I want to applaud the attitude of the moderators of the Travelblog forums and simultaneously condone them for their lack of courage. In response to a very negative posting about Oz Experience, we have worked with the Australian bus touring company to help manage their ‘naked’ conversations with past and potential customers on social media.

In order to do this we created a very open thread stating very clearly that this posting was by Bruce Thurlow, online marketing manager for Oz Experience, and that he was there to answer any questions people might have regarding Oz Experience especially since Oz Experience had been purchased only a few years ago by the Adventure Tours Australia Group and much of it’s bad press seemed to relate to it’s past.

Anyways, the forum thread has been in existence now for some four months and has generated some very reasonable discussions, not to mention making it’s way up the search engine results. In my view it provided a viable alternative to the marketing hype that we at Xebidy are actively involving in spewing out on their corporate website. In effect, it is face to face marketing where the message has to be real or you will be caught out.

Unfortunately, after 4 months one small minded poster questioned whether Travelblog had sold out by allowing Oz Experience to start a thread such as this. One person managed to engage two moderators by saying that Oz Experience by answering questions fairly in an open arena was gaining marketing exposure. Fortunately and bravely, the mods initially rebelled against this ridiculous argument pointing out the the thread was not creating problem, it was not outrightly ramming Oz Experience down anyones throats and that if other users want to post their thoughts on the questions and answers they were in no way being stopped (in fact Ali said “We’ll leave this thread “).

But, after a second round of inane badgering they crumbled and the moderators moved the sensible Oz Experience thread to a section on Travel websites (hic). Despite all their good work initially Travelblog has displayed a a lack of courage in allowing the views of one person to distract from what was a perfectly good thread being enjoyed by many.

In my opinion Travelblog has lost an opportunity to set themselves apart from the likes of Boots n All and Lonely Planet who blatantly delete any posts that are by a company representative. Rather than letting the conversation flow and telling that member (who could well have been a competitor stirring trouble) to take their opinions into another forum moving the Oz Experience post amounts to running away. Instead of moving the Oz Experience post would it not have shown more courage to move the post titled “Has Travelblog sold out..” and allowed the debate to continue there? Now it sits in the Oceania section of the site instead of a general discussion area - yet it offers no travel advice to anyone and is of no value at all to those travelling in Oceania. Has Travelblog not now penalised the greater number of members who were asking questions on this thread by hiding it in the most obscure forum area possible?

I applaud you for your initial stance but am disgusted at your about turn in the face of one person’s opinion!

Following on from yesterdays post regarding the very real problem Oz Experience are facing with the third search result being completely negative about Oz Experience we went through many of the social media sites such as Travelblog, Lonely Planet, BUG and so on and reviewed a bit more closely what people were saying about the company.

Generally it is pretty good but there are a number of people in these forums that are hell bent on slagging the company off regardless - in fact, when I looked really closely the same people seemed hell bent on slagging off most independent companies trying to do their own thing. You have to wonder if they are not simply competitors or what their self interested motive is. The frustrating thing we noticed was the number of honest questions being asked that were not being answered - such as someone asking if they could be told about Surf Camp and the answers being such insightful things as “Greyhound goes there - don’t use Oz Experience” - and nothing about the surf camp itself.

We decided that we would try creating a thread in some of these sites in which Oz Experience staff made themselves available to answer any questions and feedback and also to announce the new website if anyone had any wish to stick their sixpence in their as well. I thought this was a brave move as we are basically entering the lions den; and yes, within a few hours the mud-slinging on the Lonely Planet forum started by a couple of users asking about sex and calling the trip “the f… truck” etc. Bruce Thurlow on behalf of Oz Experience continued to humour their banter with honest answers and opinions. He was not hiding anything. The guys making the comments however were just being shear bloody minded - not giving him a chance and most likely intimidating any reasonable users who may have had a serious question. These guys had 3,000 + and 8,000+ posts to their names - clearly people who do a lot of travel from the armchair in front of their computers, and neither of them had travelled on Oz Experience!

Nonetheless, Lonely Planet removed the thread within hours and Boots n All within an hour - not even letting the conversation get going. Quite frankly this is wrong! Their justification is no commercial promotion in the site. Sure, but what about truthfulness. Guys are able to exist in these forums basically bagging tourism operators s without the operators being able to be themselves and fight their own corner. All that leads to is companies hiding behind aliases further bagging their competitors.

Is it legal that these sites can have these discussions about companies without their involvement? Oz Expereince is a trademarked name and going back to yesterdays post these companies are gaining search engine traffic based on these terms which are proprietary - perhaps the only course of action is that these forums either open these doors to the tourism companies to be involved or they remove every post and thread that refers to a company directly or indirectly. After all we all know that the TV show Big Brother blocks out the sound every time the conversation drifts to a person or company that is not on the show in fear of legal reprisals. Most companies trademark their keywords and as such competitors can’t use them in Adwords campaigns etc., what’s the difference here?

What are the travel communities scared of by banning tourism companies from getting involved and fighting their corner anyway? Let’s be honest the readers of these sites are not stupid. If Bruce from Oz Experience clearly identified as such starts hammering a bad word about an alternative product they are going to see through it pretty quickly. If he over promotes his products with flowery superlatives again his information will be seen as marketing hyperbole and users will leave the thread discounting his posts. Instead sites such as Lonely Planet and Boots n All are perpetuating a load of slander and one sided rubbish by guys such as larc and ianw who can not surely be reliable sources of travel information while they are able to sit there all day banging out thousands of posts, which would be virtually impossible for a real traveller to do - without doing what they are supposed to do - provide a medium for discussion and information flow.

If you would like to see the forum thread before it was shut down by Lonely Planet you can view it here

I have spoken many times of the risk that bad news can travel so fast in the Web 2.0 world and the importance of keeping on top of it through services such as Google alerts and Xefeed. Here is however a very real example of bad, bad news.

Type ‘Oz Experience’ into Google and third result reads:

Well, if you saw this just below the official site which result would you click? Pretty scary stuff - this is a real serious situation, as there is really nothing that can be done about.

What’s happened is that someone has written a forum post on why not to travel on Oz Experience on a website called Travelblog. The reason it is has risen up the search ranks so quickly, in only 118 days, for what is in effect a rather   competitive term is not initially obvious. Firstly, the page itself only has 115 links (according to Google) and they are all internal. But, Travelblog itself is a very reputable site - it has over 9,00 inbound links so with 115 links in the site to this page this is clearly pushing the importance of the page up. The page is also well structured - the frightful heading above being the h1 tag; then there is the number of times the words ‘Oz Experience’  appears in the content as post after post are added to the discussion. Note, many of them are positive for Oz Experience, but perhaps the damage is already done - there might even be a risk that the reader makes a decision based on this without even visiting the Oz Experience website (I hope not - we are only a matter of weeks away from releasing a new very cool website for them). The continual posts also mean the content is always fresh. A discussion in the office here at Xebidy decided that this situation is illustrative of Google adding more weighting to fresh and new content.

So what can be done? Probably nothing; perhaps as this post starts to fade away and less people add their own comments the content becomes less fresh and the forum topic falls out of favour with Google. Perhaps someone like STA Travel reads this blog - they are only 3 or 4 placings below in the search results.  As they have a massive number of inbound links and thus page rank, they could increase the number of in-site links to their Oz Experience page and hopefully rise up to third place pushing the bad news down the rankings.

The sensible course of action of course is to catch bad news like this very early on and get involved in the discussion, hopefully stemming the flow of comments and links to it and thereby reducing its’ popularity in the search engines. Identifying bad news early and addressing it head on is a web strategy I have talked about in my posts and articles (for example this one on Creating a Relationship with your Customer. Using tools like Google Alerts will go someway to helping you identify this sort of information early on the Internet. Alternatively, Xebidy offers an Interent and Social media monitoring service to our clients on a monthly subscriber basis where using our Xefeed product we can monitor a range of sources for information on your business, feeding bad news to the appropriate channels and even republishing travel stories and reviews etc onto your website. If you want more information feel free to get in touch.

I am so sorry that there has been no posts for some time - since we put the Bootstrap video up with have been inundating with enquiries and feedback. We are finalising the demo site and expect it any day now! Plus, I have only just graduated from the couch to the kitchen table with this broken ankle.

In the meantime, I have some cool news to report. We have been so busy here at Xebidy developing all our new stuff (Breathe website, Backpacking Queensland website, new functionality for Base Backpacker, and Wayward Bus and The Park websites getting close to going live) that we simply did not have time to do the designs for the new Oz Experience website. Anyway, a local company here in Queenstown called Fluid Designs was commissioned to do the designs - and they have come back with three awesome options. So much so in fact that we can’t decide which direction to go in next.

The solution: Bruce Thurlow at Oz Experience has asked the Oz Experience groups in Facebook for their opinion. I think this is awesome - after all these are the same customers that use and enjoy the product - they know the product better then the company themselves. Lets’ hope we get some constructive feedback.

Whats’ more, by empowering the customers he has created a bit of an aire of anticipation too. Once we get the feedback the plan is to report to the group and keep them in the loop, announce new functionality and generally spread he word. This sort of social marketing really gets me excited!!

I am really enjoying working on the Oz Experience project at present as everyday so many things come up that just reinforce what I am preaching about selling on the Internet and Web 2.0. The latest involves bad press.

I have talked about this before, particularly in our March article which discusses Creating a Relationship with your Customers; there exists a real risk in the greater social Internet of bad press blowing up in your face. In the case of Oz Experience a customer who travelled earlier this year has created an anti-Oz Experience page in Facebook. After I have read the guys complaint I immediately spotted one inconsistency - he had heard of problems and therefore decided to travel an alternative method. he had not actually experienced any problems. Although I only consult to Oz Experience I was well aware that during the time this guy is talking about they did everything possible to put on more buses and alleviate any backloads. Those customers that were well organised experienced very little problems.

It is interesting to see that there is already a comment to this regard by a customer on this Facebook page. From my point of view it is important that the company address the complaint immediately. I believe that Oz Experience should consider commenting on this guys page saying “hey did you personally experience any problems? and hey, we did have a few overloads due to people changing their minds at the last minute etc - but this is how we have reorganised our routes and bus management to avoid it happening again in the future”.

The important point for the rest of us, however, is that it is vital that you have someone monitoring the social Internet for these types of PR nightmares. Given the positive feedback of customers to this Facebook page it is unlikely that this will manifest itself much further and by monitoring the situation Oz Experience is more than well placed to deal with it quickly, efficiently and turn it into a positive. Can you say this of your business? Are you aware of what people are saying about your business on the Internet?

Just a plug - for those that are interested, Xebidy offers a monthly subscriber service to our Xefeed product which monitors the greater Internet, blogoshphere and media sharing sites for information continually about our clients, manually checking the information and then feeding the good news in an RSS format that can be reused as marketing material on your own site, and feeding bad news directly to you for dealing with quickly.

I have promoted heavily in the past the possibilities of using sites such as My Space and Bebo for promoting your company to the target market. I now have an amazing example of this working in practice. I am referring to two excellent groups that have been formed on the Facebook website for Oz Experience (one group is for both Oz Experience and Kiwi Experience).

As I have said before is that these types of social media inevitably lead to the growing of a like-minded community of users who are actively promoting the virtues of your company. The below quote is taken from an email sent to Oz Experience from one of the users of the Oz Experience group.

I’ve seen many a topic on here describing peoples bad experiences on the Oz or Kiwi Experience, which I must admit worried me slightly as I’m doing both, due to fly out in July.

I looked elsewhere to see what other peoples opinions were and found some groups on facebook that are dedicated to the Oz/Kiwi experiences, and each has nothing but praise for them both.

I think you need to be a member of facebook, but here’s the links…

1. Oz/Kiwi Experience
2. Oz Experience
3. Kiwi Experience

After reading these I feel a lot more positive about my trip than when I read this topic.

No matter how much you spend on marketing - you will never achieve as good leverage at this. The Oz Experience site has 401 members alone and over 190 images posted! Seriously, social media works!

You will need to register to Facebook to see the sites - which is easy, and does not hammer you with spam or anything.

This is seriously cool!

I was working in the Oz Experience office with Bruce Thurlow the Online Manager for Oz Experience and Adventure Tours when we set up this You Tube channel called 100Adventure. It has only just started but the idea is that users can post their videos of their trip on the Adventure Tours Groups including the newly acquired Wayward Bus. The next step is to start promoting the channel and get some suscribers involved. There is already a huge amount of content that we have found on You Tube covering all the ATA companies and Bruce and his team plan to contact these guys over the next few months to get them involved. Keep you eye on this channel it could be the beginning of big things to come.

I also know a cool secret about a wicked competition coming up from the team at ATA and TNT Magazine regarding You Tube, Flickr and a whole host of user generated content and free travel. Watch this space it is set to be one of the best things I have seen in Web 2.0 application to tourism business ever.