Gnomedex 6.0 - Steve Rubel

Steve Rubel, of Edelman Public Relations, addressed best practices of how traditional marketers should approach bloggers, among other things, at Gnomedex this afternoon. He mentioned that one of the biggest issues is that "every marketer is too worried about giving up control". He quoted Friedman's book The World is Flat, "we're moving from command and control to collaboration and connectivity".

Some comments that were made by the audience on how to connect with bloggers:
- Demonstrate that you have read their blog
- Do not ask a blogger to blog about something they are obviously not interested in
- Do not expect them to write anything other than what they think

Update: Image above is from blaugh, the unoffical comic of the blogosphere.

Gnomedex 6.0 - John Edwards

John Edwards just finished speaking at Gnomedex 6.0. Wide range of topics were discussed, from net neutrality to poverty.

There was also an interesting dialogue on why politicians should use more authentic language when communicating with the public. John emphasized that he often finds himself slipping into auto-rehearsed-messaging speak (my words), and is conscience about trying to speak more from the gut and authentic. I can relate to that, in my role at Farecast managing marketing and PR, I too sometimes find myself slipping out of normal conversation mode.

Farecast Launches

After several years in development, Farecast launched publicly today. The first and only airfare prediction website is now available for travelers departing out of Seattle and Boston to over 60 destinations. Access the press release here.

I'm thankful to be a part of a smart, scrappy team that is really innovating in online travel. Here is a post on FarecastBlog from our CEO, Hugh Crean.

More updates to come...

On Emily's Radar

Emily Chang posted about Farecast on June 1st and after three weeks in private beta, her site ranks in our top twenty referring domains. Thanks Emily. I spent time on her eHub site recently to get more familiar and noticed that she has posted on several next generation travel, or Travel 2.0, companies. Here are a few that stood out to me:

EpicTrip
Love the clean site and excellent use of images. Emily's description: "Discover destination travel guides with video, audio and location resources."

JustStepsAway
Simple UI and easy to view multiple rental home listings quickly. Emily's description: "Search thousands of vacation rental listings for free and without ads."

Wayn
Emily's description: "Trip and travel logs, see who's where, share experiences and travel plans."

Philip's Travel 2.0 thoughts

Philip C. Wolf, President and CEO of PhoCusWright, an independent travel, tourism and hospitality research firm, sent an email to subscribers yesterday titled "Travel 2.0 Confronts the Establishment". Philip is the "godfather", or some other cool title, of online travel. He has been covering this space since the beginning and has helped us all to define it. Here are some interesting excerpts from his email:

"Travel 1.0 started around 1995; it was characterized by the shift from offline to online reservations and was dominated for a decade by three things: price, price and price. Name your price, find the lowest price, price guarantees, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Price drove online adoption in historic proportions."

"Travel 2.0, our industry's collective fulfillment of Web 2.0, embodies how companies can differentiate themselves in a vast, dynamic space. New travel researching and planning approaches are empowering consumers in unprecedented ways. As was the case with Travel 1.0, this phenomenon is not entirely about technology; rather, 2.0 is focused on solving big problems for all types of travel customers by exploiting the latest advancements."

Travelers are keen to take control and find/create the perfect trip, not just the cheapest trip. Here's a sampling of Travel 2.0 at work:

*Social travel's surge takes networking and CRM to new levels
*Personalized user-generated editorial profoundly impacts purchasing behavior
*Reaching customers "beyond the browser" opens opportunities
*Mapping, mash-ups and tagging resonate with travel buyers
*Grass root adoption of real-time collaborative tools like wikis, blogs, bots and gadgets
*Metasearch – scorned by many while heralded by others – won't go away
*Vertical search embeds travel features and profiling to attract more qualified eyeballs
*RSS comes of age and influences travel distribution
*Customer experiences online are significantly improved by RIA-based (Ajax, Flex) applications
*Hungry for electronic snacking?

More thoughts on this and which companies are bringing customers interesting solutions by leveraging these themes and technologies in a future post...

TechCrunch Seattle - Travel 2.0

Two online travel start-ups I'm involved, Farecast and TripHub, sponsored the TechCrunch Seattle event last night along with Redfin. As mentioned in previous posts, Farecast provides airfare shoppers with an airfare prediction that helps answer the question "should I buy now or wait" and TripHub makes it easy for group travelers to plan and organize their trips with online collaboration tools. Redfin is a real estate service that helps you find, buy, and sell homes online. The average savings when buying a home through Redfin is $11,402. This service makes a ton of sense to me. As a buyer, you are naturally going to do a lot of the work finding your new home by shopping online and driving to different neighborhoods. It's logical to then utilize Redfin for the negotiation and closing. And, save a boat load of cash. As Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman put it, who needs the "taxi service" anyway.

It was great to meet Mike Arrington in person at the event, as I've been following his TechCrunch blog for some time now. Mike posted his comments "...we had a packed house at Conworks in Seattle. It’s wonderful to meet new people, or people I know online but not in person". I too enjoyed meeting people I had connected with online or heard of prior to the event.

John Cook covered the event as well. In my opinion, he has become Seattle's top blogger following the Seattle start-up scene. John's thoughts on last night's event "The entire vibe [at TechCrunch Seattle] was low-budget and grass roots, the way some argue it should be". John posted recently that "... in addition to Expedia, a number of online travel startups got started in Seattle. Maybe it is the rainy weather... Off the top of my head, [in addition to TripHub] I can think of Escapia, RedWeek, Farecast, and VacationSpot.com" This event sure added to the notion Seattle is a hotbed for online travel start-ups.

It was a talented group of folks who showed up last night and I look forward to the next event. Lastly, posted some pictures on flickr and many more are available under the techcrunchseattle tag.