Blogging and RSS: what does it mean to the travel marketer?
Recently it seems that you can’t pick up a magazine, watch a news show or browse a website without seeing reference to a blog or its accompanying technology – RSS.
Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster crowned “blog” the No. 1 word of the year in 2004. Especially in the media world, this new form has definitely made its presence felt. A study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project confirmed that by November 2004, 32.4 million adult American Internet users had visited a blog.
While still in the process of becoming part of the mainstream, RSS is already a global phenomenon with early adopters utilizing RSS to attract readers to their websites and syndicate content. The same Pew study reports that 5% (6 million) of Americans now consume news and information through RSS.
The first indicators of the application of this technology in travel, specifically in electronic distribution, is evidenced by the agenda of the upcoming TravelCom Expo: The Three Letters That Are About to Rock Travel Distribution: RSS – I am sure this will not be the last conference track dedicated to the topic.
Some definitions: A blog, short for web log, is a medium in which an author (or blogger) writes a journal-style website with provisions for readers to respond.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is a defacto standard that emerged from the need to “push” summary headlines about new content on websites out via special readers. Bloggers utilize this channel to notify their audience that they have posted a new entry on their blog.
Users can subscribe to the RSS feed and in this way are notified every time content is updated on a website. The characteristic icon 
lets you know the webpage has been optimized for syndication and can be subscribed to via a reader. There are now many readers, including My MSN, My Yahoo, You Subscribe and NewsGator, to name a few. RSS reader functionality is being added to most common email tools. Web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox already have the functionality built in. Internet Explorer will soon have the functionality as well.
The obvious application of RSS technology in travel is to allow website visitors to subscribe to the special offers and events pages to be notified whenever something new is added. From the supplier perspective this is great push marketing to get your targeted promotion to a very qualified customer (one who has opted-in by subscribing) as well as encourage an ongoing dialog – fundamentals of effective one-to-one marketing.
An additional benefit to incorporating this technology on a travel website is that RSS can greatly improve website rankings due to the fact that new content delivery is the main objective of the technology and a major influencer in the search engine ranking process. At the same time RSS specific search engines and directories are beginning to emerge, which will result in new traffic to the supplier website. A recent example of the results that can be achieved:
Blogs can be leveraged in many ways to promote a travel supplier website. The first would be to add a blog to the website itself. For example various subject matter experts from a resort hotel property such as the executive chef, spa director or the golf pro could regularly blog about their area of expertise, events and happenings etc. to encourage an ongoing dialog with prospective or past guests.
Another way the network of blogs that is being established (sometimes referred to as the blogosphere) can be leveraged to get the word out about a specific event or promotion is to have a well established blogger in that space blog about the event. In this way you reach a new targeted audience and leverage the syndication element of the blogs themselves to spread the word – they are all connected via RSS technology.
The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in
The technology, though new and seemingly complex, has at its core some very simple concepts: ongoing communication with the customer, extending your brand, and ultimately promoting your offering.
Without taking advantage of RSS and blogging you may be missing a great opportunity to maximize your internet marketing and content delivery potential.
How does RSS compare to email? Do you feel that iould it eventually replace email marketing campains? Or even replace email completely?
Paolo,
What are the time and cost implications for hotels and travel destinations if they want to sign on to the benefits of RSS and blogs? Do you see travel industry blog creation and maintenance, monitoring of other blogs, and blog PR requiring significant resources, now or in the near future?
Don Dunnington
President – IAOC
When it comes to one-to-one communication email is highly effective and it would be hard to image any new medium replacing it. However with email newsletters and email marketing campaigns experiencing higher and higher block rates due to spam filters and the subscribers themselves being inundated, RSS does seem like a very viable alternative.
We believe RSS offers unique content delivery opportunities especially for
Don,
We feel this is going to be very similar to your other online marketing initiatives. There needs to be a certain amount of time committed to the planning and execution of the efforts to make them successful. As with Search Engine Advertising and Interactive Media: planning, monitoring, and execution all take significant amounts of time to do the right way. Effective blogging, and leveraging RSS technology is not much different. A travel supplier sould consider outsourcing some of these items to specialist service providers as they currently do with some of their other online marketing efforts. That said: this is the time to start thinking about what resources are currently in place to leverage these technologies or make sure they budget is going to be there in the very near future.
Not only is RSS 100% opt-in, the subsciber has 100% control over the opt-out (unlike email). I expect this power over opting-out will result in higher RSS subscriber rates while new email subsciber rates decline.
Over the last year, we have definitely seen our clients become more resistant to our “email” newsletters. However, most of our notifications (especially leisure related travel) are to our clients advantage and are quite often time sensitive.
As a small agency with a limited IT resources, we would definitely need to go to a 3rd party to implement this technology correctly. Would we be able to maintain it afterwords?
Thanks for mentioning You Subscribe: RSS. We're just getting started with the software so you can keep up with the new features and fixes here…
http://yousoftware.typepad.com/yousubscribe/
We are interested in learning what people think when they give it try.
Very interesting post !
In boardinGate.com, we stronlgly believe in the power of the RSS and the blog for the travel Industry.
We will soon be launching the FIRST RSS TRAVEL SEARCH ENGINE and the FIRST WEBLOG PLATFORM DEDICATED TO TOURISM INDUSTRY !
PS / I can't see the conference named “The Three Letters That Are About to Rock Travel Distribution: RSS” in the program of travelcompexpo ?
Hi – thanks – I beliveve they may have cancelled the segment on RSS at that conference.
Keep us posted on the progress of your earch engine.
Hi,
Please find enclosed the url to download the press release regarding the launch of boardinGate.com :
http://insideboardingate.boardinglobe.com/files/media/boardinGate_press_release_140606.pdf
Regards,
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