Online Revealed

If you are a student in a Canadian hospitality or tourism program, you have a chance to win free conference registration, travel and accommodation to the 2007 Online Revealed Conference in Toronto on May 28-29, 2007.

The Online Revealed conference tackles issues surrounding the Internet as a means of distribution - and what this means to Canadian tourism. With speakers from search engine giants, online marketing research experts, and online travel distribution leaders, the event will give students practical approaches and insight into marketing and delivering Canadian tourism product online and off. Great stuff, and you’ll also get to check out Toronto, free!

How do you win? Well, we don’t give it away…

…you’ll have to submit an “opinion essay” or Power Point Presentation on one of the following topics:

1. Where do you see e-marketing evolving in the next five years?

or…

2. If you were in charge of marketing for a Hotel, how would you market travel online?

Entries must be submitted by April 15th 2007 (6+ weeks away) so you’d better get cracking. =)

Click here for more contest details.

And good luck to all participants!

Building strong online brand identity begins by incorporating a positive corporate or product image within the culture of an organization. Then you need to enlist support from every member of your organization to fulfill the brand promise and make it a reality.

Although many online campanies are adept at creating a positive internal culture, the important connection between online customer experience and the brand promise has often been overlooked. Most of us are probably experts at reading our marketing metrics that capture data about quantitative elements such as unique visitors and pageviews etc., but how many metrics exist that help us understand qualitative information like customer usability, and satisfaction with their experience using the site?

Jens Thraenhart is the Executive Director of Marketing Strategy & CRM for the Canadian Tourism Commission. He was also one of last year’s co-chairs for Online Revealed. Jens maintains an excellent blog where covers topics in the travel internet marketing arena.

Today I read an interesting post in Jens’ blog entitled “Marketers need to understand the Website Experience“. In the article, Jens quotes what he agrees are four critical elements that any online brand must get right in order to strengthen their customer relationships. Each of these items relate directly back to the need for marketers to ensure that they offering outstanding customer experiences on brand websites.

• Brand - The value of brand cannot be underestimated. A site with a lot of ongoing problems will lose its reputation quickly, resulting in fewer sales.

• Increasing conversion - If users can’t complete a transaction, or are frustrated with navigating through a site because they have come to a page with an error on it they aren’t likely to become a buyer.

• Customer retention - If an established customer is having consistent problems with the site then there is a good chance of losing that customer.

• Decreasing cost - Finding problems with a site can take a long time, especially if someone cannot reproduce the sequence of events that led up to the problem. Between calls to customer support, and work done by engineering and QA, this can be a costly proposition

No doubt there are many resources available that can help mitigate these important elements, but the most important action item you must implement to get into the heads of your consumers is to use your own website! If you are troubled with any area of your own site in terms of “ease of use”, then be sure your customers are feeling it 10 times worse.

While you are building your online brand, start using your own website - you might be surprised with what you find! Both you and your customers will be better off.

We’ve all read that predicting the future first requires an understanding of the past. If you are wondering what Online Revealed 2007 is going to be like, then try checking out images from last year’s event.

Now close your eyes and imagine this year’s conference being EVEN BETTER!

This year’s Online Revealed event will be featuring (among others) a keynote speaker from the Phocuswright organization. Phocuswright is an independent travel, tourism and hospitality research firm specializing in consumer, business and competitive intelligence.

Not only are the folks at Phocuswright truly experts in their field, but they also produce some pretty slick videos for their organization. Last year’s PhoCusWright “Executive Conference” developed the following terrific conference videos that seem equally relevant for our little blog space. Enjoy!

Web 2.0 Confronts the Establishment

[About Phocuswright]

The Online Revealed team is in full gear preparing for this year’s conference in Toronto. The first Online Revealed Canada was held last year in Ottawa and brought together an amazing group of online marketing experts, suppliers and speakers who really know what they are talking about, and a bunch of folks who were looking for answers about how to promote their tourism businesses online.

The feedback about last year’s event was that attendees felt that they were in “an ocean of information without knowing how to swim.”

This year, the ORC planning team has changed the format of the event to include more educational workshops, broken into 4 unique tracks to be sure that all attendees can have “take-aways” from the conference that are relevant to them.

We will have keynote presentations and panel discussions, but we will also provide working sessions that will lead to action steps. Fun!

I am excited to have Chris Clarke of Chrispitality.com joining me to start the conversation that will help us produce an amazing Online Revealed event. So - what do you want to hear about? What is your pain? Do you want to know how to participate in the social media space? Are you wondering how much of your budget should be allocated to online marketing? Do you want to know how to more effectively use online intermediaries? Perhaps you just want the basics…what is SEO, SEM, PPC, HTML…and what is this Blog thing?

We are just getting started. Register for Online Revealed Canada 2007 and make sure to visit this Blog often to see how the conference develops. We look forward to hearing from you!