By Joe Buhler, Principal, buhlerworks
The shelves are full of books about new and potentially revolutionary changes in the web that are transforming the global marketplace. Welcome to a new world where top down hierarchies no longer apply or are constantly being undercut and where one-way “push” marketing communication is being replaced by the “pull” of mass collaboration and peer production. Every organization must cope with these new realities in the competitive arena today and come to grips with what these changes mean to the survivability of their business.
In 1999, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, envisioned this as the coming Semantic Web, when he said:
“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, machines talking to machines will handle bureaucracy and our daily lives. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize”.
As idealized, the Semantic Web, or Common Sense Web, involves the use of software agents to collect natural language information from disparate sources throughout the web and then put those elements together in various ways for people to use that information more effectively and extract greater meaning from it. In Web 2.0, we have seen both the advent and the proliferation of such agents, as web applications or widgets, as well as with specialized compilations or aggregations called “mashups”.
The actual situation on the web is very different from the ideal that Berners-Lee envisioned, but at this point, it seems reasonable to assume we will get there sooner rather than later. The take-away messages for businesses are:
- If you are already using the web, redouble your commitment and plan to invest more of your time and energy to make the web a central element of your business strategy going forward.
- If you are not using the web yet or not very much at all, you really must get up on the curve as quickly as possible and make up for lost time as your business is likely at stake.
“The Long Tail” and “Wikinomics” are just two in a growing list of terms - and book titles - that try to explain and interpret what is today given the overall term - web 2.0 - where customers become “prosumers” and “crowd sourcing” or “collective intelligence” are terms thrown out along with “social networking” and “user generated content”.
What to make of it all? Tuning out is not a viable option and if you thought you were falling behind or cannot cope with these rapid developments, well there is news for you - we ain’t seen nothing yet! Nobody has really given a definite and defining label to what is already coming onto the scene. We will probably tire of the numbers game and not call this next phase web 3.0, although that is the term used in a recent New York Times article. Its title “Entrepreneurs see a web guided by common sense” is well suited. The need to make sense out of chaos is the underlying driver. Yes, would it not be great for the future web to seem like common sense — what we the users understand and want the experience online to be? It will probably turn out that way but a lot of the process in getting there will actually be chaotic.
We certainly are not there yet, but it helps to understand where in terms of capabilities and development the web is today. Using the world of telecommunications as an analogy, we are at a similar stage we were when the only tool available was a black rotary dial phone, which only those of us who are closer to retirement than graduation still remember being used at all.
What we will see in the next phase of the web - the next net - is that mining human intelligence will allow a layer of meaning to be built on top of the mass of collective intelligence now being gathered and spread daily. Today, the actions of millions of individuals who not only provide their commentary and opinions on any subjects but also increasingly develop their own software or “widgets” that adorn social networking sites such as MySpace or YouTube constantly improve the web. Our interactions with the web help to actually make it better and easier to use. Many of today’s mashups interact with and combine information to provide dynamically generated applications to improve results. These self-directed tools are used for instance in vacation planning, to manage personal schedules or even entire business projects.
As the definition on Wikipedia shows, there is no consensus on how this latest iteration of the web will exactly look like but it is equally clear that further significant improvements will happen. Using the new collaboration and communications capabilities available to everyone, today they will happen faster and with the involvement of the community at large, rather than in a closed development environment.
Web 2.0 is actually, what happened while we were waiting for the semantic web to appear. The more we see the emergence of these evolved tools it becomes obvious that there is a lot of truth in that statement. It is certainly not too far fetched to expect the near future to bring us completely personalized websites that are dynamically tailored to each users interest based on software tools that observe, collect, analyze and then correctly interpret the intelligence gathered from our online behavior.
Destination Marketing in the age of Web 2.0 and beyond.
By Joe Buhler, Principal, buhlerworks
In less than ten years since the first wave hit with the introduction of online travel agencies, the travel industry is again undergoing radical changes. Online travel, in what ever form it was and still is defined, became the largest industry on the web in record time. Changes on a scale imagined only by few, have happened since then and there is not one segment of the travel industry that is not affected by that first shift to commerce transacted online. By the end of last century, it was mostly in the United States where the initial start-up companies were concentrating their efforts and where the phenomenal growth first took place.
Today, the impact is felt around the globe and the fastest growing regions are now Asia/Pacific and Europe, and the original online travel agencies (OTA) are players on a global stage. In the past few years they have, at least in Europe, been joined by the traditional major tour operators who are now engaged in intense competition with these intruders on what many considered their turf, and after having been written off by many only a few years ago.
In a recent article, Travel Industry Wire coined the new expression of the “customer-to-customer” (C2C) marketplace. This is a very apt description of what is happening today. Enabled by blogs, pod casts and social networking sites as well as other web 2.0 technology introductions like mashups, the consumer today can be as informed about any subject as never before in history and even more importantly, has the easy means to communicate his or her knowledge and expertise to anyone else in the world. In the context of the travel industry, everyone can become a travel agent, tour operator, or even destination marketer at least in his or her own mind. The ingredients and the tools are certainly at their disposal.
Companies and organizations will in future increasingly have to try to interject themselves into all the conversations going on among customers in the marketplace about their product, service, or destination, rather than dominating what in the past was a one-way communication. This new C2C reality will have a significant impact on the role of marketing in any industry. As Seth Godin, the author of some of the most innovative bestsellers on marketing, including “The Purple Cow” has said: “Conversations among the people in your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.”
The first signs of this world of Web 2.0, which lets the audience participate in the production and distribution of content and tag it with keywords, are a number of new types of sites sprouting up such as Del.icio.us, Rojo, and Digg. In the travel space there are of course, TripAdvisor owned by Expedia and IgoUgo, owned by Travelocity, which have been around for a number of years with active communities of feedback providers. They, as well as, the traditional online travel agencies, face a new type of competition from the likes of Tagzania, Gusto, Wikia, Boardingate and many more. The most important feature these sites have in common, is the ability for users to collect information and articles from sites they find of interest, add their own comments and tag them with keywords. This makes it easy for sharing with, and viewing by, friends or the public at large. Google Map mashups, such as MapMyHotel, are other new types of sites allowing travelers to get a detailed look of a property or attraction location. Combined with personal annotations and reviews by others travelers can get a feel for the place more real and up-to-date than previously possible. Then there is TVTrip offering detailed videos of properties as a useful planning tool. In the small group and affinity travel market there is Groople, which includes tools for group planners. Of course there is also the “big daddy” of sites Yahoo! They have not only acquired the meta-search company FareChase but also with their Trip Planner made some significant improvements and added Web 2.0 features to its Yahoo! Travel section. Traditional companies, such as Starwood Hotels also have embraced this new trend. Sheraton now makes customer feedback and reviews the focus of their web presence right from the home page.
Blogs and pod casts are other developments with significant potential impact on both travel planning and the actual travel experience. Anyone with web access and some basic knowledge of computer software applications can in fact start a blog or publish a pod cast, making their experiences immediately available to the world at large. With a free RSS feed reader, this new user generated content is easily available for anyone with updates delivered automatically.
The specific impact of Travel 2.0 on the various sectors in the travel industry is yet to be determined. What seems clear already, however, is that the role of any intermediary is being challenged even more by all this user-generated content, combined with the free flowing consumer conversations going on 24/7 on all the sites and the transparency this creates. As these web based innovations further develop and become even more user friendly and widespread than they already are today, combined with improved and integrated booking functionality, the changes will be more dramatic than what we have experienced so far.
For DMO the dynamics of existing business relationships will no doubt undergo rapid and significant change. It will no longer be sufficient to maintain and develop an information rich destination website. To build a platform that taps into and feeds off the various sites mentioned earlier and to facilitate the dialog among past and potential future visitors is fast becoming a necessity to stay relevant. The opportunities have never been better to truly achieve WOM (both the mouth and mouse kind) and stimulate the buzz around a destination. What no DMO should attempt is try to control the dialog or manage it. The mirror has never been shinier but it also has never before been pointed as directly at the destination and its suppliers as it is today. Accept it, embrace change, innovate and start joining the conversation, today. The alternative is being left behind and risk being ignored.
(P.S. I wrote this article in 2006 and have not edited as it shows what I mean by vision - staying ahead of developments before they are mainstream)
