Online travel marketing tips for the times

We’re just back from Eye for Travel’s Online Marketing Strategies for 2009 conference in Miami with lots of solid information, inspiration and interesting facts. Here are some highlights which resonated with us:

• Leverage Wikipedia descriptions. This is especially useful in online mapping. Several websites offer their users the possibility to show Wikipedia articles on their map. In most cases this feature is easy to use and also adds value to your map.
• Over 80% of meeting planners go to TripAdvisor to plan meetings. Want to get more or better reviews on TripAdvisor and head off the bad ones? Send an email to guests after their stay encouraging them to post a review on trip advisor if they had a good experience and if they had problems, to contact an appointed person at the hotel.
• If you are using Twitter to market and promote your business, you’re likely concerned about how much time you spend on the website every day. Susan Black’s review of TweetDeck was great – a handy desktop application that helps us better manage time, tweets, and monitoring without staying on Twitter all day. You’ll definitely want to check this out if you’re not already on board.
• The average number of twitter followers for a destination? 600!
• There’s been a consumption boom in online video/programming viewership, which has changed dramatically in the last 6 months because of today’s technology (pc’s, mobiles, and tv/game consoles). We can watch online anytime, anywhere. (12 million watched the Beijing Olympics in August 2008; 13 million watched Obama’s inauguration live; 100 million have watched Susan Boyle’s audition to date).
• Make sure your online video content is visually appealing, entertaining, unique, intriguing, and most importantly, short! So don’t wait to get your video content out there. Post it and your consumers will decide if its right – they’ll either use it or they won’t, and then at least you’ll know what to improve upon. Sites such as Blinkx serve up travel and destination videos all the time.