I spent the day yesterday with my mates at Base Backpackers finalising the go-live beta version of their new website as well as looking to the next few months advancement of the site. Xebidy did not design the site but we developed it onto our Bootstrap content management server which is based on the Open Source Silver Stripe CMS. The most exciting is probably the next 12 months however when Xebidy will be working with the guys at Base to develop the functionality into a new world with lots of great Web 2.0 features planned - I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag just yet; and also the implementation of an extensive Internet marketing plan that was authored by Jonathan Dixon at Xebidy.

One of the cool things about this project is the courageousness of management and foresight with respect to this project. A few weeks ago I posted about a real world web 2.0 dilemma we were facing on the project; in which we are taking automatic feeds of reviews and ratings from the independent Hostel World website and displaying them directly on the Base website. As I said while the reviews were not really that bad - there were reviews that you might not want to display on your home page necessarily. Nonetheless, it was decided that these reviews would be displayed regardless, unedited.

Base understands the importance of word of mouth and that in order to compete and achieve their objectives of being the best hostel/budget accommodation in Australia and New Zealand they simply have to provide the best possible product. A message has been sent out from head office to all hostel managers that the reviews and ratings will be considered as a measurement of success and that managers should strive to improve their ratings and address reviews head-on. Further a policy has been put in place to address any negative comments head on so that they are either turned into a positive or more importantly that the issue is taken on board, that if possible they are rectified and that the users are communicated that this has been done.

It will be great to monitor the reviews and ratings over the next 12 months and see what impact this positive attitude has. I am easily betting that all the Base hostels ratings will improve by at least 5 -10% (which is a lot when you consider they are already consistently the top rating hostels in their cities) over the next 12 months through both a positive influence on the ratings and review medium and also through increased focus of the manager directly on the feedback from their customers.

It’s going to be a great 12 months and I will keep you informed as we introduce some of the new functionality and rework the site - taking it from the soft beta launch it is today to the full functionality user-centric site that is planned.

Following my post earlier this week re thinking about Web 2.0 in terms of your customers as opposed to your competitors an interesting follow up note relates to identifying your target market and therefore the Web 2.0 technologies that might appeal. Perhaps these 5 steps might be applicable:

1. Identify the nationalities and age of your ideal customers;
2. Answer “what are the key fears customers have about using your products”;
3. Decide on the key message to your ideal customer - alleviate their fears and appeal to their senses;
4. Decide on the image or perception to attract the ideal customer; and
5. Review peer websites in your ideal market and their style

An interesting task came across my desk today; “We want to know what are competition are doing that is Web 2.0″. Unfortunately, this is completely the wrong attitude to take.

I am assuming that by Web 2.0, the person asking the question means what are my competitors doing with many of the social technologies of the new collaborative Internet (see my article on What is Web 2.0 for more explanation) - which is still the wrong question! Businesses should not view mediums such as Blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, podcasts and so on, not as technologies that will necessarily accelerate the sales process but rather as the tools that will improve communications and increasing engagement with your customers.

The question therefore, should relate to the customer; “I target the luxury market (or backpackers etc.) - what do they expect from our businesses website in terms of Web 2.0?” Different customers are demanding different information and methods of receiving it - the younger market is more in tune with blogs and forums, other markets are well versed in RSS feeds (it is now standard practice with newspaper feeds and the like), and female travellers are more likely to use social networks such Facebook and MySpace. Obviously, there is enormous market and technology crossover, but most importantly, the focus should not be on the competitor but on the customer themselves and on how your business communicates with them to create the best possible relationship.

User-generated content is certainly a revolution and those that are harnessing its’ power are winning the web game to attract customers. But are they?

I am involved in a very interesting project with Base Backpackers that has somewhat run aground. I first proposed the use of inbound RSS feeds from blogs etc as a means of building up independent content about the 11 hostels across Australia and New Zealand, however, following a strategy session in Sydney it was decided to take a gigantic leap of faith in the product and take comments about the hostels directly from Hostelworld.com (the largest online booking website for hostels and backpackers with many many user reviews). Of course, I was right into the idea - an awesome real Web 2.0 initiative. The decision in the strategy sessions were that Base Backpackers was focusing on delivering a superior product and therefore this was very much firstly about facilitating the flow of information between customers to spread the word that Base Backpackers hostels were good; and secondly about setting transparent checks and balances for hostel managers to strive to.

All sounded good those days in March when the plan was hatched. However, as we moved toward going live on Friday we struck a huge snag - comments are not as appealing as it was hoped. In the majority they are not that bad - but there are those that are simply not complimentary. Surprisingly, the one that has caused the most problems is kind of completely left-field, encouraging customer to stay there if they want sex (in a few other words) - not really a complaint against the hostel but certainly not something you want displayed on the front page of the website.

We have not really been involved in the design of the website only the execution and now it is crunch time in the project. The plan is to make the Hostelworld reviews appear on the site automatically, but at present we are simply taking them to text file and then manually putting them onto the site at regular intervals. The most recent comment is displayed as a leader on each hostel home page, which then links to the other comments. We also take the ratings of each hostel from Hostel World and display these on the website. Once we automate the process the ability to edit is completely removed.

So, now in going live the questions are overarching - do we intervene and only show positive comments on the home page as the leader to all the comments? Or, do we go a step further and delete all the negative unwarranted comments from the site completely?

The theory of Web 2.0 is that the masses generate a collective intelligence, that a bad review is outweighed by good reviews (that is, if the product is good) and that one off reviews such as the review posing problems for Base Backpackers are immediately seen through by the customers. All good and well, and you know that I am a huge promoter of this, but what if there is simply not enough comments to generate the critical mass of collective intelligence? Moreover, what about travellers on long travel time frames, such as Backpackers - also tight on a budget; are they not less likely to take the time to write in a good review? Things were fine, thank-you very much, stayed for a few days, moved on - can’t really be bother filling in the online survey, reviews and ratings form.

So there you go - a real world Web 2.0 conundrum!

In driving into the office this (Sunday) morning, I was listening to an interesting article on Radio New Zealand. It involved leading members of the media discussing the demise of newspaper and television news consumption. Part of this panel was also a guy from Scoop - New Zealand’s leading online news agency (I am sorry I joined the article late so did not hear names).

The thing that interested me was just how much these guys did not get it. The interviewer kept pushing a point that the public had lost interest in news and were therefore consuming less. There was a lot of discussion around how consumers are choosing to consume their media at different times (i.e. at work via the Internet) but absolutely no discussion about consumers are demand “pull” media, as opposed to “push”.

We have discussed this before in length in my articles explaining how consumers are choosing what they receive as news and when they receive. Instead on waiting to fed the news on TV at 6pm or in the morning paper, technologies such as RSS feeds and social book-marking websites allow consumers to choose the news articles they are interesting in (or in the case of social bookmark sites such as Digg.com and Del.icio.us what the general masses consider to be relevant) and to choose when and how they consume them. For example, I have a number of different RSS feeds for my news (everything from CNN, Sky, BBC, New York Times, and NZ Herald) and I will regularly read about the same incident from two or three of these feeds getting a different slant on the news and making my own, what I perceive to be, “real truth” conclusions.

In fact, I think this is the point that these guys were missing in this radio article: the consumers appetite for news has increased exponentially, along with consumers distrust on the impartiality of mainstream news reports. The ease of these “web 2.0″ technologies has mean’t that consumers can create their own news, receiving information on topics they are interested in, and filtering out the political or other spin on the news. In my recent article on “What is Web 2.0?” I gave two examples of a more pertinent form of journalism, known as “citizen journalism”. In the UK The Sun newspaper now provides a single mobile phone number for the public to submit copy and photos, and in South Korea the OhmyNews service has over 50 journalists editing content regularly received from 40,000 citizen journalists. A fundamental
shift in people’s perception of who has the authority to ‘say’ and ‘know’ underpins the Web 2.0 ethos.

One of the points made is the growth in consumption in these off line medias (newspapers and TV) of faux journalism - by this they mean lifestyle information etc in your Sunday papers. One commentator suggested this was because consumers were sick of the news. Quite the opposite, in our daily routine we are happy to consume much more news, rather it is because reading the lifestyle section of your Sunday paper is a form of escapism from the rigours of the week of business and work. Unfortunately, by the time Saturday or Sunday, or for that matter 6pm on a weekday when TV news is on, there is no news current enough for our appetite. There is no news that we have not already digested through our computers throughout the day. An interesting term is media snacking; taking snippets of information from a multitude of media in order to consume more information earlier and faster. these snippets might be coming from our RSS feed readers, online news sites, traditional news media, and increasingly media sharing sites such as You Tube and Flickr.

So, are newspapers and TV newspapers dead? In their current format I think so. In was interesting that the section of the article that I listened to the guys from Scoop did not speak too much rather just confirming many of the statements, such as a noticeable increase in traffic at 10am and 6:30pm. It is clear that those media outlets that recognise the insatiable appetite for fast unfiltered news will be the winner.

I have said this many times before - but the ‘new’ social Internet has a real risk that a publicity nightmare could blow up in blogs, forums, or review sites without your knowledge of it. I have stressed that businesses should be monitoring the greater social Internet for all mentions of their business.

Of course the best method I promote is subscription to our Xefeed product, which scans the Internet in it’s entirety including many of the social media sites such as Flickr (for images) and You Tube (for videos) as well as the blogoshpere for mention of your business itself or it’s products or services. This information is then repackaged and sent automatically to you - it can be published automatically on your website - or bad news can be separately highlighted to management or marketing to be dealt with quickly and efficiently.

For those not ready to take the leap into a full monthly subscription then at the very minimum you should have Google alerts coming into your email box at least weekly if not daily. Firstly, if you don’t have one already set up, then set up a Google account. From your account page select “Alerts” - in the right hand “My Services” menu. From there you can create an alert based on search terms (your company name, your own name, or even the most searched term for your business); you can select to receive the emails alerts for any amount of time from as they come up (i.e. as Google finds the term on a particular page) to daily, weekly or monthly. Google will send you an email notifying you of all the ‘new’ appearances of your search terms or activity in your search terms both on web pages and within blogs.

It is not completely accurate and you will find that you receive a lot of notifications that don’t relate to you in anyway (I get notified every time Julia Roberts gets mentioned somewhere on the web) but it is a great start and for anyone serious about business and the social Internet it is an essential tool. That is, if you are not all signed up for our wicked Xefeed product!

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.

Well, the snow has arrived and we will be shutting the office for the next three months (only joking - but don’t I wish). In fact, quite the opposite as things are really heating up for us. Watch out for the release of information on our work with the well known Content Management Server - Silver Stripe. While Silver Stripe has been working away on many features at the Google Summer of Code we have been completely revamping the user interface, and have to say - it is so cool! We should have information up on the website, including an online demo in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, attached is this months article entitled “Web 2.0 Technologies”. It is part 2 of a 3 part series, the first one being “What is Web 2.0?” last month. If you missed the first article you can download it here..

In part 1 we looked at What is Web 2.0 and built up a picture of your website as a tiny piece of a much larger experience with engaged customers connecting through technology. In part 3 we look at how some of the Web 2.0 technologies can be applied to the travel industry to create Travel 2.0.

In this paper we will introduce you to VoIP, blogging, RSS, wikis, multimedia sharing sites and for those still hanging in there we have a few extar geeky technologies summarised.

Web 2.0 Technologies

So while “tagging” my “blog” I was thinking about the growing phenomenon of “folksonomies” and thought that I would update the “wiki” with a new definition and I should search the “blogosphere” to see what other people were thinking and maybe I could create a “mash-up” of a site like this as long as it obeyed acknowledged “netiquette”.

Is this just bullshit to you? Don’t worry; it’s official according to a poll of 2091 people in Britain by market research company YouGov “Blog”, “netiquette”, “cookie” and “wiki” have been voted among the most irritating words used by geeks in relation to the Internet. Number one most annoying is “folksonomies” - which is the collective naming of web items as opposed to a taxonomy which is the naming conventions of one. Still confused? Check out my article last month on What is Web 2.0?

According to the poll the second most annoying is “blogosphere” - the online world of blogs (which came third), followed by “netiquette”, or internet etiquette, and “blook”, a book based on a blog, coming in number five.

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.