I have only been playing with it for a few minutes but I am already a big fan of Apture, a beta service which allows you to link online text with rich media pop-ups in a fast and unobtrusive way.
Take a look at the travel blog example on their website to see how you can weave audio, video and reference material into your narrative.
Or just hover over this link to watch Peter Kay (just for the hell of it).
Apture works via a piece of javascript in the body of the page. To add links you call up your site, hit a hot key, sign in and then choose publicly available material or upload your own.
Unfortunately I haven’t thought of a pre-press work-around for WordPress yet. In other words it looks as if you have to publish first and then go back to your blog and add the media - which might be too slow for anyone quick on the draw with my feed.
I could probably spend days, months playing with Intel’s Mash Maker toy but, frankly, I would rather let somebody else do it and then maybe they could write a Dummies Guide for those of us with other stuff to do - like work.
However, if you have a few millennia to spare, download the extension and have a go.
It seems there are real possibilities for travel tweaking.
The open application programming interface allows users to write their own widgets and add them to other pages. For example, Mash Maker can be added to a travel site to show the leg room for all flights that are displayed in a flight search, Intel said. Or, a user could add a map, a user rating bar and a bar with the number of stars a hotel has to a hotel search site.
We just returned from a short family break at the Isle of Eriska. Stunning: weather, facilities, service. This is one of those places which constantly evolves (new spa suites, water garden, statuary) while retaining its essential character.
That character comes across in spades in the Isle of Eriska blog. I was glad to hear Beppo’s updates are really popular with guests. I am not sure the blog is much of a selling tool at the moment but it certainly keeps loyal fans happy.
Once you have polished off the nightly after-dinner tray of chocolate truffles in the drawing room, you hardly need to find more chocolate on your pillow. Instead there is an Eriska bookmark with the blog address, encouraging you to stay in touch. Good idea.
Update: I just found this in a TripAdvisor review:
“A nice surprise after returning was finding a blog that Beppo, the owner of the island with his brother, posts each day about what’s happening at The Big House….A great way to make the experience continue!”
I find plenty of cynicism in the hotel business about the value of blogs in their online marketing. That is why it is encouraging to read recent comments from Scott Allison, a Marriott VP, on the subject of Bill Marriott’s blog.
As reported on the Idea Hatching, Allison considers his boss’s blog to be very successful.
Even our competitors have acknowledged the blog as a competitive win for Marriott. Not only has it provided a great channel for customers, it also allows him to very personally communicate things that are important to him. The blog has also encouraged Marriott to expand the initiative to other Marriott executives including our corporate executive chef.
He continues:
Because Bill Marriott believes that he is first a foremost a hotelier, one of the side benefits has been the buzz generated by people who blog with him, and then link to a page to make a reservation - revenue from people who came through what wasn’t originally intended as a booking channel.
Also:
Fortunately many people read his blog and interact with us through this exciting channel, and it has definitely contributed to shifting traffic to the brand site with 80% of e-commerce being transacted on Marriott.com.
You may not have a Bill Marriott at the top of your organisation but the very idea of additional revenue generated via his blog ought to spark some interest.
It’s not funny for the stranded passengers but I am afraid I clutched my sides when I read this from Marketing Week:
Top BA marketers roll up sleeves to clear T5 chaos
“British Airways has been forced to draft its top marketers onto the shop floor as part of the efforts to alleviate the chaos at Terminal 5. Tiffany Hall, BA’s head of marketing and distribution, and Stuart Beamish, head of loyalty, in charge of BA Miles and Executive Club, have joined volunteer teams helping staff working in the terminal, as they try to restore the airline’s battered reputation.”
Yes, it’s peripheral to the situation and no, it won’t get people reunited with their bags any quicker, but there is just so much to say about the online side of the T5 debacle and how badly the communications were set up.
And I seriously doubted whether I would have time to say it when Sky News phoned last Friday. There were also logistical (mainly geographical) problems to appearing on the show.
Fortunately Kevin May at Travolution was able to go on and did a great job, despite the remote control camera drifting skywards at one point - possibly in mute comment at BA’s ineptitude.
I was full of admiration for the way he handled the interview and relieved on my own behalf as, predictably, the questions bore little semblance to the discussion of BA’s online reputations which had gone on with the producer earlier. TV always does that to you. Never trust TV people. Particularly news. I know: I married one.
Anyway - I had a meeting with some of BA’s dot com execs last year when we talked about incorporating conversational media into the main site. Not necessarily full-blown, hippy-thinking, unwashed-hordes-at-the-gate forums but just the idea of a personal voice or two cutting through marketing-speak.
In the end (and I heavily paraphrase) they were too scared of adding anything to ba.com which did not drive traffic directly into the booking engine to countenance such a flippant waste of pixels and signal. Just like an awful lot of flights last week then, the idea didn’t fly.
How I wish BA would stop being so arrogant, come down from 33,000 feet and start engaging with us, their wallet-emptying passengers, in a meaningful, authentic and personal way.
It would have been a simple business to set up a blog way ahead of T5 opening - Eurostar did that (sort of) before the move to St Pancras. Apart from keeping us up-to-date with progress, problems, stellar efforts of staff and contractors, they then would have had an established - human, rapidly-updated - platform to use as part of their crisis comms. when it all went wrong.
But they didn’t. Instead we get the usual - Willie Walsh apologising to the national media on the lunchtime news - as well as the unusual, but highly deserved: the head of marketing chipping her nails (photo call anyone?) in the terminal while shipping your cases off to that great lost luggage depot in the east, a.k.a Italy.
I was talking reviews to a hotel owner the other day and suggested they should track down some of the people leaving glowing reports on TipAdvisor and send them, I don’t know, a bar voucher for their next visit or even just a note of thanks.
Of course, that only works if their TripAdvisor username tallies in any way with the hotel booking or they could identify the guest by date, room or specific incident but it could be worth the effort.
Would that be too pushy? I don’t think so. What do you think?
While following the trail of my last post, I noticed Iain Tait had a good example of online relations to relate. He gave Make Mine a Builder’s tea a rave mention in his blog and subsequently the people behind the brew sent him 80 tea bags and a souvenir mug. “But the thing that made it super-special is that it was a total surprise. They’d gone out and done all the legwork themselves. They hadn’t emailed me to ask what my postal address was. They’d gone and figured it all out on their own. So when it arrived it was a genuine moment of surprise and delight. (In case you’re not a jaded industry hack ’surprise and delight’ is pretty much the thing that everyone talks about doing to make their customers like them better).”
I do this to my son all the time. “Look at the picture, now look at your food. Look at the picture, go on, now look at the food”. He is going to grow up to be so cynical.
Via Scamp and so many others, here is a German site where they compare images of food as it is packaged and marketed and the more mundane reality.
James Cherkoff must have been eating fish for breakfast because this is the brainiest post I have read today.
He was approached by a PR firm wanting help to pitch to bloggers. His subsequent blog post explains why, if you want to be a social media millionaire (ok, it’s a metaphor) a traditional PR mindset doesn’t work in our new media landscape.
“The old-school don’t control the new networks - we do. You no longer have the option of ringing a friend. You have to ask the audience. “
To avoid a “you suck” post from an angry customer appearing prominently in your search results, it would probably be a good idea not to upset a well-known search engine specialist.
If you are a fan of Yahoo! Pipes and have used the service to mash up feeds you will almost certainly be cock-a-hoop at the latest development: badges. Create your list of feeds or populate a map with Flickr photos, hit the badges link and they serve up the code for your blog or static website.
This one combines results for Napa Wineries from Yahoo! Local and photos of the vicinity fed from Flickr.
Penguin Books has launched a new project called We Tell Stories. According to the Penguin blog, it is “part game, part exercise in digital storytelling”. The first tale, The 21 Steps by Charles Cummings, cleverly combines its story with a Google Map adventure. This is a serious time-waster. Sit back, read, click the markers and you soon find yourself on the train to Heathrow. Scary prospect on a bank holiday weekend.
To enter the competition, you have to read all the stories posted as they unfold (weekly) and then answer six questions. The winner receives £13,000 worth of books. Enough even for a lengthy delay at Terminal 2.
My name is Neil MacLean. I am a new media strategist in the UK and this blog covers social media technologies and the travel business. I am particularly enthused by the impact of consumer generated content and how your customers can help you be found and trusted in a crowded marketplace. I am also guilty of spending too much time here experimenting with all the new tools of my trade.
