Testing the authenticity of a travel blog
Came accross an article in the International Herald Tribune Frequent Traveller: Testing Travel Blogs with Caution (by Roger Collis Sept 2006) which warned travellers to:
“Beware of bogus blogs is the watchword for travelers seeking unbiased information. There is something seductive about the immediacy of the personal blog, a community of fellow travelers sharing that authentic feeling, until you detect the powers behind it ”.
Caught my interest due to my previous posts and investigations into the world of “flogging”. Collis lists a proliferation of travel blogs which under the surface may not entirely be what they seem.
So how do you check the authenticity of a blog?
Collis goes on to say that
“The only way to check the authenticity of a blog is to measure it against what you already know of a place or to do more research yourself”.
Personally, I would go one step further and
1) Take a good look at the level of advertising on the blog - who is advertising - how much space is dedicated to advertising.
2) Investigate the owner, writers and contributors of the blog. Do a google search on their names and see if any commercial links become apparent.
3) Be wary of travel blogs with direct links to online booking site or travel consultants.
4) If the site has a moderated forum - check out who is doing the moderating and also the terms and conditions of joining the forum (what you can and can not post).
Be even more suspicious if you suddenly start receiving great holiday specials spammed to your email!
Ramblings, Tourism | Comments (2)
When is a blog an ad?
Following on from my previous blog about the EU directive on flogging. I came across an interesting blog….http://www.globaltravelblog.com/
A very sophisticated blog with RSS feeds, podcasts, videos, tag clouds, categories and very well managed content (possibly too well managed when you read some of the posts). The posts and members are currently dominated by Flight Centre consultants with email links back to a Flight Centre.
In my quest to understand Web 2.0 and the implications for the travel industry and how word of mouth is spread about destinations and products I found this site quite intriguing.
My first thought……is this a community of practice I should be a part of?
It looks a lot better than the Travelzine (the site I have chosen to study) and definitely has a comparatively improved technological framework. I was keen to find out more about this site so I clicked on the “about us” section and yes it definitely belongs to a commercial operator perhaps on the biggest in Australia …Flight Centre.
The Flight Centre Group Product Ads which exclusively dominate the site should have given it away plus if you read the conditions - you will see some interesting conditions of advertising which the owners of the site have clearly decided does not apply to them.
Look the site is a clever use of Web 2.0 and is a great way for Flight Centre to engage with their customers and build customer loyalty. I am however suspect at the efforts to profile the site as a global travel blog when it really is one big advertisement for Flight Centre and the community primarily consists of travel agents of the company.
Happy that I have chosen my community the Travelzine. I go back to my previous blog where trust is a key element in Web 2.0 and that people will trust their community when taking recommendations for products and services.
I suspect Advertising blogs will face the fate of TV advertising, similar to the power of the remote control, Net users have the power to selectively filter out the “ads” with the click of the mouse.
Ramblings, Tourism | Comments (2)Commercial Travel blogging - an offence in the EU
A recent blog on Travel Mole outlines the interesting consequence of misuse of Web 2.0 by commercial tourism operators trying to buy favour with consumers by fake postings to sites such as Trip Advisor.
Commercial blogging - ‘flogging’ - becomes an offence in Europe – March 28 2008 by Dinah Hatch
“The end, it seems, could be nigh for those cheeky hoteliers who pretend to be customers on TripAdvisor and write themselves glowing reviews. As of April 6, Brussels will be banning such underhand activities as the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive comes into force, making commercial blogging, or flogging as it’s known, an offence.
The new law includes two categories of unfair commercial practice - misleading practices and aggressive practices. Whether a practice is deemed unfair will be judged in light of the effect it has on the average consumer’s consequent decision to purchase. The law means companies, no matter how small (and that includes sole traders), will not be able to post online themselves or pay anyone else to post reviews or blogs about their own companies that are misleading.
The law comes into force at a time when the public are beginning to make their disapproval about flogging heard.In the US, the recent Travel 2.0 Consumer Technology Survey which was commissioned by Phocuswright revealed that when travel purchasing decisions are being made, most Americans said they would rather make their own minds up than follow the views of people they didn’t know (and therefore, by implication, could not trust). “
My initial thoughts are
1) How are they going to police and track it – that will be interesting to see
2) Once they work that out people will find a way to get around it
3) Trip Advisor is a commercial site – you have to take it on face value and understand that (apologies to the Americans and anyone else who didn’t see the mass advertising that dominates the site)
More importantly, it gives support to the notion that non-commercial social networking sites where people build relationships and communities of “trust” may have greater impact on people’s purchasing decisions. This is something I am interested in and one of the reasons I have chosen the Travelzine as my learning community to study.
Tourism | Comment (1)
