DestiCorp 2.0

10 technology trends for 2010 - a strategist's perspective

While I have (for good or ill)  occasionally been described as ahead of my time, I resist describing myself as a futurist as the latter label sounds so pretentious. On the other hand, I do invest many hours a month reading, scanning, searching information that enables me to sense patterns so here are some things to watch in 2010. I’ll follow each of these topics over the next few weeks and identify what i think might be the consequences for places then – so stay tuned! The anticipated "buzzwords" for 2010 are highlighted in red. PLEASE feel free to point out serious omissions. Comments welcomed!!

 
 

1. Social Media Morphs into Social Business – you don’t need a social media strategy in 2010. That won’t be enough. You  will have to socialize your entire business, starting at home by engaging your employees, then your customers, in that order.  Keeping an eye on cost and returns  will be as important as it always was but more tools and metrics will emerge in response to the need to fine tune strategies and tactics and demonstrate accountability. Enterprises that remember it's all about people before process; purpose before profit, and passion before protocol tend to come out on top.
 
2. Integration & Identity - Thanks to widespread application integration and consumer desire to use multiple, diverse applications seamlessly and together,  identity will become a key issue in 2010 – who owns it, stores it, has access to it and under what terms? Could 2010 denote the "death of the login?" 
 Without  sharing my profile, how can I expect for the information I seek to be relevant and customized? But to whom  will I entrust data about me and who else should benefit from accessing it? Will we finally see travel-specific "widget" or web services shops to facilitate aggregation and smart mash-ups that can be used by amateurs and professionals alike?

3. Place-based Communities - we've seen the importance of community to people in the offline world and global connectivity has, in many respects, divorced community from geography. But thanks to the ying & yang of life, every trend has a counter-trend and technology will now enable people who share a common address (ie live in physical proximity) to find each other. I had no idea that YELP (one example of a hyperlocal site) attracts more visitors than Twitter. For whatever reason, I think we might slow down in 2010 and take more time to enjoy what is under our noses. Fed up with irresponsible national leadership, we'll see more community self-determination. Place brands won't be created - they'll emerge from the collaborative efforts of people identifying aspirations in common. They'll be recognized as social and emergent - now that is an important word. DMOs will recognize that they are, in fact, community facilitators, experience orchestrators and stage managers for a visitor's narrative. They'll invest in "destination webs" - the neural network that binds community members together and enables them to share intelligence and respond collectively to external threats and opportunities. 

 
3.Mobile phones and mobile apps will spread in number and intensity i.e., we’ll use them for more tasks; their content will get more real-time and richer, (more augmented);  more pleasurable to access; and smarter and more relevant to my activity, place and purpose.
They'll be used as content generators and payment devices just as often as communication devices - they might, one day, solve the identity issue identified in Trend # 2. But do you trust your mobile phone company more than Facebook. It's a tough call.
 
4.Content Curation. Content will threaten to bury us so the emphasis will be on curation, filtering and managing in and out of the cloud... Expect to see a number of companies try to bite at Google’s heels with more relevant, personalised, customisable search parameters that reflect the content being searched and the browser’s objectives. 

 
5. Video – it seems everyone wants to be on X Factor or a reality show. In 2010 their dreams will be fulfilled. Cheap HD cameras, Like FLIP,  that can stream to the internet in real time (UStream) will add to the mountain of pixels already clogging the airwaves. The new word for this is Vlogging and Cisco is leading the charge – well they would be, wouldn’t they? 
 

6. Customer Engagement & Crowdsourcing - while in 2009 content was being generated spontaneously by consumers, expect brands and destinations to take a more proactive approach to engaging customers in generating useful content and supporting their brand advocacy. BTW advocacay is the new buzz word for “word of mouth” and crowdsourcing becomes a way of engaging the entire destination community (visitors, residents, local businesses, associations and people) in inviting and caring for guests. 
 
7. Women – in 2009, more men than women were using social media and women’s purchasing power and style captured men’s attention. About time. So will 2010 be the year that women leap to the stage and start presenting at travel and tech events? Your guess is as good as mine. At the Phocuswright conference, women constituted less than 10% of the presenters but, as one of them was in charge of Google’s ad revenues, then maybe less = more.
 
8. Language – as many tourism businesses and enterprises rush to the developing world, where signs of the green shoots of recovery appear first, we’ll face a new challenge. The world is not WASP; cultures differ and people need to work in their own language. Expect to see a spate of translation services – automated and semi automated. Technology costs might go down but localization costs will make up for it. There might be a low cost solution (see trend 6) but you’ll have to wait till later in the New Year for my thoughts on that one.

 
9. Semantic or Synaptic Web – as humans rush up Maslow’s ladder in search of meaning, technology follows suit – hence talk of a Semantic Web. A new term that will crop up more frequently in 2010 is the Synaptic web – are they different?  Well the first is about deeper layers of meaning and the second is about connections and relationships. The network of the web is increasingly resembling the neural pathways in the brain. 

 
10. Collective Intelligence. 2010 will mark the end of the Age of the Individual and the emergence of a new form of collective thought  - a Global Brain - and action that emerges from the multiplicity of new, different and self aware connections. We’ll start to find ways of working without formal leaders and commands from above. We’ll emulate the working of computers while mimicking the behaviour of swarms. In 2009 a number of books on swarms and herd appeared on bookshelves – expect to see more in 2010 as we learn how to work across platforms, cultures and vast distances as a agile and adaptive teams. This is especially relevant to destinations. In 2010, expect to see DMOs focus on getting SMART and attending to the needs of the niche, smaller operators at the end of a "long tail."

And if this isn’t enough, the bloggers at TNOOZ have published their technology predictions for travel here. Surely enough food for thought to fuel and entire new year of feverish activity!!!

Will DMOs* survive the next decade?

I was recently asked to write a paper on the likely changing role of DMOs. Having spent my entire career working with this institution in various parts of the globe, and intending to do so going forward, I’ve a keen interest in an accurate answer. 

This afternoon, two blog posts from very reputable sources caught my attention: 

Douglas Quimby from Phocuswright wrote a post titled Destinations: The Online Marketing Disconnect, justifiably bemoaning the fact that DMOs seem so unwilling to move significant chunks of their marketing budgets into the online space. I don’t know Douglas personally, but hope to meet up with him at the PhocusWright Conference in Florida mid November. I imagine him to be a bright, talented Gen X or Yer who ”gets it” i.e finds it impossible to imagine how destinations couldn’t see the obvious benefits of playing aggressively in the online space. 

The commentators to his post are each highly credentialed to speak and deplored the lack of appropriate measuring tools, lack of expertise and education. I suggested that the real problem is “culture” and to see why, please follow the thread…here.  As further evidence of the challenge, I’d  also recommend you read the last blog post from Vicky at Highland Business Research:  It Shouldn’t be This Difficult.   In this post, I can hear the frustrated anguish of someone who is incredibly talented and productive appear to hit a wall or be pushing a boulder up hill. I’m hoping it was her last blog post because she is sunning herself on a beach and has not given up the DMO community for good. 

The second very different post was from a DMO executive – one of the leading lights in social media (and, don’t get me wrong, there are many very talented people in DMOs pushing the edge of the envelope- see my blog roll as a starter. Troy from Denver was writing for the new e-marketing and travel site called, Toonz.com that should be bookmarked quickly by anyone in travel marketing. His post was called How The Industry Will Save the World – so you can see why it got my attention!!

Troy has a brilliant reputation for applying social media to marketing destinations.  So this was quite a step away from his normal territory. Having identified that climate change is an important issue, he appears to be applying travel marketers’ normal and contagious enthusiasm and proposes:  

The time has arrived to lend our voice to the congregation and become a part of the solution.  The travel industry…utilizing technology…can help lead the way.

Well I really hope so. And I welcome Troy and his highly talented e-marketing peers to join the conversation – quickly. But I doubt that the travel industry will save the world – if it’s at all fortunate, it might just save itself. But only if the DMOs recognize and own up to the fact that they are a major part of the problem. The transport cost of most international tourists constitute the bulk of carbon emissions. No one currently takes responsibility for that.  Tourism has to change if it is to make a positive contribution to a very different economy that is emerging from the melting rubble of the old. 

Take my word for it. There are no quick fixes. The current leadership of the tourism “industry” has first to shift its perception and see tourism as the analogue extension of the IT community – both simply connect people and places. They need to work together and fast to find a way of enabling the act of travel to coexist with the act of communication. Both have to find a way of delivering value without living beyond the physical means of the environment to support it. 

In summary – there are two major forces threatening and re-shaping DMOs: 

1. The need to deploy technology effectively or get out of the way; and 

2. The need to ensure destinations can live within the physical limits set by the host environment. 

DMOs could play a positive role in each endeavour but it will mean seeing things differently (a mindset shift); doing things differently ( a culture shift) and doing different things – a role change. Nothing serious – but certainly NOT “business as usual!!!”

To quote Troy – let the conversation continue but PLEASE may it soon lead to action. A good place to start is to join and support The Icarus Foundation, formed some 3 years ago to encourage the tourism industry to become more climate friendly. 

But  now we've started a conversation: what do think DMOs have to do to survive the next decade?

* DMO is the acronym used to describe Destination Marketing Organizations (responsible for attracting visitors to a place).

Twitter's new home page should send DMOs all a twittering

Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) and Convention Visitor Bureaus (CVBs) are embracing “social media” (notably Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts ) at a noticeably faster pace than their adoption of the internet in the 1990s. That’s the good news. 

The bad news – for those that haven’t entered the brave new world of microblogging – is that “time waits for no one”. The twitter, social media tide continues to flow fast. Twitter’s new home page, announced yesterday and illustrated below, is designed to make Twitter less confusing to newbies. More importantly, it contains a search engine that can be accessed by any browser (having a twitter account is no longer a pre-requisite of search). 

As ably addressed by Colin Schaal in his blog post today, this “changes everything” yet again. If search is the primary source of traffic to travel sites and browsers can now get real time information and offers directly from the source, we can expect Google’s domination of search to feel some pressure and the stakes to be raised for DMOs

As I write this, the Destination Marketing Association International (#DMAI) is having its annual conference in Atlanta and a handful of delegates are tweeting – there’d be more than a handful but the poor wifi reception is apparently hindering some efforts?!? Twittering is bound to be a subject of conversation...

• Nathan Kam (@nathankam) has kindly assembled and updated a list of over 350 DMOs and CVBs that operate Twitter accounts – his  current list here appears to cover mostly North American destinations..
• GoSeeTell  here has compiled a list and applied a ranking that's published in their June blog
• DCI, a place consulting firm, has recently published a report, The Twitter Elite. Congratulations Baltimore, Greater Fort Lauderdale. New Orleans, San Francisco, and Tampa Bay. 

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way of tracking, comparing and evaluating the success of these efforts or, indeed, of ensuring that the lists are complete. So we must express our gratitude to these tracking pioneers and their willingness to share. 

Destinations like Denver (@iknowdenver) that have invested significantly in a twitter strategy are not included in Nathan’s list; Greater Philidelphia (@uwishnu) was excluded even though this DMO has pioneered social media in the USA; and Travel Portland (@indpx), while listed in Nathan Kam’s inventory, does not rank in the top 5 of DCI’s  elite despite pioneering the innovative Twisitor Centre that both GoSeeTell and Travel Portland developed. 

But it’s early days, the pace of change is breathtakingly fast, and twitter account names are sometimes ambiguous. Have you secured yours?

It’s an English summer, pouring with rain and cold (!), so I thought I’d add a little research of my own. I took a quick look at four national destinations – all of whom have positive marketing reputations to maintain. They just happen to be Britain and three of “her” former colonies!

VisitBritain is active on Twitter having safeguarded the brand name (@visitbritain) and has attracted 3,866 followers. The national DMO has emulated an earlier New Zealand initiative and encouraged browsers to follow an individual travelling around the "Edge of Britain". But their twitter page laments - twice in one day, no less, that no one is following "Scott". 

It took a while to find out who Scott was (@scottyramsay) - his twitter address is buried deep within the Visit Britain site as part of a campaign called the Edge of Britain. Please follow him asap - the weather's lousy and he must wish he were in New Zealand, Australia or even Western Canada where the temperatures are soaring. 

Australia has lead the way with Facebook – its fan page attracts some 246,000 fans and its Twitter account (@seeaustralia) has posted over 398 tweets that have attracted 3,436 followers. Impressive considering that the main Australia site does not announce either its Twitter or Facebook presence on its customer facing site.

New Zealand appears to be playing catch up as far as Facebook is concerned with the 100%PureNew Zealand Facebook presence attracting only 4000 fans but their Twitter account is older, richer in content (632 tweets) and its name has greater brand integrity (@purenewzealand), attracting over 5000 followers. The Kiwis also seem reluctant to promote the twitter account on their home page. 

Canada is lagging slightly compared to its southern competitors with no Facebook presence. The national marketing organization does have a Tweet account but its name, @ctccct, is unlikely to grab popular attention.  Despite the official and mysterious name, some 1623 followers have signed on. What is also surprising given the hold that policy has on decision-making is the fact that a French only version wasn't deemed mandatory (significant if you work for the federal government, that is). There’s no reference to any interactive social media on the CTC home page but there is a direct link from the separate media centre site  to the twitter account which appears to be both a responsibility and initiative of the media centre.

So given the rapid rise in the number of Twitter accounts - as well as the number of dormant accounts (some 20% have no tweets at all), we can also expect growing confusion in the marketplace as to which Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages are being run by “official” DMOs – or does this matter?  If, on the other hand, if place brand integrity and quality assurance are important, then DMO’s will need not just to be tracking mentions and tweets but keeping an eye on responses too. All point to more labour intensive work at a time when most DMO and CVB budgets are under real financial pressure.

It's an exciting time in tourism marketing history to be involved and I defy anyone to predict with certainty how this explosion in twitter chatter will evolve. But like any good party, best not to be a wallflower...isn't it time to dance with the customer or, in my case, go "singing in the rain"?!

In subsequent posts I hope we can start a rigorous discussion about the more complex and strategic issues associated with the implications of social media. In the meantime, I'd welcome your comments. 

If you have, as I hope you you do, detailed, practical questions of practitioners, as to what works, what doesn't or why when it comes to implementation, then I suggest you contact the bloggers in my blogroll or the authors of the sites listed in this post. If you want help convincing your boss or Board that this is an area you can't ignore or starve of resources, then I'd be pleased to help!