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.

Following last weeks post regarding the importance of owning the user experience in the Web 2.0 era the question arose on whether search engines will in fact continue to be relevant into the future?

Two factors will ensure that the role of search engines will expand over time:

• The fragmentation of travel inventory; very few travel suppliers sell more than their own products through their websites.
• The low cost of search for the user: pragmatism is still a greater force then loyalty. Nearly one-half of online travel consumers will compare more than 2 air and hotel travel providers when they book their next trip. Brand loyalty remains on the critical list – less than 23% of North American leisure travellers view themselves as brand loyal when buying leisure travel.

As the role of search engines continues to grow in dominance so to does the spending on paid listings (the results that appear on the right hand column of a Google search) rise. Paradoxically, the return on investment of these marketing campaigns is declining and will so more and more, as more travel suppliers enter the search bidding process. Greater appreciation of analytics will also drive a greater understanding of the keywords that generate business and therefore a greater pressure on search results and the cost per click of advertising.

The only solution is to invest more heavily in sustainable search engine initiatives, which, when done right, will have a longer term impact on your organic search engine rankings and hence sales on a more profitable basis. All businesses should be striving to developer richer user experiences that make the most of available data to build up a sustainable competitive advantage over the rankings positions of their competitors.

It has been a week since my last post, but we have just been so heads down in projects accompanied by a few snow showers that are acting as a large distraction.

I have received a significant amount of feedback from last month’s article on What is Web 2.0? In particular, discussions have centred around the issue of who owns the data and it’s relevancy in the determination of a value or success of a Web 2.0 web project.

For example, in the world of mash-ups a website can be developed completely from other sources of information to achieve a users goal better than the original source of the data. In this case, which is the greater asset; the owner of the determining data or the website that produces the desirable user experience?

We think it is most definitely the website that owns the user experience. To put an argument forward that brand loyalty is surely at an all time low on the Internet and that the site that can attract and retain the greatest number of users through providing the most desirable experience in surely the most valuable. How about the theory sometimes put forward that the Internet will in fact shrink in the coming years as the larger sites buy up the smaller ones and simultaneously the larger sites tighten their grip on the search engine rankings making it therefore nearly impossible to launch new domains names with the regularity we see now. In this scenario the sites that can use the available data from many sources to capture and satisfy their audience will continue to build themselves up as an authority on a particular subject (read keywords) and therefore continue to dominate and in fact grow the distance in search engine ranking over competitors.

Clearly, although really promoted as a concept by search engine marketing companies, search engine rankings are relative - that is, relative to the other websites competing for a particular search term. The sites that build up the greatest customer base (reflecting in the depth of content and obviously the number of inbound links) will increase the relative gap between themselves and their competitors making it more difficult for competitors to rise up the rankings.

Therefore, the most important asset in a web project is to identify the needs of a user and how these will be met through either your own proprietary data or data that you can mash-up to create a rich experience.

We are starting to receive a number of guest posts and will be upgrading the Xebidy site in the coming weeks to handle this. In the meantime check out this from Bruce Thurlow at Oz Experience and Adventure Tours today, on life as a social Internet junkie:

Got to work early this morning I logged in and I looked at:
- My facebook page for news of friends
- Oz Experience My Space page for new friends
- Hotmail for personal emails
- The Age and NZ Herald newspapers
- Looked at my internet banking
- Logged into ebay looking for a fridge
- Searched google for a page looking for best ph and broadband plans
- Uploaded photos to my flickr account
- Checked my www.youtube.com/100adventure page because I had been notified someone had posted a comment to one of my videos
- logged into my last.fm account to listen to music while I worked
- Checked xebidy.com for any new blog info
- looked at readwriteweb.com for the latest word on the internet street
- scanned gapyear.com for any new Oz Experience or Adventure Tours related posts

Did all this in 40 mins. I then started checking my work emails!

All I can say Bruce is you need to master the art of RSS to speed up the way you receive all this information

Web 1.0 effectively ended Friday 14 April 2000, when the Nasdaq lost nearly 10% of it’s total value - a total of 37% was lost between March 10 and April 17th. It was the end of the “Internet Bubble” and triple figure PE ratios.

Yet since the term Web 2.0 was born in 2004 we have seen an exponential rise in the value of Internet companies and Web development spend. Google for example purchased You Tube for USD$1.65 billion after ten months only of it’s inception. But what does Web 2.0 really mean?

In this months article I look at What is Web 2.0 and try and bring a grounded perspective to you.

If you would like to receive these articles directly to your inbox every month then email me at stuff@xebidy.com. Next month we are looking at some of the leading Web 2.0 technologies.

Download article here: What is Web 2.0

On Friday I had the pleasure of meeting one of the most exciting ventures in the travel and Internet market - and surely to be one of the hottest properties this year!!

I am talking about Arnna Alexander and www.oe.tv - a video sharing website for travellers. While she declares herself a Kiwi, Arnna has spent a large amount of her life growing up in Sweden (her mother is Swedish) and most of the last 5 years in London - although a lot of last year was spent travelling the world with the Pro Triathlon Circuit where she honed her skills in online web streaming (check out www.triathlon.org).

While video sharing sites are not new, www.oe.tv really is something special. It is appeals directly to a target niche market and I believe will grow to be very prolific in this market. Arnna cited an example of one video that she says was posted on both You Tube and OE.TV simultaneously - while it received 7 viewings on You Tube it received 440 viewings in the same period on OE.TV. Clearly, I can see the value to travel businesses that such marketing opportunities afford; and the onto guys are already there - apparently there is a great competition about to be launched involving Stray, New Zealand comedian presenter Mickey Havoc and radio station B FM.

Arnna’s background is TV and film production and this is the side of the business that she clearly relishes; I caught her on her return from a trip to Japan where she had created a series of Travelogues. She took pride in showing me how easy it was to create a video and uploaded (something she had done in a matter of minutes at the airport in Japan using wireless).

That’s one of the big selling pitches of OE.TV it offers slick well oiled technology. In particular online encoding, which means that you can post your video in most formats and the site does the behind the scenes work to convert it for web streaming. All the hosting and streaming are managed out of the US and all the web design has been handled out of Sweden (and a great looking site it is too). The staggering thing is that the whole project has taken less than a year to get off the ground and the actual site has only been live for about 6 weeks - certainly a lot of interest has been generated in such a short time (I was pointed to check it out by 3 people alone).

This might be a startup, but it is by no means a small operation - I met a handful of staff and there is a marketing team based in the UK also. In fact, Arnna plans to spend only the next 6 months in NZ before heading back to London to give things a big push there (back-to-back winters argh!). I did not quite understand the investment structure but Arnna explained that they were in the process of attracting investment - “but only the right investment; (they) don’t need the cash but rather strongly motivated partners to make this a success”.

Arnna describes the venture as My Space meets Lonely Planet. As well as user generated content the team are producing their own series of short 6 minute or so travel stories - many of them involving well known celebrities. In fact, this is where I think OE.TV strategy is very clever. Using her contacts from film and TV Arnna has attracted a host of stars such as ex Shortland Streeters Paul Ellis, Leighton Cardno and Paul Reid. In fact, Arnna was in Japan with Adam Sinclair (the Scottish guy in the Trainspotting sequel). I have watched quite a few of them and some of them are really funny. Check out the Monkeys & Shenanigans series.

From a users point of view the site comes with much of the My Space features, the ability to set up your own profile page, “have friends” who can comment on your page, share photos, travel blogs etc., but very nicely presented. It is already along way ahead of anything You Tube has to offer - and I would seriously promoted it to any traveller to share their videos (whether they be public or private). There are lots of other cool features like the ability to build up travel chapters combined with a blog and a good photo sharing page, which is being enhanced with tagging features.

So, what’s next for OE.TV? Well watch this space as I hope to find out a lot more about the technology and are already promoting to many that they should be active on the site. I will watch and report this with anticipation. There are a series of videos due out soon featuring two well known celebrities, one NZ and one English, traveling around NZ (but we can’t know who yet). Plus, I am really interested in the coming functionality that has users tagging other users videos and images - the application and success of this will be very interesting to us in Web 2.0 geek world.

Good luck Arnna and crew I really look forward to catching up again in a month or so for an update.

Just a thought today!

The appropriateness of applying Web 2.0 principles to travel and tourism is intuitive. People love to talk about their trips, share advice, photos, stories and relive the adventure, while at the same time implicitly helping their fellow travellers make the most of their travel. But can Web 2.0 philosophies be applied to real estate? For example, if you see a property that you think is a great deal to buy you certainly are not going to tell anyone, are you?

My first thoughts are that there are elements that could be investigated - for example, wiki style contributions on the best way to purchase a property, or getting builders and engineers reports etc. I have seen a number of consolidator sites - but I have never given any thought to how this content is maintained - do these sites used meta search technology in the same way as leading travel meta search sites like Kayak and Skyscanner do?

Although it is only the second month, I have already realised what a monumental undertaking I have embarked on to bring these articles out monthly. I am already counting down to number 12 and a bit of a party!

Well, here is our March article. This month’s article is perhaps a little more intense introducing a few more elements of Web 2.0 and how you might apply some principles to creating a better relationship with your customer. Of most interest should be some of the practical ways to re-market to your customers and some important points on getting involved in the social Internet.

Creating a Relationship with your Customers

Enjoy!