Research shows the mobile channels (app and mobile browser) most valuable for travel brands include Travel, Entertainment and Games.

“By creating campaigns for both tablets and smartphones, advertisers can take advantage of the strengths of both devices to appeal to consumers booking travel. Tablets offer a larger form factor perfect for displaying photos and in-depth travel information, while smartphone campaigns capture on-the-go consumers looking for click-to-call and location-based features,” writes Jumptap.

Data from comScore shows one in five smartphone owners booked a trip through their mobile device. Four in five consumers access air and hotel content through a mobile device. Other popular travel-related activities included:

• Checking airfare prices (26%)
• Checking flight schedules/status (25% each)
• Receiving price alerts for flights (19%)
• Cancelling a flight (10%)

“The on-the-go convenience of smartphones has facilitated their emergence as an essential companion for travelers,” said Mark Donovan, comScore SVP of mobile. “We all know how hectic a travel experience can be, but smartphones have really stepped in to meet a variety of needs for travelers, such as coordination of schedules, locations, trip itineraries and transactions.”

While men and younger demographics are more likely to consume travel content via mobile, if you are trying to bring travelers to your property, it’s time to add mobile to you mix if you haven’t already.

Scruchoriffic!

I admit it…I was skeptical of the concept; but once I tried it, I was happily sold. It’s a really cool idea that at it’s core is super simple, super solid on paying off what the product can offer, and engages the audience to sell it for you. And on the flip side, it’s mega-robust on the experiential & tech factors.

OHNO-U-DI'INT!

Make sure your webcam is working and check it out for yourself. It’s pretty hilarious/fun/engaging, and I might even buy a pair of the kicks after all. Nicely done, even if whoever came up with the idea are b!tches for thinking of it before me

Why? Because the sharp blade of disruptive innovation cuts both ways. Many writers have talked about the evolution of Web 1.0 (presentation) to Web 2.0 (social), and now Web 3.0 (mobile), and the difficultly the success-story companies from each of the prior generations had in making the transition to the next.

If you’ve ever had the good fortune to be in the whirlwind setting of a startup, it is easy to understand why the companies that were successful in one generation (by stream rolling the prior generation) stand an equal likelihood of themselves being steam rolled only a few short years later. Most startups are based on a single central concept that was itself disruptive. As the company grows, this central idea expands outwards and serves as the core of the companies’ DNA. This was true of Google (and their search algorithm) and Facebook (social connection). People, processes, resources, user guides, customers, and revenue all start to be created around this central idea.

The stronger and more successful the innovative company is with their original idea, the more attached the company becomes to this idea. The problem lies in “what happens next.” Google has consistently struggled with the new socially engaged web. Their search engine algorithm, hundreds of PhD educated mathematicians, and engineers, have limited understanding on what makes a great college party, (an algorithm can’t understand something) so they struggle with the new socially-enabled web.

At the same time, the young, hip, and constantly coding Facebook crew has trouble understanding how people who don’t spend their lives on the web (and who are increasingly turning to their mobile phones for quick questions and answers) want to manage their social life online. Adding countless features and links and clicks and upload options only serves to make it harder to use, and more difficult to port to mobile devices (witness Facebook’s acquisition of Instragram if you need any more proof that Facebook is aware of this problem).

Compounding the challenges facing the Googles and Facebooks of the world are two additional factors:

1.       The rate of change in the world of technology is increasing

2.       The barriers to entry are decreasing.

If we use retail sales of technology products as an indicator for rate of change, we are living in strange and rapidly changing times, indeed. One needs only to look at the statement from Apple’s Tim Cook as an indication of where we are headed.

“…through the last quarter, I should say, which is just 2 years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million. And to put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs and 5 years for that many iPods and over 3 years for that many iPhones. And we were extremely happy with the trajectory on all of those products. And so I think iPad, it’s a profound product.”

As for barriers to entry – these are dropping even as you read this. From digital 3D printing (which can allow designers and manufacturers to bring products to market in a matter of days as opposed to years) to scalable web hosting (like Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Apps which allow developers to launch a website that can scale from 1 to 1,000,000 users without ever needing to migrate or recode) it has never been easier to get into a new technology business.

In the end, unless Facebook and Google are both very careful, we may well be reading about them as a footnote in our grandchildren’s textbooks.

This interactive digital billboard set up in London’s Westfield Shopping area, as a part of the Pennies for Life campaign, is one of the smartest PR/awareness-generating work I’ve seen in a long time, not to mention an actual live facilitator for donation generation. You can quickly donate 2£ via a simple text message, and a visual is constructed of a real woman that the money will go to help. Not only is it a really cool piece of interactive functionality, but it really makes it incredibly simple for a potential donor to contribute, and incredibly real with a tangible result almost immediately in front of them.

Make a difference for a young woman.

As we talked further into the flight, she began describing their store and clientele in more detail. They sold arts and crafts produced by local artisans to mostly tourists near a local ski resort.  As we started exploring the thought process of their customer, we realized that they had inadvertently broken a key part of what made the shop successful by creating an online retail presence – urgency!

Before their website had come online, customers had only one chance to buy the cute handcrafted ski sign monitor frame (signed by the artist) in the store. Buy it today while you are on vacation, or lose the chance to own this clever memento of your visit forever. This urgency overrode other considerations like “will it fit into my luggage?” or “do I really need to spend $50 for a monitor frame?”

As soon as customers realized that the same item they would have to carry home could be purchased online (with no sales tax), the sense of urgency disappeared, with each customer telling themselves, “I’ll check out their website when I get home”. Of course, once home, reason would set in and the monitor frame purchase would end up competing with groceries, gas and a new pair of shoes from Zappos. With this thought process in action, the better and more complete they made their website (and the harder they promoted it in store) the worse their sales got.

What to do?

We discussed a three-pronged approach to leveraging the web to generate incremental sales:

1.      Create a strong Facebook presence including a custom Facebook tab that would promote their “monthly favorite.”

2.      Create a blog-style website that would feature interviews with the local artisans that the retail shop features, as well as a “monthly favorite” feature story.

3.      Create a retail website that was connected to the blog that only sold a single “monthly favorite” (or monthly favorite collection) at a time.

Within the store they could promote the Facebook page as well as the website with the caveat that “these in store items are not available online.” They could push to capture email addresses and Facebook fans, and not replace brick-and-mortal sales with online, but rather to view online sales as being incremental.

The result would be the reinstitution of “in-store urgency” that would, in turn, be mirrored by a sense of online “buy it this month” urgency, as well as an engaging online presence to build the overall web footprint for the retailer.

After landing, the retailer bought my wife and I a very nice sushi dinner!

Then why is it so many businesses, across all categories, don’t seem to get it. OK, maybe that’s a little harsh, but riddle me this, Mr. Businessman, how much money have you budgeted in 2012 for branding? Not marketing, not sales, not advertising, but branding. If you aren’t a fortune 500 business and you even have this as a line item, well, maybe you are on your way. But if you are like most small business owners, your brand is likely incidental to what you do and who you are, and at worst it is completely accidental. Here’s the good news: branding doesn’t have to be expensive. But it does have to be intentional. And that’s the focus of this blog, to get you to be intentional about how you create and care for a meaningful brand for your business.

But, before going too far down that road, let me tell you the best reason to care about this topic. The biggest driver of profitability is NOT controlling cost, it is NOT improving process, and it is NOT sales volume. The single largest driver of profitability is the ability to influence pricing. What is the purpose of a strong brand? The purpose of a strong brand is to create a valuable relationship and loyalty with the target, right? And if you have these things, typically, you can command a premium price for your product or service, right? So, what’s the most important thing you can do to improve your profitability? Spend some time focusing on your brand, that’s what.

If you are successful with the campaign you are planning to launch, what will be different about my company (or business)? Will you have generated more online inquiries, phone traffic, more sales? Or something else? Please note, some of these things are lagging indicators, meaning there are several steps that need to happen BEFORE these things can. If that’s the case, can you define what the steps leading up to this may be (leading indicators)? If you can, perhaps your measurement should focus on these leading indicators. After all, these are the things you can most directly impact.

Can you automate the measurement of these leading indicators? If you use Google Analytics, the answer to that question is very likely yes. It’s pretty easy to set up a goal and a funnel so you don’t have to go digging to uncover the information you need to make intelligent decisions. Besides, it can be very dangerous to just start poking around all the data available in GA without knowing what you are looking for first. It’s too easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole because there is just so much available.

Make certain that the data you are evaluating will help you refine your efforts so you can maximize your results. This means, ask questions that will actually influence your behavior. We find running tests throughout the campaign is a very effective way to get actionable insights because it allows you to draw comparisons. Remember though, if you change up too much at once, you won’t know what is driving the difference in results. Be methodical in your approach. Research up front can help formulate a hypothesis and then testing will help you validate and refine.

Remember, more than with any other medium, digital is about content. Deliver what you customer expects and needs, not what you want them to have, and you are bound to get better results. If you need a hand with any of this, we’d be happy to help you get focused. Just send us an email or give us a call.

• The audience
  Like any marketing or communication initiative, target audience analysis can help you identify the best platforms for the most effective communication. It also helps you identify key influencers in your market, whether that is analysts or even competitors.
• Survey the social landscape
  What is your current status with regard to social media? Who participates and how? And what target audiences are priorities? Taking a look around can help benchmark future activities.
• Define your goals
  By prioritizing target audiences, you can create objectives for each. What do you want from each? And perhaps more importantly, what do they want from you?
• Identify your team
  Who in your organization is best placed to help with social media initiatives? This may include individuals in marketing, management, customer support, sales or IT. Your selection depends on the overall goals for the initiative and influences participation.
• Choose your platform carefully
  Prioritizing tactics can highlight how to spend the most time and effort. For example, blogging can be highly effective but it often requires more commitment and effort, while social networking may be less effective but involve a greater time commitment. Considering the strengths and weaknesses of different platforms can help you make a better match when linking your tactics with your target audiences and goals.

One of the quickest ways to begin is to make connectivity with social networks and communities easy. For example, just adding ‘Share This’ links and widgets to a website can give audiences an array of ways to not only interact but to share your content with their networks.

Social media marketing metrics
Finally, in these harsh economic times, measurement is crucial. It could take the form of any or all of the following:

• Activity: both what we and others say and do. For example, number of posts, number of tweets;
• Reach: the number of connections, followers, mentions of brand and audience reached;
• Actual interactions: replies, comments, likes, re-tweets, click-throughs and lead generation.

Measurements are important because they will justify and gauge your social media marketing initiative’s effectiveness and, to some degree, demonstrate your return on investment (a critical requirement at board level). But most importantly, the metrics you employ should signpost the way to improvement by clearly showing which social media tactics and approaches have worked best, and for which target audiences and platforms. You should therefore begin by establishing how your competition already participates in social media. What do they say, and what do customers and prospects say about them? This analysis may help to identify your unique selling points (USPs) as well as ways in which you can differentiate your message, approach, and brand. Listen carefully to and share information gathered from the prime influencers, as they can sometimes change the tune at the snap of a finger (at the click of a mouse, at least). In addition, starting a dialogue with a key influencer can provide invaluable interaction and exposure among their peers and followers.

To hire or not to hire, that is the question