photo by Shay Haay on Flickr

Ten Essential Tools for Social Media Content Creation for Resorts and Destinations

Cameras

We tell our clients to take photos (and lots of them) and post them everywhere. This may sound like a simple proposition around the conference table, but then you have to decide what camera to get, who to give it to, and then how to get the images from the camera to the computer to the web. Our three camera pics come from our friend John Shafer, Snowcialite and the man behind PhotographyReview.com.

Waterproof Point and Shoot

“I shoot a lot of skiing, so I usually carry a waterproof, pocket digital camera and my digital SLR when I’m in the snow. I love waterproof pocket cameras because you don’t have to worry about getting them covered with snow, and if you carry them in a pouch on the shoulder strap of your backpack they’re always accessible. This year they almost all have 720p video as well as still shooting, making them even more versatile. My favorite waterproof camera at the moment is the Sony Cybershot TX5. It’s tiny, has good image quality, great video and it appears to be nearly indestructible. For more general information and a list of current outdoor-friendly waterproof cameras, check out my Outdoor & Waterproof Camera Guide.”

Superzoom

“If you want more power and features than a waterproof camera has to offer, I think superzooms are the way to go. Most of the big camera companies now make pocket superzooms with 10x zoom lenses and HD video. You’ll have to be careful about keeping a non-waterproof camera dry in the snow, but a 10x zoom lens offers a lot more shooting flexibility and reach on the ski slopes. Right now the pocket superzooms I like are the Panasonic Lumix ZS7, the Sony Cybershot HX5V and the brand new Canon PowerShot SD4500 IS.”

Digital SLR

“For best quality you’ll have to carry a digital SLR and a big lens. If you’re really serious about your photos it’s just what you need to do. But for most purposes – especially if everything you shoot is just getting posted on the Web, a compact, pocket-sized camera will more than do the job.”

Eye Fi

So now lets say you’ve got a camera full of images in the hands of a liftie on the back side of the mountain on a Saturday evening. How do you get those images up on the web as quickly and painlessly as possible?

The Eye-Fi replaces the SD card in your camera and saves all your images like a normal SD card. We recommend the Eye Fi Pro X2 SD Card. The big difference is when you get back to an on-mountain WIFI hotspot the Eye-Fi card will log in and upload all the new photos to a predetermined list of web photo sharing sites like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and more. You can then log in, add titles, captions and tags and post them to your website or blog and you’ve taken a huge step out of the process.

HootSuite

Managing Twitter for a brand can get overwhelming. Hootsuite is a web and smartphone app that simplifies managing your incoming and outgoing Twitter content quite a bit. Here are the key features that make or break a twitter app for business use.

* Scheduling: Key up tweets to launch throughout the day at strategic times.
* Monitoring: monitor keywords, or profiles in real time
* Follower management: Through the app you can add, remove, search for and manage lists for your followers.
* Collaboration and assignments
* Multiple account management
* Stats and analytics

iPhone/Android

Your employees are your social media presence. Make the most of them and their ability to capture content on the mountain by distributing company owned smartphones to key personnel. A good social media strategy should include provisions for using this team of employees to create content, so go the distance and put the tools into their hands that make it as easy as possible to fulfill that part of their job. We recommend iPhones if you’re on AT&T or one of the great Android powered devices if you’re not.

Wordpress Application

Having the smartphone is just a start. The next step is to connect that devise to what should be your primary marketing venue, the blog. Most blogs out there are running the Wordpress software and the Wordpress App for Android, Blackberry and iPhone. This is a great content creation tool for creating blog posts from the chairlift (or mid mountain bar). You can also moderate and respond to comments on your blog from the app. Even if all you do is use that functionality, it can save you some time and let you be on top of the conversation.

Drop Box / Sugarsync

Sharing files with a marketing team is a nightmare when it comes to social media content. You end up trading emails with document revisions, images, videos, etc. Online file synchronization and sharing tools are becoming an indispensable part of social media content creation for teams because they let you manage files on your computer’s hard drive that are available offline, while effortlessly sharing them with your team.

Drop Box is a great tool for sharing a lot of separate folders with a lot of different people. If you’re managing a content team, this will save you a lot of grief.

Sugarsync is better suited for managing your own files across multiple machines. It can back up whole directories to a web archive as well as sync a “magic briefcase” across all your devices, including android and iPhone. The Sugarsync Android app will even let you sync all your cameraphone pics to your magic briefcase so they’re there when you’re ready use them in a blog post.

Photo Enhancement apps

As we noted recently, the quality of the photos you post to social media sites matters. We also noted that smartphones, while always the most convenient, don’t always produce the best images. Photo enhancement apps can be a solution to this problem. Many will apply an artistic effect to the images making them look like they were taken on an old camera, a Polaroid or a toy camera. Others let you adjust tone, exposure, contrast or sharpness. Or add effects like sepia, vignette, or even add titles. Here are some of our favorites.

• The Best Camera
• FX Camera
• Hipstomatic
• Picsay Pro
• Photoshop.com Mobile
• Pano

Upload by email

Sometimes you don’t have enough connectivity to use an app to connect with a content portal to upload media. Or maybe you have a smartphone or camera phone without the apps you need to connect to a particular site. There are ways to upload content by email, which you can create and set in the queue to upload when you’re back online.

* Upload by email to Wordpress
* Upload by email to flickr
* Upload by email to Facebook

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Photo by Chexee on Flickr

And, of course, that’s true. If a bear comes out of hibernation to ride a chairlift at your ski resort, run out with whatever image capture device you have because that’s too good to miss. But what about the other 99.9% of the time when what your capturing happens every day, or isn’t itself remarkable enough to make the news?

That’s when you start to see that the quality of online video and photography posted to twitter, facebook and flicker does matter. Want proof? We found some:

The online dating service OkCupid manages a lot of user data including images. To test the relationship of image quality with perception of the image, they presented 552,000 user images in pairs and asked members “who would you rather go on a date with?”

The full results can be seen here and show that a few simple photography techniques make for better photos. Sometimes those are just random luck, sometimes the product of skill and purpose. Here are some takeaways that are also good rules of thumb for social media content creation.

Interchangeable lens cameras make better photos

Photo by Alpine Meadows on Flickr, taken with a Canon Digital Rebel DSLR

This is obvious, but don’t think that you can just go out and buy a Panasonic Micro 4\3s Camera and call it good. SLR cameras require more thought, and more thought often results in a better photo. For travel and destination marketers, it could pay off to acquire and learn to use a decent digital SLR Camera.

Magic Hour trumps Flash

There’s no better way to present a travel or resort experience than to show photos and video of smiling happy people having fun. And there’s no better way to make photos of smiling happy people look bad than to take photos with an on-camera flash or during the middle of the day with harsh light and stark shadows. If you must use a flash, get an off camera sync and hold the flash out with one hand from the camera. Better yet, get photos just before and after sunrise or sunset, the magic hours, or under clouds. This is when light is diffuse and comes at the subject from all angles eliminating harsh shadows and making everyone look their best.

Short Focus

Short Depth of field is more important for portraiture than anything else. Generally with sweeping landscape shots you want the longest depth of field you can get. This represents another case for getting and knowing how to use a good camera. Being able to prioritize small f-stops (short depth of field) or large ones (long depth of field) can help take the kind of photos that can really make a difference when presenting your destination online.

Why Quality matters

When it comes to capturing the meaningful moments in life with friends, it’s the shared experiences that make them valuable to us on Facebook or Twitter despite the flaws inherent in camera phones and point and shoot photography. Memory fills in the gaps left by lack of skill and technological shortcomings of simple cameras.

When you’re using imagery to sell a destination, or resort experience, you don’t have that connection with the audience. Brands need to present the whole picture without relying on shared memories, feelings, and personal connections. Spending the time to take better photos to use on social media marketing profiles makes a huge difference in communicating.

-Mike

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Photo by Reno Tahoe on Flickr

New Mobile Apps

The 900 lb gorilla-elephant hybrid in the room now is, of course, Vail Resorts’ EpixMix. A preview of the app set to dominate Front Range Colorado skiing can be seen here.

Also, we found a couple other travelogue apps to compete with On The Road.

• Everlater
• Trip Journal
• My Vacation

Other apps of note:

• Scavengr. A cool app that lets you create scavenger hunt games for your brand or destination.
• Layar: This has been around for a while for both iPhone and Android. We didn’t mention it last time because it is more of an information discovery app, not a content creation app. The potential here is to create your own branded Layar that your customers can use to interact with your brand.

App, Mobile Site or 3rd Party App?

The discussion begins as either “we should have a mobile app,” or “should we have a mobile app?” But it isn’t as simple as that. The options as we see them are threefold.

Mobile Apps for Destinations

You have to think about how many of your customers have smartphones, what platform or platforms you want to develop on, how many of your customers would be inclined to actually download and use the app. This can vary widely from category to category and destination to destination.

Also think about what the engagement points are and will they extend beyond the visit. When it comes to audience and engagement, more is more. Don’t settle for engaging an audience only while they’re at the destination, build an app that engages them in the time leading up to or away from a visit, or throughout the entire season.

Mobile Sites For Destinations

Even media rich features can be included on mobile sites, and HTML5 has even more potential for engaging the phone’s full capabilities, so developing apps for multiple platforms might not be the way to go anymore. Mobile sites from the future will be able to access your phone’s gps, camera and memory to function a lot like a mobile app. As connectivity at winter resorts gets better, mobile sites will get a lot more valuable.

Not My Mobile App

Don’t feel like reinventing the wheel and then convincing the world that it’s better? That’s sensible. There are a ton of mobile apps already out there that you can take advantage of for your destination without having to develop infrastructure, code or, most importantly, a user base.

For these apps you just need to create a business account, claim or create your business profile(s) and monitor the community as it interacts. Many of these will allow a business to do more sophisticated things once an advertiser or sponsor relationship is engaged. The point here is that they have developed both the community and the platform for you to connect your business with an active and engaged community of people who might not be reached by either the mobile site or a mobile app you create.

• Reviews and info:
  • Yelp
  • Travelocity
  • Google Places
• Check-in and Games
  • Foursquare
  • Gowalla
  • Scvngr
• Snow and Conditions
  • REI
  • North Face
  • On The Snow

This season

We won’t try to prognosticate the future of mobile, at least not until we get invited on Good Morning America, but we will point out a few things you can infer about how the current state of mobile might play out for resorts and destinations this season.

Facts:

• Smartphone sales are up. Nielsen and ChangeWave Research predict they’ll account half of all mobile devices by next year.
• Social Networking is the fastest growing mobile app category and has increased by 240% in the last year.
• The top 5 mobile Internet activities are
  • E-Mail
  • Social Networking
  • News & Current Events
  • Search
  • Portals

The Numbers

Let’s say a given resort’s average daily visitor rate during the season is 10,000 people. 1,700 (17%) will have a smartphone and some percentage of them, say 20% or 340 of them will download your app. Who knows what actual on mountain usage will be, but it might not be enough to net a good ROI. [NOTE: these numbers are rough estimates.]

Vail hedged their bets in this regard by creating an app that engages more than just on mountain visitors with smartphones, and also spread their audience over 5 resorts. Mobile websites on the other hand are open to a larger audience across all kinds of devices. While possibilities of developing more sophisticated HTML5 mobile sites will be more costly to develop than plain mobile sites, they’ll be less than mobile apps presumably with larger audience and greater engagement.

To us it’s a question of scale and resources. Smaller destinations or resorts might be better served by creating an info and media rich mobile site and engaging heavily with existing mobile apps, while larger markets can draw both the audience for niche mobile apps and the budgets to create them.

-Mike

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Snowcial Conference Entertainment

Last year we had the great MC Hammer as Snowcial conference Keynote and entertainment main event for the  conference. This year we put together a wish list of bands that kill it on the social web and Harrah’s Entertainment was able to secure our top pick: OK Go! So for the Saturday night entertainment, we’ll have a special VIP section at the South Shore Room @ Harrah’s for OK Go! Read more

Snowcial Conference Speakers

We already have a great lineup of conference speakers for Snowcia 2011 including leaders in entertainment, travel and interactive marketing. There is one slot left to fill however, and we’re opening that up to the community. We’ve gotten some pretty impressive submissions so far, and we hope you’ll submit your Snowcial conference presentation proposal here.

EpicMix

Vail Resorts recently released their custom location based snow sports social network that lets users interact around skiing and riding using real time tracking of their adventures across the mountain. We’ll get to chat with Rob Katz and the rest of the Vail Resorts interactive team throughout the Snowcial conference as we us it for an extended interactive digital and real world game. Read more

Snowcial Conference Giveaway

Be a part of a meeting of the best minds in snow sports marketing and get it for free. We’re giving away one all access pass to Tahoe Snowcial 2011. The worlds of digital storytelling, snowsports and technology will converge again on Heavenly Mountain Resort January 6 – 9, 2011 for Tahoe Snowcial. A winter festival of technology and snowsports, Snowcial unites and celebrates our global community of enthusiasts who live their passion in the snow and tell their stories online.

If you are a part of that community, you belong at snowcial. Enter the Snowcial Conference Giveaway here

Snowcial Conference Tickets

Be sure to purchase your ticket ASAP. You have until the end of the month to register at the early bird rate (about 13% off) after which rates go to full price. The All Access options include lodging, skiing, meals, VIP events and the conference on Friday. This gives you the chance to network with other Snocial VIPs and share insights and stories on the mountain. GET YOUR TICKET NOW

-Mike

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For the last few years, ski resort marketers have been experimenting with ways to engage customers both in the real and digital environments with varying success. We’ve been using Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Gowalla to get users to engage with the location and engage with others about the location. But there was always something missing… something that EpicMix nailed.

EpicMix is a service that is a value add to the season pass you buy for any Vail Resort.
GarminConnect, nike+, Google Tracks, and other free or paid apps, let you use your phone or GPS to log your activities and view, analyze and store the data. They also let you share it socially and interact with it. But these services require you to purchase a specific gadget and remember to activate it every time you want to use it.

EpicMix, on the other hand, doesn’t require an additional piece of equipment, and is activated automatically when you come across checkpoints at chairlifts and points of interest on the mountain. You can’t forget to turn it on. You can’t forget to turn it off.

You can still forget your pass at home though.

The one thing I worry about is that the lack of a need to take action to use EpicMix could lead to a lack of engagement with it on the users part. The mobile apps will help keep people engaged, acting as a social networking filter that shows your friends Facebook and Twitter activity while they are on the mountain. We are still not 100% sure how that’s going to work.

The app also incorporates the real life game layer that apps like Foursquare and Gowalla slap on the world. Is that awesome? Some say yes, some say no. Will it become the Farmville of winter? I say yes. In that EpicMix will be configurable so that you can share updates or not, and if you do, and i don’t want to see them, I’ll be able to hide them on my side. At least on Facebook.

Which brings me to what i think is the smartest thing about EpicMix. It has something for everyone. Personally, i don’t care for the game component. But plenty of people, and kids, do. What I care about is the ability to track runs, elevation, days skied, etc. According to Mike Slone, Interactive Director @ Vail Resorts, Vail will start out tracking your lift rides, and expand to tracking other areas like runs, terrain parks, lodges, etc.

These two functionalities engage different customer profiles in different ways while letting each communicate what they are doing to their social networks. It remains to be seen how granular the controls will be, but I assume they’ve thought of content volume concerns.

Can’t wait for opening day @ Keystone Resort in Colorado on November 5th! If you want to spend some time with Rob Katz, Robert Urwlier and Mike Slone from Vail Resorts as well as Josh Williams from Gowalla, who advised the project, check out Tahoe Snowcial in January 2010.

-Mike

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An amazing mass of people documenting their booking process can be found on Facebook… one friend posts a comment “wow… I would love to go here” with a link to a photo album from a travel blog. Later that week more comments come out with videos, photos and links to hotel and airline deals found during their hunt. Pretty soon an announcement that they are waiting in the airport and a few weeks later images, videos and comments are posted and shared about the vacation.

When you break down all of the different user types; savers, spenders, thrill hunters, etc.  they all follow a similar path. They visualize a trip, organize their options, take a vacation and then contribute the experience to friends and family.

The Travel Buying Process:

From a digital marketing perspective this process contains three key questions that should be considered:

1. What stage is the potential consumer in?
2. What social needs drive behavior within the stage?
3. How can technology play a role in facilitating or enhancing the stage?

By asking these questions and understanding what stage your target is in we have a better chance at creating relevant technology and marketing that empowers the traveler and gives them a more natural and intuitive experience.

Example:

Going back to the Facebook observation you can see that photography played a role in the visualize stage. The user found a piece of content that caused them to post “wow… I would love to go here.” Developing galleries that inspire and promote a specific experience, i.e. relaxing, unique, thrilling, and allowing these to be shared across Facebook would be one small example of this process in action.

One to One Travel uses this approach to both develop and validate new technologies and marketing tactics ensuring that our points of engagement with customers are in alignment with the natural purchase process.

- Rob

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Such was the topic for #Mrktchat two weeks ago. We were grateful for the opportunity to host and steer the conversation to something we, as geeks, gadget lovers and die hard skiers and riders, wrestle with all the time.

As expected a couple of good points came out of the discussion.

Active Engagement: Several participants had direct experience and success with scavenger hunt type activities, though these don’t always need to involve mobile apps…

and

It’s hard for core skiers and riders like us to realize, but many ski resort visitors are not all that engaged with the sport. They may be there for other people in their party, or simply get their fill of the skiing by lunch time. For them, more active mobile social engagement might get them to engage with skiing more, or engage with secondary amenities at the resort like shopping, dining, and events.

Info and updates: Pushing out snow, event and operations updates is a great thing to do. A number of resorts are doing this, and a number also have a separate twitter account for that kind of content. Whether or not you need two twitter accounts is specific to your users and their needs/wants. You can usually come up with a good strategy after a few weeks of testing. Though things change pretty fast, so next season, all bets are off.

Passive engagement: We like to market the turns first and the tech second because we feel that the things people will remember, the things that the tech exists to support, is the mountain experience.

Problem: Not all ski resorts have the reception for mobile. Though this will probably change in the coming seasons.

we also need to be conscious of the fact that many tech soaked skiers and riders might be looking for a more offline onsnow experience.

When trying to engage travelers, skiers and snowboarders with mobile social technology, finding the right balance between interaction and distraction is key. Thanks to the group for letting us (Mike Henderson and Rob Gaedtke) moderate. We always come away from #mrktchat with a different perspective. Great chatting with you! Here’s a link to the transcript of the chat.

-Mike

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Conditions 100%: This is clearly the most important info feature for skiers and riders, particularly those who are at a winter destination like Tahoe, British Colombia, Park City, UT or Colorado where there are multiple resorts to choose from that may have different conditions.

Web Cam 82%: We want to know what it looks like. Numbers, stats and graphs tell a lot about a resort, but web traffic clearly shows that skiers and riders want to see what’s going on in real time. Having this available from a mobile phone is a big deal.

Mountain status 71%: Not every lift and run is open all the time. For ski destinations, visitors may have favorite runs, lift, or areas of multiple mountains. Resorts need to tell them what is open both to attract them and keep them from being disappointed.

Contact 76%: Directions 53%, Roads 41%: Consumer apps like Yelp, google places and others put this info right up front, so it’s a no-brainer that a ski resort mobile site would too. Road conditions can be a deciding factor of where to go and how to get there, so it’s good to have that available. There’s no better source for road info than the state DOT website so it’s best to just link out to them or feed in the content if possible. Finally, if you need live human help, click to call is a must.

Social: A few of these sites have links out to social media profiles, but none feed in the updates. Twitter and Facebook can be more top-of-mind places for customers to track updates. We see this as part of both the Alerts and Contact features of the matrix. Including links, content or both from social sites gives users the option to connect how they prefer.

Tickets 24%: and Deals 12%: It’s surprising that so few resorts post their ticket prices to the mobile site. Pricing can be a deciding factor when heading up to ski / ride and making that information available should be a priority. Additionally,  adding deals and specials content to a mobile site could also attract visitors doing research from a mobile device.

Maps 29%: This is a no-brainer for us as many visitors are looking for info they can use while they’re on the mountain – and it saves someone from tossing a trail map into the trash at the end of the day. A viewable and downloadable trail map that someone can revisit from the smartphone while on the lift is an easy and useful addition to a mobile website.

NEEDED: Two things we are not seeing often that should be mandatory are mobile site redirects and links to both the mobile and full versions of the sites. In our opinion, the term “mobile” website is already a lost term and websites should simply display in the best available format. Adding a sniffer that detects from what platform the user is accessing the site and then displaying the best content available is the best solution. Additionally, adding links to switch back and forth help give the user some control should they prefer one over the other.

Overall, resort mobile sites need to be presented in a manor that is intuitive, easy to navigate, provides key information for a mobile user and takes into account fat, cold fingers.

What’s your favorite resort mobile site? This list wasn’t meant to be all encompassing, but it’s a start, and I’ll update this post as I add more to the mix.

• Heavenly
• Alpine Meadows
• Homewood
• Solitude
• Sunday River
• Vail
• Mt. Bachelor
• Keystone
• Breckenridge
• Whistler/Blackhomb
• The Canyons
• Beaver Creek
• Windham
• Ski Nevada
• Stowe
• Killington
• Jackson Hole

-Mike

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But what if you want to create a more complete real time travel diary without spending the whole trip with your eyes stuck to your phone? Here are a few ways to log and document your travel experience without missing the light show at The Eiffel Tower.

Posterous
Posterous is a simple multimedia blogging tool. Though there are iPhone and Android apps, you can do everything you need via email. Just write your post, attach your media and send. It’ll be uploaded to your own custom URL. Don’t worry about connectivity if you’re in a remote desert, or a foreign country. Just find a place to poach WiFi and let your phone upload them all at once. Posterous will update a bevy of other social outlets automagically, so you can notify your mom, your significant other, your boss and your Jr. High science teacher all at once.

WordPress
Wordpress is one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world, though it does a lot more. The Wordpress applications for iPhone and Android let you post text, video and photos from anywhere. You can create the content and post it later, so you can snap a photo and get on to the next museum in a hurry. You can also get an address to post via email.

Evernote
If you’re looking for a more private alternative to a travel blog, Evernote is a good way to go. It’s a personal note taking system that mirrors across multiple devices and the web. You can create content when you’re offline and it’ll update when you get connected. You can then access the content from the web or your computer and take the time to craft the content into a more thoughtful blog post, or make the notebook for your trip public and sharable. It’s a great way to archive your content and get it beyond the confines of your smartphone.

Twitter
Sometimes it’s best to be brief. Twitter is great for that. If you are on a trip where you’ll have good connectivity, you could use any number of twitter apps to create a travel log. Most apps connect with third party services that let you upload photos and video. When mixed with your tweets and organized with a unique hashtag (eg. #Mike’sTrip) you can quickly create a simple, easy to consume travelogue.

Foursquare
If you just want to share where you are and quick snipits of what you’re doing, Foursquare works well. With Foursquare you also get the added benefit of businesses who reward customers for checking in and the potential to connect with friends who happen to be there too. Though you won’t find much foursquare action in Morocco…

Gowalla
Gowalla is similar to foursquare but more aligned to trips and travel documentation. Gowalla has Trips that are organized by location to help users enjoy their time in town. It’s kind of like having a tour guide on your phone. Again, this is best for domestic trips to big cities, not a rustic tour through the deep south.

On The Road
Saved the best for last here. There is one app that does it all. On The Road is a great tool for finding things to do and cataloging your progress when traveling. You use the app to create notes, checkins, and photos, then the app uploads them to a unique page at ontheroad.com where your friends and family can view and share your content. I haven’t spent much time with this app, and the Android seems to be a bit different from the iPhone version, but this seems like the best concept for using a mobile device to document travel without getting bogged down in the process.

The app encapsulates the whole travel process really well from discovery of activities and places (iPhone only), to creating content, to sharing that content after the fact and storing the memories to remember them later. The online Trip Book page shows a google map with route and placemarkers, a clickable master timeline, and the photos, and notes from the trip. Here’s a great example of a Trip Book page of an overland tour from the UK to Cape Town South Africa.

Note: In our opinion, a good travelogue app has to have certain functionality for it to be really useful and for interacting with it to be fast, easy and unobtrusive to the experience:

Offline Sync: In remote destinations or foreign countries, constant connectivity is not always an option. Offline sync lets you create content and upload it later.

SMS Updates: Can you post updates via text message? Sometimes this is the easiest option.

Multimedia: Can you post photos, video and/or audio?

Cross posting: Be able to post from to multiple platforms/networks.

Email updates: Ability to update by email.

Archive: Create a discrete archive of the trip.

Location: Can you add geolocation data to the post or even venue checkins?

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Save money, bid higher

CPC costs are down across the board for travel keywords. We agree with Google’s recommendation to up your keyword bids to attain better positioning.

• CPCs for travel ads have fallen by an average of 4% YoY for the first five months of this year.
• Hotel CPCs have fallen by the greatest amount – an average of 7% YoY.
• It is likely that CPC’s have continued to fall as fares and rates are slower to recover than capacity.
• The drop in CPCs reflects the fact that the auctions are less competitive as advertiser depth* has
• Declined by an average of 2% YoY for travel.

Fly vs. Drive

We’ve always known that the drive market and fly markets had differences in preference and budget, but the Google data shows that they also have different search habits when researching travel. Take advantage of this by running drive market campaigns earlier and fly market campaigns closer to seasonal peaks.

During this time period car queries peaked the earliest, on June 23rd. WoW this represented a 9% increase in query volumes and 4% in click volumes. As it can seen, individual travel products behaved differently during July. Both air and hotel queries peaked after the schools broke up for the summer, at the end of the month.  -Jonathan Cranmer

Thanks to google for sharing this data. We spend hours and hours going over the data generated by out clients campaigns, but adding in the collective information from the global ecosystem paints a different, bigger picture. Read the whole report @ the Google Barometer Blog: Summer 2010 Whitepaper: “A Paper Of Two Halves.”

-Mike

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