Travel 2.0 Year in Review. Or, How to Pass Time While at Work

Ah, the holidays, what a great time of the year.  Unfortunately, some of you are still at work this week.  I mean, the rest of us appreciate it, but how do you spend your seemingly endless minutes until New Year’s?  Well, if you are like us, the few days between Christmas and New Year’s provide [...]

Random Thoughts: This company’s on the fast track to the It List!

From a recent article on Rolling Stone about MTV’s  decision to forgo music programming in favor of additional reality shows.
“These new series reflect Generation ‘Why Not?’ — living, working and playing on their own terms, ‘adventure capitalists’ if you will, pursuing a variety of thrill-seeking, 2.0, express-yourself enterprises,” says MTV entertainment president Brian Graden.
Wow.  Great [...]

Travel Trends – Tweeting While Crashing, Web Video Use, Social Network Ads, A Mobile Future

Tweeting While Crashing – Airline crashes are near the top of the ‘things we don’t really like to talk about in the travel industry’ list, luckily, in the case of the recent Continental accident at Denver International Airport, few passengers were seriously injured.  And out of those 100 or so passengers, at least one was [...]

Email? Oh, right we can send email!

It’s an open secret that email marketing is the highest ROI tool at a marketer’s disposal. It’s more cost-effective than direct-mail, paid search and a wide array of other tactics. So it’s no surprise that email is seeing even more action than usual now that the economy’s officially in recession and marketing budgets are flat [...]

Travel Trends – .youarecrazy, Social Media Survey, Consumers Don’t Trust Blogs*

.youarecrazy – Finally, a few more rational individuals, and in this case organizations, have begun to question ICANN’s absurd recommendation of additional top level domains.  Domains such as .delta, .motel or the ever-popular, .courtyardbymarriott.
The Association of National Advertisers is sounding a big warning about a proposal to open up top level internet domain names from [...]

The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World

For marketers, Web 2.0 offers a remarkable new opportunity to engage consumers. If only they knew how to do it.  That’s where this article aims to help. We interviewed more than 30 executives and managers in both large and small organizations that are at the forefront of experimenting with Web 2.0 tools. From those conversations [...]

Travel Trends – Display + Search = Clicks, Email, Smart Web Users, App Graveyard

Display + Search = Clicks – Before we dive into the numbers, realize that the results are from a company that sells display ads. The numbers are probably not skewed in their favor, but they do have an interest in display advertising.
With disclaimers out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff. [...]

S texting d nxt big thng? Or Marketing Via SMS

This week Nielsen published a new report / whitepaper titled The Short Code Marketing Opportunity, focusing on the rise of marketing and advertising via SMS or short code or text messaging. Certainly a timely topic and one that I was speaking about with my counterpart Josh (from the Scottsdale CVB) as recently as yesterday.
So, [...]

Travel Trends – Consumer Experiences, Millennial Mindset, Surviving the Downturn

Like many of you out there, we’re going through our biannual planning process at Travel Oregon. Having emerged from almost three weeks of media strategy meetings, reading research reports and other miscellaneous fun projects, this morning I’d love to share some recommended “critical reading” as you embark though planning for the next year.

The Millennial Mindset: [...]

Marketing in the World of the Web

Retailers will eventually recover from the consumption tailspin that threatens this holiday season. But quite apart from the recession, there are other, profound changes underway in the retail sector. As the evidence mounts about the power of social networks to reconfigure individual behavior, the crucial question facing industry is: How to leverage this phenomenon into [...]