Travel blog camp write-up

Yesterday was a full day of exposure for the team at Tourdust (that being Anna and I). Following a long march around the hallowed halls of Excel for the World Travel Market, we were off to the Travel Blog Camp.  Ostensibly an excuse to network with travel bloggers and people in the industry and hopefully learn a bit about blogging. (As you can tell, I've a lot to learn)

The first half an hour was great, an informal opportunity to meet some people.  Met a nice guy, Jared Salter, who is in a similar stage of start-up to us.  An interesting sounding idea, matching travel planning up with events / festivals etc.  and certainly looks like it is well executed (joobili.com) - one to look out for.  (Sorry Jared if I have explained it poorly)

After that there was a succession of speakers talking about blogging.  Alex Bainbridge did a good job of distilling the essence of succesful blogging.  Which seemed to be (1) getting around and adding relevant / helpful topics on other people's blogs and (2) writing your own stuff with your own angle (not just re-hashing).

Karen from Europe a la carte had some interesting things to say about consumer travel blogs trying to make money from a consumer audience.  Which by all accounts is a struggle.  Alex B. made a good point comparing Europe a la carte to someone like worldreviewer.com.  Does make you wonder if a blog is the right format for this kind of information.  If you've got editorial content to inspire and inform travellers, then it makes sense to me to structure it in some kind of geographical & activity taxonomy (so people can easily find what they want), and invest time and effort to monetise the traffic by cross-selling relevant hotels, flights, activities. (which is kind of what worldreviewer do very well).  Both Europe a la carte and worldreviewer.com do this to some extent, but there is no doubt that worldreviewer have put more attention to making the content appear in an inspiring format, and in trying to monetize it.  

The next speaker raised the temperature a little.  A lady from a social media agency talked about STA travel buzz.   In my opinion, having had a little experience of marketing in large corporates, this is a great example.  They are pulling in all sorts of commentary from around the net into one place, so travellers who want to find out about STA can come to one place and find everybody's feedback.  A great and transparent service to their customers, and probably pretty much the extent to which a large brand can engage in social media.   However an argument raged around how involved a brand should get in individual consumer conversations.    From the reactions in the room you certainly get the impression that the blogging community tended to treat large brands' social media strategies with scorn.   I've been on both sides of this fence in various guises, and I do think it is hard for outsiders to comprehend the context in which large brands operate and the internal cultures at play.  For what it's worth, I believe it's ok for a brand to wade in & put things right if someone is really shouting out loud about a bad experience.  After all this is what the blogger is asking for.  In most other circumstances though, the danger is too high.  The online community can turn very quickly on a brand, and the PR consequences can be drastic - which is just not something an individual blogger need worry about in the same way.

The final talk was from Kevin May (Travolution) and he wanted to create a bit of debate. Unfortunately what ensued was a navel gazing circular conversation about the triumvirate of PR, journalism and blogs (must admit I kind of switched off).  The shame was that by highlighting the distinctions this rather poisoned the mood for mutual supportive networking.

Overall though a huge thankyou to Darren from Travelrants for organising the event.  Darren came across as a really genuine guy with little pretentions, and it's no small feat organising something like this.

Anyway my main recommendation for future events (and I personally hope there are some future events like this) is that we should try to create a more open and supportive network. There was definitely a pecking order last night, and in this respect the difference between this event and many of the events I've attended in the tech community was huge (e.g. opencoffee meetup).    Everybody in the room will benefit from a larger online travel community in UK, be it bloggers, startups or established brands.  And you only get a community if the newbies are made to feel comfortable to approach some of the more experienced hats for advice and tips.