other than within games. Good innovators dilemma. Is like the early days of Google. Both Facebook and Google are going to get closer and closer to the lead generation side of marketing through delivering people to sites that can transact.

BOOT: Any thoughts on letting hotels participate - to get involved like they can in responding to reviews?

Medros of TripAdvisor: Starting to think about that. TripAdvisor serves two sides of the trip equation. The user side of recommending and the industry side as well. Hoteliers should be able to contribute to trip planning experience. As long as users know the bias of the advice. There is room for us to take this functionality and add advice from experts as well as friends.

In part 2 I talk to Medros about the differences between the sociograph and the tastegraph.

What are your early impressions?

The BOOT at adtech: three trends for any social content strategy

I was at adtech Sydney the week before last speaking at a session called “what is the impact of social content on e-commerce”. During this session I shared my thoughts on the three main trends that an online company has to be aware of in a social media strategy. Here is a post with my speaking notes cover the three critical trends to follow and understand when crafting a social media/content strategy:

Trend 1 - Trust, interest and relevance as (if not more) important than technology

Social media is word of mouth at the speed of light. Successful word of mouth marketing comes not from technology but from trust, interest and relevance. As I mentioned in my lead up interview to eyefortravel TDS next month, getting someone to talk about your brand is not driven by technology it comes from earning a customer's trust, telling them something interesting and making it available in a relevant way. Technology is the speed and connectivity tool but is not the message. The recommendation from this trend is to spend as much if not more time on the message as the mechanism. Just like TV shows in the fifties were great ways to generate word of mouth about soap because of the relevance to the audience, so too they only worked if the soap opera carried a message targeted to and of interest to the audience. The soap operas in themselves were not transactionally driven. Similarly, this is why the initial phases of social media marketing have been content related rather than transactional or deal based. In the travel arena, content and travel stories are more likely to be relevant, interesting and build trust (at this stage) than sending out poorly targeted deals.

Trend 2 - the open ended question comes online

In the nineties and early noughties the job of the online travel industry (suppliers, agents, content and search businesses) was to help customers answer closed questions. Specific questions with specific answers. The last 2 years has seen the shift online from asking closed questions to open question. From a closed question like 'how much for a 4 star hotel in sydney?" or "how much for a flight to new york?" to an open question like "where should I go next?" or "what should I do this weekend?". The first has a limited set of answers regardless of who asked. The second has an unlimited number of answers that change depending on who asks.

For online travel businesses this means using the data we collect from our members, community and purchasers to drive recommendations and trustworthy community interaction to shift form answering limited questions to limitless questions.

Trend 3 - the platforms for social media are still in beta

I am convinced we are at an intermediary step with social media. By that I mean that the platforms are not close to being finalised in form, function or usage. Status updates in Twitter, Linkedin or the new Google buzz are still non-stop streams of information. As I mentioned in my story about tracking the Mumbai attacks via twitter this constant feed of information and innuendo can be overwhelming in volume and unmanageable in determining truth from fiction. Twitter is not a final product, same for Facebook and Linkedin. In fact the social media platform space is still in beta. People were tweeting at adtech that blogs are now dead, long live Twitter. But still only a fraction of the online world uses twitter and there are more cumulative page views being attracted to long form content than micro-blogging update. There is a next stage coming, a next product or iteration of an existing product that adds a management layer, a relevancy later and an attribution/authority layer - in other words trust, relevance and interest.