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Last week we highlighted how Matt Harding, creator of the Where The Hell is Matt videos, had produced the 2008 version of his fantastic jaunt around the globe.

Anyway, Adage.com has an interesting article about how Stride chewing gum got in the act with its sponsorship deal - and scuppered the best viral marketing deal of the decade for travel brands the world over.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

So after two months of private beta testing (we had access here), Tripwolf has finally come out of the shadows to the wide - and scary - world of the discerning traveller.

The buzz surrounding the project will now need to be translated into usage and, most importantly, engagement.

There's no point in having a travel social guide if no-one gets involved in it.

So the public version has a few nifty tools:

• A printable PDF guide which can be created by dragging and dropping content into a widget.
• Content brought in automatically from Flickr, Wikipedia and Youtube.
• Facebook integration.

In addition, the start-up, which has attracted investment dollars (around $1.2 million) from i5invest, has pulled off a coup of sorts by persuading MairDumont to throw all its content into the site - for free.

MairDumont is "Europe’s largest publisher of travel guides" and produces titles under the Baedeker, Dumont and Marco Polo brands.

So while the site is pretty impressive on the whole, TechCrunch raises an interesting point when it says:

And while it features a fairly comprehensive listing of interesting locales, it may have a hard time differentiating itself from countless other travel sites - there doesn’t seem to be anything too unique going on here.

The name would've been a good place to start:

Tripmate, Tripwiser, Tripbase, Tripup, Tripology, Trippert, blah, blah, blah. After Tripadvisor, few stick in the memory. This is not a good thing...

Anyway, let's see how they get on.

They have a fancy video to demonstrate how some of the bits work:



[NB: I was interviewed for the Tripwolf blog a few weeks back]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: facebook tripwolf

The original Where the Hell is Matt video is still one of the biggest missed travel viral marketing opportunities of all time. The sponsorship went to the forward thinking Stride chewing gum brand!

Anyway, Matt Harding has released a 2008 version of the infamous video. But rather than each clip featuring Harding dancing on his own, he's drummed up support from the locals each time in most of the shots.

Anyway, it features such gems as the DMZ in Korea, Tongatapu (Tonga), zero gravity over Nellis in Nevada and, the best of all, a coordinated Bollywood-style boogie in Guragaon (India).



It's wonderful clips like this that puts the 'rave' into travel! And forget stuffy, corporate marketing puff from tourist boards - a quick view of this is enough to inspire anyone to explore the world.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Listen to anyone from the Googleplex these days at an event and they talk endlessly about the benefits to travel brands of using YouTube for branding.

A campaign extolling the virtues of New Zealand is typically the example given - and deservedly so.

The Pure New Zealand page has had over 90,000 views. One particular video has been seen nearly 1 million times!

The organisation has uploaded 40 videos to its channel, with the top 5 all attracting over 15,000 views.

But how have some other major travel brands fared since giving some time and effort to creating a presence on YouTube?

Expedia UK has its own channel page and has uploaded a huge number of videos (103 videos) in just a few months, but its top-performer - the too-good-to-be-true hotels signs effort we featured a few months back - has attracted just 2,100 views.

STA Travel UK also created its own page in August 2007, but has just two videos on show. The TribeUnwanted video has 1,100 views so far.

Biggles The Bear, the YouTube nom de plume for Cheapflights, has faired much better. The channel page has attracted nearly 3,000 views, but its most popular video - Where The Hell is Biggles?, a pastiche of the infamous Where The Hell is Matt? montage - has been watched nearly 29,000 times.

Anyway, all this playing around on YouTube has revealed Travolution's skydiving extravaganza (and, no, for the last time, it isn't me in the video) has been viewed more times than 101 of Expedia's efforts.

And here it is again...!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt7gqjky3HI&hl=en]

Our sister title, Travel Weekly, has a ship tour video of the Norwegian Gem, which has an impressive 6,300 views against. Three times as many as Expedia's best performer.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Say some...

Hotel Blogs draws everyone's attention to the TUI Travel page on YouTube.


Thevenot, who writes Hotel Blogs, says:

For such a big company with marketing resources, I don't understand how you can fail to be more clever than that in terms of embracing social media sites like YouTube. The page even comes almost unreadable. Anyway, we all make mistake[s].

A commenter on the post has another suggestion, however:

They haven't missed the point, in fact they seem to get it more than most.

Check out almost any personal profile page on MySpace and you'll notice that they're all just as garish (if not worse). Repeating, birght backgrounds that make your text almost illegible seem to be par for the course.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Apparently this is Lastminute.com's first viral ad, according to Brand Republic.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgZuHlDuulk&hl=en]

Although, of course, there is this ad from a few years back, which just happened to find its way onto YouTube after never seeing the light of day in the real world of TV advertising.

Had viral written all over it...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: lastminute youtube

Search and social networking are becoming one and the same says Google's managing director, north American travel sector, Rob Torres.

More than 40% of the US population is on a social network and it seems it's an even greater volume in the UK.

It's not all teenagers either - 74% of 26 to 33 year olds use a social network each month and more than 40% of the audience on youtube is more than 35 years old.

There are already some great examples out there of travel and social networking converging such as the New Zealand 100% Pure campaign on youtube and similarly Delta Airlines flight safety video.

Torres says: "It is self perpetuating and there are so many more touch points to reach the consumer than ever before."

For the travel industry there's a huge opportunity to get involved and 'have fun with it.'

"It is one the largest free focus group you have."

Torres leaves us with this pearl: "If you're afraid to get involved with this because of your brand then you're missing the point."

Linda Fox, lead reporter, Travolution

Never heard of this malarkey before, but worth a look.

Apparently some people are so desperate to get upgraded through their frequent flyer status that they are willing to do a marathon run of flights in order to propel themselves to the next level.

The maker of the movie embedded below explains further:

In this case, I had Premier status on United and I was 5,000 miles short of Premier Executive. I made it on Christmas Day 2004, and I traveled from Chicago, to Oakland, to LA, to Las Vegas and then back to Chicago. All in 20hrs. Very tiring. the movie was made from 300 photos and assembled in Adobe After Effects.

The things people do for a glass of champers...



Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Hat tip: Jetvine

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-nX6g148mA&hl=en]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

If you have ever seen a presentation on SEM you will almost certainly have seen the heat map showing where users' eyes go.

The classic screen shows quite clearly a red cloud in the top left indicating that the top three organic (or paid if up there) listings get the eyeballs.

Well that's all changed. Now with blended search, often referred to as Universal search as in Google Universal, where images, vidoes, news, blogs, maps etc appear in the listings the eyeballs are attracted to other areas of the screen.

See Enquiro Research.

Simply put, an image on position #4, for example, grabs attention above (or should that be below) and beyond the top three listings.

This is a great opportunity to get exposure through social media optimisation.

Travel operators can as such grab the eyeballs then the clicks through placement of GOOD and tagged pictures/videos of resorts on Flickr, YouTube.

But there's a “but”. It also means that Reputation Management is more important now then ever.

Bad reports whether in blogs, on YouTube or in mainstream media will shoot into the SERPs on your brand name complete with imagery. And don't think it can't happen to you.

In the next five years 83% of companies will face a crisis that will negatively affect their share price by 20-30%, according to Oxford Metrica.

Datamonitor report that 33% of people who lose trust in a brand will actively campaign on the internet against that company - and that figure is on the rise.

The lesson is simple you need to be ready to deal with a crisis far more rapidly then before - quite how you do that get's a little more complex...

That's my last blog from SES so sorry to finish on an alarmist note but if there's one lesson from these three days it's that, now more then ever and for good and for bad, you can't take your (tracked) eye off your brand on the internet.

Matt Brocklehurst, marketing director, Latitude Group