Internet Marketing

Last week, I attended the PhoCusWright Blogger's Summit Workshop held at the ITB conference in Berlin, Germany.

The workshop was entitled "The Top Social Media Trends for Travel & Tourism" and featured a panel of 5 major bloggers. Each member of the panel was asked to provide his 3-5 top Social Media Trends for 2009:

Darren Cronian

• Mobile
  
• Twitter: companies are going to have to become more social and interact with the consumer
  
• Travel companies will start using more social media
  

Klaus Hidebrandt

• Social Media 2.0 is all about communication with the consumer. Companies need to know, understand, and execute social media at a top level.
  
• Get your CEO or top executive involved. Employees love it. Customers love it. There is no more powerful way to humanize your brand.
  
• The future lies in companies that adopt EVERYTHING: one brand and one media is best.
  

Kevin May

• Twitter: 974% of traffic in UK in 2008
  
• PR: people are thinking more cleverly in terms of PR. They are using different forms of media both online and offline for campaigns.
  
• Crowd-sourcing: making sure you know what is happening in a network digitally.
  
• Hyperlocal: creating niche services for a localized community
  

Martin Schobert

• Feedback 2.0: a lot of comments, learning how to communicate with a social internet
  
• Maps will be the new interface.
  
• More CONTEXT: the right content offered to the right person at the right time
  
• Do your homework. Define goals clearly with social web and have B2B conversations
  

Vasco Sommer-Nunes

• Volume of mentions will become part of a greater measurement metrix, such as "share of voice", to determine success in social media.
  
• Personal publishing on the web will continue to increase, thereby increasing the share of user generated content.
• Companies will react and hire a social media guy to listen, help and educate users
  
• Cross publishing will become stronger, i.e. publishing into several communities from one web site or mobile phone.
  
• The travel industry will embrace social media even more than other industries, because people love to talk about their vacation and show others where they´ve been!
  

After the panelists presented their trends, the audience was asked to interactively text in their picks to have a final list of 3. Although the majority of the panel's trends focused on social media sites, especially Twitter, the audience's choices end up being strategies.

Audiences Choices of Top 3 Social Media Trends with the greatest impact in the next year: