That is almost three times the room night count it was marking in March this year.

At the same time every single one of the large and small online travel agents have launched a flash sale product under brand names like Expedia ASAP and Wotif Wot Deal Day – trying to cut into the success of Jetsetter and regain the “best place to get high end deals” trophy.

With that background I had a chance to sit (ok Skype) down one on one with Jetsetter CEO Drew Patterson to hear his views on the company, competitors, the market and plans for expansion.

Look for hints on international expansion, more on mobile and an interesting last answer on TripAvisor. Here is what he had to say

The BOOT:

How have you managed to resist the fight back from the mainstream OTAs and pressure from the coupon daily deal sites?

Patterson:

The business has scaled nicely. We worry about all competitors every day, especially with the low barriers to entry. We serve an affluent niche that is well defined. And underserved.

This puts us in a different place to OTAs. As a result I don’t stay up at night worrying that Expedia could crush us.

The BOOT:

Are you worried about damage that the group-buying sector may be causing to your business and suppliers?

Patterson:

It bums me out when we are lumped into the same business category as group coupon companies. We have a full-blown inventory system with revenue management and inventory control systems.

We are a very different business to Groupon. There are some similarities in that we are both in business of merchandising but the mechanics and supplier relationships and consumer segments we are going after are very different.

The BOOT:

You have been spending a lot of time on both editorial content and user generated content. Tell us how you balance the two?

Patterson:

They are complementary. We believe in the power of an editorial voice, to give a unique point of view that UGC can’t live up to. That is the role of editorial.

At the same time we have and want to promote a vibrant community. To hear their voice. Jetsetter encourages members to post reviews of properties on the site, but are only invited to do so after their trip is completed.

Members can review our professionally written reviews, plus hear what like-minded travellers have to say. TripAdvisor can’t replicate that balance.

The BOOT:

Tell us about you expansion plans. You recently launched in the UK and have been quoted as saying that 10-15% of your business is coming from customers outsides the US. Where next?

Patterson:

Looking hard at a couple of opportunities now. Nothing finalised. Good results so far in the UK. 10-15% is still the ball park [for bookings by international customers].

The BOOT:

What are your thoughts on mobile. You have launched very content-heavy apps for iPhone and iPad. The mobile web is ten years old yet we have not seen a large flow of bookings. When will mobile become a serious booking channel?

Patterson:

It is still early days [for mobile]. That said, it is now becoming a meaningful part of conversation. We are seeing meaningful activity on the iPhone and iPad.

Mobile is not close to being a web substitute but seems to be growing at higher rate than web traffic.

The BOOT:

What do you think is next in the daily deal sector (Groupon/Living Social Escapes)? Collapse? Supplier push back? Does any of it worry you?

Patterson:

We have seen a little bit of that [consolidation] already. BuyWithMe was sold to the Gilt Group. Merchants are starting to wise-up a little bit on how they use group buying. The easy money has been made.

Things will get harder for them [group buying companies].

The BOOT:

What other companies do you admire and why (inside or outside travel)?

Patterson:

In the content and commerce space I look to One Kings Lane and Net-A-Porter. I am very interested in businesses bringing together content and commerce. In travel HotelTonight is an interesting format and attracting demand.

THE BOOT:

Last one – Expedia shareholders have approved the spin off of TripAdvisor. Does your view of TripAdvisor change now that it is returning to being an independent company? Does it worry or interest you?

Patterson:

It’s of interest far more than it’s a worry. It creates the opportunity to work with TripAdvsor in ways that would have been more difficult when they were owned by Expedia.

A few days on, after a hurricane of negative tweets, posts and down and dirty insults, Qantas has learned that social media is too powerful and dangerous a form of media to experiment on, especially when your staff and customers are looking for a fight.

Here’s what happened. Early in the day (November 22 Sydney time), Qantas launched a promotion around luxury and first class. Entrants had to tweet their “dream luxury in-flight experience” under the hashtag #qantasluxury.

The prize was a pair of first class Qantas pyjamas and an amenity kit. That’s right – the prize was not a flight, rather some left over stuff from the back of (okay, the front of) the plane.

Eighteen hours later and Twitter was still registering 25 tweets per second on this hashtag – almost all of them negative. At its peak, the hashtag stream was running at Matrix-like speed – impossible to read but impossible to turn away from.

#Qantasluxury became the place for customers (and presumably staff) to rant about the recent grounding, the failure of the subsequent enforced negotiation period, general declining levels of service, lost bags, bad meals, missed connections, declining service, the CEO’s pay increase and to just crack gags.

Here are some of my favourites:

#QantasLuxury – “when the passengers arrive before the couriers delivering the lockout notices do” @GrogsGamut

 

BREAKING NEWS: Qantas introduce #QantasLuxury class. Same as standard class, but the plane leaves the ground.@PuppyOnTheRadio

QANTASS – Quite A Number of Tweets, All Sarcastic #qantasluxury @michaelsname

#qantasluxury Somewhere in Qantas HQ a middle aged manager is yelling at a Gen Y social media “expert” to make it stop.” @kiwi_kali

My (possibly too-inside baseball) contribution:

#qantasluxury when words mean what they mean. When “streamline” ≠ me doing it, enhancement ≠ less points and new spirit ≠ pissed off staff” @hughestim

And the best of the responses actually goes to Qantas itself, when it tweeted(not realising the humour):

At this rate our #QantasLuxury competition is going to take years to judge.

The social media virus spread quickly. Stories appeared in mainstream press including newspapers such as The Age and The Australian. Forums such as Flyertalk and Frequent Flyer lit up with best of the best campaigns for tracking funny tweets.

The customer backlash on the social end of the spectrum spread to every other media channel.

The storm is reminiscent of the issues that Australian online accommodation provide Wotif hit in March this year over another failed social media competition. While the fall out was similar, the cause was very different.

In the case of the Wotif storm the cause was that the promotion did not live up to the hype. Wotif spent days building up a competition only to leave thousands of disappointed customers.

In the case of Qantas the failure was an a head-in-the-sand like mentality that it could ask people to say nice things about the brand while all around them the brand was taking a hammering from other issues.

I mentioned in a post on social media in March 2010 that a critical element to social media is having built up trust. Qantas launched this promotion at a time when trust in its brand could not be lower.

The news was dominated by the days Qantas spent grounded and by the news that the three-week peace between management and unions was over.

Customers are genuinely afraid that Christmas holiday plans are going to be smashed by industrial action. As much as Qantas spends on marketing trying to push “a new spirit”, passengers on flights are encountering angry staff and a bizarre pre and post flight announcement by the pilot reminding everyone how important it is for Qantas to be flown by Australian pilots.

Qantas’s trust levels are at all time low, consumers were looking for a way to rant back and staff were on the warpath. In other words the absolutely worst time in the world to be running a campaign encouraging people to say anything they wanted in an open forum.

We may be unsure as online executives whether or not social media is under-hyped or over-hyped but it is clear that you cannot leave social media as an after thought activity run in the same way as other marketing activities.

The airline’s big mistake here was believing that they could control or manage the responses in an open (social) environment. It appears they treated this competition like something you would submit on the back of a cereal packet. Where staff could review the ones they liked and chuck out the ones they didn’t.

Qantas gave life and a forum to the discontent out there.

Big lesson for all of us:

• do not do social media activity in isolation from the state of your brand.

Big message for Qantas:

• focus more on keeping your planes in the air and customers happy than the thread-count on your first class pyjamas.

America dominates all global economic indicators – absolute GDP, GDP per capita and foreign direct investment (nice comparison with China, India and Pakistan and nice infographic).

But they are now second in the world in the number of people wired and accessing the intertubes.

China has 477 million connected people compared to the USA’s 277 million. June 2009 marked the date that China crossed the US in the number of people online.

August 2010 signified when China passed Japan as the second largest economy in the world. Two very important dates and points on the inevitable march to the day in which the economy supporting 1.3 billion people in China passes the 300 million-strong US economy.

I believe we can add June 2011, the day Chinese search leader Baidu took a majority stake in Chinese metasearch company Qunar, to the timeline that history will use to mark China’s rise to global economic supremacy

The publically available terms of the deal are that has bought a majority state in Qunar for $306 million. Previous funding rounds from Lehman Brothers, GSR Ventures Management, Mayfield Fund, and Tenaya Capita raised $25 million.

The deal will see founder and CEO of Qunar Fritz Demopoulos step down to be replaced by current chief operating officer Chen Chao Zhuang.

It is not the size of the deal that makes it substantive and a marker of historical significance.

There have been bigger deals and fundraising activities inside and outside China. And it is not the industry (search and travel) that makes this significant. There have been telecoms, manufacturing and industrial deals of greater significance.

This deal is a marker for two related reasons related to what it says about internet business in China.

Firstly, it is deal between two large search businesses born, grown and raised domestically.

They may have copied business models that were developed in America (Google in the case of Baidu, Kayak/Sidestep for Qunar) but through their growth, adaptation to local needs and ultimately this deal they have shown that the accusation of copycat is unimportant and irrelevant in describing the Chinese economy.

For every web, infrastructure or manufacturing market leader there is in the US, there are a dozen or more companies in China racing for that space. This deal shows that it is a waste of words and analysis to accuse China of being a copycat economy.  A critical marker in the history books for China.

The second reason is that this deal finally proves that acquisition by a US company is not the natural exit for a Chinese Internet company.

The noughties/2000s was the period when US companies pushed into China and it seemed inevitable that US companies would buy their way into leadership while making scores of Chinese entrepreneurs very wealthy.

Expedia bought into eLong in 2004. In the same year Cendant (precursor to Travelport) launched a JV with local travel giant CYTS. In 2006 Travelocity bought out all of its airline co-shareholders to take 100% ownership of Zuji.

The theory was that locals would build it, Americans would buy it and the US would extend its dominance of the internet into the Chinese market. This deal (and others) kills this theory and is therefore an important marker in the part to Chinese economic leadership.

Congrats to Demopoulos and the rest at Qunar.  This deal – though small in terms of a $6.4 trillion dollar economy – will resonate as an important moment in travel and online retail in China.

This is just the latest move in the Australian vacation rental market where machinations resemble a soap opera in more ways than one.

For 26 years, home bodies, bored teens and people in emergency waiting rooms in Australia (and many other countries) have sat through the soap opera Home and Away.

Careers of Heath Ledger, Julian McMahon, Isla Fisher, Melissa George, Ryan Kwanten and many more started (or took off) on the shores of Summer Bay.

A top theme of the show is the changing dynamics of who is the top kid/head surfer in town.

But who knew that life could imitate soap as much as it has in the Australian online vacation rental and short let market.

In September 2009, Yahoo7 (JV version of Yahoo in Australia) bought TotalTravel (a mini TripAdvisor/vacation property listing service), simultaneously pushing their way into the vacation rental and classifieds listing markets.

TotalTravel’s home town of Byron Bay is as close to the fictional surrounds of Home and Away’s Summer Bay as could be imaged by any studio executive.

In 2010 the number two and three players in this market, Rentahome and Takeabreak, merged to become Occupancy.com, beat down the former top “surfer” Stayz to take the number one spot.

Meanwhile the number three player, Realholidays, was an afterthought business for online real estate company Realestate.com.au (REA).

Languishing at the Summer Bay school dance like a wall flower in faded board shorts, REA admitted that Realholiays was less than 1% of its overall revenue, and therefore a very small part of the market.

Just last month, Stayz then bought Occupancy to position itself as the dominant player in off and online vacation rentals in Australia, leaving TotalTravel and Realholidays back at the surf club trying to clean the sand out of their ears.

Until yesterday…

Yesterday the beaten and forgotten Realholidays was bought by the all conquering and cashed-up HomeAway.

Stayz/Occupancy is still number one but the beat-down kid from the rival surf club now has new vigour, money and drive.

I can only imagine the reaction over at Fairfax (ultimate parent owner of the combined Stayz and Occupancy).

Executives furiously charging into each other’s offices annoyed that their ascendency to the top of the vacation rental surf championship table may have only lasted 27 days.

We know that online vacation rental is one of the hottest and least consolidated parts of online travel.

We also know that technological changes and further acquisitions in this market are inevitable.

Furthermore, we also know that Yahoo7, and maybe even TripAdvisor/Expedia through Flipkey, will respond.

What we don’t know is who will win…

For that we will have to tune into next week’s thrilling episode. Welcome HomeAway to the land of Home and Away.

NB: I estimate the online vacation rental market in Australia to be around $455 million in 2010 (includes calculation), compared to an online accommodation size of around $2billion. For a full timeline of the life and loves of the Stayz acquisition of Occupancy check out this post.

Piecing together expert advice from the last six months of travel conferences it is clear that social media is either overhyped, underhyped or somewhere in between.

In his opening keynote at No Vacancy, Fogel (Priceline’s EVP of corporate development) urged the hoteliers in the audience to not invest in social media.

His rationale was that even though consumers are spending a lot of time on social media, “no one views the ads and no one likes to be interrupted“.

These comments have been well reported since. They also caused a storm of internet commentary (Tnooz live blogging of the event), while Guillaume Thevenot of Hotel Blogs challenged Fogel to an open debate on the matter.

In a later session, Toga Hospitality CEO Rachel Argaman provided a live challenge to Fogel. She was extremely bullish about social media and her company’s investment in the channel. As I reported in a tweet, she said: “Social media is here to stay. Future is websites inside Facebook“.

These comments and back-channel Twitter buzz reminded me of two of my favourite moments from last November’s PhoCusWright conference – an exchange of quips between Kayak CEO Steve Hafner and former Expedia CEO Rich Barton on social media.

Their exchange was brief, but like No Vacancy provided clear and starkly contrasting views on social media.

Hafner described social media as Overhyped. Barton called it Underhyped. Like No Vacancy, these hugely disparate views on an internet force drove hours of conference and Twitter chatter.

A day after Non Vacancy closed, Australian online accommodation giant Wotif launched a social marketing campaign , perfectly timed to be a case study test of these disparate views and hopefully allow either the Fogel and Hafner camps or the Barton and Argaman camps to silence the doubting tweeters (twoubters?).

As Graham Robertson reported last week, Wotif spent time and money investing in a social media campaign promoting an 11 minute long flash sale where rooms would be sold for $11 for 11 minutes.

This was not an easy campaign for Wotif to put together. They took time and money to secure effectively free rooms from 36 properties in Australia, there were promo pages to build, room types to load, site structure to stabilize to support the traffic load and then campaign buzz to build.

As we have seen with other successful social media campaigns (like the Best Job in the World), going viral takes time and money.

The high level result: 30,000-40,000 new fans, thousands of room nights sold in minutes, thousands of mentions on Twitter and other channels and work places all across Australia disrupted as employees feared to stray far from their computers lest the sale begin.

All hallmarks of a good marketing campaign. But….the negative buzz was unprecedented. On Twitter and Facebook there were streams of abuse for Wotif.

• Moms were outraged that the sale was 345 ish (school run time).
• Followers were incensed at slow site speeds and constant payment failure errors.
• Rushed consumers pressed the wrong button and were flummoxed when confronted with CC statements that said $199 instead of $11.
• People were just generally annoyed.

Follows and likes were quickly undone and the social media stream contained an extreme contrast of views between the campaign winners and losers. The winners were screaming “woo hoo”, the losers screaming “scam”.

It left me to pose via Twitter: “How much are 40,000 followers worth? Wotif gained 40k likes on FB but generated a twitter storm of hate.”

The Wotif $11 campaign does not settle the social media investment argument. Team Underhyped can argue that without a dollar of marketing spend Wotif drove volume and loyalty. Team Overhyped can call it a PR disaster with many more unhappy than happy customers.

I am clearly a believer in social media. My general advice is that social media cannot be ignored, that suppliers, agents and all players in the travel space need to have an eye on and a plan for their presence on social media.

Social media allows us to listen into and react to the comments being made by our consumers about us.

This cannot be ignored or left open and without response.  But I do agree with Fogel that the vast majority of social media experts are charlatans, meaning that they are selling an expertise and certainty of delivery that does not exist.

That it is very easy to over invest in social media by diverting too much money and resources away from the basics of selling travel online (good supply, good product and good SEO/SEM/CRM).

As I said my post on Five tips for social media success for suppliers, the key balanced first steps in social media investing are:

• Step 1 – Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Step 2 – Start monitoring social media. Make it a customer service and marketing priority
• Step 3 – Collect data – all of it
• Step 4 – Craft product and content plans
• Step 5 – Start saying and stick to it

As the heading of this post put it social media is neither overhyped nor underhyped, it is somewhere in the middle.

Technology looked for existing content to answer short questions. In the new search we can ask more detailed questions and technology can put us in touch with people creating new and specific content as an answer.

Though Q&A is the new search, it has been around for a while.

Yahoo! Answers (originally Yahoo! Q&A) launched in 2005 and, in addition to serving up 20 million plus visitors a month (according to Wikipedia), has succeeded in capturing a valuable SEO traffic flow from Google.

Start up Mahalo launched in 2007 as a “human powered” search, but by 2008 had launched a paid Q&A service based on an in-house currency.

Yet here we are in 2010 and it is only now that Q&A is taking over the search game and playing it’s way into the travel sector.

Four sites dealing with Q&A and touching on travel have caught my eye for a variety of different reasons – Quora, Aardvark, Travellr and Mygola.

In this post I am going to profile these four sites.  In part two we will look at how each of these posts worked/delivered (or not) in answering a travel question.

Quora

Quora is this week’s Internet buzz-child. The site describes itself as “a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking other people”.

Barely 18 months old, and only live for a year, it has $11 million in the bank, founders fresh from stints at Facebook (including the ex-CTO) and is the buzz of Twitter and Silicon Valley.

The simple part of the Quora product is to login and enter a question. The twist (and presumably the success) comes from the answer process.

They have combined the straight Q&A process with the following and tracking of Twitter, the editing and updating of Wikipedia and the organisation and targeting of a review site.

Aardvark

Aardvark (Vark.com) came before Quora but seems to have lost (or at least not gained) momentum while Quora has flown.

The site was founded by ex-Googlers in 2007, launched in 2008, and bought by Google for $50 million in 2009.

It is, according to the founders, as a “social search engine”. Questions are asked similar to Quora but are answered much faster via email and even Gmail instant messenger.

It has a speed over Quora in answer response time but seems to have stagnated (Dodge ball like) since the acquisition by Google.

Travellr

In the dedicated travel Q&A space is WorldNomad’s owned Travellr (no ‘e’).

Travellr calls itself a “real time Q&A service and recommendation engine specifically designed around answering travel questions”, according to Ian Cumming, Travellr co-founder, advisor and former-CEO.

Founded 2008 and sold to WorldNomads in 2009, Travellr is claiming more than 10,000 answers on 600 unique locations.

The functionality is different to the general crowdsourcing of Aardvark and Quora. The Travellr system uses feedback and voting from users to determine which questions should be forwarded to which contributors.

The question is first sent to the number one ranked contributor for a particular topic. If that contributor does not answer, the question is forwarded to the next one and so on until an answer is given.  The question is also open for anyone to answer at any time.

While Quora and Aardvark are focused on direct traffic, Travellr is taking a distribution approach. API versions are available with different implementation options but working of a common base of contributors.

A question can be asked on one implementation and answered in another.

Cumming says that a dedicated travel Q&A system is better than generic version because users can “tailor the Q&A around a specific domain of knowledge… every questions has a location and community that can be built and connected to around a travel interest”.

He is very dismissive of the generalist Q&A sites trying to answer queries in travel. Of Quora he says: “Quora is a bit of fad, is hyped, mainly Silicon Valley people talking to themselves in their own bubble”.

The bigger concern for him is Facebook. He says: “Facebook Questions is going to be very powerful and [will] weed out the lesser players”.

Mygola

The newest of the four is India-based Mygola. Founded in October 2009, Mygola is taking a completely different approach to the other three in this area.

Descriptively, Mygola sounds the same as any other Q&A site. It claims to be a “travel planning service that lets you reach human guides to do all the online research for your trip”.

The Mygola twist is that the answers come not from the “crowd” or a UGC exchange of ideas with other contributors but from paid staff of guides who will research the question and provide and answer.

The first few answers are free, after that there are annual and trip-based pricing plans (see here).

While Quora, Aardvark and Travellr are looking to advertising (and maybe lead-gen) as the business model, Mygola has the old fashioned aim of charging people for a service.

I spoke with Mygola CEO and co-founder (and another former Googler) Anshuman Bapna to find out more about this product.

Launched in June 2009, naturally the hardest part about the product was setting up the guide infrastructure. Bapna claims it takes 6-8 hours to train a guide and they are currently screening out more than 90% of the applicants (120 guides from the 1,200 people that have applied).

He admits that scale is a challenge and cites this as the main reason they are running the business out of India, where they have access to a lower cost base.

My main question was how confident he was that people would pay for answers. I cited the death of the paid Google Answers in 2006.

Bapna is betting that the passage of time, travel focus and simplicity in the pricing model should help Mygola avoid this fate.

He adds: “2010 is a very different place to 2006. Google Answers also gave too many options as to pricing. Pick your own price was too confusing.”

I am not sure if the demand is there but Bapna’s passion and enthusiasm certainly is.

My Take and the Q&A BOOT Test

There are two substantive challenges for the Q&A sector.

Firstly to make it meaningful and rewarding for the contributors/answer providers. As Wikipedia is now discovering (if reports are to be believed), there is a point where the number unpaid contributors start to either run out of stories or run out of the desire to work for nothing.

Mygola has a fix for that, but the fix depends on people being prepared to pay for answers (like Mahalo is trying).

Cummings of Travellr is not worried, convinced the human desire to share stories about their travels or their home towns will overcome the lack of incentive (other than warm glow).

The second challenge is the power of Facebook. With a gazillion members and more posts and pokes per second than [insert crude humour here!], Facebook is primed to be the number one place people ask questions in the world (not just the Internet).

All four – even the big traffic generating and ex-Facebooker staffed Quora – will have to be wary of Zuck unleashed on Q&A.

Enough of the profiled, it is time to testing them out.

I asked each of four above the same question

“I want to take the family to Africa (four of us including a 9 yr old and a 5 yr old) for a two week tour. Our aims are to go on safari, have a cultural experience, relax a little and be amazed.  We are starting from Sydney. Where should we go?”

In later posts I will report back on the types of answers I get.

NB: For more on the search revolution check out my posts:

• Is travel ready for the Google Page Rank overhaul?
• Google Instant is just the beginning in the search revolution in travel

Also, what were their favourite posts of the year, on Tnooz or elsewhere, by themselves or others.

Tim Hughes (The BOOT)

Prediction 2010 #1:

Consolidation in the sector (surely!). This is a left over predictions from 2009. The conditions in the year of the GFC seemed perfect for consolidation.

Stock prices were depressed, cost cutting acceptable and appetite for organically funded expansion low.  But we saw virtually nothing that could be called a “big deal”.

There was deal activity but was at the lower end such as through regional tuck-ins (ie Travelocity buying Travelguru, and Ctrip buying EZtravel), small local deals (ie Wotif buying GoDo) and constant content site acquisition by TripAdvisor. With bankers chasing bonuses and companies chasing growth in 2010, I expect to see some consolidation in the big end of online travel town.

On reflection:

So I predicted consolidation would come and recommendations would be the future of search. On consolition this is my second year in being proven wrong – so it is officially time to give up on predicting M&A activity and go back to talking tech, trends, search and social media.

Prediction 2010 #2:

Recommendations as the future of online travel: Search – as a means for customers finding what they want in online travel – is no longer as effective in 2009 as it was in 2005.

Two causes – the explosion of content through the UGC revolution and consumers desire to seek answers to open ended questions (ie where should I go next) that are not easily answered by a search model based on taking you to one site.

2010 will see even more investment by start ups and established companies on different ways of searching and on methodologies for recommending. The long term future is the ability to generate a recommendation of one based on the individuals unique combination of desires, needs and interests of an individual at a particular point in time (EveryYou).

The 2010 future is increased profiling, increased data collection and even more start up activity around search and discovery.

On reflection:

On recommendations and the future of search it is clear that we are at the begining of the most profound changes in search since the launch of Google Adsense.

Google got into the recommendation this year with Google Places, sparking a war with TripAdvisor and a complete rethink by the industry on how to build for search engines

Favourite articles of 2010:

• Four tips on a how a travel supplier should build a social media strategy – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 [Tnooz]
• Google Instant is just the beginning in the search revolution in travel [Tnooz]
• Business Traveller Tip – 10 tips for surviving economy class flying [The BOOT]

We have seen Google Instant, Google Places, Google Preview, Google with metasearch and pricing, Google dedicated search for blogs and updates and, now, even a Google Chrome operating system.

In my previous post on changes in search I covered the significance of the changes and impact from Google instant.  In particular the future it alluded to where multi-destinational and multi-dimensional search will support the consumer need for answers to open ended questions.

In this post I will look at the Google Places (best described here) and the obvious and less obvious clues it gives to the future of search.  The obvious impact is the change in SEO and search marketing in general driven by the reduction in the number of first page organic search results spots available to online intermediaries and all but nullified the primacy of TripAdvisor as the number one page on the internet for a hotel (and started a war).

However it is the changes under the page from Google Places that signal a true revolution in how search results will be determined. For the first time (that I know of) Google has changed (with Google Places) the measured authority in its page rank.  Thereby changing forever the elements that determine search results and the flow of traffic from search engines to destinations sites.

Under the tradditional (and patented) Google page rank algorithm, rank and thus SEO success was based on the number and quality of inbound links, architecture of the site (ability to be indexed) and the freshness/uniqueness of the content. Crudely the more links and the better the rank of each link, the higher the rank of a site.

Google Places changes this by introducing a new variable. The number and quality of reviews (picture below) for a property are now factors in the page rank for travel searches.

Reviews can be seen as distributed commentary, content and referrals for a web page. By using this as a measure of authority, Google is saving that content and commentary is now up there with links as the currency of search result rankings.

I predict that there are more changes to come in search authority and ranking algorithms.  I have been tracking commentary, rumours, start ups and innuendo in the search space.

From this I have identified six emerging (and overlapping) authority criteria that are certain to play a role in search (if not already).

1. The tastegraph

The use of likes, votes and preferences to help draw users toward content or destinations drawn from matching the tastes or likes of the user to others that like the same or similar.

Examples of this are across the web from the like button itself (Facebook) to StumbleUpon, Digg, Google’s own search results voting and content specific sites like Last.fm.

2. The sociograph

The recommendations and preferences of people selected by the user as being trusted source of information or advice drive or bias search results.

Where the tastegraph links people and recommendations based on historical behaviour and community links regardless of the relationship between people, the sociograph is above the history of the relationship rather than the behaviour;

3. The memegraph (emerging word)

Where the echoes, community commentary or spread across the internet of a story, idea or meme drives authority and ranking.  This includes re-tweets, forum discussions, review positing, link submissions and more.

It says that to “link” to a piece of content is no longer the only way to “vote” or vouch for that piece of content as being interesting, valuable or of note.  This will also introduce the notion of authority among tweeters and commentators (see the expertgraph);

4. The expertgraph (new word)

Biasing based on the views of experts. The traditional/old web said that an expert could be determined by the authority of their destination.

A website attracted links and authority because of the content of its writers.  This in turn became the destination for those experts to be found and engaged with.

But in the new web, more and more content creators of note (experts) are publishing material and views in places other than on stand alone websites.  They are on twitter, in forums, building pages on other sites, submitting reviews etc (Frequentflyer.com.au and Flyertalk are great examples of places to find experts that don’t have their own sites as a location).

New methods will merge for measuring and tracking the authority of a content creator off a website and collating that content or prioritising that content on an aggregated page (much like a Google Places page).

An interview by Danny Sullivan (story here on the Daily SEO blog) has both Bing and Google staff confirming that social user authority (or expertise) is being looked at or used;

5. The contextgraph (new word)

This one comes from Google’s search Queen Marissa Myer. Myer at LeWeb (care of TechCrunch) said that the future would be in “contextual discovery”.

This is where information is pushed to people based on their search patterns and behaviour.   It also takes in the most valuable piece of “new” information in web search – customer location.

6. Genomegraph (new word)

Like Pandora has done for music and Triporati and others for travel – breaking down a piece content or a whole content area into core (or genetic level) elements.  Then relating those elements to each other to link and relate content to other content as a means of driving discovery.

[NB: See an article I wrote on Triporati and Pandora]

Google Places has shown that these (and others?) are now in the mix as influencers in future page rank algorithms.

Not all of these will last as measures of authority (or carry the same weight) but if you are in the search business (and if you are in online travel then you are in the search business) then you need to be aware of these trends and determining how important they will be in your future SEO plans.

The runners-up were TrustYou, CruiseLabs and GroundLink

Last night I tweeted my top four picks. Two of them made the final four. My picks were all transportation search companies. I chose air search companies Everbread and Vayant, metasearch innovator Hipmunk and online rail company SilverRail.

The two runners up I chose were trip planner Gogobot and social media monitoring company Revinate (competitor to finalist TrustYou).

It is true to say that I came to the conference with some pre-conceived notions on these companies.

I believe that while mobile and social media are the areas of innovation that have captured the bulk of the buzz and media attention this year, it is in transportation search and results that can have the most immediate impact in sales and conversion.

As a reminder, innovation is not just an idea or a beta or something that is cool to look at.

True innovation is a creative idea put into action – successfully executed – that has impact on changing a market. Online transportation search (air, rail, car) looks in 2010 much like it looked in the early days of online travel.

There are a lot more filters and options presented to consumers but the list approach with predictable combinations of fares from one type of transportation has remained.

The four innovators I picked have been trying to rewrite those rules and have taken steps to put the new rules into action.

In the case of Everbread and Vayant, they have products the claim to (I need to see more of them before I can “definitely do”) provide search results with routing, carrier and fare combinations that are not available in tradditional search.

If true and they develop traction, this could profoundly change not only consumer behaviour but also airline yield and route management. See my story from yesterday on Everbread. Clearly “the crowd” will need more convincing.

Hipmunk has generated more buzz that any other three month old start up I have come across (Tnooz piece here).

During its presentation, CEO and co-founder Adam Goldstein showed screen after screen of airline search results from top tier OTAs where less than a third of the screen was devoted to the search results.

In Hipmunk they have devoted more than 90% of the screen to search results indexed by “agony” (internal algorithm for measuring how painful a flight will be) rather than price or time. It looks good. Really good. If Hipmunk gains traction their look and feel will influence product developers across the online travel world.

Finally to SilverRail. CEO Aaron Gowell felt the need to prove to a mainly US audience the importance of and potential for online rail. He won that part of the case easily.

Jim Hornthal (of Preview and Triporati fame) pointed out a number of the challenges in selling rail online (story from yesterday here).  But if anyone can get it right it looks like Aaron and the team can.

If they do, and can do to rail what online distribution has done for air, it will be one of the most profound innovations in the sale of transportation.

I spoke with him just after the announcement of the finalists and (unsurprisingly) he was very happy with the announcement and busy doing some refinements and tweaks to his pitch.

In the end, it does not matter what I think, as democracy has a funny way of producing results that no one expects (as recent election results in Australia and the UK prove).

While I may be hot for transportation search, the attendees of PhoCusWright also have a lot of time for mobile innovation bringing mobile search company Goby and mobile app developer Kony into the top four.

Later today and tomorrow, all seven will pitch – this time to a panel of judges.

For more background check out my posts from yesterday on Revinate and TrustYou, Everbread and SilverRail.

Here I list another ten tweets, notes and notions on industry trends and market activity overhead at the conference in Singapore last week.

1. On digital marketing

It is often said that online marketing is cheaper that offline marketing. During a panel on marketing and branding Nick Baker the EGM of marketing for Tourism Australia said that he plans to dramatically increase the online marketing spend from 26% of spend in 2010 to 60% of spend in 2015.

But that does not mean that his marketing costs will drop. He said that going online is not cheaper due to the high costs of good quality digital content.

2. On China

Fritz Demopoulos, CEO China metasearch company Qunar, gave some detailed background on why he thinks foreign companies struggle in China.

He said that their natural advantages in entering new markets markets – access to capital, technology, market knowledge and access to people – are not as important in China.

He said that capital and technology are not constraints for Chinese companies. Similarly top talent prefers to work for Chinese companies rather than international ones.

3. On Japan Part I

Every member of the panel discussing the Japanese market shared the same worry – young Japanese are not travelling.

For monetary and social reasons they prefer electronic and home based entertainment activities to travel. There was a discussion about how to fix this, about how to encourage the younger generation in Japan to travel.

However, no concrete answers were provided – leaving behind an air of gloom and doom about the JP travel market.

4. On Japan Part II

Social media is big in Japan but not as the West and other parts of Asia know it.

Stats were shared confirming that local Facebook clone Mixi is kicking its social rival, but that Twitter is the biggest of the three.

The stats provided said that Mixi has 15% share of social media, Twitter 16% and Facebook less than 3%.

5. On Indonesia

Main message on Indonesia coming out of the emerging market session (which also included a discussion on the Philippines and Korea) was the mobile web is growing in Indonesia at rates that are exceeding everyone’s expectations.

There were even claims (which I have heard anecdotally from others) that Indonesia is the largest Blackberry market in the world.

6. On the airline market

Peter Harbison of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation painted a grim picture of the financial recovery and airlines.

He said that the current recovery was financial and not economic. Meaning that while stock markets are well up from the lows of 2008, economic indicators like unemployment, consumer confidence and consumer spend are still well down.

For full service carriers this meant strength in the front end of the plane but weakness down the back  - where 60% of the revenue is made.

7. On Mobile Part I

Gerry Samuels, founder and executive director of Mobile Travel Technologies is convinced that the time for mobile web transactions is now.

While many are still talking about the mobile web for location services, customer care and stay services (like check-in), Samuels showed tables and charts to indicate that mobile web bookings are growing faster than services.

8. On Mobile Part II

Everyone agreed that 2010 was “the year of the app” [check out my 2010 predictions where I said the same].

Brett Henry of Abacus argued that the rise of the mobile app will support intermediaries more than suppliers.

He said that as consumers move more and more to the use of apps over browsers to access the web, they will more and more favour intermediaries over supplier direct as the consumer won’t want to go to more than one app to get the choice they need.

[NB: See more on this in my Tnooz two parter: Two missing pieces from the mobile revolution jigsaw].

9. On Social Media

Circos Brand Karma boss Morris Sim summarised the impact of social media on marketing with reference to an Ogilvy & Mather article called “The four Ps are out, the four Es are in”.

The four Ps of marketing (Product, Place, Price and Promotion) are giving way to the four Es.  From Product to Experience, from Place to Everyplace, from Price to Exchange and from Promotion to Evangelism [full article here].

10. On Search

If you will allow me to quote myself, I discussed how the future of search and online travel is answering open ended questions.

The whole travel inspiration funnel, circle, bow tie etc is now online.

Consumers not longer want suppliers and OTA to just provide prices and timings for itineraries planned and scoped by the consumer.

Instead the consumer wants some combination of experts, friends, family, crowds, technology and suppliers/OTAs to help them answer the age old travel question “where do I go next”.  To do this search has to change.

The future of search is one that answers open ended questions, where we can draw together information from more than one content location (multi-destinational search) and prioritize it based on different trust or ranking metrics (multi-dimensional search).

Where search brings together the answers from different existing pages (destinations) as well as different perspectives and sources (dimensions) such as the instant responses of experts, the instant responses of our sociograph and the instant responses of a searcher’s tastegraph- search will change.

These soundbites were mainly about companies and from delegates about trends and market intelligence.

In this first list, I will share with you ten interesting things I heard about companies at WIT.

1. Wotif is working on adding consumer reviews and social media content. Matthew Varley (Wotif’s EGM in Asia) was asked about Wotif’s plans for reviews and user generated content.

He said that reviews are now a hygiene factor for online travel sites.  He made it clear that Wotif are planning on launching review functionality when he said “watch this space” in response to being asked when reviews would appear on Wotif.com.

2. DaoDao (TripAdvisor in China) showed (once again) that online travel in China is different to anywhere in the world.

DoaDoa GM Hao Wu told us that to attract more reviews DD have been physically locating paper review forms and comment boxes in hotel lobbies.

Customers fill out the pen and paper review, drop it in the review box, it is collected by DD staff, who type it up and publish the review online.

3. TripAdvisor’s newly arrived MD of Asia, Marc Charron, was not giving much away on the performance of (or his happiness with) their Facebook integration (called TripFriends).

When asked directly on the question of success or not by Tnooz’s Kevin May, he said “too early to tell” (also non-committal about TA’s flight search). This can be code for “not working as well as we hoped”. For more on TripFriends, see interview with TripAdvisor product VP Adam Medros.

4. Mobilizy (Wikitude) CEO Andy Gstoll told us that the secret to them keeping the content on their wikitude up to date was input from users on the ground. Makes sense, but I am still concerned that inaccuracies in Augmented Reality content could produce frustrating consumer experiences.

5. At the WITovation Bootcamp, Hrush Bhatt of Cleartrip told me that they continue to have their eyes expansion outside India into the Middle East.

They have already launched in Dubai with plans to across the region in Qatar, Oman and Bahrain. He mentioned that the most challenging part in launching is getting the local top level domains.

6. Word on the street is that Kaha Tour and Travel is planning a huge online push with the launch of a new site. If true will be one of the most significant developments in online travel in Indonesia.

7. Chinese online travel company eLong, currently the second biggest in the country, claimed (through CEO Guangfu Cui) to have more hotels live in China than the number one player Ctrip.

He said eLong has 15,000 hotels to Ctrip’s 12,000. eLong’s strategy is clear: push faster and faster online in the hope of claiming a larger online booking percentage and business compared to Ctrip’s offline call centre business.

Guangfu said that online was now a third of eLong’s sales, up from 12%.

8. Kathleen Tan, regional commercial head of AirAsia, is very bullish about the airline’s plans for sales through mobile.

Currently they are planning for mob only deals to drive the percentage of bookings through the mobile web fro the current level of less than 5% of bookings to 15-20% within 18 months.

9. Paul Kerr, CEO of Small Luxury Hotels of the World, highlighted the value of a loyalty and retention program for even a small customer base.  He said that their program had 95,000 members, 10,000 of which are the most important. #

These 10,000 (a relatively small number) are responsible for a staggering 40% of SLH’s online bookings.

10. WIT conference boss Siew Hoon Yeoh and Abacus VP Brett Henry are convinced that wifi in hotel rooms should be free (like the water and electricity), but Accor Asia-Pacific COO Michael Issenberg does not agree.

While Issenberg admitted that in some markets competitive pressure has resulted in individual Accor hotels providing free wifi, he made it clear that he does not think that wifi in hotel rooms should be free.

NB: In Part Two, I will cover trends.

They are going to push for more money and regaining traffic lost to social media and be pulled into the new ways in which consumers what search and search results.

This push and pull is going to change the dimensions of search and the ultimate destinations to which consumers are sent.

Google Instant is part of this change.  It will generate more money for Google, generate faster answers for customers and prepare consumers for the next revolution in search.

That revolution will be search going from single answers based on single measures of authority to multi-destinational answers based on multi-dimensional sources of information. Let me explain.

Search is as old as the modern internet – say 16 years. From the days people first discovered Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, Yahoo, Looksmart, Excite, Altavista and eventually the king of search – Google.

But search is getting old.  Internet search says that there is one site, one location that can answer your query.

Type in “what time is it in New York” and internet search will give you the number one site with the exact answer.

Same for “how many inches in a meter”, “where is the Eiffel tower”, “how many people live in Seoul” and every other closed question that has a limited number of answers.

But type in an open ended question and current search struggles. Search for “what is the best movie of all time”, “who is the greatest of them all”, “where should I go next” or “who do you love” and it becomes clear there is not one site with the answer.

The future of search is one that answers open ended questions.

Where we can draw together information from more than one content location (multi-destinational search) and prioritize it based on different trust or ranking metrics (multi-dimensional search).

Where search brings together the answers from different existing pages (destinations) as well as different perspectives and sources (dimensions) such as the instant responses of experts, the instant responses of our sociograph and the instant responses of a searcher’s tastegraph.

With Google Instant, however, results appear as you type. The search results update as you search rather than waiting for you to complete your query and hit “Google Search” or “I Feel Lucky”. I believe Google has done this for two reasons.

Firstly to make more money and secondly to prepare users for the multi-dimensional and multi-destinational future of search.

In relation to revenue, Google Instant has the chance to make Google a lot more money in the short term than the traditional search process.

The most expensive words in search (at least travel search) are in the head terms.  Phrases like “hotels in [major city]” and ‘flights to [major city]”.

Type in something like “Hotels in London” or “Flights to New York” and you will see what I mean. You will see the battle ground of the biggest and most cashed up travel companies in the world.

It is arguable that as head term bidding costs have risen, head term paid search marketing has moved from a direct marketing activity to one more akin brand building and long term customer acquisition.

As a result the paid search battle has expanded rapidly from high cost head terms to the lower cost but harder to target body and tail terms.

The paid search battle has expanded form “hotels in [major city] to sub divisions of minor destinations such as “hotels in [suburb of secondary city]” and to refinement of head terms such as “[type] hotels in [major city] with [special requirement]” such a as “luxury hotels in new york that take pets”.

With Google Instant, as soon as customers type in “hotel” or “flight” or “cruise” the result will appear and paid search clicking will start before the consumer has a chance to qualify their request.

Instead of customers typing in a full long tail search term and then clicking on the cheap(er) paid advert, they are likely to click sooner on a more expensive head search term.

Under Google non-instant a customer would type in “hotels in Bondi with a swimming pool and view”, wait for the results then click on the link. Under Google Instant, the second they type in the word “hotels” results will start to appear.

Any percentage of long tail searchers that abandon a long tail search to click on a head term paid advert is more money for Google. Great move.

But Google Instant is not just a revenue generating move, it is also part of a search training exercise to get help prepare consumers for the transition to search 3.0.

For the transition from the type, search, wait, review and proceed method that is the current search model to a constantly developing and refining approach that will be the hall marks of the mutli-destinational/dimensional search model.

To answer open ended questions we need to collect information from more than one place/destination. We need to be able to see how different content locations (sites, updates, blogs, news feeds, discussions etc) are dealing with the same piece of information.

To see this is a way that makes it clear which is the most recent piece of information and how each piece of information relates to the other.  This is the multi-destinational element.

As well we need a new process for attributing ranking. The current page rank algorithm derives authority and ranking from links.  Inbound links and outbound links are like votes of authority.

Each vote (link) is not equal.  The higher the authority of a page – the greater the value of a link from that page. In future search authority (page rank) will need to come from more than links.

There are new methods on the Interwebs for marking a piece of content or information as important and valuable. The “like” button, a re-tweet, a URL shorten, a Digg, a reddit vote, a stumble upon, a youtube view, a status update and many more.

In the social media world there are scores of ways to give authority to a piece of content without giving it a link.

In my own case I am writing more and more content than ever before but because I am writing it on Tnooz, Twitter, Linkedin and other places – not just the BOOT – my BOOT page rank has dropped from six to four in the last year.

[NB: Our apologies. Ed ]

The future of search will change the measures of authority to take into account that you can “vote” with more than a link.

Google knows this and along side the changes with Google Instant has been putting stars and voting buttons on links in search results.

They have added bounce rate to the measure of relevance. And offered more and more ways to see the search results in different formats and different sources.

All aimed and training the consumer to prepare for the next revolution in search.

Search is changing – so expect more. Keep an eye on the new dimensions for authority and incorporation of more than one destination in the answer.

If you want more background on Google Instant I suggest reading the following links

• Google’s own blog post
• Googler Matt Cutts on the change
• Rubel calling the death of SEO
• Tnooz’s Kevin May on what it means for travel

Critical to the first four steps in this recommendation is that launching a social strategy does not mean opening up a Twitter account or Facebook page and typing away.

Instead, I recommend holding off on signing up with social media sites until a series of preparatory steps are undertaken. They are

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it

Part Four: Craft product and content plans

Using the data collected, plans made and early monitoring, suppliers can now start to craft the product and content plans that will make up the social media plan strategy.

There are two parts to this step – developing product offerings and developing content plans. In the product area it is time to craft targeted deals and offers specific to social media distribution platforms and demand patterns.

Taking first steps at micro-targeting. Using the data collected and information provided from distribution partner and own sales channels to engage in targeted product development.

That is, the development of offers and product specifically designed to target the customers identified in part one and tracking and investigated in part two and three.

The offers/products developed should not be exclusively targeted at pre-sales activities or driving immediate transaction response.

As we discussed in part one, there are many different ways that consumers can be targeted without having to require an immediate transactional response.

Social media content and offers during and post consumption could be just as (if not even more) valuable than transactionally focused product.

This is where the communications development is as important as product development. Using the information collected in the first three steps to plan a whole of company customer conversation plan based on the developed social media goals.

Content creation is just as important as offer creation. The people/department responsible for your social content creation should be looking into both areas of content creation – proactively creating content on your own site and social media platform pages and in responding to user generated content across the web.

[NB: For more on content and UGC see Three rules for a UGC start-up]

It will take time and devoted effort to craft these product and content plans. It cannot be rushed.

Talking, writing, posting, updating and tweeting before you have crafted targeted offers and messages increase the risk of your conversation falling flat and lacking response.

Especially if you try to simply take offline and static web brand approaches and translate them into social posts.  In all likelihood you will find that each social channel requires a different target approach and therefore different content response.  This is a good approach.

With products prepared and content ready to go… it is time for the final stage.

And, the bonus one, Part Five: Start saying it and stick to it

Now you can open the accounts, sign up and start being social.  The critical part of this step is to be engaged for the long haul.

Do not dip into and out of social media. Make a long term commitment to creating content and products targeted to this channel.

Launching a content or product plan and then pulling out if response is low or the time commitment too hard is the wrong response.

If the plans are not working, stay committed but go back to step one and come at the strategy from a different angle.

A social media audience can take time to build and may require different angles that first planned.  Trying once then pulling out will take you out of the conversation – leaving it to others to drive the conversation around your brand.

But even with these steps completed it is still not time to log on and starting tweeting, updating and commentating.

Next you need to know more about your product and which segments it is attractive to.

Part Three: Start collecting data. All of it. Every single piece you can

To communicate effectively with customers you need to know that they like to do and what they want.

Social media opens up the chance to talk to every customer as an individual. Futhermore it also gives you the chance to talk to different versions of each individual (my EveryYou concept).

I was asked at a recent AsiaPac Aviation Conference to name a successful global social media campaign.

Someone quickly responded with the Queensland Best Job in the World campaign. I proposed that that the long term impact from social media campaigns are not around trying to replicate the massive effort involved in a Best Job-esque campaign.

Instead, it is the ability to develop one on one communications at scale. To develop micro-targeted deals and communications, but at a level that can be rolled out to a large number of people.

In other words: many deals to many people (a one-to-one approach) rather than one-campaign-to-many-people.

For a travel supplier to build a campaign around micro-targeting at scale requires having data. Lots of data. Data about everything that a consumer does in relation to a booking.

Where they click, upstream and downstream links, demographic details, email preference etc. I am talking about more than Ominture and Webtrends.

This is also about collecting data directly from customers’ pre, during and post consumption of a product.  Data that can be used in targeting offers, deals and content.

Some examples:

• Hotel: Recording the checkin and pre-purchase habits of people that order room service or ask for restaurant advice. For example how many people who check in after 8pm at night order room service or ask for a restaurant. Collect data to find out how many as this will open up social media recommendation options.
• Airline: Complaints at check-in by time of day and customer characteristics (solo, family, business). Use this to try to find patterns of how external factors (time of day and nature of passenger) can lead to increases or decreases in complaints.  Use that as a basis for determine communications and ideas to reduce check in complaints.
• Car Hire: where you have GPS units in cars, anonymously track the routes that people take.  Use that to publish a “top routes” list or “favourite drives” list to customers and build up a touring network and conversation.  Use staff profiling of customers (family, work, adventure) to build sub-categories of tours.

Arming yourself with data like this will be critical in finding the right targeting of the right message and therefore essential to a social media strategy.

Suppliers should go so far as to create an incentive structure around data collection. Staff should be rewarded for the amount of valuable customer information they collect.

It goes without saying that you will need to invest in the infrastructure to collect, sort and manage this data (and there will be a lot of data).

So now you have the target audience and what you want to say.  You have started to monitor and are collecting all the data you can.

Next we will combine part four and five into a single recommendation  - crafting product and content plans, and actually doing it.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

In part two, I am still recommending that social media accounts are left unopened.

There is still more work to be done before a travel supplier should be creating socially distributed content.

Part Two: Start monitoring social media, make it a customer service and marketing priority

As I discussed here, consumers are turning more and more to social media sites to help them get more information on brands.

So it is important to set up the infrastructure (readers or monitoring tools) that scrape social media and review sites and serve up mentions of your brand, competitors and (if relevant) location to customer care and marketing teams.

Use this in the first instance to listen to what people are saying about you, your brand and competitive landscape.

Then settle and agree on the response you will take to various mentions.

For example:

• Agree the format for Twitter responses when customers make queries and complaints.
• Appoint some one in customer care to respond each day to negative (and positive) reviews on TripAdvisor.
• Find the forum(s) where customers are talking about your area or product or experience and monitor what is being said about the brand (eg Flyertalk or frequentflyer.com.au).
• Publish an internal social media policy that encourages your staff to be watching,  consuming and participating in social media.  But make it clear when they can and when they can’t speak for the company in a response.

In summary. build up a list of tools and set up an agreed and actionable plan for monitoring and responding to social conversations about your brand.

This will initiate your involvement in discussions initiated by consumers and prepare the ground for (hopefully) exerting some influence over that conversation.

Important points to remember:

• Influence is achievable but control is not.
• Be clear in your understanding and expectations.
• You will not be able to exert control over social media as it is word of mouth at the speed of light.

Combining parts one and two is the first step in setting a social media plan and help you find your voice, primarily by deciding which of your customers want to talk to and what you want to say.

The next rung on the ladder is to start monitoring all of the mentions of your brand in social media so that you can learn what is being said already by which segment of your customer base.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

“What should I do?” they say. “I joined all the social networks but there is nothing there!”

From these discussions I have developed five steps for a supplier on how to plan, set up and execute a social media strategy.

I have previously covered trend driving social media adoption, but in this post I want to provide more detailed advice on implementing a social media strategy.

[By social media I mean online/interactive user generated content sites where there is no substantive restriction on who can create, share or contribute to content. Includes social media sites, forums, blogs and even comment sections in mainstream media]

Part One: Decide who it is you want to talk to and what you want to say

The assumed first step is to jump straight in, sign up for each and every social network and wait for the customers to come pouring in. This is a bad move.

The correct first step is to do the opposite, to stay clear of any proactive social media interaction until such time as you have decided who you want to talk to and what it is you want to say.

Jumping straight in without this ground work could result in one of these outcomes:

1. Nothing happening and no one cares – you sit there with no followers or friends and no means for building a following.
2. Too much happens and angry customers take over. There is a danger that a poorly monitored or executed social media strategy can leave open a chance for disgruntled consumers to become the dominant content providers. Most extreme example of this is the take over of the Nestlé’s Facebook page by Greenpeace in protest of Nestlé’s use of palm oil from endangered forest areas.

There are number of different angles that can be taken in deciding what to say and who to talk to. The angle chosen needs to be based on the brand identity and vision of the supplier.

Who you want to talk to:

• In deciding who you want to talk to, there are different classes of customers – existing customers, new customers, loyal customers, suppliers and more.  Decide which of these groups you want to talk to is critical before executing a strategy.

What you want to say:

• Similarly there are options in deciding what it is you want to say.  Do you want to push a message around your price, service, location, facilities or expertise?  Are you trying to communicate to people during their consumption of the service, before or afterwards?

It is possible but very very hard to cover all of these in one social media plan. The best approach is to pick the combination of these options that best suit your product. Here are some (hypothetical) examples of different angles that different suppliers could take:

1. A Budget Hotel: deciding on an approach of targeting new customers on rate and cleanliness.  Therefore will look to talk to customers about the deal value and the certainty of the product;
2. Adventure tour company: targeting their social media activity at existing customers that have already bought. Helping those customers prepare so that they get the most out of the experience and soliciting feedback and testimonials to help attract new customers;
3. A hotel near an event location: targeting loyal customers with information and discussion about events at a location and their knowledge of the location rather than the hotel itself;
4. An airline with a large leisure network: targeting new customers with general holiday information for their home market.  Driving discussion around generic holiday options rather than their on board product; or
5. A winter cruise tour company: identifying that consumer information about the destination is the most critical element rather than the specifics of the product. Building up a body of content about a location first rather than the product.

Social media distribution and usage is vastly different to traditional web retail and marketing.

To simply take a deal distribution approach or a join and hope approach will be a certain path to an unsuccessful strategy.

Before you do anything in social media take time to decide the customers you are targeting and what you want to say.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

Starting in the late nineties with Travelocity’s acquisition of Preview and reaching a peak in the mid naughties with the Expedia/Hotels.com merger, Lastminute.com acquisition by Travelocity and the Orbitz/Ebookers/HotelClub acquisitions by Cendant.

Big dollar deals covering America and Europe. As we enter the third decade of the online travel I strongly suspect we are seeing the rise of Asian firms as acquisition targets and as potential acquirers.

When I suggest M&A activity in Asia, I am not just talking about the buying of Asian online travel companies by large European or US companies. I am also referring to Asian firms with money to spend and a target list to spend it on.

There are three big and M&A active Asian based companies with money to spend and a need for growth outside their home market – Rakuten, Wotif and Ctrip.

• Rakuten – is the largest online travel company in Asia and one of the largest ecommerce companies in the world. Based in Tokyo, Rakuten is generating around $2.5billion in gross bookings. 90% plus of it within Japan
• Wotif – is the dominant force in online travel in Australia. They are on track to sell $1billion in travel this year, 85% of it in Australia or New Zealand.
• Ctrip – is the biggest travel agency in China. Generating $3.7billion in GBs per year (according to PhoCusWright). Critically the vast majority of the sales are offline through a 12,000 seat call centre rather than online. I normally hear that 70% of their sales are offline but have also heard talk that the offline percentage could be as high as 90%.

In the last three years these companies have been very active in buying companies.

In 2008, Wotif bought Sydney based travel.com.au/lastminute.com.au and (separately) Thailand based AsiaWebDirect. The AWD (though a English language business) is Wotif’s first push for demand outside Aus/NZ

In 2009, Ctrip bought EZTravel, the number one domestic player in Taiwan. In December of that year Wotif also bought GoDo, an activities and services provider.

Rakuten has done three big deals in 2010 and we are only halfway through the year. Rakuten’s parent company launched a JV with China search giant Baidu, purchased US based Buy.com for $250 million and had $250 million left over to buy Euro ecommerce site PriceMinister (all separate deals).

None of these deals are specifically travel-related but they are indicative of the companies desire to push beyond Japan. The company has even announced a English By 2012 Pledge that will see English become the official language of the company in two years.

Also this year, Ctrip has announced plan to buy offline Hong Kong Travel Agency WingOn (to provide them with ticketing and fulfillment services in Hong Kong). And In a move reminiscent of a 1980s European tour operator, Ctrip has started buying up hotel interests across China. [NB: Tnooz post on both those deals]

Three years of deals from three companies

The reasons behind these deals are clear: each of the companies is very different but they share the common traits of being dominant in their home market and unable (mainly through market factors) to replicate outside of their home market the elements that drove that dominance.

Hence the need to use the big domestically generated cash-lows to fund international growth.

I predict that there is more to come; that we should expect to see more deals by these companies in the next three years. I would also not be surprised to see one of these companies make a major play through a big ticket acquisition in either Europe or America.

As I said in part one, 2010 is Year of the App. Record breaking numbers of apps were developed and downloaded in 2010, transforming mobile phones from messaging devices with somewhat functional browsers to internet platforms trying to challenge the desktop as the primary online access device.

But two pieces are missing. The first element is the limited number of tools for app search and discovery.

In this part we talk about missing piece number two – the limited interoperability between apps and multi-tasking on mobile devices.

For app and mobile device developers there is a tension between the need to keep a mobile device stable (ie no crashing and long battery life) and the need to replicate the multi-tasking and application data sharing that we see on the desktop.

On the desktop I can move data between excel, powerpoint, firefox, etc with relative ease and keep all open at the same time.

But on a mobile device you have to exit each time and have real trouble getting the different apps to talk to each other.

I believe we will hit a plateau in the growth of mobile as an internet platform until such time as data can be moved between apps and mobile devices can multi-task.

Indeed, online access via mobiles will not be an activity of the majority of internet surfers until users can move between apps and get their data to move between apps.

Normally, when I am writing for the BOOT, I would come up with a prediction like this, publish it and be done with it.

This time I wanted to collect background thoughts and commentary from some experts to help bring this theory to life.

I emailed a number of executives directly involved in the development of apps and use of mobiles as a distribution channel and asked them some questions. Here is what they said…

GlobalMotion Media (creator of Everytrail) founder and CEO Joost Schreve:

“It’s very interesting to see the distinct approaches that iPhone and Android have taken [to interoperability and multi-tasking]. Apple is optimizing for a controlled user experience. They tend to limit possibilities in order to increase battery life, and improve stability and usability”.

While he believes that lack of interoperability and multi-tasking is a challenge, he is not overly worried. Schreve says: “Mobile behavior is typically more task-oriented than behavior in front of a computer,” concluding that the trick for developers is to be very focused.

“While I agree that there is demand for more data integration between apps, these use cases can be fulfilled very well with focused apps. Over time we will see more data integration between apps, in order for each app to be able to deliver a more complete user experience. In fact this movement is already under way. “

Appolicious’ vice president of product, Dan Hontz, agrees that the need for a balance between functionality and stability is not an overwhelming impediment for mobile take up.

“The limitations in processing power on mobile devices are why you don’t see multitasking like you do on the desktop. That said people use phones differently than they use desktop computers; you probably don’t need to be running a camera app while running a PDF viewer while running a game. Some multitasking makes sense – playing music with Pandora while you’re checking your email, for example. I think Apple’s strategy of providing limited multitasking makes sense — by limiting the processor cost while multitasking (and allowing just certain kinds of multitasking), the user’s experience on the device doesn’t degrade.”

Point Inside CEO Kevin Foreman thinks that full multi-tasking on mobiles is some way off – but he, too, thinks that usage growth will continue in the meantime.

“The lack of true multi-tasking certainly has NOT been a barrier to device take up, nor do we believe it will be in the future. People aren’t making the smartphone or app “buy decision” based on whether or not they can multi-task; they’re asking the question: will this device or this app a) entertain me, or b) help me in my daily life?”

He believes consumers will focus on less rather than more when it comes to apps and that interoperability will not be a key concern for now.

“We believe take up for useful services will continue unabated; however, there will likely be consolidation of use to fewer and fewer apps.  People don’t want to have a hundred apps on their phone…”

Foreman sheds some light on the reasons for limited interoperability in mobile apps, saying:

“Primarily a limitation of resources for developers. Even for large companies/brands there are limitations on resources, and a need to focus on core competencies.”

Foreman sees the solution for developers is to focus on opening their data to interconnectedness – that is APIs. He adds:

“We believe the near-term future of app interoperability is the approach we at Point Inside have taken, which is to focus on a particular core competency (in our case creating interactive indoor maps, with navigation, positioning and detailed points of interest) and offering that data or core piece of functionality to other app developers to integrate into their apps via robust APIs. “

Turning to the blogger, Joe Wilcox of Betanews, casts a vote in favour of multi-tasking and mobiles:

“People take multitasking for granted on the PC, which will make its absence more noticeable on the smartphone.”

It is clear from the current growth numbers that the lack of decent app discovery, app interoperability and app multi-tasking is not slowing the revolution.

Not yet anyway.  I’ll know that mobile internet has gone from revolutionary to dominant when I feel comfortable going to meetings, conferences, hotel visits etc with nothing more than my phone.

When the different users that make up me (the leisure version of me and the business version of me) can both use a smartphone as the primary connectivity device rather than as ancillary to my desktop/laptop connection.

To get to this position of mainstream usage of one small mobile device rather than the mobile/laptop combination the challenges of multi-tasking and interoperability will need to be solved.

Where do you stand on the importance of interoperability and multi-tasking in the growth of the mobile web?