Since Google launched its social sharing service Google+ 7 months ago, it’s remained at the bottom of the priority list for travel and tourism marketers – a poor third behind Facebook and Twitter. Even when Google launched brand pages to emulate those on Facebook, there was hardly a stampede of travel and tourism brands to set them up. But all of that has changed.
 
That’s because Google has announced the release of ‘Search Plus Your World’  – the integration of ‘public’ search results and private search results from the user’s social …

An old boss of mine once said to me, ‘Our job is to get the phones ringing’.
 
Granted, this was in the days before the internet but it does really seem to be a pretty limited ambition for a marketer, and it’s not a mantra I’ve pursued throughout my career.
 
Sitting in my CIM Diploma classes, I seem to remember there being 7 P’s in the service marketing mix (Product, Place, Price, Promotion, People, Process, Physical Evidence – I’m quite impressed I can still remember them!) so why should we only be …

I don’t want to burst anybody’s bubble, but just because you’ve created an iphone app for your brand doesn’t mean you can tick off that box on your to do list which says ‘mobile strategy’.
 
Firstly, Apple’s iOS is just one platform for apps, albeit the dominant one at present in terms of volume of downloads. But Google’s Android platform powers a number of the top smartphones and is catching up fast.
 
Also, there are some rather sobering stats when it comes to apps that I’d like to share with you:
 

A recent …

I rather like British Airway’s ‘To Fly, To Serve’ campaign. As a marketer it appeals to me on several levels.
 
Firstly, it’s focusing on what is perceived as a core brand strength – service, delivered in a distincly British way. As BA’s MD of Brands and Customer Service, Frank Van Der Post, put it:
 
‘BA is a very strong brand. We do not need to reinvent ourselves as something else. What we need to do is to tell the story a little louder.’
 
Secondly, they’re backing words with actions – £5bn of investment in …

Here’s a bit of role play for you – imagine you run a convenience store. One of your customers fills their basket and walks up to the till. You run the items through the till and tell them how much it’s going to costs. But instead of getting their credit card out, they just walk out of the shop and leave their shopping behind. Now tell me – wouldn’t you be a little curious as to why that customer hadn’t paid for the items they’d spent so much time loading …

I was talking with an internet consultant contact of mine the other day – chatting about how he helps businesses with their online client acquisition strategies. In the midst of our conversation he said something very interesting – something that resonated with my own experience:
 
‘Before I even get into the online strategy I spend a lot of time working with clients identifying what they actually sell. You’ll be surprised how many don’t know…’
 
Now clearly you’ll be assuming that this guy must work entirely with morons. How on earth can they …

I’ve been meaning to write a blog on Facebook’s Open Social Graph ever since it was launched back in April, and having finally got round to it, I decided to do some research on which travel companies had integrated the functionality into the site. How many did I find? Well…..none actually.
 
That’s not hugely surprising. The adoption of these features has been much quicker over in the US as you’d expect, and in environments frequented by social media savvy types such as mashable.com.
 
So what is the Open Social Graph and why …

Like many travel marketers, you may be finding the world of paid for search increasingly frustrating as your cost per click escalates and your click thru rates decline.
 
The natural thing to do is to keep fiddling with your bid levels – trying to find the optimum level that will deliver you the maximum clicks at the minimum price.  But I’d suggest you’d be much better advised to take a long, hard look at your copy.
 
I know, I know – you’ve got hundreds of keywords and the thought of re-visiting it …

I like to think of good marketing as ‘the mortar between the bricks’ of a strong organisation. Good marketers should bind everything together, making sure the customer experience is solid and consistent with the brand’s values from beginning to end.  That’s the only way to build an organisation which realises its potential.
 
The problem is, too many of us build a separate tower away from the rest of the organisation and only very rarely open the gates up to let anyone else inside.  You might think it’s only your responsibility to …

People are always telling me that marketing is ‘common sense’ – usually those not in the profession or those that have made a made a move from another role.
 
Frankly, this particular observation drives me round the twist.  It’s like telling a doctor all those years of study and practice were a waste of time as you can just look up your ailment on the internet.  Quite apart from that it’s clearly wrong.  We’re surrounding by thousands of examples of ‘common sense’ marketing and do we pay a jot of notice …