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

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.

This entry was posted on Sonntag, November 4th, 2007 at 19:01 and is filed under About earthfaves, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.