Two stories hit the press this week involving UK airlines and Facebook.

First we had Virgin Atlantic reportedly sacking 13 air crew who branded passengers “chavs” and mocked the airline’s safety. [Source: The Sun]

Now we have British Airways who have launched an investigation about some of their staff reportedly calling passengers “smelly” [Source: The Daily Mail].

The key questions are

• Now “anyone” can publish - how should large companies handle this?
• If an employee publishes a comment in a forum - or semi-public place - are they communicating on behalf of the company they work for - or themselves?
• Should the reaction be to “sack” an employee - or should they be sent on “PR training” instead? Is the sacking just an excuse to reduce headcount in a difficult period?
• Is the issue whether to permit staff to create forums on the web for open discussion - or was the issue about what was said in the forums? Would this have been a problem if there hadn’t been rude comments about customers?

The many to many relationship
Historically public relations was undertaken (in a cosy way) between journalists and PR teams. This was a one-to-one relationship (using a database analogy for you technical lot!). Now its many to many. Individuals (employees) can communicate with individuals (consumers, subscribers etc).

There has always been a big discussion about corporate blogging….. empowering individuals within a corporate to communicate on behalf of the company. Often these were experienced individuals as writing a blog requires a long term commitment by the blogger. This experience helped individuals understand where the line was (and the main concerns related to leaking of corporate IP or internal project news - rather than being rude about customers!)

However, with forums, there is no commitment on behalf of the employee to learn any skills on how to use the facility….. and the damage can be done with one or two comments that get pulled out as press headlines.

Separating your job from your personal life
I am not on Facebook. I made this decision as a conscious decision to have a separate business and personal life. If I had a Facebook account lots of people I know from business (including you lot who read this blog) would want to link and be upset if I didn’t reciprocate. Likewise I have a couple of personal friends who are on my Linkedin account - but very few - most come from my “business life”. Of course, I have some (now) personal friends who have I come to know through my jobs or through business….. so it is not black and white! 

Handling this better - learning from doctors
One thing for sure is that this scenario will occur many more times in the future until everyone is educated on the difference between a public and a private place on the web. I am not even sure if there is a private place on the web.

Perhaps we can learn from the medical industry where they have plenty of slang [See wikipedia] - e.g. FLK - Funny Looking Kid.

In many countries, facetious or insulting acronyms are now considered unethical and unacceptable, and patients can demand access to their medical records. Medical facilities risk being sued by patients offended by the descriptions.

There the practice of referring to patients using slang was greatly curtailed as a result of patients having access to their medical records (i.e. what was once private is now public).

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As I have mentioned a few times (!) I will be taking part in a public discussion with Google Travel UK during World Travel Market [London 2008].

Seminar details - Thursday 13th Nov

What questions do you have for Google?

• Competitors bidding on your trademark issues - no one cares about this now - do they?
• Keyword bid price inflation - a problem - but not much Google can do about that - except get more travel content publishers on board to increase supply
• Account management - interesting - but not really a worry to all as only large travel companies have account managers with Google
• Strategy - any insights on that?
• How to rank well - er….. don’t think Google will give any hints on that so a bit pointless asking

On a related topic, I read the news that for non-travel ecommerce, comparison sites now drive 10% of online sales (see news from InternetRetailing blog).

A key quote from that article is:

“Google Shopping/Google Base is the most commonly used (by retailers) comparison engine, utilised by 63% of retailers. Half of online retailers surveyed said that they used Kelkoo while PriceRunner, Shopping.com, and Shopzilla are each used by 30% of internet retailers.” 

So if Google have one of the best price comparison systems for non-travel ecommerce…… it can only be a matter of time before they have a travel one - regardless of how many times Google deny it. When they do launch in travel I expect it will be a “game changer” for the travel industry….. I personally would welcome it because I am sure Google would do it in such a way that smaller travel companies could compete alongside larger ones…….

ps - if you are wondering why I have stopped writing this week - I am maxxed out with projects that need to go live before the UK sales season starts in Jan. No pressure then! 

But for those who can’t function without their daily dose of my musings I have written something about Expedia and OTA business models, published on Travolution, if you are into that kind of thing.

Expedia (UK and Italy) have added Google Adwords to their site:

Thats an interesting move. Lets look at why they may have done this:

From Expedia’s perspective

• Enables them to bid higher within their own PPC campaigns - as they are doing a form of “arbitrage” (i.e. a certain proportion of their incoming traffic will be monetised on the way out - hence giving them more capacity to bid high for PPC)
• Continues to ensure that Expedia are where people start their travel research. After all, if users can get to related (and relevant) sites from Expedia - you may as well start your travel research at Expedia.
• Lets Expedia understand if they are actually presenting the correct product on their site - if users are tempted by other products (found within the advertising) then obviously not!
• May be a better way of selling RON advertising than any other alternatives supplied by DoubleClick (also on the Expedia site - and also owned by Google)

From Google’s perspective 

• Should increase Adsense advertising inventory - hence help keep down keyword bid inflation for all travel advertisers
• Gives them great insight into the traffic patterns of a leading OTA.

The million dollar question is whether this is a first step in Google buying Expedia. If you search the web (using Google!) you will find plenty of rumours about Google acquiring Expedia. Google would want to understand exactly what Expedia could give them before they bid for the company…. and what better way than check out Expedia’s advertising statistics…..

Further news about Expedia carrying Google advertising from Travolution

Regular readers of this blog have been following (no doubt with some interest) the Leading Hotels of the World 1928 promotion saga. Other bloggers have written that I have “called for a video apology” - I did no such thing - I merely suggested a course of action that would improve their PR situation. I write from the industry’s perspective, not the consumers.

The most amusing write up came from Neil Maclean, himself a Travel PR guy, who wrote that I had “skewered the CEO’s apology like a frog on the dissection table”. Quite.

The failure timeline

Attempt #1
On the first attempt the LHW servers reportedly collapsed. Certainly it was a big fail. [I wrote about it]

Attempt #2
Luckily LHW always had a backup plan. Unfortunately the plan wasn’t up to the task. “Although our original back-up plan provided a viable solution for the 150,000 people who were registered….. “. Perhaps sensibly, in light of the growing media attention, they aborted their second attempt.

(The second attempt was mentioned in their CEO’s apology (which I have also written about))

Attempt #3 - TODAY !
If you hop over to http://www.lhw.com/1928status right now….. you can watch it in action

We are pleased to confirm that the USD 19.28 promotion will take place on Thursday, October 23, 2008 at www.lhw.com/1928. The sale will begin at 2:00 p.m. GMT (10 a.m. in New York, 7:00 a.m. in Los Angeles, 3:00 p.m. in London, and 11:00 p.m. in Tokyo) and will last for a total of 80 minutes 

This time they have brought in the big guns - Akamai [AKAM] - who presumably are helping with their CDN.

I guess the approach is that if LHW are going to fail, at least they want to fail having looked like they have tried everything. They have even publicly stated that they have completed some testing of their new scheme…..

Since enlisting the services of Akamai Technologies, Inc. last Friday, we have made significant progress with the technological redesign of the USD 19.28 Sale. With the majority of the newly-built system completed, we are approaching the final launch phase of this project. Tomorrow, we are performing the “User Acceptance Testing” (aka our internal “dress rehearsal”) in order to ensure that your customer experience is pleasant.

However, I think load testing would have been more appropriate than UAT testing…..  

I hope that LHW succeed this time. I will certainly be taking part - expecting a $19.28 hotel room in London during World Travel Market.  

On a related topic - is this turning into a FAIL tracking blog? Not sure I have a big enough legal budget for that.

I know, I know - we all make mistakes. However secretly we all enjoy reading other people’s misfortunes. This time it is Expedia’s turn.

Expedia UK , as reported by Travolution [See post] have launched a new scheme for offline UK travel agents to access their hotel inventory. This is, on the face of it, quite an interesting scheme.

From the travel agent’s perspective it gives access to equal rates (in particular for late availability) and therefore enables them to compete with other online travel agents.

From Expedia’s perspective it enables them to understand the size of the offline market better - and gives them invaluable insight into the natural progression to full online sales. It also makes them look like they are “siding” with travel agents - which is all helpful PR vs the pureplay online guys. It may also help stop hotel chains from “cutting” Expedia inventory - as Expedia can say they are not just an online travel website - but a travel agent distribution channel. This significantly reduces Expedia’s risk of losing contracted hotel product.

All round, great for everyone.

However, if you are launching to the UK market - and making a big PR announcement, don’t you think you would first make sure your sign up form would accept UK address styles? I think I would.

Yep - the form only takes numeric postcodes…… which, er, excludes all UK travel agents. I am sure they will have it fixed in a jiffy. (And note to Expedia - if you hadn’t done this - I wouldn’t have covered your announcement - so, er, you should be glad you did!)

Hat tip to one of my clients who kindly pointed me towards this unfortunate fail.

If you want coverage that is more sensible than mine, I suggest you read Travolution’s coverage on this launch

Hospitality eBusiness Strategies Inc. have announced their 2009 hotel survey via their irregular blog. This drew my attention back to their 2008 report which is well worth reading if you haven’t seen it before.

Read their 2008 survey results on Internet marketing budget planning and best practices for the hotel industry

Last year’s survey came up with the amazing finding that 47% of all hotel websites were looking to add a blog to their website.

Read that again. That is a big number. I am not completely clear if this is “multiple hotel” websites that they are referring to (i.e. chain websites etc) or whether this is for individual hotel websites. I expect it is the latter. I will assume it is.

How many hotels are there? Most leading hotel agent websites have 50,000 large hotels on their system - but in you include all the niche accommodation providers you can get upto 200,000 (potentially - although I don’t think any site has that number in practice??).

Either way, lets muse for a second on what would happen if there were 100,000 hotel blogs on the web:

• Who would be reading them? Would consumers, as part of the pre-booking product evaluation, learn they have to check the blog first?
• Would blog articles come up alongside product availability search results? For example could you order by who has the best blog rank?
• What skills will be required in order for hotels to become content creators? (after all, 3rd party blog writing companies are hardly going to be able to service that number of clients)
• Will we need hotel specific blog meta-search? Could anyone make a business out of this? (for consumer use)

The one point that intrigues me is that how would the big chains handle this? After all the entire point of a chain is that you get consistent service and product between all your hotels of the same brand - hence your guests understand when they book with you what they are going to get - even if they haven’t been to that hotel before. For example I always book Ibis over Premier Inn (if I can) because Ibis always have French TV.

Chain hotels have become disciplined in creating uniformity between hotels. The thinking happens at head office, the doing happens in the hotels. Blogs though will only work if their objective is to assist with defining individuality between hotels. The thinking has to happen at the hotel level.

I suggest that with hotel blogs, individual and mainly independent hotels will probably have an advantage over chain and brand hotels. Could be interesting to watch how the chains handle this threat. They could either try to “control from the centre” (which wouldn’t work as blogs need to be unique to that hotel or destination) or let the hotels do their own thing (which will mean that there are good and bad ones…. which is exactly what the chains don’t want as that breaks their uniformity strategy).

I have asked this a couple of times in the past and reviewed:

• OkTaTaByeBye - a travel community website in India
• Panedia - panoramic photos service from Australia

So anyone else want to go under the Musings microscope? Anyone want a bit of free coverage that goes to over 500 online travel thought leaders and assorted journalists….. (not that those two groups are mutually exclusive of course!)

Place your URL in the comments below and write a short comment stating why you should be picked. I will chose one that, when written up, will make the most interesting blog post for everyone.

What promotes products the best in travel?
Video (but we all knew that)

Why then don’t all travel websites have videos?
Because its hard to create (or perceived to be hard) - and definitely hard to keep current (descriptions, backgrounds etc age badly - and then you either have to reedit - or reshoot - both of which are costly).

When is Google going to launch a travel website? (over and above what they already do - which - when you look into it - is actually quite a lot….)
Who knows - but I have written about what I would do if I worked for Google

But today we got one step closer. YouTube have launched “click-to-Buy” (see YouTube announcement). If you see a product featured in a video - and you like the look of it - you can buy it.

Here is an interesting quote from today’s announcement:

This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable eCommerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. Our vision is to help partners across all industries — from music, to film, to print, to TV — offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos

Looking to the future I see something like this

• 20 different tour operators put up a 5 minute video about their tours in Egypt
• A home consumer watches all 20 videos on their television (via YouTube / TV integration) (from the comfort of their sofa)
• When they get to one they like - they click on a button - and “shortlist / bookmark” the tour
• Later, on their PC, they review their shortlist, start price comparison - and then buy (earning Google a cut of the commission)

i.e. this is UGC travel TV (but where the U in UGC are travel companies)

It would work for destination choices too.

If I had a bit of time I would build this on top of YouTube right now…… as it would make perfect “acquisition bait”

What have Google said about travel on YouTube?
[Source: The infamous Business Week article]

Also spurring Google’s interest is some early success with sponsored travel offerings. Nearly 900,000 people have watched a New Zealand tourism board’s video ad since it was uploaded to YouTube last September. That kind of traffic is bound to draw marketers.

Travel pages, or a full-fledged travel channel, also promise to help Google make more money from YouTube. Rather than try to convince travel marketers to advertise on user-generated videos, they can sell sponsored destination pages on YouTube where travel marketers can post their own videos and influence or control what types of content users upload. Then Google can also sell other forms of advertising, such as search ads, to drive traffic to the site.

Mind you, this pre-dates today’s announcement about building ecommerce into videos. I just wonder whether the travel guys (and girls) at Google chat (over their free coffee) with the music industry Google people. They should be looking how to make this music oriented ecommerce platform work for travel.

Something else worth reading - Google Rallies Embattled Travel Marketers. Google had a meeting with more than 100 travel marketing executives this week (over in USA). That article is a write up. Anyone read this blog who was there? Please write a review in the comments below. Thanks.

And finally, don’t forget, for the second time this year, I am on stage “interviewing” Google travel. (World Travel Market 2008 - seminar details). Time to start thinking about questions! What do you want asked?

Lets say you want to get your latest news published in the trade press. How would you go about it?

In this modern world the press don’t want to cover boring new product launches - so in order to “spice it up” (and make it publishable) companies often spill the details on how a product will work. I am not completely clear that this is a great idea. I have a scrap book of functionality that has been made public this way.

Lets have a look at some recent examples that I have kept:

Opodo incorporates “a little personal touch” to bookings
Passengers booking flights through Opdoo will now receive a handy text ahead of their trip containing their booking reference number, flight number, flight departure time and a weather summary at their chosen holiday destination. The text is sent to bookers in the UK the day before they fly. To receive the Tarmac Text, customers optionally supply their mobile phone number at the booking stage online or over the phone.

Great. Opodo may as well have published the functional specification. Thanks Opodo. Next time I do a project based on pre-flight information I know exactly what the text needs to contain.

Freedom Direct SMS case study (Travel Weekly July 2008)
….. now generating SMS messages at several key stages - including initial booking confirmation, balance reminders, overdue balance notification, pre-departure advice and ‘welcome back from your holiday’ messages.

Thanks Comtec. I was wondering how others incorporate SMS into their reservation systems. Now I know. We will have this in the next few months.

HotelConnect anticipates 40% increase in paid search revenue following agency switch
Working with Jellyfish we will have improved landing pages built for generic search terms, which engage the customer blah blah blah….. This agreement will allow us to find new space in the CPC landscape, which is crucial to the continued success of paid search.

If it is that crucial - don’t you think you shouldn’t have mentioned exactly what your strategy is? Don’t you think your competitors read your press releases? With PPC being so competitive even the slightest idea about what your competitors are working on is valuable information.

Why is this a problem?
Learning about functionality on competitor websites can be quite tricky. You think you could just go to the website and see it - but sometimes functionality only becomes apparent when certain situations occur. Also quite a lot of this functionality is “behind the scenes” so never visible unless exposed by the PR team.

I guess the PR people working at travel companies don’t realise what competitive advantage can be gained from clever functionality. If I was in charge I wouldn’t let functionality based press releases take place. I would also stop agencies doing “new customer acquisition” press releases on your behalf as they often give away exactly what the agency has been requested to deliver. Bad idea.

Over the weekend I did a bit of analysis on this blog. Anyway, I thought you may like to see what I have found out.

• 500 subscribers (of which 80 are via email)
• 431 blog posts (e.g. average of about 1 a day since the blog was launched)
• 586 comments written by 272 unique people (uniqueness by email address) (excludes my comments and trackbacks)

Comments by post
i.e. how many comments would I expect to see on a single blog post

TOTAL             431 posts
0 comments      250
1-5                   137
6-10                  28
11-15                9
16+                   7

So 250 out of the 431 blog posts have no comments at all. Gawd - what I am writing must be dull or not provocative enough.

Total number of comments by person
i.e. for each person who has commented at least once, how many times have they commented?

TOTAL            272 unique people have written at least one comment
1-2 comments  229
3-4                  19
5-6                  11
7-8                  4
9-10                2
11+                 7

So 7 people have commented 11 or more times. 

Gartner’s four levels of community engagement
In July this year Gartner announced the following community segmentation research findings:

Working on my numbers, 7 out of the 500 subscribers are “Contributors”. Interestingly, 6 out of those 7 actually maintain their own blogs - hence this backs up this assertion (Because they are also “Creators” with their own spaces).

So is this blog unhealthy - or is it within the norms that you would expect (based on the Gartner research)?