This Tourism Week # 81

NEW KID ON THE BLOG (Oh my hat! What an awful pun - and it’s probably been used a hundred times, too).

And on that terrible note - welcome to This Tourism Week’s first offering for 2008. I hope it’s a good year for all of you because it’s certainly started well for me - because, as I’ve been promising, I’ve brought TTW into the Web 2.0 age by converting my web site to a blog.

DO NOT PANIC.

According to Gerry (you know him well), Web 2.0 simply means the democratisation of the internet. Web 1.0 was an extension of traditional advertising: it told you what the teller (usually the seller) wanted you to know. And of course there were those who responded - people who knew enough about building web sites and who had enough of a beef to do so - but you and me, the general public, still didn’t have a voice of our own.

But with the advent of Web 2.0, marketing has become a conversation and the internet has become truly democratic. Now users can freely participate, collaborate, communicate and share information - and, in effect, shape the web.

This means that we’re all going to have to re-think the way we do business and how we communicate our business messages to our markets.

You can panic NOW.

Because we’ll not be telling prospective guests what WE want them to know for much longer - instead, they’ll be telling each other about us. Consumers are sharing information at an unprecedented rate and they distrust the mainstream media and corporate advertising and they’re turning to each other (And travellers, of course, are consumers, too).

Consumers are looking to one another for information about us, they’re recommending us (if we’re doing our jobs right) and they’re probably dissing us if we aren’t delivering on our promises.

Oh, yes, and they’re be doing this through technologies like:

  • RSS Feeds (news feeds which bring the latest information from web sites, blogs, etc. directly to your computer)
  • Blogs (web logs or interactive on-line diaries)
  • Podcasts (‘narrowcasts’ - as opposed to broadcasts - that are downloaded to your iPod or MP3 player for later listening - like while you’re commuting for work)
  • Vlogs (video blogs)
  • Wikis (on-line encyclopaedias that anyone can edit or ad to)
  • Social Networking (what, you haven’t heard of Facebook? You aren’t ON Facebook? And Youtube? - More people watch Youtube than CNN: web users watch over 100 million Youtube videos EVERY DAY!)
  • VoIP (Voice-over Internet Protocol - you know it as Skype)
  • Mashups (I’ll get back to you on this one - I’m still learning)
  • Tagging (recording and sharing your favourite links)
  • Rating (where readers vote on content)

… and so on.

Here’s a scary Gerry-type quote: in 1996, there were 250,000 web sites and 45 million users on the net. This was Web 1.0 - “the mostly read-only web.” In 2006, there were 80,000,000 sites and more than 1 billion users - many of whom were generating the content on those sites. This, according to Gerry, is Web 2.0 - the “the wildly read-write web.”

If you want a good example of how Web 2.0 can work, have a look at Gerry’s site - www.go2sa.co.za. All the content on this site is generated by the users - for example: MEMBERS who subscribe to the site can create their own profiles and submit their own articles which are then rated by USERS. But here’s the thing: the users’ ratings decide where on the list the articles appear. This means that over time the most relevant information naturally rises to the top of the list and the least relevant falls off the home page. So simply by looking at the list of articles, you’ll know which are the most trustworthy by their positions on the page.

And that’s the kind of thing that makes Web 2.0 becomes so powerful.

Here’s a hint. Look up www.tripadvisor.com (their pay-off line? ‘get the truth. then go’) and search for your town or your product - because the chances are someone who’s planning to visit you is doing the same. And what do they have to say? Not always comfortable, is it?

So there you are - now that This Tourism Week has its own blog at www.barefootclients.co.za, you can talk to me - and talk to one another. And that’s Web 2.0.

Simple, innit?

Have a Great Tourism Week
Martin Hatchuel
BarefootWriter

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