Wow
Remember “Lies, damn lies and statistics” but this is an excellent video compiled by Erik Qualman showing just how powerful social media is and how fast it is growing.
Expedia.se marketing FAIL
Spotted an interesting billboard advert in Malmö tonight. Expedia Sweden can get me to Copenhagen and back with a flight + hotel deal – 3 nights in a 3 star hotel for only 2534 Swedish Crowns (about £199), fair enough perhaps but the flight is leaving from Stockholm – 6 hours drive from Malmö.
Think I’ll take the 25 minute train ride from Malmö to Copenhagen instead thanks.
Expedia Sweden Marketing Billboard
Yahoo opportunistic marketing
Spotted this opportunistic bit of marketing from Yahoo tonight. Well, I’m sure it’s automated to match keywords but looking at one of the headline news stories about a Monarch flight that aborted take off 3 times, yahoo manages to squeeze in an invitation to search for a new flight and even more relevant given the headline (and the one at the top about a near-miss incident) an advert for travel insurance.
Pitch your idea to Branson
Got an idea for a great Travel Industry business ?
If you are running a successful travel website and want to take it to the next level or if you have a bright idea (and experience) you might be interested in pitching for investment at the Get Funded Show which is part of the Travel Distribution Summit, Europe 2009. What you need is to :
- Be available on 20th and 21st May.
- Have a business plan with growth forecasts.
- Have an idea of the cash requirements of the business.
- Detail you and your teams skills and experience.
If invited to pitch you will be in the running for direct investment from travel gurus as well as a national recognition and £7000 worth of exposure which should get you off to a flying start.
If you are successful in your application and get through to the first stage you will at least get some valuable feedback on your business plan.
If you are already a travel guru and want to be involved in the first stage, listening to pitches and choosing the finalists for day 2 you can apply to be a guru.
New flight agency homepage design
The Canadian part of Flight Centre have given their blog readers four snapshots of potential new website designs for their homepage. They are running a survey asking for more feedback and opinions on each of the mock-ups.
It’s well worth a look as they have some interesting ideas.
I have also seen the idea of letting people decide the design of the website used by Socruise.com a couple of weeks ago.
Magpie embrace affiliate model
Just had an Email from Magpie to say they have changed the “compensation model” for their tweeters. When Magpie launched they paid by impression or anyway based the payment on the number of followers you had. In addition, they will now offer a choice* of :
- Pay per Click – if one of your followers clicks your link and visits an advertiser.
- Pay per Lead – if one of your followers clicks your link, visits an advertiser and signs up e.g. to a newsletter.
- Pay per Sale – if one your followers clicks your link and makes a purchase from the advertiser site.
* The choice is up to the advertiser, not the user.
I haven’t used Magpie apart from a quick trial in January as I value the exchanges of information you get on Twitter much more than making a few quid. It would be interesting which model becomes most utilised by advertisers as I originally thought the pay per view was a bit dodgy!
Social Bookmark buttons on blogger
Tutorial
I wanted to add social bookmarking buttons to my blog, not that I ever use them myself but a lot of other blogs have them so it’s worth a go.
First lets look at what Social bookmarking is / what social bookmarking buttons are. They come from the phenomenem of social networking such as facebook and myspace and also the web communities such as digg and stumbledupon which go a step further and allow users to vote for their favourite articles. Have a look at the bottom of a post on the Win a Holiday blog and you will see the share icon that I have installed. If you click on it or even hover over it you will get options from all the popular social network sites to add it to your profile.
How do I add the social bookmark buttons to my blog ?
This was fairly quick and easy to do. One of the great things with this is it works retro-actively so all the old posts feature the social bookmarking buttons. The provider I have chosen is free and also provides some stats so you can see if the buttons are effective.
1) Go to addthis.com
2) Click Register and make up a username and password
3) Click on “get your button code”
4) Select the type of button you want (sharing or boomkarking), tell it “blog”, then platform “blogger”, press the button to get the code.
5) Login to your blogger dashboard and the blog you want to add the bookmarking to.
- Select Layout then click Edit HTML
- Click the Expand Widget Templates tickbox
- Copy and paste the code from AddThis into the template, right after the ” div class=’post-footer’ ” tag [if you are on firefox, use CTRL+F to find this]
- Click Save Template
- Check what has happened.
Final thought.
It’s worth checking you have the “Email this article to a friend” option selected in your blogger dashboard too. People might prefer to send your articles to someone they know specifically will be interested in it. This will have a much higher conversion than the social bookmarking.
Another way to advertise your business
Reach over 1million Twitter users
Just came across a new way for companies to go viral.
Be-a-magpie is a German company that displays relevant ads on people’s twitter stream based on a keyword bidding system like Google’s adwords.
It’s certainly fast growing. On 18th November their reach was 400′000 people, now they are claiming over 1 million. For the twitterers doing the advertising they have got a nice website and it’s easy to sign up. You get paid by paypal which is pretty convenient.
My main concerns with this business are
- People don’t in general twitter to have advertising sent to them, so the risk of being seen as a spammer is very real. It will depend on how good be-a-magpie is at matching relevant ads. (they do let you pre-approve all ads and adjust the frequency of the ads). I just saw this on my twitter feed from someone using to market travel deals :
Twitter marketing really sucks! 4 months, 1,000 followers and $0 in sales. Do I feel lucky?’
- They are not affiliated to twitter so presumably twitter could act to shut the process down if they wanted. When I thought about it Twitter are probably quite happy for this to happen for now. Firstly they get to test if it’s possible to monetise their business but get the test done by a third party in case it all goes Pete Tong, secondly if the scheme did happen to work Twitter users using the scheme would probably be more active.
