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?

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.

In our always-on social media world I think we are assisting to a new phenomenon: the “social loneliness“.

Social media has changed the way we interact with our friends, colleagues, loved ones. Mobile devices and their wireless and cheap connections have changed the way we use social networks. We are using mobile devices to update our status on facebook, twitter, tell friends where we are having dinner using foursqaure, and upload pictures of what we are looking at.

Wonderful! I would say.
But the strange thing I would like to address here is that not all of us are as social as they might appear on social media!

I was running in a public park in Milan a few days ago and I’ve noticed a noticeable amount of people who were sitting or walking alone in the park playing around with their mobile device. Most of them were probably updating their status on social networks, reading posts from friends and sharing their position somewhere else. In a situation where you would expect some lonely and contemplative thinking or reading, these people were actually trying to feel in the middle of a crowd. I often update my status or position from mobile too, but usually this is while I’m on the way traveling and do not have the chance to have face-to-face chat with friends. This is also a nice way of feeling close to friends.

Hence I have two open questions:

1. since they are walking alone in the park, do you think these people are really as social as they appear on social networks?

2. could spending a bit less time updating our status from mobile devices in the park help us in getting a few real drinks with friends at the pub?

This makes me think that some people are not expressing their real inner soul, appearing much more social then they truly are.
Also, should we try to be a bit less lazy and go outside to meet with people instead of updating our status from our iPhone? Are we going towards a social loneliness?

Any thought or ideas are more than welcome.

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.

I’ve  used several social media applications in the last few months, all with great capabilities and features. I was basically not deciding which one to use for all my social media accounts.

Hootsuite has definitely helped me in deciding.
Hootsuite is a web based social media aggregator, with no need to install on your computer.

You can manage all your twitter, linkedin, facebook and foursquare accounts from one place. Each of your social media accounts will be a tab in the web 2.0 interface, where you can see the home stream, the direct messages, the posts you have sent, etc. You can also schedule your tweets and have Hootsuite notify you by email when the tweet has been posted.
Since you have all in one place, you can decide to post the same tweet to all your accounts simultaneously.

Also, the very well designed user interface makes it easy to see all twitter direct messages or mentions and reply to them from inside the stream.

One feature that has been really improved after the last update is the statistics interface. You can see stats for single messages or as a summary of all the messages you have posted. But most interesting thing is that you can view statistics compared to your google analytics account, in order to match tweets and web stats.

Recent changes in Gmail APIs have opened the door to third parties applications which can integrate into Gmail.

I’ve been (and still am) testing a few interesting (social)CRM applications which integrate into Gmail.
Here is what I found:

1. Rapportive: probably the best one in terms of seamless integration with Gmail. Every time you open an email it shows you additional information on the right column, hiding ads. It shows you all the social media information that is is able to find about the contact you have received the email from, including facebook, linkedin, twitter status and a picture. Nice looking integration but still lacks follow-up, reminders and auto-send features.
2. etacts: integrates into Gmail’s right column, moving down the ads. It is much more oriented to follow-up email, finding un-answered emails, getting in touch with people or prospects setting automatic reminders. Each time you send an email you can decide when should etacts remind you, in the case your recipient hasn’t answered. It keeps track of how many emails (and calls) you’ve sent and received from a given contact. The annoying thing is that it opens pop-up windows to show you some of the info. Still has some bugs and in some cases I think it ignores answers.
3. CureCRM: the only one with auto-sending options. CureCRM integrates an email Robot which (should) send emails automatically for you at given intervals. You can set email templates to send to prospects with personalized signatures. It has an Outlook plug-in, which I have not tested since I’m not an Outlook user. It can be integrated into Google Apps, even if I think the pay-per-email pricing is really too expensive.

They all have add-ons for Firefox and Chrome.

Please let me know about more similar applications..

Vincenzo Vecchio, durante il suo elevator pitch al Working Capital di Napoli, ha presentato SentiMetrix, un software di analisi semantica che promette una percentuale di errore molto bassa.

Durante la tappa napoletana del Working Capital Tour Vincenzo Vecchio ha introdotto SentiMetrix, un tool di analisi semantica in grado di monitorare un numero molto elevato di fonti — blog, portali di informazione, social network — trovare i contenuti riguardanti uno specifico cliente e comprenderne il significato. Il servizio è in grado di fornire una panoramica delle opinioni apparse nel web, presentando un report molto utile per comprendere gli umori della rete. Vincenzo porta l’esempio del politico, che ha la possibilità di controllare il gradimento dell’opinione pubblica nei suoi confronti e di monitorare le richieste dei cittadini in merito a determinate questioni, con l’obiettivo di modificare l’andamento della propria campagna elettorale.

La rete rappresenta ormai da tempo un ampio contenitore di opinioni e, proprio per la loro natura spontanea e incontrollabile, esse risultano particolarmente credibili agli occhi degli utenti. Come illustra un report di Nielsen, i consigli personali e le opinioni pubblicate online dai consumatori sono considerate le più autorevoli ed efficaci forme di pubblicità. A livello mondiale ben sette consumatori su dieci si fidano dei consigli comparsi in rete, mentre in Italia oltre l’80% degli utenti ha dichiarato di ritenere autorevoli i pareri e le recensioni che compaiono sui blog e sui social network.