A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Long Tail, a syndrom analysed by Chris Anderson’s which delves into the economic models of Amazon and Netflix.
You will ask me how the Long Tail can/is applied in the travel and tourism industry? well, voila, I now have more information for you. Travolution, a site dedicated to the online travel industry has an objective to research and analyse the Long Tail syndrom within the travel industry.
Enjoy your reading!
Sunday 9am. Back online, as you do. I haven’t dreamt last nite, I ‘bleamt’. All these thoughts were on my mind… blog analytics, driving traffic, plugins to make my life easier… at least I do not have to worry about content this morning!
I should be wary of doing what I preach and not focusing too much on the hole otherwise I will for sure miss the donut. It is a lovely day on Australia’s Gold Coast, not a cloud in the sky (mind you, they are very rare here!), a bit chilli though. Ugg boots are out. This laptop should be packed away and I should be mingling with the locals sipping coffee and fresh air. but no, my processor is still running. And on full blast.
This morning my goal was to re-caliber my thoughts. Hence the Blog 101 title to this post. Not approaching the Online Tourism Marketing just yet but the water is still simmering on the side. I decided to further delve into the Small Marketing Ideas forum and find some kind of list that would allow me to further advance my blog. I found this gem: StepForth Tutorial: Blogs 101, Part 1.
The other thing that almost prevented my peaceful sleep was Blog Analytics. Or shall I say “Glog Analytics”. I knew deep down inside of me that I would be able to integrate my blog onto Google Analytics. Better even, someone would definitely have come up with a WordPress Plugin (keep in mind that I had never heard about WordPress until 2 days ago… but I knew what a plugin was!). A noble Dutch man - Wilfred van der Deijl - had designed one: ultimate google analytics.
Now I am set, well, at least I am “started”. I just need to build content. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Before I do go and tackle the coffee sipping situation, I also want to let you know about an easy listening way of tackling the blogworld: sit back, relax and listen to this short and rich podcast note to self, think before you write and do not forget to save the url of great tools. I will find it again and keep you posted. One great tool was discussed: HitTail. HitTail is the only product that reveals in real time which keywords people use to find your website. When acted on, they can increase the natural search traffic to your website. Once again, here I come with my WordPress Plugin expertise: Sourjya has created a plugin to install the HitTail code on WordPress. HitTails’ approach is based on The Long Tail concept.
Enough for now! Go get those fab plug-ins!
How often have you looked at the amount hotels charge for internet access and have wondered when this saga was ever going to stop?
When I lived in Switzerland, I didn’t even think twice about having free internet access in any hotel or serviced apartment I stayed at. I simply took it for granted. Then I moved to Australia and it was a totally different ballgame. I quickly realised that, in 2005, on the Gold Coast, there was almost no free internet Hot Spot, or you had to stand on one foot, with your laptop high up in the air trying to get half a bar of signal. The only functional one that I found was at Gloria Jeans in Surfers Paradise, and it wasn’t free. I even tried the libraries… you should have seen the look on the face of the librarian when I mentioned “Wi-Fi” or Broadband. They did have PC’s with access to the internet in the library, but I was not able to get on my Hotmail as it was apparently linked to a Hot X rated site… I ended up going to my former university, borrowing my ex flatmate’s login and surfing the net, wirelessly, from the uni’s coffee shop, at high speed, and for free.
Two years down there track, there are a few more Hot Spots on Australia’s Gold Coast, where you can connect using Telstra or Optus. Not a very good idea I am telling you if are planning or have to use your own credit card. If you are traveling, you might be lucky if your hotel or serviced apartment has Broadband or Wi-Fi and is not planning to charge you a mint.
There was a relevant article in today’s Boss Magazine of the Australian Financial Review called: Superhighway Robbery: Internet access on the road is a necessity, not a luxury… a lot of hotels still treat it as an extra. I have typed it below for your convenience…
Hotels have always been known for their bizarre parallel economies. Witness the outrageously marked-up mini-bar, where the most mediocre half-bottle of local vino can cost you $25, and the pricing for soft drinks, chocolate bars and nuts seems to be benchmarked against what you’d pay in London, perhaps, or Tokyo. Ditto the phone call, a relatively cheap and simple means of communication that assumes an entirely unaffordable guide inside the rarefied walls of a hotel suite. Perhaps it’s not the surprising, then, that many hotels, having belatedly plugged into the internet revolution, are charging guests greedy sums for the privilege of getting online. Daily internet access rates seem to average around $5-$30 – a fee that seems difficult to justify given it’s almost as much as you’d pay in a month for your broadband service at home. (more…)
I was having lunch with one of my best friends yesterday and was happily running her through the wonders of the web and how she had to tackle the whole online space in order for her business to reap bigger rewards…
And then this morning, 6.30 am, when I open to the world (aka press the “power” button on my airplane-sized laptop), I stumble upon an article in the Advertising Age that I wish I had been able to show my friend yesterday:
here is an extract :
All of us know the web has a huge impact on our experience of brands, products and services. As one point of data, the internet now represents nearly 20% of media consumption, a significant measure compared to newspapers (about 5%) and magazines (about 3%), according to ACNielsen.
Talk about needing to take it seriously.
So here’s the key question: Do you have a relevant web strategy? Or do you have a traditional marketing strategy with advertising, demand-generation campaigns and a PR program, with some web stuff added as an afterthought?
If you would like to know more, …. (more…)
Being a newbie in this blogging world, I have spent many hours searching the web for similar content. Google was already my best friend but I have now quadrupled my knowledge of its functionalities… did you know that Google was a calculator? Try 4+3 in the Google toolbar! Did you know that Google was also a dictionray? Try define: vertical market.
I have discovered an extremely informative and well designed blog: Tourism INTERNET marketing blog by Jens Thraenhart. It will only take you a split second to realise how experience Jens is in the online tourism blogosphere. Not only is its content extremely relevant to the online tourism industry but Jens also uses creativity to the max plugging in Youtube video updates, papers and market intelligence on Web 2.0 and tourism and links to worldwide articles on the subject of tourism, travel and online marketing.
I do hope to be able to take this blog, aka “the holy donut” and bring it to the level of Jen’s blog. It might take a while, but as we say in French “la patience est la mere des vertus” (literally: patience is the mother of all virtues). After all, Jens’ blog started in January 2006, and “the donut” only came out of the deep fryer less than a month ago!
Please go ahead and visit Jen’s blog and leave a comment, bloggers love it. If you know of other tourism blogs, please let me know and I will use the links to increase my page rank! As Lance Armstrong says in one of the most inspiring book I have ever read: Every Second Counts (or every link counts?). I shall leave you with this thought…
How to add RSS buttons and code to your blog?
It seems pretty straight forward you would think. “Just google it” I told myself… well, the answer is no. Actually, I thought I had found a fantastic side explaining how to do so but after 5 minutes of contemplating the explanations, I realised that Lorelle was explaining how to add – within your blog – updated information on other blogs! If you are interested there it is: How to use RSS feeds on your Wordpress site
I do understand what RSS and feeds are. If you don’t, I highly recommend the following 3.43 minute Youtube video by Commoncraft
.
Commoncraft also has another awesome video explaining what on earth are Wikis and how they work:
But translating this knowledge into action is another pair of sleeves as we say in French! See, there are a few things to consider here:
1. You need to access a free news feed management provider such as FeedBurner which is now owned by Google. FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters and other web-based content publishers. Trust me, getting the FeedBurner side of things organized was a piece of cake. What it gives you is your own url that you will integrate in your Wordpress options (using the plugin – read below)
2. Now that I have that custom feed created, what next? I went and got myself a plugin, as you do. I fell for Chicklet Creator Wordpress Plugin as it dealt with both giving me buttons and generating the code to link these buttons to my custom feed from feedburner. Very easy to install, just follow the instructions and remember that if your icons to not appear once you have activated the plugin, it is because your FTP client has not uploaded the subfolder with their images!
3. last but not least, I now have the buttons, and the code, but they are not IN my blog! Where do I physically copy and paste the code in the css code??? This one was pretty tough, especially as the css lingo still sounds like Korean to me. Let me run you through how I tackled that issue: I did a view source on my blog homepage and searched for titles that I then searched for in the css stylesheet. Then, I inserted the code that the Chicklet Creator plugin provided me with right there. And it works! My buttons (or Chicklets as I am meant to call them) now appear on the left, simply because I am yet to find where in my fantastic 3k2 theme is the code for the right column!
Et voila, it only took me about a week to get this done, but hopefully this post will help people that are in the same situation as me! Please share your thoughts and / or comments and I will update this post accordingly to make it more accurate!
Being in charge of Market Intelligence in the Tourism industry, I am well aware of where and when different publications and stats are released. However, I realise that if I get run over by a bus, my clients and colleagues will be left with Google only as a best friend! I think it is about time I put a few of these valuable links together… I will not be updating these on a daily basis but will try to keep an eye out for changes and make sure I amend this post!
Australia
Travel Daily
Travelmole
Australian Tourism Export Council
Sustainable Tourism CRC Newsletter
Queensland Tourism Industry Council
Tourism Australia Essentials Newsletter
The ICE news
Tourism Research Australia & Tourism Research Australia free publications
Department of Industry Tourism and Resources
Australian Bureau of Statistics (including hotel occupancy)
Tourism Forecasting Committee
Australian Federation of Travel Agents
Northern Territory Tourist Commission
South Australian Tourism Commission
Tourism New South Wales -
Tourism Tasmania
Tourism Victoria
QLD Specific
Tourism Queensland & Tourism Queensland free market intelligence
Queensland Smart State
Statistics Queensland (OESR - Office of Economic & Statistical Research)
World
Cornell Center for Hospitality Research News
Deloitte Research Alerts
Australian Regional Tourism Research Centre
International Air Transport Association (IATA)
World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC)
Caravan Industry RV and Accommodation Industry of Australia
Ecotourism Australia -
World Tourism Organisation - World Tourism Organisation Barometer Newsletter
Travel and Tourism Research Association
Tourism and Transport Forum
European Travel Commission
Market Specific Outbound:
Outbound from Japan
Outbound from China
Business Tourism Specific
International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) ICCA Publications
Tourism Events Australia
Tourism Blogs
http://jensthraenhart.com/cblog/
Airport and Airlines
Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation Peanuts Newsletter
Brisbane Airport Corporation
Gold Coast Airport
Queensland Airports Limited
