You can now download Qube’s benchmarking survey into Social Media use, attitudes and budget in the travel industry, with insight from nearly 100 key players about the challenges and benefits they face with Social Media.
More about the travel and social media benchmark report.
High scores started in the arcades. Whilst “Insert Coin” flashed at the bottom of the screen the rest was a leaderboard of the best player with only 3 letters to identify them. Arcades were gaming hubs and being top scorer meant you were the best in the local area.
Those 3 letter names were infamous in friendship groups and you know who you needed to beat. It created a social incentive to want to be better than your friends, play one more time and put more money into the machine.
With modern online gaming the leaderboard is back. You can now see how good you are at the game compared to the rest of the world. But knowing you are 231,321st out of 2 million players isn’t as impressive as being in the top 10 in your local arcade.
Some of the most powerful incentives we have are social ones, and trying to be better than millions of other people will only compel the few. We need to make the leaderboards local and unique to each user. This creates a much higher social incentive and makes players play more to beat their friends.
Games are turning our social circles into personalised leaderboards. Every user has a unique leaderboard that only shows the scores of their friends. Being the best of your ten friends is a lot more compelling than being better than millions of strangers.
The beauty of these modern games is that they can always be connected online. They can always be plugged into our social circles.
This means no one ever needs to play a game in isolation (unless they chose to) it also means you don’t have to play a game with everyone, you can choose to just play with the people that matter to you.
Now when I play Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook the game is constantly reminding me of how I am doing compared to my friends. I don’t know if I am the best player in the world, I don’t even know if I am in the top million, but it doesn’t matter.
What I do know is that (for a short while) I had the highest score of all my friends and it was great, but my high score just encouraged others to play until they beat it.
This is just the first step soon games will go beyond reflecting your social circles scores. They will start using our social circles to make our games more personalised and unique to us. Our experiences will be used to enhance other peoples games and we are starting to see the beginning of this with games like Spore using our friends creations in our game to make our experience matter just that little bit more. I expect a whole lot more of this over the coming years.
Now I must go and get the top score again on Bejewelled!
We held a very insightful roundtable on Social Media in the Travel Industry yesterday at the IAB.
It was attended by representatives from a wide range of travel companies including Virgin Atlantic, Eye for Travel, A Hedonist’s Guide To…, Visit Britain, Virgin Holidays, Contiki Holidays, Siren PR, Travel Counsellors and Visit London.
One of the discussion topics was ‘Are all customers VIPs in social media?’
When any customer can broadcast to the world are they all VIPs? The best customer care used to be given to those who spent the most money or where deemed important but now anyone can start an internet campaign how do you deal with each complaint?
We considered the example of Dave Carroll’s guitar getting damaged when he flew with United Airlines a while back on the Qube blog.
More recently there is the example of Hollywood director Kevin Smith kicked off a plane for being ‘too fat’
Some of the views at the roundtable included:
We will be releasing some more insight from the round table and also our benchmarking report on Social Media in the Travel Industry over the next few weeks.
I have spent a fair amount of time saying how games need to bring themselves closer to the social web, it now looks like the social spaces might be ready to shoot/splice there way into games.
Even in this day and age of developer blogs and podcasts there is still an element of mystery around how many games comes to exist. There is no mystery however on the origins of “Dudebro: My Sh*t is F*cked Up So I Got to Shoot/Slice You II – It’s Straight-Up Dawg Time”. This game was born by an off-hand comment on a messageboard and by trying to belittle the common “hardcore” game the user cuyahoga has ended up inspiring one!
After creating that title as a way of mocking the “mature” games, cuyahoga inspired the popular gaming forum Neogaf into an idea frenzy. Users began to speculate on what the game might be, what Dudebro looked like, how the game played until it was decided they would make it into a real game. (check out the full story here)
Not only was Dudebro created in Social Media, the creators are using a variety of social tools to make the game. Right now the team is creating design docs using Google docs, using a Wiki to share information on the game, Youtube is being used for users to audition for voice parts or share their Dudebro music, there are Twitter and Facebook pages, there is even a Cafepress to purchase DudeBro Merchandise.
The game, regardless of final quality, will be a great triumph for the hundreds of Neogaf users that have come together to create something. It is inspiring to see a group of people using the power of social media to find all the creators they need to make the game work. What is an important take away is that although the final game may not be as grand and impressive as a retail game, these guys are already using Social Media tools in a far better way then the majority of their professional peers.
I think big developers and companies could learn a lot from how these guys are using Social Media. It isn’t just about setting up a Twitter and Facebook for marketing, they are using tools for internal communication and collaboration. These tools are not just for the community managers and digital marketers they are for everyone! Start looking for communication problems and opportunities in your business (be they internal or external) and start experimenting with social tools and see how they can enhance the things you are already doing.
I look forward to seeing how Dudebro turns out later this year 
Oh Ryan Air… bless you. Or not.
A Which! survey has just found that despite seemingly cheap ticket prices, they simply hide more hidden costs than other airlines. Their charges increased by a massive 61 per cent (MORE than Bmibaby, Jet 2 and easyJet).
Why is this relevant for a Social Media blog? Because Social Media is all about personality.
How do you engage people, what is your online personality like, do people actually like you? This is equally (arguably more) important for brands as it is for individuals. And Ryanair has always maintained an… unapologetic online persona.
But with these findings showing they aren’t so cheap after all, might they need to improve their brand image to continue competing? Will it force a change in Ryanair’s external ‘persona’ and how they conduct their online – and offline – engagement?
Lunatic bloggers
Unless you’ve been in a cave pondering Platonian shadow dancers, you’ll know the appalling track record that Ryan Air has in terms of its online presence and engagement. If not, you can read more about their history of abusing bloggers and the like here.
If you haven’t got time to read a catch up, this quote from a friend sums up how many people feel perfectly:
I wouldn’t spend a second with a person who behaved like that – why would I spend any time (or money) with a brand like that?
Ryanair worst for ‘hidden costs’ that ramp up ticket prices
The findings of the Which! survey show Ryanair quoted £82 for a return flight for two to Paris but this increased by £50 to £132 with charges.
The brand isn’t yet showing any concern that this might affect business – in typical Ryanair fashion, spokesman Stephen McNamara said: “Nobody pays attention to Which? surveys and we’re not going to either.”
But with the knowledge that their hidden charges are higher than all of their competitors in the cheap air travel market, might that soon have to change?
I’m not going to hold my breath, but it would be nice to see something dent their ego a little.
Qube recently ran a benchmarking survey into Social Media use, attitudes and budget in the travel industry.
With nearly 100 key players in the industry taking part from travel organisations large and small, Qube has gathered key insights into how this sector views and engages with the challenges and benefits of Social Media.
Social Media Benchmarking
81% of marketeers and directors in the travel industry say they use Social Media due to pressure from customers. And despite the fact almost two thirds of respondents felt Social Media was important for the future of their business, nearly 50% still use non-expert staff to deliver Social Media marketing.
Platforms
Bebo and MySpace, perhaps unsurprisingly, were the least popular social networks for marketing activity within the travel industry, while Twitter is by far the most popular tool in use for this sector.
Setting Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
Whilst there are many ways to measure Social Media activity and quantify ROI, difficulty in measuring direct impact of sales was far and away the greatest reason cited for not engaging with Social Media marketing.
Interesting, a large proportion of respondents don’t actually set any Key Performance Indicators for any of their current digital marketing activity.
Round table event
Qube will be releasing and discussing the full benchmarking report at the Social Media for the travel industry round table we’re holding on the 17th February.
This is a chance for people in the travel industry to discuss the findings of the report and talk to each other about the particular challenges travel companies face in this ever-evolving digital era.
If you work in the industry and would like to attend, you can find more details here.
Here at Qube we (obviously) believe in Social Media as a platform for change. Social media and the Internet are such important parts of our daily lives it makes sense for public officials to start using it as a way of making a positive difference to our country. With that in mind we thought we would start highlighting some of the best and worst uses of social media and the Internet in official communication on a weekly basis. With the election looming it seems now more than ever social media will be important for the political parties.
This week saw political figures respond to questions asked by social network users. Barak Obama spent half an hour answering a variety of questions from Youtube users. While he was only able to answer a few of the 11,696 questions asked it was great to see the president of the United States taking the time to respond directly to his citizens. The video has received almost half a million views and has over 9,000 comments. That shows a great level of discussion and influence with a smart piece of crowd sourcing.
Over in the UK Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg was taking part in a similar endeavor. Reddit users had been asked to submit questions for Nick and then vote up their most popular questions. Mr Clegg then answered these questions in a refreshingly under produced Youtube video. It was great to see a party leader taking the time to go into other communities and get involved in discussions.
David Cameron has also taken some time to answer user submitted questions. Although the Liberal Democrats approach of going into existing communities may be preferential to some, it is great to see the Tories taking this action (they also have a nice and slick system for submitting and voting for comments).
Why is this worthwhile? A couple of Youtube comments from Nick Cleggs Reddit video make it perfectly clear why.
The next step is for the parties to get involved in these comments on their own videos
Labour have a bunch of “tools for your website” on their official site. Rather than focus on their own policies they seem to have taken the school boy approach of throwing insults. There are a series of “satirical” widgets that you can install on your site to show txt speak conversations from the Conservatives. Hardly the most thought provoking or conversation starting stuff. Instead of creating fake conversations for your site perhaps they should help voters engage in real conversations with the party?
Have a look at the offending item below and let us know what you think. How do you think the political parties should be using social media?
5 of the best Social Media stories of the week as chosen by the Qubites. Also 5 of the rest aka “Things MC Hammer says you can touch”.
There are times when I worry about how much Google knows about me. They know all of my web history, my conversations, my personal blogging…the list goes on. On the one hand I can see how it creates better results for me (in both the paid and natural results) as well as providing me with plenty of highly useful services for free. How much should our privacy cost though and how much are you willing to give up? This video calms me a little that Google is thinking about these things and says they will let me remove private information when I choose, but is this enough?
UK Internet Map (as featured on the BBC’s Virtual Revolution)
The BBC’s new show on the virtual revolution had an amazing 3D diagram of how Internet traffic flows in the UK. Here you can see it in all its 2D glory and realise that maybe cyberspace isn’t as big as we think, or at least for all its size we visit a few websites very often and the many websites much less.
We love pretty graphs. Here is a collection of useful and interesting top level views of how people are using the Internet.
Five lessons from MyDavidCameron
My David Cameron is both a stab at political satire and interesting social experiment. I would recommend that everyone running social media campaigns reads the findings and see how they reflect their own experiences. I particularly like the “Crowd Sourcing is Good” and “Crowd Sourcing is Bad” section.
Government 2.0: Communication and Engagement Are On a Collision Course
Couldn’t agree more with the differences between communication and engagement strategies. There is a huge difference between using Twitter as an alternative to the phone or website and actually going out and engaging in conversations where members of the public are. Food for thought for any government officials.
70-Minute Video Review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
Any Star Wars fan (and Phantom Menace hater) should find 70 minutes to enjoy this beautiful, witty and spot on analysis of the Phantom Menace that shows how off-base Lucas really was.
Internet archaeologists find ruins of “Friendster” civilisation
Very funny and makes you wonder how long it is until something similar to this becomes reality. Maybe I should start trawling through the way back machine for similar findings, I wonder how Friends Reunited is getting on. Also this Onion video has me chuckling .
Ashen’s Tech Dump – Retro Games
The BBC are doing some great web comedy content. Short in length but not low in quality. This is a funny look into the “past”, They don’t make them like they used to!
The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” quotation marks
This is a very “Funny” series of photos
The Best Google Street View Fails, Wins, And WTF’s
It is amazing to get a snapshot of our streets at set points in time, although some of these people will have wished they stayed indoors the day the Google car came around.
Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world with over 350m users and counting. With every person (and some animals) in my family having an account it seems the social media revolution is as mainstream as it could be. With that in mind you would be silly not to have a Facebook presence right?
Before you dash off and put some pack shots and a link to your micro-site on your Facebook take a step back and consider some of the following:
1. Who is your Facebook page aimed at?
Notice I asked who your Facebook page is aimed at, not who is your product aimed at. A product can have many target audiences so making a one size fits all page may end up not appealing strongly enough to anyone but making it too specific may alienate too many. Make sure you know who you want to target so you can tailor the page to best meet their needs.
2. What interests that audience?
Knowing who you are targeting is just the first step, different audiences require different communication strategies. Some audiences will want facts about the product (how much is it, when is it out etc) others may be interested in a behind the scenes look at how it was created and others will be more interested in engaging conversations around the product and its subject matter. For example Wii Fit users may want to talk about their progress and other fitness tips and Lost fans may want to talk about their show theories and ideas.
3. Do you need to create content?
Creating content, such as videos, is a great way to get people talking about your Facebook presence and while it may not cost the earth you may find that time spent creating content could be better spent engaging. As just discussed different audiences have different needs and you may find that putting all your time and effort into responding to every question that needs answering and stimulating conversations is a much better use of your resources. If you do decide to create content make sure you still keep involved with the community or at the very least continue to make great content.
4. Is this community for your product or your brand?
It seems a fundamental question to the creation of your Facebook page but one that frequently isn’t answered. Successful products these days are often turned into a franchise, iterated on or spun out into other products. If this is the plan for your product why try to create a community from scratch with every release? Creating a brand community can spread the news of more than just one product and build a fan base over many years not months. That said creating a umbrella community for your brand can lead to the page being too broad and you may want each product to have its own bespoke page.
5. How will people find out about your page?
We all want to believe the things we do are so good that everyone will just turn up to get involved, but that isn’t how the world works. You may want to create great content that people will share with their friends, word of mouth may be free but the cost is in the content. You may decide that driving people through targeted advertising is your best bet. Leading people to your Facebook page instead of your micro-site may be a better method for your traditional advertising also. You could also use traditional outlets and influencers to spread the word but as before make sure people have a good reason to do this.
Simply put, know your audience, know what they want and then give it to them. It seems so obvious yet so many people overlook it. Facebook is just another platform and not the be all and end all, you may decide you are better off creating your own community, or using another social network. Do what is best for your product or brand and not just what everyone else is doing.
Twitter: @qubemedia