23 Musings

The perennial rumour of Microsofts impending acquisition of Yahoo has resurfaced in an article in the NY Post today. I last posted on this in September. See the last line of this NY Post article for the hint supposedly from an insider at MS, apparently the deal is still being debated at Microsoft.

I'm actually less unconvinced than I was about this rumour now. Microsoft are still failing to build the traction around their MSN portal and get significantly less browse traffic than Yahoo and have significantly less advertising real estate available to them. They are also lagging behind in search (although that could change soon). Yahoo would still be a great buy for them, and instantly propel them up the charts in terms of eyeballs and ad clicks.

News out today that the founders of online travel site Lastminute.com are launching a new site. Mydeco.com aims to be the online hub for the budding decorators and diy'ers out there who currently don't have a home on the web to call their own.

Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox are coming together to launch this new venture, it's the first thing they've worked on together since Lastminute. The site aims to be a one stop shop for people looking to improve their home, and as well as advice and tips it will sell items such as furniture.

Word is that £5m in seed capital has been raised which should see this venture take off!

I reckon it's a winner. If you get the social aspects of a niche site such as this right and do the right deals with third party suppliers then you will be on to a winner. Traffic shouldn't be a problem as relevant terms drive huge volume from SEO and the £5m will go a long way towards getting them an audience.

I say back to 1997 as a friend and I ran niche portals such as this (based around forums) for fun back in those days. Maybe it's time to dust off carmechanic.com...

An ex-colleague of mine who's an extremely gifted technical wiz with the rare talent to be able to talk turkey with the business world set up a range of GPS based mobile services a while back. I've just been to check out his progress and the service is looking amazing now!

The service is called Sportsdo, originally it was a range of services aimed at specific sports (Skido, Rundo, Snowdo, Cycledo and Bikedo) but he's now got a single service aimed at users of any sport or leisure activity that involves movement. The idea is that you install the Sportsdo software on your mobile phone (they support Windows Mobile and Java based phones), plug in a GPS receiver and go take part in your activity. The software tracks your progress using GPS to give you accurate realtime performance stats. It can generate live and accurate readings on your speed, distance travelled, time, gradient, calories used, pace, total ascent and descent. A full log of your exploits are created and can either be viewed on your phone or uploaded to the Sportsdo portal.

The software has a Live option which can transmit real-time performance information to the web so everyone can see how you're doing. You can even set it to send regular text messages containing your key stats to your mates as often as you choose.

The portal has a community feel and you can share info and meet other enthusiasts through it. You can create your own sportslog which stores your sporting achievements and sorts all your data for you. The sportslog contains Google maps showing your routes and image maps from Google Earth. You can even upload pictures taken on your phone and they're fixed to the maps at the points they were taken.

The portal has a really nice blog feel to it and a lot of influence has obviously been taken from various Web2.0 companies. I'm really pleased for the guys involved as they have been nursing this idea since it started as a way for two techies to see how fast/far they were skiing on their expeditions. The great thing about this service is it's been developed by sports people for sports people, it just so happens that the sports people who developed it also happen to be extremely technical! I'm sure Sportsdo will be a success, there are so many activities it fits with (motorsport comes to mind) and the possibilities are endless.

So, the buzzword of the year seems to be UGC (no, not that cinema firm) 'user generated content'. The practice of allowing users to contribute to your website is not a new one however, in fact it's been around since the 1990's in the form of forums and reviews, but lately it's become seen as one of the key points of Web2.0 and it seems everyone is scrabbling to get on the bandwagon (at least they are in travel).

UGC add's a huge amount of value to your website in a number of ways (here's a few below):

• the content changes regularly which is key to securing repeat visitors and a good position in natural search
• it builds trust; the subject of reviews has made many travel companies very nervous but those who have bitten the bullet and allowed it have found it helped increase conversions by allowing users to read what real people thought of a hotel/destination (you only have to look at the success of Tripadvisor to see the demand for this type of content)
• it's free; all the content you receive is freely contributed generally by people who care about the topic

Of course there's also some downfalls (again, here's a sample below):

• quality; letting anyone submit content to your site means you are going to receive alot of badly written, poor grammer laden content which can lower the overall quality of your site (in my opinion you should resist the temptation to edit and leave it as is, editing users submissions is one way to lower the trust in your site)
• increased work for you; someone of course has to manage this content. While I believe yu shouldn't edit anything yu allow to be posted you do of course have to filter out the offensive or wacko type submissions you will receive
• legal; at some point something libellous will get posted (you just can't avoid it), be prepared to have to deal with it

In my opinion the opportunities presented by UGC far out weigh the pitfalls!

In the travel sector there are many opportunities to acquire and use UGC. I've detailed some of the opportunities below and split them into pre-booking, post-departure (while they're away) and on return (note; this isn't an exhaustive list, just a few ideas of how I would do it).

Pre-booking:

• not so much content but at this point I would gather info from the user as to what hotels they are viewing etc and store this to be able to display the most viewed or popular
• also worth finding out what kind of holiday they are looking for (eg. family, honeymoon, couples) and cross referencing this with the hotels they book to help you classify your content better
  

Post-departure:

• there's an opportunity to cash in on the more tech savvy holiday makers at this point. There are many services that can be built allowing users to SMS or email photo's from their mobile phones onto your website while they are abroad. Imagine allowing everybody who books on your site to set up their own photo blog for when they are away
• you could also get reviews from the more tech savvy customers, both online or by text again (the customers blog could include text entries as well as photo)
  

On return:

• reviews; get your customers to tell you what they thought of the flights, hotels, resorts, activities, staff etc. This becomes a hugely valuable source of info for prospective customers
• tagging; get your customers to classify the hotel/holiday for you. If you have a decent content management system you should be able to associate this data with the hotel and allow other users to use this data in their hunt for a holiday
• photo's; get their holiday photo's on to their blog that you gave them. Make it clear that you may use the photo's and then you can take your pick from the best
• video; similar to photo, video could be uploaded to the site for other users to view
  

So there are quite a few ideas for ways to acquire content from your users in the travel sector. There are many more touch points than these where you can make use of their interactions with your website as well but I'll leave you to uncover them. all these touch points also become great opportunities to collect customer data for marketing purposes as well, so make sure you have a decent CRM system so you can make full use of it!

The key to all of this is having a decent CMS and infrastructure which links all the data you glean from users with your main content repository. There is absolutely no point in collecting content from users unless others users are going to be able to find and make use of it!