smallmedialarge

Phone us today for a free audit of your PR and online communications strategy.

About this site

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 study the impact of consumer generated content and analyse how your customers can help you be found and trusted in a crowded marketplace.

This blog is a playground and in a constant state of experimentation. Sorry about that. But please subscribe to my feed on the navigation bar.

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.

There’s always a moment in a certain kind of press trip when the subject turns to stuff you have eaten around the world. Now, if you really want to brag, see how many of these dubious dishes you can tick off.

How about broadcasting your next resort opening in Barbados? Instead of flying a posse of hacks out to the sun, send round a complimentary pina colada to the office and invite them to watch the event live on the internet (yes, yes! they’ll love that).

Webware reports that Seero has opened for business with a service intended to link live and archived videos to their locations - a “geo-broadcasting platform” no less. And it looks great. No, I can’t get any of the location videos to work right now, but it does look great.

Their business model unsurprisingly involves running ads relevant to the locations in the videos; which, is probably a lot more useful than serving ads related to tags.

The sort of equipment you need to broadcast live is detailed on the Seero help page and needless to say, it doesn’t involve a film crew and catering truck.

As the blurb goes: “If you are a citizen journalist, local tour guide, back road explorer, talented performer, or simply have a great destination to unveil, Seero is your platform to broadcast your world.”

Wait, do we need to be concerned about the citizen journalist on that list - aka disgruntled customer? “Coming to you live from our cockroach-infested cabana in Cancun! Zoom in on the map to see exactly where not to stay!”

We can all think of a few niche travel brands with loyal followings which could usefully experiment with their own social network. But, could they justify the cost of setting up their social test tube?

Enter LovdbyLess a new open source social network which, though not quite plug-and-play, makes the idea of setting up a network a whole lot easier.

Customers, colleagues or maybe just like-minded travellers can create accounts, set up profiles, catch up with friends, receive email updates, add comments and integrate photos and videos - yes, of your cruise, safari, 18-30 pub crawl - via Flickr and YouTube.

At the moment somebody with a large brain needs to be conversant with Ruby on Rails to get it up and running. However I am pretty sure it will soon be available as a one-click install through hosting providers.

Remember the New York Times’ article about “determined detractors”? One trait they didn’t mention was a tendency to play fast and loose with the yellow highlighter.

OK, I am being flippant but just look at this anti-Expedia site I turned up this morning. The customer is plainly upset and has been for a very long time.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of his case, which you can read about in plenty of detail, his sucks-site highlights the disadvantages of an automatic, or at least an impersonal, email response when your customer has a beef.

Now Mr D Tractor. has taken it upon himself a) to aggregate every scrap of Expedia complaint or criticism he can find while b) associating Expedia with all scams he can dig up on the internet. Ouch.

Wait, do I detect a similar design style in the equally critical Expedia News ? I think I do. Here you can download a black ribbon for your blog to show solidarity with the other Expedia haters.

Finally there is a campaign page over here to rally the troops against Expedia’s “unethical business practices” which is looking for a million members and so far seems to have found about two.

Interesting numbers from Michael Read at ComScore Europe who says 80% of Google and Microsoft’s traffic comes from outside the United States. Also the average internet user spends 23.4 hours on the internet every month, visits 42 web domains and views 2,331 page impressions.

The number of domains seems low and suggests pretty conservative surfing.

Read James Cridland’s post for more fun stats.

“I ended up standing outside the shower to lather up and then stepping back in — my arms clenched against my body — to rinse off.”

From today’s New York Times which reviews The Rockwell hotel in (shudder) Cromwell Road in London. It seems that discovering a decent bargain hotel in London continues to make tracking the Holy Grail look like finding a needle in a needle stack.

Any city which hosts conferences should take a look at Air Bed and Breakfast where like-minded (you have to hope) people provide low-cost accommodation for attendees flocking into town. No, the founders won’t really “turn the hotel industry on the head” but the idea of a friend, not a front desk will always have a market.

via Mashable.

The online+offline world of AIR applications has huge potential for the travel business, combining rich desktop experiences with constantly updated data. Here’s an interesting video from the Flash Blog about the creation of an AIR app designed to help American travel agents sell Disney. Apparently agents like nothing better than to whip out their scrap books whenever clients mention the Magic Kingdom. Now, Frog Design have produced an application allowing travel agents to drag and drop their Disney wonders onto a virtual scratchpad, while summoning up special offers, playing videos and assembling live quotes.

Well, it made me laugh. There’s not an awful lot to Forkd yet, the new social recipe site (I mean, my first foray turned up a recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich of all things) but I like it. And look at this: instead of beta on the logo - it’s a feta release. Boom boom.

After my last trip to Philadelphia I am not exactly in love with America’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Few people are; they have taken quite a kicking in mainstream, blogs and other media over the last few years.

They deserve credit, however, for opening at least one extra channel for travellers: Evolution of Security - the TSA’s blog, which took wings at the end of January.

It’s not a great name but at least the blog has an honest purpose: to let people know what their officials do, what they have done, what they are going to start doing and most importantly, why to all of the above.

Predictably, the comments are lively - this is as much a punch bag as a blog - but the posts themselves are well-written and the TSA blogging team, (”Hi, my name is Ethel and I’m from Wisconsin”), are doing a good job putting a human face on a much-criticised service.

via CNN

On the subject of the Tourism Innovation Day: I gave everything full marks on the feedback form except for the very dull Ben Vinod keynote at the top of the day, which was little more than a paean to his beloved Sabre.

He talked about the value of online marketing and encouraged everyone to dive in. But I felt an almost collective drop of the shoulders in his room full of mainly small tourism businesses when he told us Sabre optimises one million search keywords every day.

Thanks, there’s nothing like a little healthy competition.