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

Roger, Roger.

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 a tweeter.

Boulder software engineer Mike Wilson…needing to share his experience, he began twittering under the name 2DrinksBehind, broadcasting more than 30 short text messages about the crash and its aftermath and gaining national attention.

Mike’s tweets give the public instant insight into an experience that few of us will ever encounter.  Not to mention provides a perfect example of how interactive and social tools such as Twitter are increasing the role of citizen journalism and allowing real-time updates on major news stories.  A scary accident, but a fascinating perspective.
http://www.denverpost.com/

Web Video Users Are Day Clickers – A small, but still relevant report on web video usage by daypart or time of day from Nielsen Online.  While online video use is continuing to grow rapidly, the lack of saturated broadband internet access at home is creating different viewing patterns for consumers.

During the traditional nine-to-five work week, 65 percent of online video viewers streamed at least one piece of content in October.
http://www.mediaweek.com/

Social Networks: Millions of Users, Not So Many Marketers – Oy, another post about the difficulty of cracking the mythical social networking site advertising code.  How do we get these xx million people to pay attention to our ad on social networking site blank?

Anyone still questioning the efficacy of social network marketing needs to look only as far as the 2008 presidential election. Barack Obama rode a wave of social media support to the White House—using both established social networks and homegrown networking site My.BarackObama.com to build a database of millions of supporters.

But despite these and other success stories, the social network ad market is suffering. In fact, eMarketer significantly lowered its forecast for US social network ad spending.

How did Obama do it? Okay, I am going to give away the Barack Obama social media marketing secret…

People actually cared for and were passionate about his campaign!

There you go, that is it.  With that little bit of passion from the consumer, the Obama campaign could leverage any social network with their message.  Now, does the same formula apply to your brand or product?  Probably not.  Unless your organization has brand fans that are actively collecting everything with your logo on it…Coca Cola, Harley-Davidson or Apple…your social media marketing campaign on Facebook or MySpace is not going to be as easy as the Obama campaign made it look.
http://www.emarketer.com/

The Future of Mobile – Imagining the Internet: A History and Forecast from Elon University/Pew Internet Project is a great look into the future of technology from some of the best and brightest minds in the world.  You could spend a lot of your pre- and post-Christmas ‘work’ day on this site…at least you can say you did some work this week.  For this post, just a couple of highlights from the question about the future of mobile:

The mobile phone is just beginning to touch our digital lives. As these relatively inexpensive devices continue to improve in performance and connectivity, they will serve more as a “remote control” to many of our electronic touch points, such as: purchasing retail items through scanning, serving as an electronic passport, turning on our cars/GPS systems, translating text to talk, and video conferencing with our friends through our online accounts. As we improve visual projection and “plugging-in” to larger display systems- mobile phones can serve as the old laptop we once new and lugged.
–Drew Diskin, director of e-strategy, Johns Hopkins Medicine

Mobile phones also replace our wallets, doubling as identification devices, credit cards, and car keys using RFID tags or a similar technology.
–DJ Strouse, international relations and computer science student, University of Southern California

Mobile phones are affordable, portable, and a virtual appendage for several generations. It is only logical that it will become the primary Internet connection.
–Hinda Feige Greenberg, Ph.D., director of the information center for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, dedicated to improving healthcare for Americans

By 2020 the phone will be melting away into the environment, its functions provided by distributed, intelligent components. People will talk to—and through—their cars, desks, etc.
–Greg Laudeman, utilization catalyst and facilitator, community technology specialist, Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute

As screens get bigger everyone will use a mobile device to access the Internet. Everyone!
–Dan Lynch, founder of CyberCash Inc. and Interop Company and an Internet pioneer; board member of Santa Fe Institute; director of computing for SRI International in the late 1970s

Fantastic stuff…and that was only a fraction of the responses.  Happy reading over the next few days.
http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/

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. According to a new study from Specific Media, utilizing comScore data, display ads increase the volume of searches for a specific product or company.

Display and search are directly correlated, judging by a Specific Media study of comScore data. Brand- and segment-related searches (for cars, automakers and vehicle classes) jumped by more than 100% in several categories after consumers were exposed to display ads for those brands.

Search clickers exposed to display advertising were 22% more likely to produce a sale than those who were not exposed, according to a September 2008 study of Microsoft’s Engagement Mapping system by Atlas Solutions.

In a ClickZ article, Microsoft’s Young-Bean Song said the study results suggested that search alone was not a cure-all for customer acquisition.

Clearly, the interesting stat for everyone reading the Travel 2.0 blog is the huge lift that display ads deliver to searches in the travel and tourism industry.  Should this come as a surprise?  Display ads have quickly become the online equivalent of a print campaign, providing a good opportunity for branding, but low results and CTRs.  Until now data showing the effect of display on search was not clear, although most assumed a correlation was probable.

As for all of those articles and discussions about the death of the display ad, it appears that the display ad is still just as healthy as it’s printed brother.  When used and measured correctly (engagement!), the display is still an important piece of an overall interactive marketing campaign.

And, apparently, it drives searches in the travel space.
http://www.emarketer.com/

Email – Shocker! Old people like phones and email.  Young punks like text and social sites.

Personally, the stats about the boomer generation and communication preferences are not surprising.  What is surprising is the realization that the younger demographics…Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials, whatever…are rapidly changing their communication habits.  We have heard these stats before and even discussed them on the blog, however seeing charts such as this one should cause one to pause.  Look at the drop off in email usage from 25-34 to 15-17, nearly half in a span of 10 years.
http://www.emarketer.com/

Congrats Online Users, You Are Smart(er)! – For years, digital marketers had to keep track of broadband penetration rates, browsers used, and other signs that campaign messages would reach their intended targets. Now it’s largely taken for granted that most Internet users will be able to watch an online video, forward a link, or otherwise perform the tasks required in the average digital campaign.

http://www.emarketer.com/

Apps: The Newest Brand Graveyard – Ah, the promise of Facebook and all it’s possible applications.  Let’s do the math, Facebook has 130 million users + a cool app = success!  If only it were that easy.

…Nike global director of digital media Stefan Olander explained how the brand saw its mission as building community through applications. He highlighted a new initiative: the Ballers Network, a robust Facebook application built by digital shop R/GA for basketball players to find games and manage leagues. On its Web site, Nike promises it will “revolutionize the way players around the world connect online and compete on the court.”

Six months later, Nike is confronting a dilemma familiar to many brands that charged headlong onto Facebook: very few people use Ballers Network. Despite its global ambitions and support in three languages, the application has a mere 3,400 users per month. According to Nike, it’s still testing the application.

3,400 is a pretty small number and if my calculations are correct, only about 0.002615% of Facebook users interact with the app.  What happened?  How does an organization such as Nike, clearly one of the leaders in the social media marketing (and marketing in general) field fail to take advantage of 130 million people on a social network?

The theory is that branded applications are, well, too branded and too complex for daily use.

“It’s pretty clear building [brand] applications isn’t working.”

Application experts pointed to several other reasons so many top brands have fallen short. In some cases, they said, brand apps are too complicated. Some provide little worthwhile interactivity and are overly branded.

“Marketers want to build something that’s product and marketing first,” he said. “The developer wants to provide utility, functionality and better someone’s life.”

Marketers have an agenda, a goal, a target, while developers are simply trying to make something easier for the end-user.  So far, those two factors do not mix well…regardless of how many people are using a social network.
http://www.adweek.com/