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!

I have been reading a great book by Daniel Pink called A Whole New Mind. The argument being put forward is that in today’s society, which Pink calls the Conceptual Age, a person is required to be more right-minded and therefore more inventive, empathetic, and meaningful - as opposed to a left-minded person who is by definition more analytical such as doctors, accountants etc.

Much of the discussion put forward by Pink mirrors a lot of the ideas we hold today about the ‘new’ Internet. Firstly, Pink says that society has transformed through stages of agriculture (farmers), industrial (factory workers), information (knowledge workers) to the conceptual age (creators and empathisers) - which is the period we are embarking on now. The movement from information to conceptual on the Internet is certainly the case.

The ‘new’ Internet - Web 2.0 - is a distinct shift from the simple publishing of one-dimensional information to a dynamic environment of creation, editing, contributing, recreation and definitely empathy for each others opinions, creations and contributions. Within each person’s Facebook profile we find a healthy dose of right brain conceptualisation.

Pink argues that the growth in influence of right-brain thinkers in this modern age is the result of a number of factors shaping our everyday society. Inter alia the growth of low cost knowledge economies in Asia and India has led to the outsourcing of so much work such as software development, accounting, and even medical by Western countries that it is making these left brain skills in the developed countries largely redundant. In their place is the demand for more designers, inventors, entrepreneurial types who can see the big picture - bring all the pieces together and so on. Similarly, improvements in technology that master many of the knowledge workers functions including the creation of software code, linear decision-making for medical diagnosis, number crunching for accounting and the bringing together of skills from every corner of the globe further exasperates the redundancies on these left brain services. It is easier today, according to Pink, for right brain dreamers to get their ideas realised with cheaper access to analytical and knowledge services.

This definitely is the case in the new Internet where we see a massive growth in start-up businesses that tap into both our creative and empathetic values; sites where we promote ourselves through building up our profiles for others to admire through friend networks and inter-link relationships, such as Facebook, Twitter, Friend Feed, and even the common blog. The growth in ‘platforms’ such as Ning or Yahoo Pipes further allow us to produce our own creations almost on the fly.

Obviously a society of purely right brained designers and creators doesn’t sound like an economic mecca and Pink spends the second half of his excellent book discussing ‘a whole new mind’, one that takes advantage of both the left and right minds. However, so far this book has been a great read and it is interesting for me to see the reality of psychology in things we do everyday in our business.

You think there has been a lack of blog posts recently, and first reaction would be they must be busy or on holiday.  Truth is I have been looking after my health.  I was passed an article today from the New York Times about people who write blogs for a living literally working themselves to death.

The article comes in the wake of the recent death of two popular Bloggers from heart related diseases and the heart attack of well know tech blogger Om Malik.  It seems that professional bloggers are setting up offices in their bedrooms, avoiding sleep and in some cases neglecting food in order to be at the forefront of timely blog posts.

These professional bloggers are paid usually by the number of blog posts they can create and by their readership  numbers.  Being the first to report a story, news item, new product and so on makes your blog all the more valuable.

Well I don’t think there is any risk of myself and Gally skipping meals, sleep or blogging to death.

This has been on You Tube for a year now and is still completely relevant - watch it - it is extremely good.

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.

We gave our unsolicited opinion on a website and potential strategy the other day and it really got me thinking about the importance of establishing some social currency in today’s Web 2.0 sites. The site was effectively a reviews and ratings site that was struggling to generate the traffic and comments that were wanted.

I believe the reason that people are not using the site is because it does not answer the basic marketing axiom of “what’s in it for me”. There is no social currency to be earned from leaving a review or a rating for the user. It has already been shown that cash or prize incentives don’t work for this sort of thing (ala all the video publishers that pay for content versus You Tube and still You Tube wins). You need to create a method of people earning social currency, whether that be through a rate the rater system of some other method.. Thereby there is something in it for those doing the reviews - to get a better rating.

I also think that in the plethora of review sites, even bookmarking sites there needs to be a second layer of demographics added to the process. In my opinion reviews these days are only useful if those reading them can identify with them. An example is on the Base Backpackers site where we take comments directly from HostelWorld. These comments include the reviewers age range and their nationality and sex. That way if you are an English lager lout looking for a party hostel and read a review saying that it is too noisy from an older American lady you can take the review at face value - or vice versa. We know that users are quite open with their personal information if they believe it is going to be of benefit to them.

I am reading Wikinomics by Don Trapscott and Anthony Willliams (thanks Nigel at AJ Hackett for the recommendation) at present and it was interesting to come across a similar argument put forward by blogger and media consultant Jeff Jarvis. Although talking about “ownership” of all the user generated content his sentiments echo the argument that for a site looking to gather user generated content the site needs to recognise the ownership of the content - reward the contributors with social currency, in my words.

“These collective benefits yield a richer web experience and enhance the wisdom of crowds (see my article on What is Web 2.0 for information on this). This new wisdom can be useful in helping people discover content, or in organizing the web around topics, or improving search results, and even in improving ad performance.”

“So who owns that collected wisdom of the crowd? Obviously the crowd does. Platforms like Google, Technorati and Yahoo (…) merely borrow it. And they can only borrow it if they continue to have the trust of the crowd and if the pay dividends back to the crowd. And those that try to hard to control that wisdom, to limit its use and the sharing of it … risk turning away the crowd that creates this value”.

I have so much to say, but have just been so busy since getting back from Cairns with the brilliant launch of the new Backpacking Queensland site. We even made the news - hopefully, I will post the clip tomorrow.

In the meantime, two websites have come to my attention that you simply have to check out.

The first, is my mates Brett and Brad and their new site for their hostel NJOY. Check out www.njoy.net.au - funky colours and a great look and feel, which I must completely reflects the great place it is. These guys also own and run the famous Calypso hostel, which is probably my favourite hostel in the world (and I was privy to a few others saying this last week). If staying at NJOY is anything like staying at Calypso then I don’t know why anyone would stay anywhere else in Cairns.

The second site is the new HostelWorld site. First there was Boo.com and now this (check out my post earlier this year on Boo.com here). The guys at World Reservations International have really stepped up the game once again. It is amazing hwo they simply provide the service that travellers really want. While other sites have a mass of technical booking functionality or some sort of Web 2.0 economic model that is hard to make sense of, the new Hostel World site is simply awesome. Everything seems to be in the right place, links to the Google map, reviews, a clear booking engine, plus all the community aspects. I was not a big fan of the look and feel of the last site - this one I love!!

In yesterdays’ post I introduced some of the new functionality in the new Backpacking Queensland website (you can see that post here). In this part two I introduce some more.

Reviews and ratings: As I discussed yesterday the ability to review a product and have your say, and the ability to make purchase decisions based on other peoples’ input is an important part of Web 2.0. It was agreed very early on that this was a desired feature of the new Backpacking Queensland website. We added one “new” feature, if you like, to this; and that is the ability to add images to a review. If someone has something bad to say, such as the room was dirty, then they can back this up with an image. Hopefully, however, it will lead to users sharing good images as well - “had a great time, here’s me at the Calypso pool table soaking wet - don’t ask”. The greater the users interactivity the more successful the site will be.

Google translations: In a second part to Mr Geherts’ email that I have quoted in my two earlier posts on Backpacking Queensland he comments negatively on the use of the Google translator tool for different languages on the website. You will see in the top right hand corner of the Backpacking Queensland site flags for the different languages and then clicking on these a user is redirected to the Google server where the site is automatically translate. Of course, this is not ideal as inevitably the translation is not of a very high quality, however, it does provide a good intermediary solution to Backpacking Queensland. Anyone that knows anything about websites will know that translating a site can be both expensive and very time consuming. The intention here is for Backpacking Queensland to monitor the traffic and clicks over the next six months or so and should one or more languages prove very popular then they will consider the resources needed to do a proper translation. The Google tool, however, is not all that bad; one of its’ cool features is that it allows users to correct the translations that are not right through the “suggest a better translation tool” and also view the content back in English to assist with deciphering the content. Hopefully, travellers may even contribute to bettering the translations so that it becomes more useable for Backpacking Queensland over time.

On-site advertising: The Backpacking Queensland website uses the Swuzzlebucket onsite advertising network. This is a very new concept that offers an advertising network for the Australian and New Zealand backpacking industry only. It focuses on providing advertising only on adventure tourism and backpacking websites and only shows relevant ads. It means that the users are getting a better experience as they are getting appropriate ads and that advertisers are getting much better value for money as their ads are displayed to their target market. The Swuzzlebucket network works on a minimum charge per 1,000 times an ad is displayed and a cost per click meaning that advertisers only pay for when their ads are working for them.

Newsletters: The newsletter functionality is based on the Open Source solution PHP List. It is all managed on the Backpacking Queensland server and is using probably the most popular newsletter serving software in the world. Like my previous posts on why Xebidy chose the Silver Stripe framework for the Backpacking Queensland project (which you can read here), we chose PHP Lists because we do not see the point in reinventing the wheel. PHP List is awesome, it has great reports and monitoring ability to see who opens the newsletters, which are deleted and the links etc., that are most viewed. On the Backpacking Queensland site we have used the functionality to the fullest by collecting some demographic data as part of the sign up process. The users are asked when they are traveling to Australia, how long they will travel in Queensland for, some demographic information like age, sex and nationality and then there are options for their interests. Armed with this sort of data Backpacking Queensland can now run specific targeted newsletter campaigns; for example, they may want to send a newsletter to all females, from the UK, aged between 20 and 30 who are interested in diving, that are coming to Australia and Queensland in the next six month, offering some special diving products. There is enormous advertising revenue potential here.

So that’s the Backpacking Queensland new website in more than a nutshell. Its’ really a very large site and one that we at Xebidy have enjoyed working over the last four or five months. The girls at Gate 7 in Sydney, who are charged with maintaining the site, have been a wonder to work with and hopefully we can work with them again to extend the site. We already have lots of ideas about how to make it better and increase the reach. I am off to Cairns tomorrow for the launch of the site and look forward to hearing all the feedback first hand, positive and negative.

FB is cool, but I just don’t get it. Perhaps it’s because I am 30+ - a Gen - Xer with no role models and therefore no need to show off the number of friends I have accumulated (hic).

Seriously though I do actually believe that the likes of FB and MySpace are doomed, because they offer little more than a vain effort to accumulate social currency. There are often referred to terms as ego-oriented versus object-oriented social networks. Ego-oriented are all about the person (or profile). Object-oriented is all about the items (object). For example, You Tube and Flickr are often cited as object-oriented, the video and image sharing are more important than the person doing the sharing. These sites have something tangible to hang your hat on and therefore will well outlast the social ego-centric networks such as FB and MySpace.

The thing about the social network sites is that it is so easy to change sites. You have not stored anything on Facebook apart from your profile. In fact, it is easy just to setup a new social site elsewhere and import those same friends again using your address books. Hence the migration from My Space to FB occurred almost overnight while us oldies slept. With object-oriented sites the actual moving of the data is much harder and in most cases not practical. Take Del.icio.us as an example; if you have built up a stream of your bookmarks going to the effort to move these is almost unimaginable and leaving them behind equally insane.

So, FB is dead, what’s next? Clearly it is about the data (the object) - the web as an application, collecting data and making it more useful for the user. Moreover, the user has the power to collect the data they want from anywhere and manipulate it in their own ways. As most know we are well underway getting the Travel Generation project live and are currently in private alpha testing. An important part of this development is this ethos - giving the user the power to collect travel data that is pertinent to them and build rich itinerary and mapping outputs that are meaningful to them. I will keep you posted when we migrate to beta release soon.