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Travel 2.0 Tools: Blog + Social Media and Viral Videos [Workshop]

by Massimo Burgio, July 2009

A couple of months ago I have been hired, via my friends from Spanish search engine agency Overalia, to design and deliver a two-day workshop on the topic of Tourism and Travel 2.0. The workshop, two full days of Spanish content, training, site clinics, tools and exercises, has been offered to CICtourGUNE, the Center for Cooperative Research in Tourism, a Basque governmental agency dedicated to generate knowledge excellence in the areas of tourism and mobility, with offices in the very cool technology Park of San Sebastian (Basque Country, Northern Spain – Euskadi, in Basque).

25-30 people in the room, all related with the Travel and Tourism industry: local hotels and local tourist services, a museum and the local Tourism Board at the San Sebastian City Hall, plus other attendees with ideas and business plans for Travel industry, looking for some good advice to be successful on the web.

Good audience at CICtourGUNE – very interested people, strongly motivated to put things in being and to launch projects straight away, but unfortunately lacking of basics foundations of search and internet marketing – difficult for me to get them started in the 2.0 arena, and to vertically enter into the online Travel / Tourism industry topics, so I decided to invest day one of the workshop in providing the audience with a solid understanding of what internet marketing is about, before dedicating day 2 to social media and its applications and declinations for the Travel 2.0 industry.

The presentations with the entire content of the workshop are now online and available for download and embed on SlideShare, where are going particularly wild! In just few months the five presentations had a total of more than 10,000 views, and dozens of comments / embeds / favorite. Well, they are now also all collected on this Travel 2.0 page door your convenience, but they might need some quick explanation since they are in Spanish.

Let’s start with the first part of the workshop: Turismo 2.0: Elementos Basicos de Marketing Online y Social Media Marketing (translation: “Travel 2.0: Basic Elements of Online Marketing and Social Media Marketing”). I kicked off the San Sebastian workshop with a basic introduction to online and social media marketing. Find the presentation here on the side of the page, while this was the workshop agenda:

Introduction to online marketing
– basic tools for online businesses
– the importance of search engines
– the importance of search engine optimization
– introduction to paid search
– introduction to the new web: user power, paradigm shifts

Introduction to social media marketing
– marketing 2.0 and social networks
– basics: blogs, RSS, social networks, tools
– social media optimization
– social media marketing
– web analytics
– content copyright issues and creative commons
– social media networks and Travel 2.0

Now that the foundations were set, we dedicated some time for the first site clinic session, where we evaluated some problems related to the online presence a few attendees.

The second part of the workshop, still on day one (afternoon) introduced to the audience the power of online video optimization and online viral video as a key asset for Travel and Tourism-related online performance – “Turismo 2.0: Introducción al Marketing Viral” (translation: “Travel 2.0: Introduction to Viral Marketing”). Presentation embedded on this post. The topics of the viral marketing session of the workshop were:

Viral Marketing
– definition of viral marketing
– the viral process in the social web
– buzz and word of mouth: the web noise
– the 5 Es of viral marketing
– classic mistakes in viral marketing campaigns
– viral channels: email, web, blogs, social networks, AdSense, iTunes
– offline viral marketing: mobile, desktops applications, advergaming

Viral Marketing targeting
– targeting the right audience
– communities, networks, questions and answers
– the online conversations
– gain authority and traffic through viral marketing
– the new 4 Ps of Social Media Marketing

Day two of the CICtourGUNE Travel 2.0 workshop started with a session on “Turismo 2.0: Herramientas Básicas para Campañas Virales: Blogs y Redes Sociales” (translation: “Travel 2.0: Basic Tools for Viral Campaigns – Blogs and Social Networks”). Presentation on the side. The agenda:

Basic tools: blogs
– blos as social phenomenon and new marketing tool
– basic blog tools: blogging and microblogging
– basic blog tools: WordPress
– focus: the importance of tags and categories

Basic tools: social networks
– facebook: social trend and new marketing tool
– facebook: users, pages, groups, applications and more
– basic networks: MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn
– basic networks on travel opinions: from TripAdvisory.com to Trivago.es
– more tools: Facebook, Twitter, Podcasts, Contests, Videos

A vertical focus on viral video followed, with the session “Turismo 2.0: Herramientas de Marketing Virales – Videos Virales” (translation: “Travel 2.0: Basic Viral Marketing Tools – Viral Video”). Two presentations have been dedicated to online videos, the first exploring viral video strategies, the second showing a number of international and local Spanish examples of good viral marketing campaigns in the Travel industry. Both presentation here on the side of the page. The agenda of this final workshop session was:

Viral Marketing Tools: Videos
– videos as viral marketing tools
– viral video strategies
– beyond YouTube: the major video sharing networks
– viral video distribution tools: TubeMogul
– YouTube marketing, videocasting, microvideos

Successful Viral Marketing Case Histories for the Travel industry
– mountain cleaners in Switzerland
– hotel marketing in Spain
– Asturias 2.0

The Travel 2.0 workshop ended with a guided exercise session where the attendees to the workshop started drafting their own draft plans for a successful Travel 2.0 marketing strategy.

I hope you enjoyed this “virtual Travel 2.0 workshop“. I take the opportunity of publishing this post to say thank you to CICtourGUNE for the kind hospitality and the opportunity to explore such a fascinating online universe such as the Travel industry.

Need a full immersion workshop like this as part of your training programs? Get in touch with us, we’ll always happy to share our knowledge.

gsi-logo-oldiesThis section of the site used to be active as a blog, but we stopped blogging at the beginning of 2013. This article is a couple of years old, but we think that its insight still provides value, so we included it in our new site as an “online marketing resource”. A sort of oldies but goldies.

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