Social Media and Tourism

Our research into tourism and social media over the past two years has provided us, along with our clients, with some key insights into how tourists use social media. Among our key findings is that it is almost equal between males and females using social media to research destinations (52% female to 48% male) across the broad demographic range of 20-55+. When it comes to sharing photo’s and videos of their experiences however, that changes to 64% female and 36% male. This correlates to other consumer demographics where women are more likely to share experiences. When it comes to business travel however, men are 15% more likely to share their experiences from their travels.

Niche tourism markets are also very heavily engaged in social media for both planning trips, sharing experiences and recommending locations, things to do and where to stay. Tourism operators and authorities however, are seemingly still unsure about reaching out to niche markets online. Traditional marketing isn’t very cost effective for reaching niche markets for tourism, but online marketing, especially through social media, is. Niche markets are the most active in social media channels and can be effectively targeted and engaged.

In some of the projects we’ve worked on however, tourism authorities have focused on traditional mass markets and their engagement in social media. This would mean families, retirees or a broad demographic. They too are active in social media channels, but reaching them cost effectively either online or through traditional channels such as television, radio and print, is harder to do and remains more scattershot than targeted. Our research has shown that targeting tourist “segments” through social media, from niche markets to more defined segments (e.g. cruise lovers or value seekers) is a far more successful approach.

Through our work, we see we are at the forefront of this kind of tourism research into social media. And lets be clear, there is a definitive difference between monitoring your brand in social media and conducting social media research on tourism. Monitoring brings up conversations “now” and is limited in its ability to find true trends. Nor do any social media monitoring tools effectively (or to any degree) identify niche markets. Using social media monitoring tools is useful once you’ve done the initial research, engaged and have something to monitor. Using social media monitoring tools to research tourists use of social media will lead to disappointing results.

Tourism is a very hot topic across all social media channels and is one of the top three online topics of discussion and engagement. Tourism authorities and operators that research these opportunities and then engage may find significantly valuable new opportunities.

How Age Groups Use Social Media Differently

Over 30? Well, you prefer text-based content, you’re more likely to use Flickr and you’ll fuss over photo editing but rarely record, edit and upload a video. Under 30? You love video and if you’re female you’d prefer to edit photo’s than video.

These are just some of our findings into 2010 in our ongoing look at how we’re using Social Media channels and the technologies that product content. Remember, today, everyone is a producer.

Youth: This market, under 30, prefers video to photo’s, yet interestingly enough, women prefer to edit and then share photo’s whereas boys prefer to create, record, edit and share video content. Additionally, youth (under 30) are more likely to participate in marketing promotions that have some form of participation that includes ranking content, changing content or somehow manipulating outcomes.

Adults: Those of us over 30 (sadly I’m one), well, we like to mess with photo’s more than video and we are prolific when it comes to writing. In an analysis of blogs across North America (we sampled profiles indicating 30+ to over 40,000 blogs) we found that the +30 crowd actually reads, whereas the -30 crowd prefers to massage video and watch. Interesting hey?

Marketers…if you want to engage the under 30 market segment…give them something to do with your content. That’s what they’re interested in. Over 30…stop being boring, but we’ll share your content if it’s interesting. Boring content? Don’t waste your money. The Web really is about “action” and the moment you forget that, you lose.

Want more information? Give us a holler and we can let you know what’s happening by generations or age groups and we can slice it six ways from, well, boring old Sunday.

(Author: G. Crouch)

Social Media Is A Freekin’ Mess

After three years of analyzing Web and Social Media behaviour and engagement for clients and reading many other reports like those of PEW Internet, Forrester etc., I’d like to formally state that Social Media is a total and utter mess.

It’s just a messy place. In terms of information, both useful and not. Because it’s very hard to define what is or isn’t useful.

Just look at blogging platforms alone; there’s over 300 blogging platforms out there (i.e. Blogger, WordPress, TypePad) and then there’s the search engines for blogs…Google’s blog search, IceRocket and Technorati among the leaders. Recently when we looked at the results our system brought back from Google and compared them to IceRocket, we found Google had an average of 62.4% more spam and unrelated content than IceRocket and don’t get me started on Technorati.

Think Twitter is the only Microblog? It’s not. There’s over 170 different microblogging services being used. Think Facebook is the only Social Networking service? Yup, you guessed it. There’s over 40 of those and their fragmenting everyday.

Then there’s aggregator services that enable you to share all your information or suck it up into one place. Google’s Buzz is a kind of aggregator combined with participation.

All of this to say; Social Media is a massive tangle of data.

It’s not information until you can make sense of it. There are a number of “reputation management” tools out there that enable some form of aggregation of the data into information, but so far none have proven overly useful.

There’s nothing wrong with this messy place called Social Media. It’s part of the progress. It’s wonderful because ideas are being shared, new approaches being developed towards a better world and well, that’s good.

It’s just  a messy, unmanaged mess right now. And it likely will be for a while yet. This creates a nightmare for marketers, PR pro’s, businesses, government and the average citizen.

To me, Social Media will evolve to more simple systems. Such complexity is not sustainable.

What do you think?

(Author: G. Crouch, CEO)

How Consumers Are Shaping Social Media Apps in 2010

Perhaps “killing” is an aggressive word, another might be maturation or natural selection. Our nearly three years of researching consumer and citizen behaviour in Social Media has taught us a lot and enabled us to see some interesting trends now that we’ve been at it a while. Chief among them now is how people are deciding the fate of existing and new Social Media apps and services. We suspect 2010 may be a year of attrition and consolidation.

Consumers in the U.S., Canada and England tend to actively (i.e. create content and interact) use only 3 services on a regular basis (more than 4 hours per week.) Other services are used about once every two weeks, on average.  This is usually tends to be one Social Network app (i.e. Facebook or Bebo), one time-sensitive app (i.e. Twitter or Instant Messaging) and one video app (i.e. YouTube.)

Other services that fall behind the actively used ones are photo sharing or editing (Flickr, PhotoBucket or PicNik), blogs and Wiki’s.

We can clearly see the economic concept of the Solidarity Value at work in Social Media. As in the more people using a service the more inherent value it gains, socially and economically. Twitter owns the microblog space; Plurk and Identi.ca lost out. Facebook owns the Social Network space, MySpace is on a steady decline and lost that race. Facebook has already acquired FriendFeed in August of 2009.

But what we’re also seeing is an interesting trend towards specialized Social Networking sites; such as for cultures, hobbies or life-interests. This trend is just emerging as far as we’re seeing, but has been trending upwards over the past 6 months. For marketers, we suggest monitoring this trend since people tend to spend the most time on the things that they are most passionate about.Obviously.

As we have an abundance of information and a scarcity of attention, the same goes for Social Media services – people can only spend so much time using any set of services. And now we’re starting to see habits emerge as these channels and services become more commonplace in our daily media consumption lives.

When it comes to age groups and this pattern, it repeats itself. In fact, the younger the age, the more “closed” loop they like their services to be (i.e. txt messaging, IMing and Facebook.) Added to this factor is the increasing “interoperability” between services (i.e. aggregating your activities into one place like Buzz or Facebook.) More on that later.

All of this is  pointing to a trend that will see  a significant increase in the fight to gain peoples membership in free and freemium services and to keep them there. That will be a tough challenge ahead.

(Author: Giles Crouch)

A Reality Check on Social Media Crises

United and the broken guitar, moms insulted by Motrin, snotty-nosed Domino’s pizza employees; they’ve been analyzed and analyzed. Each element picked apart and pontificated over. I too am guilty of that. Let’s face it, they make fur juicy fodder to citizens alike and those of us engaged in the social mediasphere. Now it’s about to get a lot harder for Joe-citizen to get anywhere with social media.

Time to take a deep breath, step back and look at it from a different perspective. The likelihood of many of them happening again, to the degree that they did, is minimal. Each has changed an industry; mostly for the better. But what happens after the first big crisis in each industry?

United wasn’t the first airline to suffer from a social media crises and it wasn’t the first time United suffered from social media either. JetBlue gets that honour on valentine’s day 2007. Taco Bell will likely wear the unadorned crown of first for restaurants in 2006 with the rat scare and Domino‘s second.

Most of the social media crises have happened with major brands. Not all, however; we’ve dealt with smaller businesses facing more localized crises. These big crises are likely to happen again, but one can speculate they’ll be in different industries. The airline industry groaned yet again with the United issue. Food services with Domino’s.

If citizens want to truly make a point with a negative experience via a major brand, they’ll need to become increasingly creative. Dave Carrol wrote a great tune and added a video behind it. Simply text blogging his experience likely wouldn’t have worked. We picked up on the Motrin issue more because it took a series of practitioners involved in Social Media to push out the message on how flustered moms were.

While it’s not impossible that another video of fast-food employees doing gross things to customer orders couldn’t go big, it’s not likely to happen to the degree it did with Domino’s.

There are still a lot of industries to be hit in a negative way, but as we did our research into the discussion volume around these crises, we found that each time around (with only United and the guitar incident as an exception) the volume of discussion decreased as did the viral factor and the Echo Ratio increased (the story stayed quite contained.)

Essentially, we’re saying that it’s going to get harder for the average Joe to use social media as an effective weapon for change or compensation when done wrong. Messages are 30% less viral the second time around in an industry and 65% less the third time around. The story will also have less of a long-tail effect; although it can stay alive forever in the digital world of Cyburbia.

While this can still be damaging to a company’s bottom-line, it’s less so than before; unless your industry hasn’t been hit. In that case, brace yourself if you’re the first to be targeted. Business will (and are) get savvier in dealing with them and citizens will have to work harder to get the message out.