Last week we released a new look and feel of the Base Backpackers website and it looks cool.

The site was given an upgrade in February but was in beta and we added more functionality last week. Some of the things we have introduced are:

• A cool accordion menu that Mat developed in Javascript himself
• Latest photos feed from Flickr
• Magnetic Island Full moon Party booking engine
• A new map
• New comments section that allows us to pull comments from a variety of sources including Hostel World, but also other sites and blogs. We run the blogs through our XEFEED product which can filter the comments for relevancy
• A news section to track all the news media for each of the hostels
• And, some updated content

The site is still in development and Xebidy is contracted to continue development through to late in 2009 so expect lots more things to be released soon - in fact, we have some cool You Tube video scanning and destination wiki stuff coming in the next month that we will announce soon.

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.

So continuing on from my earlier post about Backpacking Queensland (which you can read here) going live and “that’ email from Simon Gehert, I quote:

“Rarely have we seen something more obviously shoehorned into existing technology where it shouldn’t be. Take an open source CMS you didn’t develop complete with tag clouds, social network site links, unrelated blog headline feeds, google maps etc ,which was never intended for this purpose, add some crap interface design, a link to your site in the footer which says “Well made in New Zealand by Xebidy … and you have all the makings for a car crash of epic proportions.”

In my earlier post about the site I discussed the Silver Stripe content management system. One of things I said was that in the whole scheme of things Silver Stripe is not a very large Open Source project, which means that unfortunately at this stage a lot of the functionality such as tags, social bookmarks, RSS feeds, maps etc we have had to develop ourselves - plus there is not enough people using the Bootstrap interface yet. So I thought I would use this post to introduce you to some of this functionality and explain what it means and why we have chosen to use it in the Backpacking Queensland site:

Tags: I posted last month on the tags in Backpacking Queensland (read that post here) and my belief that in fact the tag system we have used in this site are more meaningful that many of the tags I have seen on other sites. The way they work is that users can add their own keywords to pages throughout the site as they travel the site to use to remind them of the pages. When an internal page is tagged this tag helps to build up the tag cloud which appears on the home page. The larger the font of the tags on the home page, then the more pages within the site that have been tagged with those tags. Tags, subsequently, provide an informal navigation structure created by the users. We added a little twist to the whole tagging concept by also then providing the user with links to You Tube for videos, Flickr for photos, Wikipedia for definitions, and del.icio.us for other pages across the Internet tagged the same. That means, if a user tags a page Cairns and then wants to see videos and images of Cairns from where they are on the Backpacking Queensland site the functionality is there.

Social network links: The social bookmarks facilitate users saving the Backpacking Queensland pages in popular bookmarking websites. Sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us are where users save their favourite web pages instead of saving them in their browsers. This is very pertinent for travellers who are never in the same Internet Cafe, or on the same computer, and so use these social bookmarking sites save pages they might want to go back to for booking or more information. By providing these links we think we are making it easier for the users, one less impediment to use, and therefore hopefully increasing users likelihood of returning to the Backpacking Queensland site. We included the ability to save a page to Facebook as well, because lets’ face it, everyone in this market uses Facebook.

Blog feeds: I have written and presented so many times before about the importance of user generated content. In the new Internet users are seeking information from their peers about the products they are consuming, whether they be travel products or otherwise. Reviews and ratings sites, forums, and blogs provide a user with a great deal of independent content to help them evaluate their options. In the same way as a traveller will talk to other travellers in the hostel common space so too do they use the Internet to research their travels. On the Backpacking Queensland website we have introduced links directly to blogs about the member products. Like the concept of linking the users to You Tube and Flickr for same tag images and videos, we believe that by providing this information on the Backpacking Queensland users will be able to get the independent feedback they require about the products without necessarily needing to go searching elsewhere. The travel stories are all received through our Xebidy Xefeed product where the feeds can be checked for relevancy and then fed back to the Backpacking Queensland website. It means that “unrelated” feeds do not appear. We have handed this completely over to the girls at Gate 7 to manage on a daily basis - although we do offer a complete Internet and social media monitoring service in house here, which you can find out more about here.

Google maps: I think the functionality is pretty intuitive here and don’t quite know what Mr Gehert is referring to when he says “… which was never intended for this purpose”. The maps show you where the member being shown on that page is, and an aggregating map shows where all the members in the area are. Rather than using stylised maps which are meaningless to a user who has not been to, say, Toowoomba, a Google map can be traversed and can show different views from street levels to satellite. On the Backpacking Queensland site we default to satellite maps for the aggregating views because they are fun and make the site look cool, and then use hybrid maps which combine the satellite map with streets for more purpose (unless the satellite view is not high enough density and we just use street view). The user can easily change these views. As many know mapping is something we take quite seriously at Xebidy and unfortunately it becomes a function of time and cost as to how much mapping functionality to include to a client. We are currently undertaking a very extensive development with another client that would see the maps being able to change the content on the page around them and also have a lot of information around the main focus of the map, for example, a hostel can show where supermarkets, ATM’s things to do etc are relative to them. Hopefully, we can extend Backpacking Queensland mapping in this direction at some point in the future.

There is lots more cool functionality in this site, and lots more to Mr Geherts’ email and I will introduce all this tomorrow - need to get on with some work now. As I am sure you can all see, loving the new Backpacking Queensland site though, well done guys.

Another big announcement for us today! We have put the Wayward Bus Beta version of the website live today.

This is a cool site and includes amazing banner images by Chris Cooper. As I posted earlier when we released our new logo look, Christ has been working in the Xebidy studio doing some illustrations for the new Xebidy website - I know, I know - its’ coming (and so is Christmas)!

No amazing new features in this website yet, except for the inbound RSS feeds on the home and community page which are being fed via our XEFEED functionality and cleansed for relevancy.

Next step, travel planning, more community elements, fancy booking engine and so on.

Well, its’ about bloody time some of you may say. But the first purely Xebidy designed website is live. The Park hostel in National Park.

This is one of the best hostels in New Zealand - evidenced by the blog stories we keep picking up. They might only be small guys but they certainly have an amazing product.

For this site we tried to bring the warmth of the atmosphere into the site - they have two huge open fires and being nestled in National park have stunning mountain views and a unique alpine feel. I have been lucky enough to have been there twice visits - once involving too many bourbons and an incredibly wrong decision not to jump into the spa pool with the Stray bus load of English girls after an eventful night in the National Park tavern - my wife is happy though.

Since then the guys have developed their own house bar and cafe which I am told is a roaring success for a chilled night in and a few quite ones (how many still end up in the spa, hmm?)

The unique things to look out for on this website are the inbound feeds from travel blogs around the Internet that feature The Park hostel. These travel stories are picked up by our Xebidy XEFEED product which is continually scanning all forms of social media including photo and video and video sharing sites, blogs, forums and review sites and feeding them back to a central server where we go through them sorting for relevancy and refeed these back to the website. Any criticisms or bad press can be picked up very quickly and sent through to management where they are immediately dealt with.

We also have a comments section on the site where guests are encouraged to leave their comments. We intend developing this further to produce a cool guestbook for reading of the comments - watch this space.

The site is built completely on our Bootstrap content management system (based on the awesome Silver Stripe open source platform) - which, if you have not heard about yet you must be in the dark ages! Have a look at Davis giving a seminar on it here.

Finally, we have linked the bookings part of the website to The Parks property management system, Starfleet. Our friends at Starfleet have integrated the booking engine so that it interrogates their database for availability and then populates with the booking - no need for endless double handling.

So, there you have it - a cool small site - lots of work to do on content to keep if fresh and happening but a site we are proud of as our first one purely designed and developed by Xebidy. We have retained a marketing contract with the guys at The Park and hope to do some really cool stuff over the next 12 months to get to the top of the search engines and lots of bookings!!

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.

Many of you have been eagerly awaiting (and badgering us) for the release of our XEFEED product. Well here it is in beta at last!

XEFEED, scans the “blogosphere” for content relating to particular words using all sort of RSS aggregators from Bloglines to Google Blog Search, takes in those feeds to our unique desktop manager, where they are “rinsed” (that is, checked manually for relevancy) and refed to a website for presentation as independent third party content. In essence, we are a big human powered search engine for information, comments, and reviews and ratings about your company or operating area through the social blog network. We can also set up alerts for management or marketing staff when bad news strikes - and inevitably it does - so that this can be tackled head on in the open transperant forum that the Internet creates.

Over the next few weeks we will be developing further marketing material on XEFEED and extending it to scan many of the leading other community sites that travellers use for sharing information, such as the photo sharing sites of Flickr and Photobucket and the video sharing sites of You Tube and OE.TV.

At present XEFEED is only in invited beta release, but you can see a very simple example on CarsandCampers.co.nz where we are taking blog RSS feeds from a few selected sources for the tag “spaceships”, rinsing the feeds and refeeding back to the site. The link back to the original content remains intact, maintaining the authenticity of the feeds.

If you want more information then definitely send us an email.