23 Musings

Great article in Computer Weekly that describes the benefits of semantic web and why companies need to start preparing. Tim Berners-Lee mentions the Resource Description Framework and Web Ontology Language that's coming from the working group. This is something I'm looking forwards to (as an information junkie), it's similar although much more complex to Microformats which is pleasing (as an avid fan of Microformats) and will really help make the information available through the web more useful and accessible (Google really should have thought of this...)!

The more we get overloaded with information and the more disjointed the web becomes it's imperative that we (as designers/developers/experts) all embrace semantic web and ensure it becomes the defacto standard for tagging up content as soon as it's released (of course your Microformats will work alongside). Content that can be understood (to some extent) by software opens up a myriad of possibilities for us all, especially with the growing trend for data mashups...

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the use of tagging is growing fast among US web users. The December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

Tagging has always had this perception that it's a step towards a semantic (read more intelligent) way to traverse the web, but in reality it is proving a common sense approach to cutting and dicing information to make it easier to manage/find. Although it does have it's detractors who say tagging is too simple, I'm of the opinion that it's an incredibly useful tool when used correctly. Roll on the day when all content management systems come with a built in folksonomy function!

Some new research has been released by Compete Inc looking into social networking and the next wave. Amongst other interesting findings, one that stands out is the fact that the users of social networking sites are rejecting traditional online advertising in favour of recommendations and reviews by friends and peers.

Now this has been pretty obvious with the rise of tagging as a major form of navigation and recommendation, the emergence of Digg et al and the emergence of the new social shopping sites such as Crowdstorm.

Reviews have been a part of online shopping for me for many years, the first place I remember seeing and using them was Kelkoo (the online price comparison service) followed soon after by Amazon with it's 'people who looked at/bouth this also liked' feature (which I still find invaluable to this day).

To move these kinds of features into the social networking realm seems a natural progression and one that will work extremely well. In social networks you have groups of people with similar interests and ideas, to allow them to recommend products and services is a logical step and a valuable one for members of those communities.

Marketers need to embrace the emergence of these trends and move away from displaying ads on the most viewed pages to get coverage. By taking advantage of group recommendations and trends within a social network advertisers can target their offerings much more accurately, more so even than contextual placement.

The key steps identified by this report are:

• Research consumers while they research you and your brand
• Create a channel to connect consumers and your brand
• Engage consumers; listen, learn and leverage

Good advice! Of course this does leave me wondering how Google will display ads on YouTube, the traditional Adsense model seems a little underdeveloped to take full advantage of the social aspects of video sharing.

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!