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Internet, tourism bc, Travel & Tourism

The long tail of tourism information

03.13.08 | 6 Comments


Chris Anderson’s the long tail has inspired much of my strategic thinking the last year or so. It’s a great book that highly recommend reading. Or at least his article in Wired magazine. Recenly I was asked to speak about the changing expectations for content in the tourism industry. First thing that came to mind.. the long tail.
tail2.jpg
Traditionally (well, pre-internet), consumers had limited information about destinations and available tourism product and experiences. Guidebooks were the most common source for planning information. They do a terrific job at providing information about the most popular tourism experiences. But Guidebooks are constraint by the number of available pages and the result is that only most popular tourism experiences are included, with a sample of supporting services such as accommodation and restaurants.
Tourism websites like ours don’t have a limited number of pages. We can include much more information, in a greater level of detail. As a result, consumers have access to more information and potential experiences that could meet their specific interest. Websites have removed the physical constraints of paper pages in a guidebook and can go further down the tail. But there are constraints still. There’s only so much content publishers can create and maintain.
To go all the way down the tail, publishers need help. That’s where user generated content plays a key role. This is how you can get the information about all kinds of experiences you will never find in a guidebook, or even on a website. But these experiences can be very appealing to some consumers, and play a key part in making decisions about where to go, and how long to stay there. This how to fill the tail, provide consumers with the information they seek, and maximize benefits to tourism businesses.

  • http://www.tourismuszukunft.de/ Daniel Amersdorffer

    You are writing that physical limitations of content have been banned by the unlimited space of internet servers / webpages. Now the difficulty is to produce enough good content. Therefore web2.0 can play a key-role: Users generate content and thus support the destination.
    Consequently the crucial point in tourist information has become the management of information by the destination management organization or by the tourism provider.
    Between internet users and between users and tourism providers has developed a stream of information exchange resulting in big amounts of information. The new task for tourism managers is to control these information flows. In details this means on the one hand to support contents which are useful for your business, on the other hand it might mean to manipulate “bad” content?
    Besides the manipulation of popularity of contents, the new information management requires to motivate users to generate content and then to control the flow of this contents by suitable measures (eg tagging).
    Just some wild thoughts about this topic in the middle of the night :)

  • http://www.tourismuszukunft.de Daniel Amersdorffer

    You are writing that physical limitations of content have been banned by the unlimited space of internet servers / webpages. Now the difficulty is to produce enough good content. Therefore web2.0 can play a key-role: Users generate content and thus support the destination.
    Consequently the crucial point in tourist information has become the management of information by the destination management organization or by the tourism provider.
    Between internet users and between users and tourism providers has developed a stream of information exchange resulting in big amounts of information. The new task for tourism managers is to control these information flows. In details this means on the one hand to support contents which are useful for your business, on the other hand it might mean to manipulate “bad” content?
    Besides the manipulation of popularity of contents, the new information management requires to motivate users to generate content and then to control the flow of this contents by suitable measures (eg tagging).
    Just some wild thoughts about this topic in the middle of the night :)

  • http://wilhelmus.ca/ Wilhelmus

    I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks about these things at night…
    I think the words ‘control’ and ‘manipulation’ are things we have to put in the past. Consumers are increasingly demanding about quantity and depth of information. And they posses access to the sources to verify any statement made by the travel industry.
    Destination Marketing Organizations are in essence media companies. They provide information to consumers. Consumers give them credibility through their official status. They also represent an industry. They should create the motivational content consumers seek, collect the information from their industry and distribute it across the internet, and gather user generated content to allow consumers to verify the statements made.
    By leveraging content generated by industry and consumers, they can provide the quantity and depth consumers seek without losing their status of creditability. Without it, consumers might very well just move on.

  • http://wilhelmus.ca Wilhelmus

    I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks about these things at night…
    I think the words ‘control’ and ‘manipulation’ are things we have to put in the past. Consumers are increasingly demanding about quantity and depth of information. And they posses access to the sources to verify any statement made by the travel industry.
    Destination Marketing Organizations are in essence media companies. They provide information to consumers. Consumers give them credibility through their official status. They also represent an industry. They should create the motivational content consumers seek, collect the information from their industry and distribute it across the internet, and gather user generated content to allow consumers to verify the statements made.
    By leveraging content generated by industry and consumers, they can provide the quantity and depth consumers seek without losing their status of creditability. Without it, consumers might very well just move on.

  • http://www.tourismuszukunft.de/ Daniel Amersdorffer

    Some thoughts during day-time… Thanks for your interesting answer. On the one hand I have to agree to what you wrote – one of the main tasks of DMOs is to distribute relevant information orginated in the destination towards the customers. This might be described as development of internal potentials and it does make the distance between the organization and the customer smaller (makes me remember to cluetrain manifest). The marketing seems to be changing to some kind of social job: Marketers ought to produce conversations about a destination, emotions and motivations. I will call it “creating conversation” (c2c, b2c, b2b).
    But I think, at least for nowadays, destination marketing also requires to put some influence onto the streams of informations. Maybe manipulation was not the right word. I think it is all about managing these flows of informations in the internet. The DMO should try to benefit from user generated content. As I consider it, it doesn’t harm the DMO’s credibility, if the DMO e.g. shows the customer, where in the internet he may find interesting conversations regarding certain topics related to the destination.
    Maybe that is what people should understand as social media optimization instead of focussing so much on digg etc. :) I am writing my thesis about smo, so that is why I was thinking of that point… BTW what do you think is smo in tourism?

  • http://www.tourismuszukunft.de Daniel Amersdorffer

    Some thoughts during day-time… Thanks for your interesting answer. On the one hand I have to agree to what you wrote – one of the main tasks of DMOs is to distribute relevant information orginated in the destination towards the customers. This might be described as development of internal potentials and it does make the distance between the organization and the customer smaller (makes me remember to cluetrain manifest). The marketing seems to be changing to some kind of social job: Marketers ought to produce conversations about a destination, emotions and motivations. I will call it “creating conversation” (c2c, b2c, b2b).
    But I think, at least for nowadays, destination marketing also requires to put some influence onto the streams of informations. Maybe manipulation was not the right word. I think it is all about managing these flows of informations in the internet. The DMO should try to benefit from user generated content. As I consider it, it doesn’t harm the DMO’s credibility, if the DMO e.g. shows the customer, where in the internet he may find interesting conversations regarding certain topics related to the destination.
    Maybe that is what people should understand as social media optimization instead of focussing so much on digg etc. :) I am writing my thesis about smo, so that is why I was thinking of that point… BTW what do you think is smo in tourism?


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