I have just completed judging the website category for the NZ Community Newspapers Association Annual Awards.  It was an interesting exercise and one that made me think about what is a good newspaper website – particularly one that appeals to a specific community audience.

I spent quite a bit of time reading blog posts and articles about the change in the media landscape and how newspapers are facing challenges with the loss in readership, decline in advertising dollars and realignment with the web.  Nothing new I can report here that is for sure.

Nonetheless, I thought I would share the categories I came up with myself for grading the websites:

1. Quality of Code – those that have heard me speak at conferences etc will know that I have a real thing for this.  I got it from Mat Weir (our Lead Developer) who is simply brilliant at making websites the right way through his judicious and expert use of CSS and Javascript.  Here I was looking for minimal use of code relative to content, preferably not tables, and javascript stored off page at a minimum.
2. Aesthetics – this is a hard one, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I was looking for sites that are initially pleasing to the eye, showing easy symmetry that draws your eyes to the content and through the navigation.
3. Clarity of navigation through to important data – here I was looking to see that I could get to the main content whether that be a news story, a weather report, classifieds or what-ever that website offered to the community with a minimum number of clear clicks.  I don’t really mind making lots of clicks to get somewhere, but what I do mind is that the navigation is not easy to spot where and how the site actually works and what I definitely hate is getting lost in a site to where I can’t easily get back to the content I want to read.
4. Engagement of the community readership – I broke this into a number of categories:

• Commenting/interaction – I asked the question how much is the reader encouraged to comment and interact with the website?  Was it easy to comment on a story and were readers actually encouraged and rewarded to do so.
• Creation of viral loops – this is the ability of the web user to share stories through Facebook, Twitter etc to beget more readers for the website?
• Stories beyond news – again I was looking for a communication with the community that was more than just a rehashing of new stories every Thursday when the newspaper was published.  I like the sites that had regular blogs and competitions etc.
• Two way relationship with readers – I don’t think that a community news media website should be purely about pushing Thursday newspaper stories down the web as if it was just another channel.  I think that such a site should at least make the effort to include an introduction to the reporters (whether that was via a link to their profile pages) and should reach out to the community for some sort of engagement whether that be suggesting stories to follow, citizen journalism where the community submits stories, sharing of community photos or simply a discussion initiated around commenting.  Anything but a one way straight publishing attitude.
• Engagement of the reader – once reading one story I was looking to see how likely the reader was to keep going and look for more stories of interest.  The goal for the newspaper surely is to increase page views, increase time spent on website and therefore increase value for their advertisers.  I was looking for tools such as related stories or headings and archives that made it easy for me to follow from one news article or opinion piece to another that was in my area of interest.

Overall none of the newspapers that I judged rated very highly.  I came up with a scoring system out of 80 and only one got past the half way mark.  It was quite a way ahead of the next three.  I don’t know when the results are named but I am speaking at the Community Newspapers Association Conference in May so I am looking forward to defending my decisions and putting forward an argument for a new style of “community” media websites.

Happy New Year to you all.  Back from holiday and straight back into it.  I hope this first half of the year gives me more time to post more regularly than the last half of last year did.

To start the year off I found this great list of articles on the forcasted trends in tourism and travel in 2010: http://aboutourism.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/trendsspotting-2010/

When Google and Bing announced that Tweets may appear in their search results my first reaction was – this opens a whole new field for experts to sell services on how to optimise your site for Twitter or more relevantly your Twitter account for search engines.  I wondered what people would say if they were told they need to pay an “expert” to optimise their Twitter account.  Many people are already sceptical of “social-media marketers” because of the mixed bag of skills and approaches.

But over the last few days the whole idea of how Google (and Bing – but I would doubt they will have where near the same analytical clout that Google will approach to whole phenomenon) might determine when or which Tweets are shown in search results.

Surely simply the number of followers would not determine whether a Tweeter has more relevant Tweets than another.

Luckily, I found a great article the other day by Debra Askanase called The Case of the 4,000 Twitter Followers Who Don’t Care. In this article Debra analyses a Twitter account and finds that very few of the 4,000 followers are actually engaged with the person they are following.

Over the past few days I have really been thinking about what makes a Tweet worthwhile to appear in search results and is there anyway that you could in fact optimise your Twitter account so that your Tweets were considered more relevant.  In answer to my prayers I found a website called Twitalyzer which goes a long way to devising a measure of how valuable your Twitter account is.

Twitalyzer comes up with a rating of influence out of 100.  This rating is calculated based on:

• Your relative reach in Twitter, measured by the number of followers you have
• Your relative authority, measured by the number of times you are “retweeted”
• Your relative generosity, measured by the number of times you “retweet” others
• Your relative clout, measured by the number of times you are referenced by others
• Your relative velocity, measured by the number of updates you publish over a seven day period

Would Google use an algorithm similar to this in which they determined some “optimised value” of  a Twitter account and therefore the influence of the Tweets? After all the Google algorithm is supposedly moving away from just counting links to looking at the actual value of the page giving the link through analysing everything from the anchor text to the actual text on your page and the linking page (Latent Symantic Indexing).  In social media linking I would think that an even more developed algorithm would look at the “influence”, I guess, of the person sharing the link not just based on their physical following but generally based on the value of everything they say.  For example, many people have built up large followings on Twitter by actively hunting out people to follow or using automated services.  These users tend to have very large followers and followings.  Other users such as Robert Scoble simply have thousands of people hanging on their every word (not withstanding that for a long time Scoble followed everyone back who followed him, which he later re-engineered).

These are jut thoughts – in the meantime, I have a new personal goal, which is to improve my own Twitter influence rating according to Twitalyzer (I am supposedly crap) – although they do recommend that I dramatically increase the number of Tweets I do and that is not going to happen.  I am only going to say stuff that I think my followers will be interested in.

The recent launch of Google Sidewiki is destined to be one of the most controversial products ever to be seen on the Internet.  The blogosphere and Twitter stream is simply alive with complaints about the implications of the Sidewiki.

Sidewiki is like a mini-forum or comments board that appears down the side of a website visible to anyone with a Google toolbar installed.  Anyone (with a Google toolbar) can leave a comment in the Sidewiki.

The outcry from website owners is that all this will lead to is a giant graffitti board for spammers and competitors to abuse other people’s websites.  There is no way for website owners to delete or moderate their comments or even more importantly to opt-out of the technology.  Website owners can report abuse – but from what I have read it is taking Google moderators about 48 hours to respond and in the world of online that is a lifetime – moreover, it seems that this lag will blow out further if Sidewiki takes off.

Google’s moto is “do no evil”, but judging by the outcry in social media I would say the general opinion is that in this case they have crossed the line.  Josh from www.hostelmanagement.com sums up general feeling when he said on Twitter “if Google wants to have a review site for my website, fine, but not *on top* of my own website. ”

What does this mean for an average business with a website?  Well it could be massive.  Spammers are clever and they are already working away at applications that will go through the Internet writing alongside websites via Sidewikis quickly and effectively.  But, competitors are worse!  At the moment there is no way to stop one hotel writing on another hotel’s website, promoting cheaper beds or tour operators slagging each other off.  I am definitely not a spammer, but I find myself already considering going to all competitor websites for my clients and writing comments promoting our product – or alternatively my own affiliate links.

An average website owner will need to be vigilant of the comments that are written reporting them to Google as soon as they appear.  Likewise they will need to be continually active on Sidewiki on other websites promoting themselves and also being able to respond to any bad press they may get.  As yet I have not seen a way to monitor any mentions of your own company in Sidewiki unless Google Alerts works sufficiently quickly.  Potentially I could write a blog post about a particular travel experience – say on the Travel Generation website. We currently have a comments section, but I would moderate these if I felt that the conversation was becoming derogatory or unproductive for readers.  With Sidewiki this policing will simply not exist.

I found one statistic that said approximately 20% of web users have the Google toolbar installed in their browser – which means that immediately 20% of web users can start writing and viewing comments.

There is no doubt that this technology is going lead to much more heated debate in the coming weeks and some of it is bound to get extremely vitriolic.  I for one am against Sidewiki and I agree entirely with Josh that I don’t care if someone develops website review and discussion sites (Digg, Stumble Upon etc are already these) – but I do take offence if it happens on my own site.  Already there are solutions being developed that will block Sidewiki from showing up on your site I would expect these to become prevalent pretty quickly.  The interesting thought is what will Google then subsequently do to websites that block Sidewiki will they seek retribution through degrading their search results performance – or even blocking them from search results.

In the meantime, I will be perfectly honest – one part of me wants to hook into Sidewiki right now and start writing on everyone’s website promoting my own affiliate links and client sites.  Why not play the Google game and become evil?

I have just returned from a week in Manchester at the World Youth Student Tourism Conference where I was the official blogger.  It was great event overall.  The one thing for me, however, was the lesson in blogging that I received.

I have written before about the dumbing down of travel writing in which shorter “highlight” pieces attract more traffic and readership that lengthy travel articles on the Internet.  The same is pretty much the case when it comes to news reporting on the Internet I have discovered.

Quite simply the answer lies in the fact that people do not like to read the Internet.  Rather they prefer to scan through a few paragraphs, grab the key points and move on.  For me, it was a real lesson in blogging as it meant I really had to focus in on what was the key message – get it across quickly and substantiate it with facts, statistics or a quote.  There is no room for building up an argument as there is in traditional media.  I certainly found it challenging.

Going forward it really has made me think about this blog and Travel Generation.  In particular, who are the audience, what do they want from the information being shared and what is the desired outcome.  In Travel Generation it is to build a really informative resources around the community for Xebidy it is to share my knowledge with our readers.  Does that mean a change in strategy?  At this point the jury is out.

Finally many thanks to the crew at Thumbrella who published many of the blog posts I generated while in Manchester and also to WYSTC themselves for the invitation and support.

I enjoyed a fascinating presentation today at the WYSTC conference in Manchester by Technology Futurist Lee Crockett (committedsardines.com) on just how the “digital generation” think. According to Lee there is a whole type of human beings (primarily those under 25 but not necessarily) whose brains are wired differently to ours. These people he refers to as “digital natives” – digital is their first language (as opposed to everyone else where digital is their second language).

Traditional theory on brain development said that an individual’s brain cells were completely developed by the age of three and there after no more could be grown – only destroyed. However, new research has shown that the brain is continually developing and morphing and that by using one subset of your brain over another then those brain nodes will grow stronger and more efficient at the transfer of data and decision making. Crockett says that those growing up in the modern area suffered digital bombardment through the thousands and thousands of hours exposed to television, computer games, and mobile phones. By the time a digital native reaches 21 they will have spent 100,000 hours playing computer games, received and sent 250,000 emails, spent 10,000 hours on a mobile phone and watched 21,000 hours of television. In contrast they would have spent only 9,000 hours in school (most of those un-engaged).

Lee’s presentation covered a lot of ground very quickly but it did raise some really interesting points about the way we communicate with the next generation. One of the most important points is that because of the digital bombardment digital natives are graphical people. Research shows that they can recall as much as 90% of 2,500 images several days after exposure despite only seeing them for a few seconds each. In contrast 72 hours after leaving a lecture only 10% of students could remember the content – add a picture that retention increased to 65%. In fact the eye processes images 60,000 times faster than text according to Crockett. The implications for text heavy websites and brochures are obvious.

Lee showed digital natives read a page quite differently to “normal” (hic) people. Digital natives read pages in an f-like shape virtually ignoring content on the right hand side of the page unless colours catch their attention. Once again the implications for web design are obvious. It is not something we did not know and Lee showed heat maps of how a user might read a web page – however actually hearing this put into physical science was interesting.  The two images on the left show the different reading patterns according to Lee.

Lee listed some key elements which characterise the digital generation which I think are really relevant in thinking about Internet Marketing to the next generation:

• The need for speed in information flow
• The ability to focus on multiple images and multiple strands of information at once
• The randomisation of information processing (known as hyper-linking, digital natives get bored following logical processes)
• The ability to networked simultaneously with many instead of traditional one-on-one communication
• Prefer just in time learning – just tell me the next steps to win or succeed – as opposed to traditional here is loads of information ‘just in case’
• Prefer instant gratification and immediate reward (a video game for example has a major decision at least every second and rewards the player for success every 7 to 9 seconds). This is quite different to the traditional thinking of building and earning a reward over a long time frame
• The ability to funnel out any information that is not relevant or fun

Lee Crockett’s presentation was fast pace and challenging and so far one of the highlights for me at this years WYSTC conference.

Today is the start of the World Youth Student Tourism Conference (WYSTC) in Manchester and this years theme is “innovation”. The first major session started with a panel discussion on the broad term of innovation – which unsurprisingly quickly took on a theme of social media.

The interesting thing however for me was the blind faith that all panellists had in Facebook – they simply see it as the ‘holy grail’ of social media marketing. In contrast, Twitter received a hiding; Mark Harris, CEO of CISS, when asked what is the most innovative thing at the moment launched into rant about Twitter saying that it had no purpose and no users. Likewise Technology Futurist Lee Crockett from CrammedSardine.com dismissed Twitter as only users under 30, “it will be dead in 2 years”.

Here is why I think Twitter is a brilliant tourism marketing tool and why I don’t think Facebook is necessarily that panacea.

• Twitter works for generating page views and attention for your brand. Sharing links on Twitter will generate clicks through to your website – obviously the number of clicks will be relative to your number of followers and the value of the information you shared. (I will do a separate post about how to actually implement a Twitter strategy later when I have time.)
• Twitter is a fabulous social aggregator which can be used to listen to a wide network of conversations. Searches can be run for your keywords against the Twitter stream and when you identify them you can jump into the conversation and help. For example, when I tweeted that I had book my flights from Manchester to Geneva for the weekend to meet a mate. Almost immediately I received a tweet from Hotel Bristol in Geneva asking if I had booked accommodation and would I like help. They would have been running a search against people who mentioned Geneva.
• Twitter has very easy API that can be developed against and the data mashed up into new inventive ways to present content. Both The Winery Project at My Aching Head and Experience Queenstown use Twitter data on their own website in interesting ways. The potential for the use of Twitter data on third party sites is completely unexplored in the tourism industry.
• Finally, Twitter can be used to make sales. The potential here is as yet untapped in the travel industry but for example, Joaquin in our office set up a Twitter account called @ToursNewZealand and tweeted a few gems about travelling in New Zealand. He also shared his own affiliate link for Naked Bus in New Zealand. The result he has earned himself over $200 in commission from only 300 followers.

To many Twitter might be seen as just the latest fad, but for those that actually take the time to understand it and identify a strategy that best suits their business there is enormous opportunities. Facebook in my opinion however is much harder to use a vehicle for marketing your business.

• Firstly, if you set up a Facebook Group it necessitates that the users actually visit the group page within Facebook which I challenge they don’t do very often.
• Facebook pages on the other hand are a better way to reach out to your customers because what you say appears on your fans pages, yet there is a very fine line on how much you can reasonably say before your message becomes spammy and fills up your fans wall and they unfollow you.
• People view Facebook like they view their email inbox – quite simply we don’t want to spammed or over marketed too within Facebook.
• There are many successful examples of Facebook marketing strategies.  None less than the IDIDIT website that we developed for AJ Hacket Bungy New Zealand which gives customer the tools to share their Bungy Jumping photos and videos on Facebook. However, such development is usually expensive and way beyond any marketing budget that might be used on Twitter.

WYSTC continues all week and I will keep blogging where appropriate. You can get live updates by searching Twitter for #WYSTC also. Let’s hope there is no more Twitter bashing.