Internet Company 2.0

We have been talking a lot about Web 2.0, or the socializing of the internet and letting them take more control. I do believe that besides the technical changes that are currently underway there are also going to be tons of social changesin the way the users interact with those companies but there is also going to be ‘major’ internal organizational structure changes in these companies.
.

Internet Travel Company 2.0 - Digg for Hotels

.
In order to create the new generation of an Internet Travel company we must closely look at the social revolution that is currently happening on the internet. The social networks, the social search, the reviews, the RSS, etc, etc, etc, and start thinking about giving the users more power for choosing which hotels or travel companies to patronize, kind of a Digg.com for hotels, where the users make this or that hotel more popular and it is not the travel companies deciding which hotels to sell. This company will also allow user comments and reviews on its website, similar to what is TripAdvisor today, but with the difference that these ratings will push hotel properties up or down. In this new world the company will only play the role of platform governor or administrator and will not be the king, the customer will reign. It will be kind of a Democratic company where users get to pick and push what they like and what they want.

.

Companies and their managers like to be in control. They like to control their products (e.g. six sigma), they like to control communications & brand (e.g. press releases & PR stunts), they like to control which customers they address (e.g. high networth individuals), they like to control the channels through which their products are distributed (e.g. DVD country codes) and they like to control processes.

Forget that! It’s a thing of the past. I believe that the most thriving companies of the coming years will be those that are able to successfully lose control. This doesn’t mean that they will let things get totally out of hand, but they will replace control with governance in order to create space for creativity. The reason? This new openness will allow people to live out their full potential, they will be able to focus on what they like and do best and they will have space to implement their best ideas. Openness will also allow people to install collaboration beyond traditional roles such as customer, marketer or engineer.

Uncontrollable Value Propositions

The value proposition of many striving Internet companies lies in the content its customers create and provide. While they might control the platform (governance) they don’t control the actual product (content). Flickr gets its value from the photos its users upload and the communities formed, Google’s Adsense gives advertisers targeted visibility but heavily relies on the quality of its members’ websites and eBay has to hope that offer and demand match on their platform. None of them is truely in control.
Out: product design
In: enabling solutions and value co-creation

.

Unpredictable Customers

Isn’t the customer best suited to know what his needs are? It has been said over and over again that we have moved from a mass-market push economy to an environment of very informed and knowledgeable customers that carefully research product information on the Internet, especially in the travel sector. But many managers are still not realizing how to best cope with this fact. Take the music industry. The major record companies are still building on a business model that banks on pushing/creating hits for specific customer segments: step 1 identify potential stars, step 2 market them with big bucks through all possible channels, step 3 materialize on the few hits and flip the flops. But platforms like MySpace are giving the majors increasing headaches. On MySpace stars and fan communities alike emerge out of nowhere around different styles and bands of music. The platform has been hugely successful in giving unknown artists visibility and music fans choice.
Out: customer segmentation
In: matching offer and demand

.

Unguardable Communication Borders

Communication departments think they have to control every message that goes out of the company. That doesn’t work anymore. In the era of blogs companies have to let their employees directly communicate with customers, employees of competitors and stakeholders. Company frontiers will become much more porous. IBM leads the way and has fully embraced blogging,as well as Google, Microsoft and eBay. By letting employees directly interact with the “outside world” companies get a much more human touch and feel. And that is important in a world where a a group of uncontrollable customer bloggers can potentially create a lot of negative publicity.
Out: controlled communications & company borders
In: from speaking to listening: permeability and customer collaboration

.
Liberalize Distribution Channels

Selling is difficult. What could be better than getting others to sell for you? Rather than trying to manage & control your distribution channels it makes sense to capitalize on the entrepreneurial capacities of others to get your value proposition to the market. Amazon.com has long ago made the affiliation model popular by mobilizing thousands of small, specialized and often personal websites to market Amazon books. Grameen Phone of Bangladesh uses microcredits and entrepreneurial village women to sell their phone services. This so-called trend of minipreneureurship is one of the strongest flavors of the day.
Out: direct-to-customer
In: minipreneurship
.
Adaptive Diversity

Innovation is hard to spark and even harder to manage. Nokia tries to foster innovation around its telecom products by running The Nokia Ventures Organization that invests money in promising ideas. But this almost seems outdated when thinking of how Google brings home innovation: By opening up their application programming interface (API) to the world they allowed thousands of programmers around the globe to access to their database and content. These developers then tinker with innovative applications built around google search, which the company picks-up on as soon as one strikes success. It’s innovation at zero and gives google access to talentend and innovative programmers around the world… At zero cost (read more about this trend). It’s sort of a shift from venture capital to open innovation platforms.
Out: deciding and allocating
In: prototyping & adaptive diversity

.

In the future the most successful organizations will be those that are able to design business models that successfully build on participation, involvement and an enabling environment - but it will almost definitely be at the price of control.
Out: reigning
In: governance

I have been recently reading and writing about Web 2.0 and the social media phenomenom.

Today I want to write about the different Web 2.0 websites within the Travel Industry, that I have come across in the last few weeks.

As we have previously discussed Web 2.0 changes the way people perceive information. These type of websites use Web 2.0 elements like Blogs podcasts, user reviews and comments, ajax, tags, etc, and they are particularly attentive to RSS, which represents a formidable opportunity for the travel industry.

RSS is also spreading rapidly across the internet. The new format is changing the way we access news, revolutionizing the way we inform ourselves – the required information comes to the user. An intelligent tailored access to information – each surfer, depending on his requirements, can personalise his news bulletin: “It is information on demand.”

A well informed traveler is a happy traveler!

Here are some of the Web 2.0 websites that I have found in the travel sector:

.
TripAdvisor is a collection of more than 5,000,000 traveler reviews & opinions of hotels, destinations and vacation packages worldwide. URL: www.tripadvisor.com

.

TravBuddy: Easily create your own travel blogs with amazing maps, upload unlimited photos, share travel reviews and meet people from all around the world! URL: www.travbuddy.com

.

43Places: Share stories about places in your city and around the world. URL: www.43places.com

.

Epictrip: Epic Trip is a new and unique way for travelers to know what their destinations and their hotels are all about, even before setting off. By connecting travelers with videos, virtual tours, reviews, and the wealth of experience brought to bear by the very users of Epic Trip, it is their mission is to spark people’s desire to discover their own epic trip. URL: www.epictrip.com/

.

TripHub Group Travel Site: Great site to plan, coordinate and share any trip or event that involves people going to a destination. The service allows you to: - Invite people to join your trip and keep track of who is coming (eVite like functionality) - Research and discuss hotel options in over 350 cities (provided by hotels.com) - Share travel itineraries from any source or supplier - Send e-mails to some or all members of the group - Track who owes money Cool site. Launched in March. URL: www.triphub.com

.

World66: Open content travel guide, where people all over of the planet can write about the places they love, hotels and restaurants they love. URL: www.world66.com/

.

Thisplaceiknow: There are tons of travel guides that have touristy places like The Empire State Building or The Hollywood Sign, but this is a travel guide that has places that are “more personal”. So for example: There’s this awesome place in Rehoboth, Massachusetts where you can see all the way into Providence. It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s a great place to go to see a really cool view of the city, and it probably wouldn’t be in any travel guide URL: www.thisplaceiknow.com/

.

Rent Me A Vacation: World wide vacation rentals direct from the owners. Uses google maps. URL: www.rentmeavacation.com

.

I would highly recommend to visit these websites and explore the different opportunities with them. I think that adding our travel content on these websites will be a good start.

.

I recently came across this ‘weird’ website:

How Web 2.0 aware are you ?

As it describes itself it is part disturbing, part humourous, but all in all this is a fun “Web 2.0 Awareness Test” that uses some slick technology based on a combination of CSS and Javascript which allows a site to programmatically determine if a link has been visited before, and then it assigns you a Web 2.0 awareness score.

In any case I would love to use a similar type of flash animation (the rolling numbers and the rolling drums) for a Vegas Vacation type of promotion…   Let’s think about it…

There is a post on the Flickr Blog announcing that 1,234,384 photos were geotagged in the first 24 hours after the new feature launched this week.Flickr Geotagging, which allows users to drag photos on to a Yahoo map and mark them with a specific worldwide location, received rave early reviews, even from competitors. I haven’t yet tested it myself, but I’ve read that it is incredibly easy to go back and geotag hundreds of photos with very little effort.

I have always admired Flickr (Social Web 2.0 type of website).

Flickr continues to rock along, with 4.5 million registered users and 17 million unique visitors per month. They have just under 230 million total photos uploaded and 900,000 new photos are uploaded daily on average. Read more about Flickr on Wikipedia

Now, just think of the possiblities of geo-tagging photos for the travel industry, the marketing opportunities could be incredible. Let’s start a discussion about this.

Social Media Optimization: It’s Like SEO, For Social Sites

One of the coolest things about the rise of social networking and sharing sites like MySpace and YouTube are the new opportunities they offer to marketers, even to search marketers. Into that space seems to have come a new term, SMO — social media optimization.

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) from Rohit Bhargava to my understanding is the first use of this new term. In it, Rohit expresses how SMO and SEO can work together:

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

In other words, many who do search engine optimization have learned to build search engine friendly sites. Do that, and the search engines often will naturally reward you with traffic. But is your site social media friendly? Have you added the things that will get you into the new fertile ground of SMO?

It’s worth considering. Conceptually, some of this stuff isn’t new. For example, we long had people taking about ways to help others bookmark your web site. But today’s new wave of social media sites can operate as a magnifying glass. Get that one person to bookmark you to del.icio.us and in turn you might tap into many other links. And those links, of course, flow back into helping with search rankings.

Rohit’s got tips in his post above. If those aren’t enough, check out Cameron Olthuis’s Introduction to Social Media Optimization, which provides further tips. Loren Baker then goes on with further ones in Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO, recapping those from Cameron and Rohit and adding his own. For yet more, Lee Odden offers some up on New Rules for Social Media Optimization. Need still more? You can’t go wrong keeping up with post from SEOmoz. Rand Fishkin’s never happier than when he’s offering some SMO advice. And someday I’m going to sit Dax Herrera down and debrief him on the many sharing sites that I’ve him frequent with the ease of a native. The sale of his mustache, while not technically on a sharing site, was still a classic of working another site (eBay) to drive traffic to your own.

One of the biggest adjustments coming from the SEO world and into SMO, understanding that your presence can be in multiple places without being harmful.

Generally in SEO, it’s good advice to have one single web site that you point to. Build traffic to a common domain, rather than divide it among various places. Sure, as you mature in SEO, you learn the advantages to having multiple sites. A corporate blog and a corporate web site can equate to double the representation in top search results. But there are limits, and you’re still basically driving traffic to places you own.

With SMO, the adjustment is understanding that you have multiple places that while you don’t own them still can be valuable to you. A Flickr profile can get you traffic in the Flickr space. Similarly, your del.icio.us bookmarks while on the del.icio.us site still might drive traffic. And have you gotten a MySpace profile yet? Go now, because you might decide you want it to drive traffic from MySpacers down the line.

Matt Cutts didn’t — and now someone else owns his valuable Matt Cutts persona over there. Meanwhile, I might never flow into MySpace the way my 16 year old niece does.

Want to know more? There are two good threads going in the Search Engine Watch Forums, Here Come’s Social Media Optimization? and What Is Social Search?

Gregory Kohs is a junkie for sites like del.icio.us and popurls.com.  “I love seeing what the web community is currently gobbling up, and thanks to these folksonomy and democratic bookmarking sites, it’s easy and fun to do,” he said.

One night last April, he found Placeopedia, which is a mash-up of Google Maps and Wikipedia.  He tested out some places in Atlantic City.  Interestingly enough, there were no casino hotels marked.Hmmm….might there be a business opportunity?

Well, he started MyWikiBiz.com.  Basically, his service is to author articles for companies and organizations that currently lack a presence on Wikipedia.  “First and foremost, if you’re an eligible corporation or non-profit, make sure you’re on Wikipedia,” he said.  “But I just can’t fathom how a company’s marketing or communications manager can shut off the lights for the night, knowing that his or her organization is missing out on a daily Wikipedia market of 6 million people – each of them hungry for information.”

I recently posted on Starwood’s Virtual aLofts in Second Life

I usually read Ilya Vedrashko blog the MIT AdLab mostly because he is a grad student at MIT University and is very much updated with what is going with the emerging media. He just recently wrote his graduate Thesis on “Brands in Games”, for which he also created a blog where he wrote this post that I want you to read: A Store is taking hostage by the Second Life Liberation Army - …. “Weirdo Stuff happenning in SL….” What do you think ?
I hope I can build my Resort one day, and no one will come and take it hostage, at least in Second Life…

As I have recently talked about, the owner of the Westin, Sheraton, and W chains is testing out a new loft-style hotel with prototypes in the suburbs and in virtual reality , you won’t be able to check into aloft, Starwood’s new line of moderately priced, loft-style hotels, until the first quarter of 2008. But in September, you can wander into the lobby of its digital Doppelganger inside the popular online world of Second Life.

Why is Starwood doing this ?

Starwood, owner of the chic W brand as well as the Westin and Sheraton chains, is the first real-world hospitality company to open in Second Life, and joins a growing list of other companies who are using the online world to build their brand name, test products, or simply sell merchandise—albeit digital merchandise

Created and run by San Francisco’s Linden Lab, Second Life is a 3D digital universe with a growing population of some 400,000 people. This alternate world is filled with the same mundane interactions as our real world: People buy land, build homes, and pay for a range of everyday goods and services. And they pay in cold, hard U.S. dollars (which are exchanged for Linden dollars, Second Life’s currency).

FISHING FOR FEEDBACK. For Starwood, opening aloft in Second Life is a way to test-market the hotel’s design and rapidly prototype the evolving concept. For instance, staffers will observe how people move through the space, what areas and types of furniture they gravitate towards, and what they ignore.

The project is also an effort to tap consumers for ideas. The ultimate goal is, of course, to attract hip, youthful, tech-savvy customers to the aloft brand. For that reason, the virtual hotel will remain online, as an interactive marketing tool, even after the real-world buildings open.

PARALLEL UNIVERSE. The prototype being built in Second Life is based on a physical prototype under construction in a nondescript warehouse near White Plains, N.Y., a quiet suburban setting north of Manhattan where the company is headquartered. Starwood hired two New York-based companies to build the digital model and then to market it within Second Life and beyond: marketing firm Electric Artists and the Electric Sheep Company, which specializes in designing goods for sale within Second Life.

Visits to the aloft prototypes at both the White Plains warehouse and online in Second Life revealed parallel works-in-progress. In the warehouse, index cards were taped to the walls indicating where some architectural features, such as an indoor waterfall, would eventually be placed. And sample fabrics were draped over ottomans in the bar area. In the Second Life version, one designer placed photographs from the warehouse near furniture to compare the digital models to the real objects.

Both sites featured the clean architectural lines, high ceilings, and minimalist couches, tables, and beds that characterize the aloft brand as efficient yet stylish hotels that offer sophisticated, W-style environments at budget prices (Starwood hasn’t set final pricing yet).

MORE PROTOTYPES. “The aloft brand fits well into Second Life. It’s about sleekness, and the buildings and furniture don’t take a lot of time to render or load,” says Marc Schiller, chief executive of Electric Artists. He adds that while it’s possible to build an ornate Rococo-style hotel in Second Life, “the aloft project is much more appropriate.”

This is the first time the company has created a complete mock hotel—digital or physical—to serve as “a laboratory,” says Starwood Vice-President Brian McGuinness, adding that they’re already building a second physical prototype for an extended-stay hotel under the Westin label in the same White Plains warehouse.

This is unusual for the industry. Hotel prototypes usually don’t amount to more than a single-room model that might be shown at a trade show. But the company says that both prototypes made financial sense.

OPENING SOON. “We’re saving money. If we find that significant numbers of people don’t like a certain feature, we don’t have to actually build it,” says McGuinness. “We don’t have to have a painter here for 40 hours changing the color of a wall. We can reconfigure a detail. It is very parallel to rapid prototyping.” Starwood doesn’t disclose the actual cost of producing the prototypes, both physical and virtual.

The first aloft hotels are scheduled to open in Lexington, Mass., Tucson, Ariz., Cherry Creek, Colo., and the San Francisco and Philadelphia airports, and are available for franchising. Starwood predicts that by 2012, there will be 500 aloft properties worldwide.

The company’s ambitious launch of what it hopes to be a rapidly growing line of stylish and affordable new hotels reflects analysts’ predictions that there’s room for sales growth in the hospitality industry. In his presentation at the 2006 American Lodging Investment Summit, PricewaterhouseCoopers analyst Bjorn Hanson predicted that U.S. profits in the lodging industry will increase steadily between 2005 and 2007, from $20.8 billion to $29.7 billion.

LONG-TERM CHALLENGE. The increase seems dramatic after a period of low profits after September 11, when the travel industry cooled. Still, Hanson predicts hotels will see profits surpass the industry high of $22.5 billion in 2000, in part because U.S. hoteliers such as Starwood are building more properties. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts hotel room construction starts will rise from 77,549 in 2005 to 127,708 in 2006.

While Starwood’s approach to developing the aloft design is certainly innovative, the long-term test for the company will be to lure Second Lifers, and, more importantly, real life guests, toward the brand. Opening the doors of the aloft hotel in Second Life next month might be a big help in meeting the challenges ahead.

Private Island

The Second Life version of the aloft hotel is located on its own virtual island (a standard piece of Second Life real estate). Although Starwood doesn’t disclose the cost of building its virtual property, Second Life islands start at $ 1,250 and can reach $5,000, depending on size. In real life, aloft hotels are scheduled to open in less exotic locations such as Tucson, Ariz., and near the San Francisco Airport.

Drawn from Life

Designers at The Electric Sheep Co. and ElectricArtists based their digital renderings of aloft on photographs taken during their visit to the physical model in White Plains, N.Y.

By the Book

The designers of the virtual version of an aloft hotel consulted actual floor plans, seen here, that were used to build the physical prototype.

Less Is More

The minimalist design of the aloft hotels, seen here in an architectural rendering, includes many clean lines and bold modern shapes.

Good Translation

The sleek environment is easier to render in 3-D digital form than a Baroque-style building with lots of details and flourishes, making the aloft interior a good match for Second Life.

Early Concept

Starwood hopes that the Second Life version of the aloft hotel prototype will help the company test market the floor plan, furnishings, and other elements of the structure’s design. Seen here is a rendering of an early aloft hotel concept.

Be My Guest

Designers at Starwood will consider how virtual hotel guests in Second Life react to the configuration, color scheme, and other details of the building when finalizing their plans for the real aloft hotels.

Bigger Ice Buckets

The hotel in Second Life is both a testing ground – a way to get public feedback on the designs developed in White Plains – and a marketing strategy aimed at tech-savvy, hip consumers.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Advertisers will spend $1.9 billion on social-networking sites in 2010, according to new estimates from eMarketer. And, while those sites will continue to capture a relatively small share of all online ad spending, analysts believe the phenomenon is having an incalculable impact on strategies for reaching newly empowered consumers.
As you might already know Google stroke a deal with MySpace this month.

Well now MSN has been busy striking ad distribution deals with MySpace competitors like Friendster and FaceBook.

MIcrosoft Strikes Ad Deal with FaceBook - Advertising Age - Aug.23.2006

I used to wonder what these deals meant for the me as an Internet Marketer and advertiser, I don’t have a MySpace page and neither participate in the other social networking websites, so why should I care ?
But after learning that MySpace for example has more traffic (unique visitors) than Google, I had to really try to figure out what these social networks are all about, especially because most of my ads could be showing in those websites, and I needed to be able to figure out what would be the best way to target the different demographics on those sites.

Food for thought…

There are literally thousands of “web 2.0” companies, and until now, there’s been no easy way to compare which ones are getting traffic. This list of 937 sites was inspired by the list started by Bob Stumpel and then added to by many others.

For our purposes, my definition is that most of these companies are, as the wikipedia says, sites that “let people collaborate and share information online in a new way.” So, Google doesn’t make the cut, because most of their traffic comes to their search engine. eBay is an “old” company, but the many-to-many nature of the site means that they do.

If you have a site you’d like to add, please visit Chris Mayaud’s All Things Web 2.0 site and leave your ideas there. We’ll do at least one update to this traffic rank list, in October.

Link to: Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List

-Seth Godin