Photo courtesy David Erickson
SOCIAL TRAVEL
Tripl Infographic
72% of all social network users access their social networking sites daily while they are traveling.
THOUGHT: People are sharing their experiences all the time online and travel is no different.
Online behavior around travel is pretty predictable: You research where you’re going, you plan your activities, you book your flights or plan your driving route, and make arrangement for accommodations.
And all the while you’re probably talking about your trip on Facebook and Twitter and likely asking for advice from your network.
For the travel industry, then, there are ample opportunities to identify and connect with travelers: You just gotta listen and respond appropriately.
But an often-overlooked aspect of travel is the business travel.
A common aspect of business travel is attending conferences and industry events. Event marketing/planning is something we do quite a bit of at Tunheim, and that includes conferences.
There are still a lot of similarities between business and consumer travel; you still book flights, you still arrange for accommodations, but the activity is typically more focused, especially for conferences.
So we look at what those activities might be: They very well may be using LinkedIn in addition to Twitter and Facebook; joining conference events on LinkedIn, participating in LinkedIn groups related to the conference, and connecting with people they meet at the conference through LinkedIn.
If there’s a hashtag for the conference, then there will likely be a lot of opportunities to connect with attendees on Twitter, before, during and after the conference.
People will often research the speakers at a conference to see if they want to attend a given session. If you’re speaking at a conference, what information is there about you online for attendees? Your presentations? YouTube videos? Your LinkedIn profile? Are you active on Twitter? All of these things can help drive attendance to your session.
Create scenarios about the activities conference attendees will likely engage in before, during and after conferences and then look for opportunities to help them in some fashion. Being helpful is a great way to start a relationship.
SUPER COOL TOOL TUESDAY: Posterous Events – Launched with their iPhone app earlier this year at SXSW, the events feature is location-aware and allows for group sharing of event content at one Posterous Events page, a nice tool to crowdsource and consolidate event content.
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