I have discussed quite a bit recently on Twitter our work with AJ Hackett on their new photo and video sharing community - called i-didit.  It is a pretty exciting project and one that in a few weeks we will be able to reveal.  The actual technology we have used is pretty cool - building the whole interface on the drag and drop “Canvas” platform.  Rather than expounding the virtues of this project in this post the whole project has led me to do a lot of work on the philosophy behind creating of a community for a corporate (and I use that word liberally in the case of Aj Hackett.)

At its heart the primary reason for building a community for any tourism company is to engage your customers; or better still to create a relationship with your customers beyond simply providing them the experience of your product.  One of the biggest risks here is that in jumping right in to create a community many companies risk trying to stick a square peg in a round hole.  There is the risk that you are actually trying to force a community on your customers where they do not want it.  Likewise, fitting your community efforts into your organisation’s overall strategy, measuring success, and committing the resources required to make the community flourish is fraught with numerous perils.

Here are some of the things I think about when discussing community strategies with clients and partners.

1. Straight off the bat if the community does not ‘fit’ with the overall strategies of your company it will not succeed.  We all talk about this great mecca of “user generated content” and “self-moderating” forums or discussion groups.  But, do not be under any illusion - like search engine optimisation - setting up a community can be extremely onerous and laborious.  A community that supports your companies goals is more likely to succeed and receive the necessary resource support - but never under-estimate the amount of work needed to build and maintain a community.  Keeping spam at bay alone with take a serious amount of your time if your community is that way structured.
2. Engagement with your customers is usually one of the primary reasons a tourism company will want to create a company.  In working out the reasons for your community and therefore the “core” that will bind your users think about how you can leverage those members to get product feedback and ideas, to become evangelists for your products.
3. 3.  The core of your community is probably the most important element once you have decided why you want a community.  Firstly, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to create a Facebook around your product.  I just can’t imagine people keeping in touch with one another based around your company.  Instead you need a hook - in the most case this is the sharing of some experience unique to your product.  In the case of the AJ Hackett Bungy project I mentioned above it is about the sharing of photos and videos.
4. Determining the core will also determine whether you need to develop your own community from the ground up or whether you can leverage an existing community - the most obvious being company and group pages in Facebook.  But, think strongly about the difference between interruption and permission marketing.  Permission marketing means that your market have given you their permission to be marketed to.  Does creating a group on Facebook and then chasing people via that endless stream of spam mails actually account to interrupting them? and if so, does this do anything for the good name of your business?  Just be conscious of what your users goals are as well as your own and don’t try and ram your agenda down your customers throat or your community is doomed to fail. By its nature community means a two or more way relationship - not you pushing your marketing message out to your customers!
5. So once underway are there any rules that will help towards success in your community.  I think that a lot of these rules are probably the same that we have discussed before for operating within forum environment.  Common sense such as being open and transparent about why the community might be steered in a particular direction, listening to all feedback from your community and being actively engaged - not necessarily dominating - but contributing regular fresh content and responding to the feedback; don’t cover the cracks and delete the negative feedback - deal with it, improve your product.  I think also an important point where many communities fail is that there create air of impenetrability for new users to join.  Users often can’t see content without joining or the registration form is so long that you give up.  If you main community drive is to engage your customers so that they become evangelists of your company then surely letting potential or new customers easily into your community should be a keep construct.

So there it is, some thoughts on the basic theory about setting up a community for your travel and tourism company.

While I write this it would seem that we might have ridden out the worst of the “global credit crunch” and some level of confidence restored. For all of us with enough nouse there was a great opportunity to make significant money buying Google and Apple shares on Friday and selling them on Monday. But what about Yahoo!, surely there is a goldmine there for someone.

Regardless of the opportunities and apparent buoyant mood (this I am sure will be different in another few hours – things seem so volatile) it does seem fair to say that global tourism will suffer in the next year or so. Discretionary spend is always the first to suffer and none more so than travel and holidays.

That is in all markets except one –backpacking. In fact I believe that the coming year will see Australia, New Zealand and South America experience a much stronger performance than any tourism sector or market. My reasons are these:

1. The rise of the currencies of the traditional backpacking countries (Europe, Canada, Scandinavia, UK) related to the NZD, AUD and South American currencies: As investors panicked they pulled their investments closer to home lowering demand for the periphery currencies and strengthening the value of the USD, EUR and GBP. For backpackers this means that their already tight budget is suddenly increased dramatically –almost doubled.
2. During periods of downturn travel (backpacking is particular) is often a serious alternative to unemployment or low wages: During strong economic periods it is difficult to turn down a job paying GBP 50,000 in finance or law as you come straight out of the university. But in times of recessions business are less likely to take on graduates as the starting salary is much lower; a “gap-year” becomes a viable alternative.
3. History has shown that in the past 20 or so of downturn such as 1987, ’93 and 2001 have been the catalyst for backpacking booms in Australia and New Zealand in the following few years.
4. The downturn on other areas of tourism and business travel will put pressure on airlines, which may see them reducing the cost of long-haul flights or including more price competitive offerings aimed primarily at the backpacker market.
5. The backpacker market has shown itself over the years to be the most resilient market, even during SARS, Kuwait invasion and Sept 11 backpacking numbers continued to grow in New Zealand and Australia (they were negatively hit however in Europe and North America)

Although the overall tourism market is heading for some pretty tough times - I think it could be a very positive time in New Zealand and Australia.  Certainly on my travels I have heard some pretty positive feedback from some operators - and the silly season is yet to come.  Let’s hope the Australian and New Zealand tourism boards recognise that for the short-term their future lies in backpacking and give the industry all the support they can.

I found this interesting article on ChrisBrogan.com discussing an analogy between social media and a phone.  Chris quotes Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, who had said that companies needed to realise that some of their customers are “dialing the social phone”, and that they better have some “operators standing by”.  The most interesting takeaway I got from Chris’ post was the emphasis on the the way we use the social phone.

Chris says “getting on the new tools and blasting out old methods will fail (is failing)”.  I can’t agree more!!  As you know I am massively into the idea of permission marketing - finding your niche that “invites” you to market to them.  Simply blasting promotional information down Twitter I don’t think is very clever.

I have a great personal story to recount where one big company has listed their address in the social phonebook but is not answering the phone.  Vodafone New Zealand is on Twitter.  I laughed when I saw them as I had just given up on a week long argument with Vodafone over my eligibility for an iPhone.  Apparently I am on a 3 year plan (I pledged my allegiance to Vodafone) and although at the time I was 17 months in the plan I was not able to switch to an iPhone plan - because this is a 2 year plan.  My argument is that I am upgrading my remaining 18 months to a further 24 month plan, paying more per month and all is good.  Vodafone view is that I am breaking my 3 year plan for a 2 year plan.

So, when I saw Vodafone come up on Twitter I asked them why I could not do this “upgrade”.  Their answer was that @vodafoneNZ was unable to answer technical questions and that I would have to address this directly with Vodafone.  Vodafones exact words were “Many questions require specialised knowledge, so the forum is the best route.  Twitter will mainly be used for announcements.”.  I noted only a day earlier Richard McManus of Read Write Web had receive similar short shrift when he had asked how come iPhone early adopters were being penalised by the introduction of cheaper data plans only a few weeks after the release of the phone.

Needless to say very few have chosen to follow Vodafone New Zealand on Twitter.  We simply do not want to be messaged at.  Social Media is not another opportunity to ram traditional marketing messages down peoples throats.  It is an opportunity for companies to engage their customers thereby creating a more loyal relationship.

P.S. I still don’t have a frigging iPhone - bring on the Android to NZ and alternative phone providers.

An interesting piece of correspondence came across my desk recently and I thought it worth sharing.  The thread of emails was a discussion on pricing and promotional strategies for a tourism operator to manage flow through shoulder seasons and in fact grow the business overall.  This large well-known operator has enjoyed fantastic growth in their traveller numbers in the past three or four years but have reached a bit of a plateau recently and the strategy talk was on how this might be arrested.

The strategies were all great - and you can see why these guys are definitely the market leaders.  But one of the discussion points put forward was somewhat different and it really grabbed me and recalled some of the experiences I have.  The point was that rather than focusing exclusively at sales, market and price promotions a huge amount of focus should be on looking at ways to improve the product quality over and above all other offerings as a way of re-igniting the sales growth they are accustomed to.

In all the businesses I have been lucky enough to be involved in over the years this rings so true.  Oz Experience for example has always struggled head-on against Greyhound because the latter can offer express services at a fraction of the cost that Oz Experience can run even a comparative product.  Instead Oz Experience has grown into the large, quality operator it is now, by focussing on going to the “real” Australian places that give travellers an authentic experience.  In my day this was the working sheep station of Nundle, country town of Bingara and the real outback experiences at Dingo, today it is Kroombit and Spot X Surf Camp.  When we developed the Oz Experience website last year this motivation was continued in that the site focuses on the things that a traveller will do, the places they go, and the things they see as opposed to the unfortunate but necessary evil of travelling on a bus from point A to point B (sorry Neil, I know Buses are the best thing since sliced bread) - it is about selling the sizzle!  That is why a traveller really does travel to Australia, New Zealand, Italy etc.

Oz Experience continues to dominate on the East Coast and new operators such as Mojo Surf have reinforced the importance of quality; these guys offer a product that is so bloody good and gets such good word of mouth from customers that they can charge more for a few days than Greyhound can for a whole East Coast trip.

I think you see the same in New Zealand - and it is a market I always watch with interest because of history.  Kiwi Experience was always the market leader and I remember sitting in our front board room planning meticulously with the head drivers the walks, the beach stops, the free activities, the “real” kiwi stuff.  It was this stuff that made Kiwi Ex the overnight success it was, and the company that spurned a whole industry.  The competitor Magic Bus was always mediocre by comparison, in my opinion racing around the country and positioning itself between the Intercity express bus option and Kiwi Experience - why would you pay more than the express bus option without receiving a necessarily better product.

I look in on this market now as an outsider and believe it to be deja vu.  Stray entered what appeared to be an already saturated market in about 2002 and immediately seized market share from both the established competitors simply by offering a better product.  In fact, Stray has done this by continually being the most expensive product on the market.  I don’t care what anyone says - I count the bus numbers as they leave Queenstown nearly everyday (bad habit) - and Stray is continually the most full or second most full behind Kiwi.  Stray has focussed on the real things travellers want such as a unique overnight in a Maori community, evening sea-kayaking on the Coromandel, or staying in places like the Able Tasman National Park or the Barrytown Pub on the West Coast.  The word of mouth and customers reviews are case in point; and once again I see these independently on forums such as Thorn Tree and Travelpod as part of our everyday work for a variety of clients.

On the other hand from where I sit Magic Bus is 45% the price of its competitors and just fails to capture the market despite have stronger international agent support and nearly 20 years marketing distribution.  You simply can not produce an average product, charge an average price and expect to do well.  Quite clearly travellers don’t want that shit!

To ram the point home; you would know from previous posts I read a lot of Seth Godin’s books.  In his recent book Meatball Sundae he reiterates the point over and over that mediocre products at average prices don’t work.  His argument is that in “the old days” - five years ago before the Internet really changed everything - you could produce a mediocre product and if your budget was bigger enough you could market it heavily through traditional channels and get the market share.  I think this was proved explicitly in Europe where despite having a massively superior product Stray was outgunned by a marketing budget at least 20 times the size.  A travel agent in STA Los Angeles could not be bother with trying to explain the finer details of why Stray did more along the way and went to better places because it travelled on trains than the significantly cheaper Bus-a-bout product (that could afford to run at massive losses with a massive marketing budget because of its Travcorp ownership) when their own experiences were so removed from the actual reality of the product.  Stray did however do very well with local sales (the Earls Court STA around the corner) because these guys were closer to the market, were getting the customer feedback directly, and understood the real value and experiences that traveller got.

Today, however, with the Internet a customer can actually get a better quality of information - travellers are no longer reliant on travel agents on the other side of the world.  In fact, it is the travellers telling the agents what they want - walking into the store, brochure in hand saying “I want that one” (in a funny Little Britain accent).  In this way, the power is in the customers hands and it is not blanket price discounting, gimmicky promotions or add-ons that determine the purchase - but quality!