earthfaves – Your positive location recommendation network – build your own trusted good life network with friends and colleagues, about favorite places for leisure, lifestyle, savoir vivre, travel and sustainable products

Last Monday, Markus and Markus presented earthfaves and the underlying business concept to more than 50 International Tourism Management students at the HTW in Saarbrücken. It was fun, we had more than 75 minutes, explained a lot, answered many questions, made great contacts and already received quite a few applications for internships for 2009. We are going to co-operate more with the HTW in the future.

Today, Jan Grönefeld from our partner Ergosign held a keynote about “UI Design for Social Commerce” – check it out, it is about how and why we designed earthfaves that way we did:

Von unserer Praktikantin Stefka:
Am 09. August war es endlich soweit: eine ausgiebige Feier auf geräumiger Terrasse in gemütlicher Grillatmosphäre. Markus und seine reizende Familie, sowie Freunde, Kollegen und Nachbarn feiern das Projekt earthfaves und die baldige Fertigstellung der innovativen Plattform. Zur Zubereitung kulinarischer Köstlichkeiten, wie Lammrücken, Kanninchenspiessen, Schweinefilet und den sehr beliebten Merguez-Würstchen wurde ein handgefertigter, echt saarländischer Schwenker verwendet, der für einigen Qualm sorgte. In der schönen Umgebung der Terrasse inmitten von spielenden Kindern, wurden anfängliche Schüchternheiten schnell über Bord geworfen und man unterhielt sich angeregt in einer großen Runde. Nachdem das letzte Stück Grillgut an den Mann (Daniel) gebracht wurde, konnte der Gastgeber zur Präsentation des Projektes earthfaves übergehen. Im hinteren Teil des Wohnzimmers wurden mithilfe eines Beamers die verschiedenen Bereiche auf der Web-Seite aufgezeigt und unterschiedliche Funktionen getestet. Die Demo auf Firefox lief sehr gut und die begeisterten Gäste legten ihre ersten earthfaves an, d.h. ihnen bekannte, schöne oder beliebte Plätze weltweit. Dies konnte entweder ein gutes Restaurant, ein gemütliches Hotel, der beste Strand zum Surfen oder auch einfach ein Berggipfel sein. Währenddessen machten sich einige der Gäste über das aufgetischte Kuchenbuffet her oder genossen die kühle Abendluft bei einem Glas Rasteau auf der Terrasse. Alles in allem war sowohl die Präsentation, als auch der gesamte Abend sehr gelungen und die Vorfreude auf den Tag X, den Geh-Online-Tag, ist weiterhin ungebrochen…

Hier ein paar Eindrücke:

Barrett presents in Walldorf, Germany

What a great opportunity it was to speak at the SAP Web2.0 Business User Summit last week! Using the collective intelligence of your business teams’ “social knowledge” about where to stay, where to go out, and what to do when traveling professionally was our presentation focus. The presentation also included a live demo of our beta platform and lead into a great discussion about mobile Web2.0 applications and how they will ultimately enhance business users access to trusted information on the go. Audience members actively participated in a half hour post-presentation discussion and asked some solid questions about our platform and how it will benefit all types of teams within SAP.

A big thanks goes out to Michael Altendorf for inviting us to take part in what was a very successful event!

Friends, if you have nothing to do this Saturday and if you happen to be in Berlin, go and check out our marketing/design mastermind Olli spinning hot stuff in the “Monarch” in Kreuzberg! He is going to rock the house with his krautdubstepitalodisconewwaveindierock live mix – together with his friend Carsten as “The Boom Boom Dollar Brothers”.

Check out Olli and Markus in one of their favorite record stores, Das Drehmoment in Berlin – Prenzlauer Berg – they are djing for more than 15 years now.

Yes! We made it. What a week it was in Berlin:

And there should always be an earthfaves team picture somewhere, right? Sure! …oh yeah, we’d also like to thank Olli for putting us up in his cool flat in Kreuzberg for the entire week — nice place, dude.

They’ve got wheels and they’ve got Autobahn…! Markus and Barrett are off to the ITB this morning. We’re all kinda hoping that Google updates their satellite images soon. Why? Check this out:

The earthfaves logo should be able to be picked up from space, right?

In Germany, if there is a reason to drink beer, eat pretzels and cake, and spend some time with friends and family, then we’re on it! This past Friday night, we had a nice little get together to celebrate earthfaves.com beta. It was a fun time and was great to see the people that made it out!

A couple of shots from the party:

Hmm, my last entry was too long ago…how embarrassing. And no, my New Year’s resolution isn’t to make sure the blog is updated every couple of days…although, I will try. I guess I don’t have to write a 500 word essay every time…

So, where were we? Ah yes, the World Travel Market 2007. It was, in a surprisingly small way, a success. The weeks leading into the event, I really didn’t know what to expect at all. I thought, “it will be two guys running around at the world’s second largest travel event with a heavy stack of brochures in their hands, trying to explain what earthfaves is, how it works, and why travel bureaus, tour operators, and other travel-related businesses should be psyched about it.”

My preconceived notions were not so badly preconceived at all, except for the brochures – they weren’t just a heavy stack; they were more like lead bricks – and we didn’t even use them all at the event! Markus and I decided to stick together and pitch earthfaves as a team – our personal styles are quite different, to say the least, and I think we complemented each other well when “pitching” earthfaves. Our team effort usually resulted in me randomly running up to people without reservation, chatting them up for a couple of minutes about the uses of the site and how “cool it is” and then Markus smoothly sliding into the conversation with his obvious knowledge of the travel industry and our platform. Barrett lead in, Markus lead out. Lots of fun, and lots of positive response.

We connected with travel bureaus from around 50 different countries. Many were interested in the platform, but I have to say, in this business seeing is believing — and because the site wasn’t live, it took more time to explain the earthfaves concept. No matter, we did a good job getting solid contacts and since the event, we’ve had a many countries follow-up and ask us how the site is coming along. The Republic of Malawi and Brunei were among the first to contact us, which I thought was completely cool – and their reps at WTM were also completely cool!

How are we coming along, you ask? Well, our travel custom search engine is live! You can access it here: http://www.earthfaves.com/travel-search-engine/

Let me know what you think.

Personally, I think it rocks…good job Markus, Daniel, and Tim!!

In two weeks, Markus and I are heading to London for the one of the biggest travel industry events of the year! WTM will be an amazing chance for us to meet the whole global travel trade industry, hotel owners, tour operators, destination marketing agencies etc! We’ll have plenty of time to network, find business leads, and stay on top of the latest Web 2.0 developments in the travel community.

We’re coming to the market with a new marketing message for the leisure and lifestyle industries that include travel. Just so you have a bit of background before I get into what our message will be, read this quote from Joseph E. Buhler writing about destination marketing in world of Web2.0 (written 1 year ago!!)

“Companies and organizations will in future increasingly have to try and interject themselves into all the conversations going on among customers in the marketplace about their product, service or destination for that matter, rather than dominating what in the past very often was a one way communication. This new C2C reality will have a significant impact on the role of marketing in any industry.”

full article here

Brilliant, I tell you, brilliant. Some may say “no kidding, man, just look at Facebook or YouTube, those guys are all about mass conversation…and Google intelligently posts sidebar advertisements in our email based on email content. Totally big brother, dude.” Right, well…you get the point…they are listening to us. But now let’s talk about those “companies that are interjecting themselves” into the travel industry; where even today, the C2C reality is making differences.

TripAdvisor, one of the clear leaders in the travel market, has accumulated a huge number of user-generated reviews and comments. Their site lets travelers search for hotels/restaurants/etc. and also lets them see comments from other traveler’s previous experiences. Fair enough, nothing really new. Users search, read, or respond to all sorts of comments, negative or positive, and when they finally find something of interest, they can use TripAdvisor’s own booking engine.

Here’s what’s interesting: from many of the folks that I’ve talked to and that are regular users of the site, many don’t actually book their hotels there at all. Mainly, they’re there to check out other travelers comments! One question I asked, “How do the negative comments affect your decision when checking out hotels at TripAdvisor?” Astonishing answers, actually. Almost every single person that I interviewed ultimately said that if there was more than 5 negative comments, they’d move on in their search. The next question was, “Do you read the comments entirely or do you just browse the title headers?” Again, amazing: about 1 in 4 people just read the title headers.

I’m not jumping off the deep end here and telling you that my little science experiment of interviewing a handful of people denotes a solid estimate of how the world thinks when it comes to travel recommendations – but if we did take it as a very small semi-truth, can you imagine what these negative comments are doing for the travel industry? People just blatantly skipping the hotels with more than 5 negative headlines? Could it be that negative C2C has an adverse affect on the travel industry?

Remember my first blog? Oh yeah, yesterday. Sharing the positives? earthfaves is about the best places, not second best places, or places that you “kinda like, but only sometimes go there.” We’re talking about the places you go to on a daily basis because you simply love what they offer, places you dream about going to or dream about going back to! The kind of places you want to find anywhere, no matter where you go! So when you start recommending those earthfaves on earthfaves, remember that those best experiences are the ones your friends are looking for – and these are the places you want to know about if you go to a place you don’t know that well. So tell your friends about every earthfave you add, and ask them to add theirs! This way, you can create YOUR PERSONAL RECOMMENDATION NETWORK.

Love makes the difference – therefore our focus on “earthfaves”, favorite place / places you recommend, is key if you want to not only provide a social recommendation management tool, but only a recommendation marketing platform.