Tourism INTERNET Marketing Blog 1.0

The UK Media firm Ellion published a neat and handy guide about "Web 2.0 in the Travel Industry" that offers realistic, practical techniques which can be applied to allow travel companies of any size to harness and benefit from the new networking phase of the world wide web.. If you haven't seen it, you can download it here.

Also my friend Felix Laboy at E-Site Marketing published a white paper on Web 2.0 in Travel last week. Maybe it's a trend but defintely worth looking at. Also good for Felix - he just sold his company to Sabre Holdings.

More and more Tourism Destinations, especially at the national level are now looking to go Web 2.0. The Austrian National Tourist Board launched phase one of their initiative, Cool Austria (I do have to say though that I love their cheesy and tacky tag line: "My land is your land"), and VisitSweden is developing theirs. And we at the CTC just launched a few initiatives ourselves; phase one of our community site on Canada.travel, our "We are more" contest, and our community on Yahoo! Canada.

Austria's site is a full fledged community site, where you can connect with fellow travellers, including maps mash-ups, and message boards. It seems though that CoolAustria has challenges generating content - one thing we anticipated early on, and solved through our partnership with Realtravel.

Sweden is looking to incorporate Personas, which should be interesting. 
But what Sweden did launch is a fun interactive map, leveraging Google Maps.

And then there are our friends from Australia who launched a partnership with American Express to build a site called MyAussieVacation. The site features mobile applications, Google Earth, and the Australia Travel Wiki (build in Wetpaint). Now, I do have to admit, the Australia Travel Wiki is cool, should be interesting to see if they can generate content, or if it is done with help via feeds...
Note: I told my friend Chris Clarke about Wetpaing and the Austrailia Travel Wiki, and we played around with it, and he launched a test wiki for the hospitality and travel industry at Chrispitality. I encourage all you tourism/hospitaltity marketing bloggers to sign up, add your blog, and get involved.

It seems like everybody is taking a slightly different approach, which is exciting to see. Both William Bakker and Karin Schmolgruber blogged about the new US version of Holland.com.  You can read their analysis, which I completely agree with.  The only thing to point out is that while I have to agree that from a website design standpoint, the site is clever (maybe a bit too much flash for my taste) and makes probably the best use of new social media web technologies, in my opnion it does not do a great job in stimulating a conversation with travelers - as Joe Buhler stressed in his recent blog post.  Now, I noticed a button on the side, promoting Holland's planned presence in Second Life, but would be interesting to see the connection.  Clever nevertheless, but even though the site includes tag clouds, and bookmarking tolls, I am not sure if this is the future of destination websites, and since designing a stylish side does not necessarily create value for consumers as well.  But in any event, a huge step ahead of most destination websites, especially at the national level.  So well done Holland, for taking that step!

I also support Holland's direction to test this approach in one market first, in this case the US market.  I am not sure though if this really a test managed by the Netherland Board of Tourism and Conventions' Headquarter back in Leidschendam, or if this initiatve was driven by the US office (smile). This is pretty common - I just recently wrote about New Zealand's social media campaign site for the UK.

I can say that many of our global market office at the Canadian Tourism Commission are extremely creative, and always looking to leverage the web and emerging technologies. One of these examples is our German office, that a couple of years ago launched a very innovative web initiative targeting women interested traveling to Canada.  This site, CeverWomen.de, not only makes use of blogs, newsletter, guestbook, online shop, forums, and podcasts, but it even has its own video site at CeverWomen.tv (including the new video magazine CANASTASIA). I think this is a very clever site (and I can say that as I was not involved in the conception of the idea), without lots of flash but some real conversations.  Women can even look for their Canadian Dream Man. (and the guys can look at dream girls...maybe the German CTC team discovered that they were also getting a loyal male audience...?)

Lots of stuff going on (and I probably missed a few sites), and all of this and more will be topics at the upcoming Canadian E-Tourism Strategy Conference, Canada-e-Connect, being held in conjunction with the first ever Canadian E-Tourism Awards, featuring an exciting User-Generated Content and Social Media component itself.  Stay tuned, and visit the Canada-e-Connect Blog as the awards will have a global twist as well...

Could this be the next big thing? Well, Bill Gates says, advertisors, like Alexa, and Yahoo should be worried about Agloco. Currently, the most popular Internet businesses are built on the power of social networks, who have become worth billions because other businesses realize that these social networks are generating huge advertising and marketing opportunities.. Agloco is the internet's first economic network. Unlike social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, Agloco will share it's profits - and stocks - with the members. While I'm not sure how successful it will be, one thing is clear - this company is getting huge amounts of attention. It just might be the next big thing online!

AGLOCO (short for a global company) has asked a simple question: "The users created the community, where’s their share of the profit?" From that very question, AGLOCO set out to create the Internet’s first Economic Network by using the strength of social networks to directly benefit the Members who build the community. Becoming a member of AGLOCO is as simple as completing a simple sign-up page (name, age, location and email address.). Once you’re a Member, you will be asked to then download the Viewbar™ software.

The Ways AGLOCO Makes Money for Its Members Search: Each time you use the Viewbar™ to do an Internet search, AGLOCO earns money from the search engine providers. (Google pays as much as $0.10 on average for each search that is directed to its search engine.)

Advertising: The AGLOCO's Viewbar™ displays ads that are specialized to you. Through clicking on an ad and/or making a purchase, AGLOCO receives a referral fee, which we then pass on to our Members.
(Please note: Individual members do not receive any compensation for clicking on ads in the Viewbar™, and the Viewbar™ can detect if someone is clicking ads in a fraudulent manner.)

How much can you earn: If you become a member, and refer five more members, and these members refer three members respectively (and assuming that an Agloco hour is valued at $1), you can earn $761 per month (with five member referrals), $1,522 (with ten member referrals), and over $3,000 with 20 member referrals. Currently, there is a five hour surfing maximum that you will get paid for per month.

At this point nobody can say how much an hour of surfing will be valued. This will certainly be dependent on the number of people signing up with Agloco as it gives Agloco the power to negotiate with companies. Presently, Agloco is working on listing the company on the London Stock Exchange. You can have a look at the Simmon Analysis of the Agloco business.

It is also not clear if Agloco is scaling back how much it is being paid for later members, but according to blog posts over the past days, the time to sign-up and potentially get the biggest share of the opportunity is now.

Is this a spam? Well, this potentially could look a spam, but having done a bit of research, it looks pretty legit. From a business model standpoint, it makes sense. All Agloco is attempting to create is a permission-based advertising model for companies, build on the foundation of creating a social community that receives benefits via making money by doing what they already doing, networking with friends a la Facebook style (according to blog posts in development), and building strong content by aggregating content via feeds and having members share content.

Agloco was developed by Stanford University students and graduates, as well as some of the same people that create AllAdvantage. AllAdvantage was a similar idea back in 1999, and was a vicitm to the dot-com bubble - however was able to pay out over $120 mill to its members in a short time period. More info here.

Now finally what has all of this to do with travel and tourism marketing? Well, maybe nothing, and maybe everything. If this is one of the new way how advertising is being sold, and if social networks are the new influencencers of travel (I personally believe that networks such as Facebook, but also very exclusive and by-invite only networks such as A Small World, as well as the travel specific communities such as dominant Tripadvisor, or sites such as RealTravel and IgoUgo, or the new Vibe Agent are the way how consumers make their purchase decisions), an ecomic social network such as Aloco can be the way where travel and tourism companies have to ready shift their advertising dollars to. This is a very dramatic shift in marketing, and it is one that make a lot of traditional marketers feel very uncomfortable and at some point probably will have some even lose their jobs! So, I recommend, that you check it out, sign-up, and watch it to be ready before it is to late - and you even get paid for doing so.

By the way, when you do sign up, you would make me very happy if you used my referral code (BBFS9841), or used this link: www.agloco.com/r/BBFS9841 - Thank you!

Also have a look at this interesting interview by well-know Internet blogger Robert Scobble (author of "The Naked Conversation") with members of the Agloco founding management team. Scoble gets downright skeptical at times, and he asks the questions you’re probably thinking right now.

Read some more details about Agloco below, especially concerning Privacy, and how it all works.

This weekend Canada kicks offs its hosting duties for the FIFA-U20 World Cup with players all aged under 20 years arriving from 24 different countries around the world to compete in a series of 52 soccer games planned across six different Canadian cities (click on the map to explore the locations). Its expected there will be over 700,000 international visitors in total and when they arrive they will all find that their cellphone and wireless internet needs will be supplied by Bell Canada. For fans with Bell Mobility cellphones equipped with the ability to play video over the network, Bell is going to offer a number of video highlights and “other exclusive highlights” during the event. Also, free webcasts are available online. As a side note, it is surprising that some of the major European teams did not qualify, including Germany (!!!!), Italy, England, France, and Holland.

It is interesting, shocking, and funny at the same time - and we see it constantly. Top marketing geniuses that get interviewed by the media, (TV, Radio, print newspaper and magazines, as well as online publications and blogs), to talk about their great innovative capaigns and cutting-edge marketing programs. At the same time, these same executives spend many times millions of dollars on websites and e-strategies. And, what happens during the interview??? Well, nothing! So many times, these marketing experts forget to mention the URL of their website that they spend so much effort promoting via advertising, search engine marketing, etc. Maybe I am missing something, but isn't an interview just another marketing opportunity to drive more traffic to the websites to increase awareness and sales? Well, it seems that many senior sales and marketing executives have forgotten their ABC's. In my book, ABC stands for the most fundamental rules of sales and marketing: ALWAYS BE CLOSING! And even Alec Baldwin's character agreed back in 1992 and preached the rule of ABC - "Always Be Closing" in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

Just a thought on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Vancouver. Happy Canada Day!