Social Media and Marketing

The web has grown to the point where there’s too much information. Finding ways to filter out information and find what’s relevant to you is getting harder and harder.

Published: 11 Jul 2011

The web has grown to the point where there’s too much information. Finding ways to filter out information and find what’s relevant to you is getting harder and harder.

According to a report filed by delawareonline.com, Travis Katz, founder and CEO of travel recommendations site Gogobot, says “the model of Google doesn’t work at scale -- especially when it comes to things where taste matters”.

“Web 2.0 was centered on user-generated content, where anyone could be a publisher. We’re now in the third wave -- I call it a social wave,” reportedly said Katz.

In the same report, Katz predicted that the future of the Internet “is one where every page is going to be personalised. If you plan a trip to Paris, you shouldn’t see [search results listing] 900 hotels. You should see six hotels based on where you stayed before, the places you checked in at on Facebook and Foursquare and the places where your friends have stayed. It’s not something that's just relevant to travel; it’s something that makes sense for almost every part of the Internet.”

Using more “upper funnel” search terms

Online travel companies have been trying to create tools that work in the organic way people like to think about travel. A lot is being said about fuelling ideas, inspiration or even bargains/ deals.

In an interview with EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta late last year, Jane Butler, MD for Travel in the US at Google, shared: “At Google, we take a very user-centric approach, so we like to think about travel in five phases - Dreaming, Researching, Booking, Experiencing and Sharing - and I would definitely agree that there is potential for innovation in these early stages of the process. I think a few players have dabbled with some fun ideas on the more organic, unstructured way of thinking about travel in the ‘Dreaming’ and ‘Researching’ stages, but I think we’ve yet to see anything really break-through.”

Browsing content is a critical part of the research phase, however travel businesses must get better at communicating their unique value proposition or generating urgency in the buying process.

According to Butler, users are doing extensive research online when it comes to making travel plans; travel marketers need to put more effort into differentiating themselves and creating urgency.

Expanding on the same, Butler said: “Let’s take the differentiation point first. Travel marketers have typically used the web for direct-response purposes and clearly search is a fantastic DR vehicle. But the web also provides a very engaging platform for branding and highlighting a company’s unique value proposition. Being present in the ‘Research’ phase by using more “upper funnel” search terms (e.g., family vacations vs. insert-brand-name vacations) is one way to put your brand in front of potential customers. Having text, display, or video ads targeted to relevant content and audiences via the Google Display Network is another.”

When it comes to creating urgency, it is pointed out that remarketing is the best tool a marketer can use to prompt searchers to take action. Remarketing allows advertisers to re-engage users who’ve previously visited their websites as they browse any of the million-plus sites in the Google Display Network, according to Butler.

Social media – access to data

Social media, from a personalisation potential point of view, can be of great use.

Social media can be used in many ways to increase an organisation’s ability to deliver a personalised experience, says LikeCube’s co-founder Eleanor Ford.

“It provides simple access to some data about the user with little effort from them, which is great to address the challenge of dealing with anonymous users. It also can be used as a way to let users easily create data that will not only contains an interesting personalisation potential but also entice their friends and followers to create more data to be used in the same way. Learning how to interact with social media (e.g. via "likes" and "check-ins"), capturing this data and using it to best advantage is now a very relevant part of an organization's journey into personalisation,” according to Ford.