Posted for Nancy Yearout
RE/MAX Properties of the Summit, Breckenridge, Colorado
nyearout@colorado.net
http://www.realestate-breckenridge.net
#Breckenridge, Colorado
It's April, and winter doesn't want to surrender its grip.
All you can
think about is getting out of the mountains and onto a beach after being cooped
up since November. Two social-media giants are salivating over the opportunity
to help connect you and a destination.
Google and Facebook are racing to
expand their empires into the next frontier for them — the travel industry. They
want to influence how consumers select places to spend their vacations and how
destinations sell themselves to prospective customers.
Representatives of
the two companies outlined the opportunities and how they plan to grab them for
roughly 1,200 attendees at the Mountain Travel Symposium on Wednesday in
Snowmass Village.
Both companies' strategies rely, to some extent, on
mining data from their users.
Erik Hawkins, Facebook's industry manager
for travel, claimed that the social-media site is “an underappreciated source of
travel bookings” and one the travel industry should tap to a greater
degree.
Facebook users, he said, are ripe to be “relying on the wisdom of
our friends to make choices.”
He advised the audience — which included
representatives of everything from skiing companies to tourist accommodations to
recreational firms — to use Facebook to connect with special
audiences.
“When Facebook first started, it was really a mad rush to get
friends,” Hawkins said. “What we've discovered is it's not how many friends you
have but who your friends are.”
Companies don't want to “junk up” their
Facebook pages with casual friends; they want to connect with their best
customers, Hawkins said. The company can help them accomplish the
goal.
“There are mechanisms now on Facebook where you know who your best
customers are and you can find them on Facebook and make them your friends,” he
said.
The target audience can be engaged “with frequent, lightweight
interactions,” Hawkins said. Essentially, Facebook will help companies plant
subtle ideas in potential customers' minds. One method is to amplify the
favorable actions of a person's friends. In a fictitious example, Facebook will
partner with Acme Hotel Co. to make sure that John Doe's friends on Facebook
know that he used www.acmehotels.com to book a trip to Cabo San Lucas,
Mexico.
Facebook reached 1 billion active users in September, according
to media reports. Hawkins acknowledged that some Facebook members take a
“holiday” of undetermined length but that others check their homepages every
day. Users average about 11 hours per month on the social-media site, he said.
The amount of content shared on social media is doubling every two years —
exponential growth —so, there is vast potential to tap friends' experiences to
sell vacations and for destinations to use their content to sell themselves,
Hawkins said.
Imagery on something like a Facebook page is key to how a
destination is perceived, according to Hawkins.
“Sometimes their images
are bad, and that's how they are representing themselves to millions and
millions of people,” he said. His advice was to “invest in high-quality
content.”
Rob Torres, Google's managing director for travel, concurred.
He is touting Google and its affiliate YouTube as great tools for the travel
industry.
YouTube has 1 billion unique users visiting the site each
month, according to media reports. There are 8.5 million video versions of the
“Harlem Shake” dance floating around on YouTube, a prime example of how
something goes viral and inspires imitations.
“Generation C” — which he
described as a group of people with a shared mindset rather than an age — has
exploded. They rely on video for entertainment rather than commercial
television, and they increasingly rely on video for research on topics such as
vacation destinations.
“If you're not reaching them by video, you should
be,” Torres said.
Content is king, he added, so places such as
mountain-resort hotels should post fresh video as often as they have something
relevant. But, Torres warned, the video shouldn't just be a “sales
push.”
“People see right through that,” he said.
User-generated
content, on the other hand, can be valuable in gaining credibility. Consumers
trust it, he claimed, so he encouraged attendees of the conference to make
arrangements with the producers to fold user-generated content into their
marketing when it's good.
Google also plans to harness the search-engine
capabilities it's famous for as well as its YouTube affiliate to get more
involved in the travel business.
Google will use “social indicators” from
a person's previous searches to help find “what might be interesting to you” in
future searches, Torres said. It results in more relevant content “upfront,” he
said.
It's also working on a program that uses travelers' search habits
and trip iteneraries to provide information on where they might want to eat or
what activities they might want to engage in. Google would make suggestions
rather than just provide answers, Torres said.
The Mountain Travel
Symposium will continue today with sessions to help attendees understand major
trends and issues unfolding in the travel industry.
Courtesy of the Summit Daily News
