The folks at the FTMA invited me to speak about Web 2.0 at their Fall conference in Miami last week (thanks folks for that!). The audience was mostly marketing folks, with a few IT folks in the mix.
My prediction was that Web 2.0 is here to stay (whether they like it or not), and my observation was that Web 2.0 and travel are a match made in heaven. Some supporting proof points included:
TripAdvisor has 30M monthly unique visitors, and
Forrester Research found that 62% of people aged 18-26 used online peer reviews to make travel decisions in 2006, 83% of people 50-61, and 90% (!!) of people over 62 did.
I issued my usual plea for marketers not to ignore Web 2.0, since the conversations are happening online and everyone knows how to find them, so why not provide the environment to host them, and reap some of the benefits, like increased loyalty, better SEO, better conversions, and improved customer research?
As usual, some in the audience said that although they agreed in principle, travel as an industry might be different, because there are so many people that have poor travel experiences (sigh). It was actually one of the IT guys that suggested that perhaps if they're so afraid that the tone will be negative, that the answer might not be to think they can prevent the feedback, but to look deeper at the root causes of the sentiment.
(FWIW I offered my suggestion for increasing loyalty, which was to equip every plane with high speed satellite internet access, add A/C outlets under every seat, continue to block cell phone access, and charge us whatever they want).
He (the IT guy) also thanked me for making it clear what was motivating the marketing guys to ask them for some of the projects that that they're working on, like desktop applications. So perhaps some feedback to marketers that are tasking IT with projects: give them the ROI and the business reasons for the projects. They'll understand it, appreciate it, and it will probably result in better implementations.