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.

Via DesignTaxi.com, we present to you bottles you can eat, and a zoo using poop from its animals to power it’s carts.

Baby steps. Totally rad baby steps. That being said, Rome wasn’t built in a day. And despite what I’ve been led to believe, it wasn’t destroyed in one either (Nero did try his best, though).

Perhaps not directly related to the minutiae my cohorts and I dive in to every day, these creations are representative of a desire to innovate, to evolve, to have a positive impact on the world, or even just a neighborhood or state, that lies at the center of what motivates me. While I don’t plan on downing any empty water bottles anytime soon (barring an unanticipated end-of-the-world scenarios coming true), it is inspiring and refreshing to know that someone is hard-at-work figuring out how to free our landfills of those pesky plastic bottles.

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!

Research findings from Google initially released in 2011, and updated last week, make a strong case that “clicks from organic results on the search results page [do] not substitute for the majority of clicks from ads on the page when the ad campaigns are turned off.” In fact, Google estimates that anywhere from 50% – 96% of ad clicks are incremental to organic results, with the range largely dependent upon the associated organic result’s rank on the page. Undoubtedly, a prime advantage of search advertising is that any click on an ad is 100% incremental when there is no associated organic result.   That last bit is an important qualifier, though: WHEN there is no associated organic result.  What happens when there is an associated organic result? Is it still worth purchasing keywords that may show up in organic results anyway? Inevitably the question leads to branded keywords. We are often asked by our clients, “Should we purchase my brand name as a keyword even though my website shows up in the first page of organic results?”

What this translates to is advertisers could see great success with a branded search campaign, as we have seen in strategically managing PPC on behalf of clients.  The key, as is often the case with digital media, is to test, experiment and test again.

For more detail, read Google’s blog post, “Impact of Organic Rank on Ad Click Incrementality” or the full Google study.

First of all, Rob Forbes founded this San Francisco-based company. He is also the founder of Design Within Reach, another secret love of mine, which is a furniture design company. So, I knew PUBLIC Bikes would be cool. When I clicked the orange bicycle and found myself on the PUBLIC website (http://publicbikes.com/), I was immediately in love — the colors, the design, the clarity, the simplicity, the bikes — so timeless, so great. These European designed bicycles are fantastic.  They come in different sizes and multi-speeds — ha, no more one speed madness.

I love that PUBLIC bikes are designed for city riding. They’re comfortable, lightweight, utilitarian and chic. They have fenders to protect your clothing, and you can sit up straight while you’re riding and see the world in front of you. They also have kickstands and awesome baskets, lights, and other stylish accessories.

The thing is, I totally get this company. And all I know of them is from their website. It so clearly represents the PUBLIC brand and what it stands for. It is easy to navigate and the use of color is fun, fresh and engaging. Not to mention that they use video really well. In fact, watch this video PUBLIC Bikes: Design Matters, and you’ll see what I mean. But they also include videos on how to find your PUBLIC bike and how to assemble your bike after it’s been shipped to you.  PUBLIC’s message is clear: style and function can go hand in hand, and you can feel like a kid while getting where you need to go efficiently and economically.  And everything from their logo to the people who work there, tells that story.

Ok, enough. I just think these guys are clever, fun and smart, and they love design. Check it out. I’m saving my pennies for a Public C7, in orange, with a basket on the front. Just you wait and see.

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
• Contact information, such as a web address, email, mailing address, or other information intended for your Page’s About Section
• References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends.”

If you want to see how some of the big-boys are managing this, take a look:

http://www.facebook.com/cocacola

http://www.facebook.com/sears

http://www.facebook.com/target

Again, when you remember how social media got started, this new look makes lots of sense. It really does contribute to making a connection – not a sale. Here are some of the other changes…

Page admins will be able to choose which posts will display at the top using pinned posts. A pinned post always appears in the top left of a Page’s timeline and has a flag in its top-right corner. A post that has been pinned will remain there for seven days. After that, it’ll return to the date it was posted on the Page’s timeline. To pin a post, simply click the pencil icon in the upper-right corner of your Page’s post and then select “pin to top” in order to pin a post.

In the past, as a business page, you couldn’t send private messages. With the new changes, now you will be able to privately message any contact details or private information without posting it to the whole world.

Currently, any apps that you created for competitions or the like can be switched to feature as your default landing page, meaning that you controlled what visitors saw first. Unfortunately, with the new timeline, you will no longer have the ability to set a default home page. Your timeline wall will always be the first thing any visitors see. The only real way to direct fans to a specific page will be through the use of ads.

If you are looking for help with these changes or any social media concerns,  don’t hesitate to get in touch …

Tips on the new Facebook Timeline