Eurostar launched a “social media platform” a few weeks ago as part of a wider campaign called Explore Europe, aimed at showing off other destinations around the continent.

The European high-speed rail operator reckons the new system, Europe by Eurostar, encourages people to travel around Europe and book their own get-aways.

“Visitors will have the option to post online their comments and tips once they’ve returned from their trip,” Eurostar says.

There is also the now obligatory use of “influential bloggers” to write guests post on the platform, “sharing experiences from their visits to Europe.”

The reality is slightly different. Eurostar has simply integrated destination content from a previous platform and thrown in a handy map to find destinations in France and other countries the operators services.

The “social media platform” element is allowing users to leaves comments or tips against other articles and find out how to follow on Twitter and Facebook.

Needless to say, Eurostar’s Facebook page is where the action and engagement is taking place, not on Europe by Eurostar.

I recently caught up with Benson Puah, the man who runs the Esplanade-Theatres On the Bay, to see if technology is intruding into his world of live events.

I was curious to find out if all the competition for our leisure time had affected attendance at the many live performances that are held in his venue, a leading tourist and local attraction in Singapore.

After all, there’s never been such a grab for our leisure time and never has our leisure time been as fragmented as it is now.

I read an article last week that said we were even trying to fill our downtime with “micro-moments”.

In gyms, as we cycle away, we play Scrabble on the iPad. Or as we run, we listen to music and watch television. We use our gadgets as tools to stave off boredom so that every little bit of downtime we have, we look for something to do.

“Mobile phones … let people relieve the tedium of exercising the grocery store line, stoplights or dulls in the telephone conversation,” says Matt Richtel, author of the article.

“The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining and potentially productive.”

So these days we don’t only multi-task… we hyper-task. And Attention Deficit Disorder is no longer a condition but the order of the day.

I find myself doing just that with the iPad. I’ve found it very difficult to read any article or book at length on the device because my mind is constantly wandering and wondering if someone has just emailed me, if I should update my Facebook or if I should check out this word or that or, how about a game of Scrabble?

“But don’t you do that anyway even with a real book?” asks a friend.

“Yes, but with the iPad because everything is in one place, it’s so easy to be distracted,” I reply.

So with all these weapons of mass distraction before us, it is very easy to be, well, distracted.

So where was I? Oh yes, Benson Puah and the Esplanade.

The good news is, attendance for live events at his venue has been rising. Since its opening in October 2002, he tells me, more than 10 million people have attended concerts and performances in the centre.

About 3,000 performances will be held this year, out of which 85% are presented by Esplanade. The annual Mosaic Music Festival in March, started by Esplanade in 2005, has grown from 65,000 attendees to 100,000 this year. A 2010 survey estimates that 14% of the attendees were tourists.

Benson sees digital media as an ally of the performing arts, rather than a competitor for our leisure time. He cites a survey by the National Endowment of the Arts in the US which debunks the myth that new media will replace live performances.

“In fact, if you are into new media, you are more likely to go to a live performance and the more active you are in all forms of media, the more experimental you are with discovering and trying new acts. Humans are social beings. There is no replacement for engagement in a social setting.”

There is also no replacement, I think, for real downtime.

The article mentioned earlier points to one side effect of constantly filling our time with “micro-moments”.

“When people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas,” Richtel says.

It contihnues that scientists at the University of California found that “when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration, do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience”.

They suspect these findings may also apply to how humans learn.

So next time you get some downtime, remember – go out and do something new, catch a live act or something, and not be like a hamster in a cage… with an iPad.

On Holiday Group was not expected to be given much time before Google came down hard on the company for brand name infringement over the Google Bypass project.

The initiative is a social media-driven affiliate scheme that allows Facebook and Twitter members to circulate links to travel deals around their networks and, in return, get a commission (£25) if someone books a holiday.

The name of the project, Google Bypass, would probably pass over the heads of consumers as many would either not care or understand the reasoning behind avoiding paying advertising fees for keyword buying.

So the title was clearly aimed at an industry all too aware of how much the search giant makes from travel companies during the purchase cycle of a product.

Co-founder of Travellerspoint, Sam Daams, gave the project less than seven days before Google stepped in.

But why would it?

Well, Google has a dizzying array of guidelines about using or playing with its protected trademark. Such names as Googliscious, Googlyoogly or GaGooglemania are given as example names not allowed.

These examples given nothing away about what might be behind the service, unlike Google Bypass (it’s hardly the name of a road dedicated to the folk at Mountain View), thus the predictions about the longevity of such a flagrant and pointed breach of its trademark.

Google, of course, might just be weighing up its options or simply considers other litigious matters such as its review by the Department of Justice over the ITA Software acquisition in the US rather more important in the grand scheme of things.

Or perhaps Google just hopes it’ll go away.

Nevertheless, Google is aware of the Google Bypass initiative, acknowledging a query late last week with a short but courteous: “No immediate comment from us.”

This is the final combined steps four and five in my five step recommendation on what a travel supplier should do to build a social media strategy.

Critical to the first four steps in this recommendation is that launching a social strategy does not mean opening up a Twitter account or Facebook page and typing away.

Instead, I recommend holding off on signing up with social media sites until a series of preparatory steps are undertaken. They are

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it

Part Four: Craft product and content plans

Using the data collected, plans made and early monitoring, suppliers can now start to craft the product and content plans that will make up the social media plan strategy.

There are two parts to this step – developing product offerings and developing content plans. In the product area it is time to craft targeted deals and offers specific to social media distribution platforms and demand patterns.

Taking first steps at micro-targeting. Using the data collected and information provided from distribution partner and own sales channels to engage in targeted product development.

That is, the development of offers and product specifically designed to target the customers identified in part one and tracking and investigated in part two and three.

The offers/products developed should not be exclusively targeted at pre-sales activities or driving immediate transaction response.

As we discussed in part one, there are many different ways that consumers can be targeted without having to require an immediate transactional response.

Social media content and offers during and post consumption could be just as (if not even more) valuable than transactionally focused product.

This is where the communications development is as important as product development. Using the information collected in the first three steps to plan a whole of company customer conversation plan based on the developed social media goals.

Content creation is just as important as offer creation. The people/department responsible for your social content creation should be looking into both areas of content creation – proactively creating content on your own site and social media platform pages and in responding to user generated content across the web.

[NB: For more on content and UGC see Three rules for a UGC start-up]

It will take time and devoted effort to craft these product and content plans. It cannot be rushed.

Talking, writing, posting, updating and tweeting before you have crafted targeted offers and messages increase the risk of your conversation falling flat and lacking response.

Especially if you try to simply take offline and static web brand approaches and translate them into social posts.  In all likelihood you will find that each social channel requires a different target approach and therefore different content response.  This is a good approach.

With products prepared and content ready to go… it is time for the final stage.

And, the bonus one, Part Five: Start saying it and stick to it

Now you can open the accounts, sign up and start being social.  The critical part of this step is to be engaged for the long haul.

Do not dip into and out of social media. Make a long term commitment to creating content and products targeted to this channel.

Launching a content or product plan and then pulling out if response is low or the time commitment too hard is the wrong response.

If the plans are not working, stay committed but go back to step one and come at the strategy from a different angle.

A social media audience can take time to build and may require different angles that first planned.  Trying once then pulling out will take you out of the conversation – leaving it to others to drive the conversation around your brand.

In parts one and two we discussed deciding who you want to talk to and what you want to say and monitoring mentions of your brand in social media.

But even with these steps completed it is still not time to log on and starting tweeting, updating and commentating.

Next you need to know more about your product and which segments it is attractive to.

Part Three: Start collecting data. All of it. Every single piece you can

To communicate effectively with customers you need to know that they like to do and what they want.

Social media opens up the chance to talk to every customer as an individual. Futhermore it also gives you the chance to talk to different versions of each individual (my EveryYou concept).

I was asked at a recent AsiaPac Aviation Conference to name a successful global social media campaign.

Someone quickly responded with the Queensland Best Job in the World campaign. I proposed that that the long term impact from social media campaigns are not around trying to replicate the massive effort involved in a Best Job-esque campaign.

Instead, it is the ability to develop one on one communications at scale. To develop micro-targeted deals and communications, but at a level that can be rolled out to a large number of people.

In other words: many deals to many people (a one-to-one approach) rather than one-campaign-to-many-people.

For a travel supplier to build a campaign around micro-targeting at scale requires having data. Lots of data. Data about everything that a consumer does in relation to a booking.

Where they click, upstream and downstream links, demographic details, email preference etc. I am talking about more than Ominture and Webtrends.

This is also about collecting data directly from customers’ pre, during and post consumption of a product.  Data that can be used in targeting offers, deals and content.

Some examples:

• Hotel: Recording the checkin and pre-purchase habits of people that order room service or ask for restaurant advice. For example how many people who check in after 8pm at night order room service or ask for a restaurant. Collect data to find out how many as this will open up social media recommendation options.
• Airline: Complaints at check-in by time of day and customer characteristics (solo, family, business). Use this to try to find patterns of how external factors (time of day and nature of passenger) can lead to increases or decreases in complaints.  Use that as a basis for determine communications and ideas to reduce check in complaints.
• Car Hire: where you have GPS units in cars, anonymously track the routes that people take.  Use that to publish a “top routes” list or “favourite drives” list to customers and build up a touring network and conversation.  Use staff profiling of customers (family, work, adventure) to build sub-categories of tours.

Arming yourself with data like this will be critical in finding the right targeting of the right message and therefore essential to a social media strategy.

Suppliers should go so far as to create an incentive structure around data collection. Staff should be rewarded for the amount of valuable customer information they collect.

It goes without saying that you will need to invest in the infrastructure to collect, sort and manage this data (and there will be a lot of data).

So now you have the target audience and what you want to say.  You have started to monitor and are collecting all the data you can.

Next we will combine part four and five into a single recommendation  - crafting product and content plans, and actually doing it.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

OnHolidayGroup launched Google Bypass this week in a bid to reward Facebook users with money for travel leads, instead of paying advertising fees to Google.

The move is being touted as the first personal affiliate scheme in travel (at least in the UK) and utilises different concepts including social networking, email marketing and good old fashioned travel agent-style commissions.

Run through OHG’s Holiday Nights accommodation-only B2C brand, Google Bypass is handing out £25 to Facebook users if they refer a friend to a product on the system which they eventually buy.

The title of the scheme, Google Bypass, was clearly created for the PR value within the travel and web industries rather than making much sense to consumers – “no comment”, says CEO Steve Endacott, a figure not exactly known for his love of the Big G and the keyword advertising model.

Endacott claims Google takes on average around 75% of an agent’s (off or online) commission through PPC costs, so he would rather give the commission it would ordinarily pay to the search giant to an individual with, presumably, better loyalty and the chance of recommending a product or company again and again.

So how does it work?

• Holiday Nights customers are sent an invitation to participate.
• Each is given access to lists of offers within the system.
• Each offer has a unique identifying URL, matching the user to the product.
• Members of the scheme are then encouraged to send the URL around their various social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
• When a friend or follower clicks on the link and makes a booking, the originator gets £25 wired immediately via Paypal.

Much of the management of the system is contained within a Facebook application, meaning users can throw offers around their network easily and see how their various campaigns are performing.

Endacott predicts the scheme will be mostly taken on by individuals, rather than offline travel agencies.

Although currently limited to the bed-focused Holiday Nights brand, plans are in place to extend to other areas of the OHG business including its dynamic packaging service.

The idea behind the project (alongside presumably avoiding the Google cash drain) is to turn individuals into powerful advocates for a service or brand, an area once the preserve off the agent but now through networks such as Facebook allowing consumers to wade in.

Early stages of the project are “pretty good”, says Endacott.

Around 4,000 opt-in members of the Holiday Nights database were emailed last week. Approximately 150 registered and the average pass-on was to nine people. The early phase has generated nine bookings, totalling £225 in commission.

The company may licence the Facebook integration and other elements of the technology to third parties, Endacott adds. The project is a collaboration between OHG, RateGain and ClickWithTechnology.

In part one I discussed strategy, deciding who you want to talk to and what you want to say. How looking to the messaging and audience is a must do before opening up social media accounts and submitting content.

In part two, I am still recommending that social media accounts are left unopened.

There is still more work to be done before a travel supplier should be creating socially distributed content.

Part Two: Start monitoring social media, make it a customer service and marketing priority

As I discussed here, consumers are turning more and more to social media sites to help them get more information on brands.

So it is important to set up the infrastructure (readers or monitoring tools) that scrape social media and review sites and serve up mentions of your brand, competitors and (if relevant) location to customer care and marketing teams.

Use this in the first instance to listen to what people are saying about you, your brand and competitive landscape.

Then settle and agree on the response you will take to various mentions.

For example:

• Agree the format for Twitter responses when customers make queries and complaints.
• Appoint some one in customer care to respond each day to negative (and positive) reviews on TripAdvisor.
• Find the forum(s) where customers are talking about your area or product or experience and monitor what is being said about the brand (eg Flyertalk or frequentflyer.com.au).
• Publish an internal social media policy that encourages your staff to be watching,  consuming and participating in social media.  But make it clear when they can and when they can’t speak for the company in a response.

In summary. build up a list of tools and set up an agreed and actionable plan for monitoring and responding to social conversations about your brand.

This will initiate your involvement in discussions initiated by consumers and prepare the ground for (hopefully) exerting some influence over that conversation.

Important points to remember:

• Influence is achievable but control is not.
• Be clear in your understanding and expectations.
• You will not be able to exert control over social media as it is word of mouth at the speed of light.

Combining parts one and two is the first step in setting a social media plan and help you find your voice, primarily by deciding which of your customers want to talk to and what you want to say.

The next rung on the ladder is to start monitoring all of the mentions of your brand in social media so that you can learn what is being said already by which segment of your customer base.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

NileGuide has integrated recent acquisition Localyte into its main platform, allowing users to ask questions from companies and individuals in a destination.

NileGuide purchased Localyte for an undisclosed fee in May 2010, a deal which was inevitably going to lead to the two systems combining in some way.

Visitors to NileGuide can now access an Ask Locals channel on its destination pages. The system works by allowing users to post a question about a particular area, topic or product and then Localyte’s army of tens of thousands of local experts can respond with tips and advice.

The idea is that over time a particular Localyte will earn the respect of travellers for their help and obtain a better star rating.

Although the experts are not paid for their advice, they are able to offer services.

Localyte is similar in some ways to existing and smaller services such as UK-based TripBod, although the latter charges users for the advice and guides they receive.

Nevertheless, the consumer Q&A idea for travel has taken another twist in recent months with the launch of Facebook Questions, a system where users can pose a question about any subject area and the Facebook community can respond.

I am often approached by suppliers (mainly hotels) telling me that they have opened a twitter account, started a blog or set up a Facebook fan page but nothing is happening.

“What should I do?” they say. “I joined all the social networks but there is nothing there!”

From these discussions I have developed five steps for a supplier on how to plan, set up and execute a social media strategy.

I have previously covered trend driving social media adoption, but in this post I want to provide more detailed advice on implementing a social media strategy.

[By social media I mean online/interactive user generated content sites where there is no substantive restriction on who can create, share or contribute to content. Includes social media sites, forums, blogs and even comment sections in mainstream media]

Part One: Decide who it is you want to talk to and what you want to say

The assumed first step is to jump straight in, sign up for each and every social network and wait for the customers to come pouring in. This is a bad move.

The correct first step is to do the opposite, to stay clear of any proactive social media interaction until such time as you have decided who you want to talk to and what it is you want to say.

Jumping straight in without this ground work could result in one of these outcomes:

1. Nothing happening and no one cares – you sit there with no followers or friends and no means for building a following.
2. Too much happens and angry customers take over. There is a danger that a poorly monitored or executed social media strategy can leave open a chance for disgruntled consumers to become the dominant content providers. Most extreme example of this is the take over of the Nestlé’s Facebook page by Greenpeace in protest of Nestlé’s use of palm oil from endangered forest areas.

There are number of different angles that can be taken in deciding what to say and who to talk to. The angle chosen needs to be based on the brand identity and vision of the supplier.

Who you want to talk to:

• In deciding who you want to talk to, there are different classes of customers – existing customers, new customers, loyal customers, suppliers and more.  Decide which of these groups you want to talk to is critical before executing a strategy.

What you want to say:

• Similarly there are options in deciding what it is you want to say.  Do you want to push a message around your price, service, location, facilities or expertise?  Are you trying to communicate to people during their consumption of the service, before or afterwards?

It is possible but very very hard to cover all of these in one social media plan. The best approach is to pick the combination of these options that best suit your product. Here are some (hypothetical) examples of different angles that different suppliers could take:

1. A Budget Hotel: deciding on an approach of targeting new customers on rate and cleanliness.  Therefore will look to talk to customers about the deal value and the certainty of the product;
2. Adventure tour company: targeting their social media activity at existing customers that have already bought. Helping those customers prepare so that they get the most out of the experience and soliciting feedback and testimonials to help attract new customers;
3. A hotel near an event location: targeting loyal customers with information and discussion about events at a location and their knowledge of the location rather than the hotel itself;
4. An airline with a large leisure network: targeting new customers with general holiday information for their home market.  Driving discussion around generic holiday options rather than their on board product; or
5. A winter cruise tour company: identifying that consumer information about the destination is the most critical element rather than the specifics of the product. Building up a body of content about a location first rather than the product.

Social media distribution and usage is vastly different to traditional web retail and marketing.

To simply take a deal distribution approach or a join and hope approach will be a certain path to an unsuccessful strategy.

Before you do anything in social media take time to decide the customers you are targeting and what you want to say.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

At Microsoft they have this great expression that has passed into common language – it’s called “eating your own dog food”.

It implies that you must consume the products that you create. As Microsoft was the epitome of the software world and changed the way people developed code, this made sense.

While the company may look a little dated and as less able to remain relevant than, say, 15 years ago when I was there, it still cuts a swathe in the world. And rightly so.

Microsoft like many companies particularly Google and Yahoo are deeply involved in social media.

In travel, the powerhouse in our little world has to be Expedia and it’s TripAdvisor product.

But it is by no means the only game. Twitter has taken the sector by storm – in my view not always for the better, but that’s another story.

There is another issue – that of the whole concept of social media within companies.

A recent study by Creative Group on where Marketing and Advertising Execs Get Their Social Media Information seems to be the antithesis of the “eating your own dog food” concept.

But what of the other side. Are there any studies that show us how people are consuming social media inside companies, and is it healthy?

Corporations have done plenty to build security into their corporate IT groups – social media seems to want to break down those barriers and, indeed, cause a company a lot of problems.

There is even software from a company called FaceTime whose product Socialite is designed to  “… track users across multiple social media platforms; prevent data from leaving the company, either maliciously or inadvertently…. ”

This is a bigger issue that perhaps people realize. Of course people spilling the beans outside of work with the data stores they carry with them (aka their memories) are hardly controllable by software (or hardware).

But there is an increasing trend towards social media monitoring tools from just about every software vendor worth his salt.

An interesting study was released last week on the subject (referred to here).

On the hiring side, companies are using social media to check out prospective staff (estimates vary from 25% to more than 50% of companies are checking you out on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks).

But it’s interesting to note that now they are starting to monitor and even control use of social media during office time.

Sadly there is still a dearth of talent in the area of social media. If you put “SM specialist” on your resume, you can get hired in a heartbeat.

Or so it would seem judging by some of the talent I have been exposed to lately inside some organizations who should know better.

At least one major hotel player has had to do conventional (aka public relations) spin/damage control after some ill-advise comments posted by an authorized employee.

And what of a company’s internal consumption of social media? Should this be encouraged or curtailed?

Perhaps we should encourage responsible use of social media inside corporations, even amongst ourselves.

Like everything else, moderation should be the order of the day.

My biggest concern is not that bad things will happen. I worry more about the amount of lost productivity.

To support this, UK Jobs website MyJobGroup published a survey earlier this month, asking 1,000 people to determine their use of social media at the office.

Employees spend an hour a day during work time on Facebook, thus accounting for £14 billion pounds of lost work time.

On the plus side – at least they are not round the pub gassing to their mates. But you have been warned…