As standards of living improve, people are placing an increasing emphasis on leisure, dynamically seeking ways to relax and eliminate stress. This is why travel has become a popular leisure activity. Numerous factors influence the destination choice, including advertising campaigns, travel agency promotions, airline ticket discounting, movies or TV programs, personal preferences and word of mouth.

In particular, the Internet has dramatically changed the competitive dynamics of the lodging industry, since a continuously growing number of tourists use this technology to collect useful information for their travels. Marketers, who have long sought to harness and manage interactions such as these to their own advantage, have recently begun to consider and devise strategies to manage online interpersonal influence.

Especially hospitality and tourism marketers find the issue of critical importance in view of the fact that recent research has demonstrated the influence of both positive and negative word of mouth upon tourism products in studies across a broad range of nations.

I think marketers in the tourism market cannot ignore word-of-mouth today and therefore cannot ignore what is being said on the blogsphere about specific locations and type of accommodations.

Competition is increasing in the tourism industry as tourism businesses move into the electronic marketplace. Increased competition calls for more customer orientation. One way to obtain competitive advantage is trough customer satisfaction, a factor of increasing importance in the more competitive electronic markets.
Today users can easily spread their comments and complaints which, in turn, can significantly affect a company’s image. Electronic word of-mouth is a useful tool to disseminate positive and negative observations on companies and brands via websites, chat rooms, and consumer forums.

Tourism organisations need to recognise these changes and to develop personalised services to address individual needs. Proactive services may be offered based on the anticipated needs resulting from known and declared or previously experienced customer profiles. Although a number of research studies regarding web sites relating to the tourism/hospitality industry have been conducted worldwide, few have been found that deal specifically with consumers’ opinion and the way brands or travel operators react to positive or negative word-of-mouth. I think the tourism industry still lacks in analyzing and gaining marketing intelligence from social media, underestimating the potentials of brand engagement in the blogsphere.

This is why I believe tourism organizations should investigate sentiment analysis software, capable of helping in re-arranging marketing campaigns “on-the-fly” with best practices.

What I think is important, especially to tourism agencies, is the ability to analyze and react in near real time. The majority of tools available today are SaaS based web application that enable users to define search terms (products, services, company names, brand names, etc.) and configuration parameters from a browser.
When a sentiment analysis software identifies an article relevant to a query topic (such as “Ischia Island”), it first retrieves blogs and news articles relevant to Ischia Island and then analyzes their content using a mix of natural language processing and statistical methods.

Finally, another interesting point is to compare and contrast findings between different time periods, since consumers change their perception frequently. What could be of great impact could be the integration of sentiment analysis tools with existing marketing applications.

Anyone has used commercial sentiment analysis tools for tourism marketing?

We often read about time management and tasks management. I have to say that GTD has really changed the way I work and the way I manage my time in general. David Allen has done a great job at putting into simple words a great process and approach to work/life management.
Following the GTD success, many software applications are now available that really help you in managing time and tasks with the GTD process in mind. I have previously posted a few articles about interesting apps that can make your GTD time management easier, such as To-Do Lists & Tasks Management.

Although these apps are all excellent for managing your tasks I have found that none of them put together time management and time tracking.
What about if you have the following requirements?

1. track the amount of time you work on your projects
2. track the time you work on each task or type of task
3. bill your customers according to the time you spend on their project

Unfortunately none of the software I’ve tested really put together these two aspects. It would be great if you could write down each of your tasks, insert an estimated time-to-complete and then actually track how much time you have spent on that particular task.

I’ve found a few apps for time tracking that are very well thought:

1. Yanomo
2. Paymo
3. Yast

All three offer a limited free subscription, which I would give it a try. The last two also offer a free iPhone app that lets you track your time on the go. But syncing your favorite GTD system with one of the above mentioned time tracking apps could be really time consuming. If you have very few tasks that are not updated very often, then you could also consider the possibility to manually update your time tracking application with the data in your task management software.

An interesting solution I’m (still) evaluating is to use Google Calendar.
What I’ve found viable is to create as many calendars as projects you have. A good idea could be to create calendars named “PROJECT XYZ – TASKS”. When you want to insert a task within that particular project you just add an event into the calendar. In case you have sub-projects you could name the tasks “@SUBTASK: task”. Quite trivial up to this point. But how do we track time?

Well, here is where Youcalc comes in. Youcalc is a very interesting software that can be hooked to you google calendar. After you have created your free account, you can start tracking:
- the amount of time you have spent on each calendar
- the number of events you have on each calendar

Although it seems like an interesting (and free) solution, it still has some bugs I’m trying to sort out:

1. you have to decide if you can manage to copy your tasks from your GTD app to your Google calendar
2. inserting your tasks only into Google calendar could be dangerous if you don’t complete those tasks, because they won’t show up anymore in the future
3. you have to decide if the tasks in your calendars are SCHEDULED or COMPLETED tasks

I would be tremendously happy to hear about your opinion or some alternative solution.

I used to post tweets and blog posts as soon as they were ready, as soon as I had something to share.
But lately I’ve figured out that choosing a time and date to put your content out there could be crucial. Also, with the help of very easy to use tools for  tweeting and blogging, I believe choosing a correct time has become really easy.

Some studies show that posts on Facebook are more often shared between 9.00 AM and 10.00 AM. Also, it seems like there are more chances of your message to be re-tweeted in the early afternoon, from 1.00 PM to 3.00 PM.

As far as blogs, posting in a given time is something you can do from the publishing options of any blogging software such as WordPress. The correct time for posting your blog is a bit less important than the correct time for tweeting and Facebook. This is because your blog post will be there for a long time, obviously unless you have some incredible news you want to share with the world as soon as possible.

Your tweets and posts on Facebook are the ones you should pay more attention to, even because you might want to share here a link to you blog posts.
There are several tools that make scheduling your tweets easy, such as Tweet-U-Later.
But the one I have found very efficient is HootSuite, which makes you schedule twitter tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn posts at the same time at a give time and date. You can also see your pending posts and post links when visiting web pages with the Firefox or Chrome add-on.

I came a cross a few interesting new web apps that maybe represent the social answer to the economic crisis we are living today.The first one is called Fiverr where the slogan is “The place for people to share things they’re willing to do for $5″. And that’s exactly what it is. A kind of social network where people offer the most strange performances and services for just 5$!

Even if the bigger number of proposals are technical ones (such as debugging web sites, installing wordpress themes, etc.), you can also find pretty strange announcements such as: “I will call your girl and tell her that you are gay for $5″, or “I will send you

a hi res photo of me doing any yoga pose for $5″, or “I will be your friend and send you an email every day for 14 days telling you how wonderful you are for $5″…

The other (very similar) service is called TenBux. Given the “expensive” quotation – from 5$ to 10$ – you can find here more complex offers, which in some cases really seem to be unrealistic, given the amount of time needed. Great attention is on social media and new marketing concepts, such as “I will send an email ad to 92,000 people about your business or website for $10″, or “I will make a basic but nice-looking blogger blog for $10″. Silly proposals also play a key role, like: “I will eat a whole onion and send you a video for $5″, or “I will sing happy birthday in spanish whilst drunk to your chosen person for $10″.

These, and probably other web sites, are an interesting phenomenon a proof of evidence of what the social media experience has been dragged and how an economic crisis can lead people to work for a few bucks.

There are some times when you just have to decide which project to pursue. You can’t just go for every project/opportunity you encounter on your way.
A project may be a new customer, an investment opportunity, a familiy project (such as re-painting your bedrooms) or an ordinary company project.

Simple enough, I have found pretty useful to use a Project Evaluation Model for all the cases above.

When choosing which project to go for, just have these elements clear:

- the criteria you are using to judge your project
- the importance you are willing to give to that specific criteria
- the score you assign for that criteria (low, medium, high)

This will create an easy to read table with some numerical evaluation of your project.
Of course, many situations need some personal thoughts and instinct.. but this could be a solid base on which to build your thoughts.

Download a sample Project Evaluation Model.

If you could listen to this picture, you would feel the incredible and wonderful silence.

I always look for very innovative (and in some cases high risk oriented) talents, that combine enthusiasm for the idea and at the same time a clear view on market opportunities and barriers.

Hundreds of ideas I have seen lately have very original technology but do not look at what is going on in the world, relegating them in a closed space. I love ideas that seamlessly integrate with other proven success technologies and market accepted innovations or habits.