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 current ones like .com, .net and .org to a wide assortment of character strings.

…the switch would create an expensive nightmare for marketers, raising cyber-squatting and copyright issues that could cost marketers considerable money to fight.

Hopefully comments and concerns such as this one will cause ICANN to reconsider the current domain extension plan.
http://adage.com/digital/

Social Media Usage in the Travel Industry – Our counterparts at GoSeeTell are currently surveying members and peers within the travel industry on their current usage, strategy and thoughts on social media and social media marketing.

Numerous studies claim that social media sites like the ones mentioned above have a huge impact on buying behaviors, especially for travel products.  How are destination marketing organizations (DMOs) reacting? What are best practices? Is this a fad or is social media here to stay? To find out answers we have put together this survey. It is being sent to over 100 DMOs all over the United States.  The purpose of this research is to determine the current use of social media in the US tourism industry.

So, if you are a CVB or DMO within the US, please consider taking the survey.  Data and reports such as this one will benefit the entire industry as we develop new marketing channels.

People Don’t Trust Company Blogs – Crap.  Really?  Only 16% of you trust our company blog? By this point, most of you have seen the report from Forrester that consumers don’t trust company blogs.  Thankfully, Forrester went on to explain that stance:

Make no mistake. This is not a plea to give up on blogging.

It is a plea to be thoughtful in how and why you blog.

…This means that if you blog, your goal should be to create a blog about which people say “I like that – I don’t think of it as a company blog…

Perfect.  Honestly, who wants to read a blog that does nothing but praise the Duracell battery company (for example) and how innovative it is?  No one.  Consumers want some kind of value in return for their time spent reading the blog.  Quality content.

If you have hordes of fans, blog for them. For the other 99% of brands it doesn’t apply.

The same idea of passion that we have talked about in relation to SMS marketing and Facebook also applies here.  Hordes of fans = passionate.  Or, they will read a blog about your product.  Case in point, the Coca-Cola Conversations blog.  A blog dedicated to Coke history and memorabilia.

Blogging is still an excellent medium to connect, market and converse about your product, but only becomes truly beneficial with quality content and conversation from a consumer point of view.

As for the *, while the statistic of 16% is a headline maker, it does not tell the whole story.  So, don’t plan on breaking out that little chestnut of knowledge at your next board meeting…unless you have time for the rest of the story.
http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/

Seriously, .hotel?

Simply log on to marriott.marriott for more info.

Worried about having to shell out millions of dollars to protect their brands, several major companies are protesting the launch of a slew of new top-level domains — the suffixes like “.com” that appear at the end of Web-site names.

Verizon Communications, Marriott International and New York Life Insurance are among the companies arguing that the new domains could open the flood gates to Internet fraud and drastically increase their costs of doing business online. The companies also say there couldn’t be a worse time than a down economy to saddle them with the added expense.

The organization that oversees the Internet, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, plans to start selling the rights to an unlimited number of top-level domains next year. These domains are likely to take their names from popular subjects, types of businesses, geographic locations or even brand names, such as .bank, .hotel, .nyc or .verizon.  >>Full Story

Thoughts// A good article on a frankly ridiculous subject that has been floating around interactive marketing circles for a while.  ICANN, the masterminds at the control of this domain name headache, says that the current .com domain name landscape is ‘too crowded‘ and offering new domain extensions such as ‘.bank, .hotel, .nyc or .verizon‘ is the answer.

Amazing.

As some of our loyal members know, we are not so high on the current state of the .travel domain name, let alone any other domain name that does not end in .com.

I could rewrite the entire article, but it addresses the issue perfectly:

Companies fear that if they don’t register their trademarks at the new domains, their brand names could be hijacked, leading to mistrust of their brands, as well as Internet scams.

Companies are debating whether they should buy up the rights to operate their own brand-specific domains, such as .marriott or .nylife. They also are looking at registering their trademarks for more generic domains. For example, Marriott is considering acquiring the rights to Marriott.nyc, Marriott.travel or Marriott.vacations.

The application fee to operate a new top-level domain is $185,000. Companies that buy the rights to one would also bear the technical costs of running a registry, as well as the marketing costs of drawing consumers to the new sites.

Industry executives say consumers are likely to stick with their current Web-surfing habits, so they expect the new domains to have little business purpose. Web surfers are more apt to continuing visiting sites with the standard .com suffix, such as NYLife.com, instead of visiting a Web site with the address customerservice.nylife, says New York LIfe’s Mr. Hittel.

“It is difficult enough to get consumers to visit any domain name that doesn’t end with .com,” he says.

Companies say they have been through this before, pointing to earlier launches of such domains as .asia or .eu. They bought up hundreds of thousands of domains pre-emptively but say these sites either sit dormant or fail to generate traffic.

I could not have said it better myself.