Articles about Vertical Industries Online

“Netconcepts took away the headache of getting the site built so I didn’t have to manage it too closely.”

In March 2008 Blair Peach, Director of Marine Electronics launched their new ecommerce website, designed and built by Netconcepts, with the aim of shaking up the recreational marine industry online.

With many marine related websites in New Zealand being a “jack of all trades” by selling everything from ropes to wrenches, Marine Electronics differs by targeting the recreational fisherman and boat owner by being a price competitive specialist in marine electronics.

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I just got back from a really great seminar series organized by e-retail consultant Cate Bryant under the auspices of the New Zealand Retailers Association. It was a great event with fantastic presentations from Grant Jennings of Ezibuy and Vikki Branagan, former CEO of Stevens. Sailesh Manga (of Optimal Usability), Cate, and myself also did some site reviews of well known Kiwi eCommerce sites as well as some on the fly assessments of sites volunteered by attendees. The event was held over three days in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch and I think was genuinely useful for all the attendees. If you are in the business of online retail I would recommend looking for the next in this series which will feature a talk by Will Hunsinger, ex VP of Gap online in the US.

A couple of takeways for me related to the use of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in the online retail space, which was something the Ezibuy team talked to, and also the idea of Gift Giving as an online retail strategy which is what Vikki Branagan talked about. I’ll be following up with some posts reflecting on both these soon.

At SMX in Sydney I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing a range of professionals in the search marketing space. Over the next few days we will be delivering some of the video interviews that we conducted. The first in the series is with Monte Huebsch from AussieWeb where we discuss the state of local search in Australia and New Zealand.

Jacqui: Hi, I’m Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts and we’re at SMX in fabulous Sydney. Right now we’re speaking with Monte Heubsch from AussieWeb. How are you?

Monte: I’m great Jacqui, thanks for talking with me.

Jacqui: So you’re originally from Brisbane aren’t you and you’ve flown down to Sydney for the SMX conference?

Monte: Yes, we came down. This is the largest international conference of its type in the southern hemisphere with 200 plus people, people from New Zealand like yourself. I’ve got a yank accent, but, yes, I’m from Brisbane.

Jacqui: Is it possible that you can tell us a little bit about AussieWeb and what you do?

Monte: AussieWeb is a local search and business directory with 1.2 million Australian businesses in it. It’s the 5th largest directory in Australia. People who are larger than us are who you’d expect like Google, Yellow Pages and TrueLocal which provide the data for both Google and Yahoo!.

Jacqui: What is the status of local search in Australia and New Zealand if you know that?

Monte: Local search is in its infancy and is just beginning to grow. All the searches that were done historically in the past, and even Google recognises this because we partner with Google, you’ve used Google and found what you wanted and you have bookmarked all those sites and so you do less searches unless you have a new problem. Now people are using the Internet to find local businesses.

They are doing research on the Internet and finding a local company and not completing the transaction online, but they are buying local. In fact 62% of online purchases are influenced by online research.

Case in point, if you search for an Apple computer, an iPod or an iTouch you might find the Apple website, however you might not want to buy online and wait 3 days for it to be delivered. You want to find the local outlet, find out whether they have the stock of the phone or iTouch you want and then go buy it. Actually, local search is a percentage of general searches growing at a faster rate now.

Jacqui: Sorry, did you just mention before that you supply some of the data to Google and Yahoo!? Is that correct?

Monte: No, TrueLocal is the provider of the data. It is owned by Rupert Murdoch and they provide in Australia the data to Yahoo! and Google business directories. Google actually takes their data from multiple sources so they will have restaurant reviews from a restaurant review site. We provide Google with an xml feed if they think that data is useful so they use our data as well.

Jacqui: Do you think that over time that by Google’s local search and maps technology becoming more popular will possibly make local directories such as AussieWeb and local search redundant at all?

Monte: Good question Jacqui, it’s a valid one. Of all the major directories in Australia of which there are about 8, there are only two that are considered Web 2.0 and what I really mean is that they are free which are Google and ourselves. All the rest of the directories have premium listings and charge anything from $800 to $8,000 to participate. TrueLocal is a good case in point. They are an $800 a year product and if you list in TrueLocal, you automatically show up in Google and Yahoo!, as well as TrueLocal.com.au. That’s a paid environment and there is a big difference between paid and free. I don’t think we’ll go out of business just yet.

Jacqui: What do you think are some of the greatest challenges for businesses in Australia and New Zealand in regards to search?

Monte: The challenge in either country is the same and that is that there are so many new businesses starting every year and there are also so many businesses that exist and then go out of business. The number is around 40%. So keeping your directory base current and accurate is the biggest challenge and the way we get around that we have a button on AussieWeb’s site that says “report this listing as wrong”.

If someone goes and says “hey that business is longer down the street or they have closed or changed their name”, we’re actually using our users like a wiki to provide information to keep our directories fresh and current. That is our greatest challenge.

Jacqui: What are your top tips or what do you see happening in the future or what would like to see happen in local search?

Monte: We just did a seminar session with all the search players, competitors and friends alike, all got together and spoke about that. Google is a good case in point, where they have just added video, where you can link video to your local search listing and I think you’re going to find rich content coming along.

The ability for a small company who may not even have a website, having a directory listing that includes pictures, a map to get there, directions, a video, it literally becomes their web presence. And having that in multiple locations is valuable and the cost of being on virtually every directory in Australia of consequence, except maybe Yellow, is a few thousand dollars and that is probably better money spent than building a website which small businesses are time poor and do not have the ability to maintain and operate.

Jacqui: Absolutely. They are all the questions that I have for you today. Thank you for speaking with us at Netconcepts and I look forward to catching up with you again soon.

Monte: We hope to catch up with you in New Zealand.

At the last Google Geek Night I interviewed Jeremy Wood from Google about Google Gadgets and Gadget Ads. He provides some helpful hints and tips for marketers and developers on how to get the most out of Gadgets.

Jacqui: What are Google Gadgets and how do they differ from Google Gadget Ads?

Jeremy: We have two products which can be confusing. One is Gadgets and the other is Gadget Ads. Starting with the base program and model is Gadgets themselves. Typically Gadgets are most familiar to people who use iGoogle. When you go to the iGoogle homepage, all those gadgets, also known as widgets, which can be anything from weather to horoscopes to crossword puzzles to much more complex. They are really like little applications or mini websites.

Jacqui: Why do you think marketers should care about Google Gadgets or Gadget Ads?

Jeremy: So, for the Gadgets themselves is huge exposure. It is basically a way on a free platform for marketers to get additional exposure either driving traffic through to their website or branding or just getting interaction or value with their clients. Or even just to have a bit of fun without it costing anything except for some development time.

The Gadget Ads themselves could take advantage of our broader content network. You can place those ads in much more specific highly targeted pages so you know that the viewers who are seeing those gadgets are indeed your target audience. It is the ability to take a mini version of your website or a component of it to get in front of your end customer.

Jacqui: You’ve just spoken about how Gadget Ads can be placed onto the content network and that is a paid placement. What are some other ways for marketers to get more exposure for their Gadgets?

Jeremy: We encourage people developing gadget ads to place an “add to iGoogle” little button on their gadget ad itself. Although it is serving on the content network and they are paying for that, they can also let users take it off the content network and put it onto their iGoogle page leveraging that platform to get that additional viewership. People are also free to take that to put it onto their Facebook page, MySpace or even their own webpage or blog. It repurposes itself over and over so there is no end to where you can put it as it is just a simple snippet of code.

Jacqui: That sounds good that you can get so many uses from such a small application. Many of Netconcepts clients really care about conversion and driving traffic to their website. Do you think that Gadget Ads are a type of banner ad which is possibly not so great for driving traffic or do you think it is useful for that purpose?

Jeremy: Actually I think one of the powers of Gadget Ads is that because it is essentially a website in a website, you are free to develop it in anyway that you want. Based on your objectives such as driving traffic, then you are free to build a gadget ad to drive traffic right through to your website. We had a few people in the beta testing phase that did exactly that. They had one or two layers of interactivity before it drove people straight to the site. They had phenomenal click through rates and at the end of the day it was driving that drive click through rate versus just pure branding where they are just engaging users. It is wide open to what you want to do with it.

Jacqui: What we have seen so far with Gadget Ads that they are mostly flash banner ads. Do you see advertisers creating more mash-ups or reservation forms or other types of applications as such?

Jeremy: The great thing is that you are limited by programming or restrictions because it is open source. So it is native for people to take advantage of flash, it is familiar to people. We are trying to get people to be more creative and think outside the box. They are slowly starting to do that such as integrating different languages and things like that. We are going to see cooler and cooler stuff from the developers putting these things together.

Jacqui: What are some tips or hints how marketers could increase click rates from their Gadget Ads?

Jeremy: One of the learnings we are getting from the early testers and even people adopting it right now is execution. We are not seeing people fail because of distribution or anything else rather than the creative execution. We want to encourage people to spend the time in the development phase, take their objectives and build out exactly what they really want to do and they will see great results at the end of it. It is like any traditional website. Keep it fresh, keep it unique, make the navigation easy and make the path obvious.

Jacqui: How do advertisers track the performance of those ads? From the guidelines you are not allowed to place any cookies within those ads. How do you do that?

Jeremy: It is one of the unique things that stands out for gadget ads apart from anything else at this stage which is our interaction tracking. We offer up to 30 levels or different types of interaction tracking which feeds right back into your AdWords account. You’re free to bake that into the code yourself whether it is play, fastforward, rewind, mouse on, mouse off, clicking in a certain corner instead of another corner. Right now we have thirty but we’re hoping to expand that over the coming months to a much deeper level. Basically you have that great reporting that is fed right back into your account so you can track very, very well.

Jacqui: In the guidelines they also specify that animation must be kept to a limit of 15 seconds is that for the total ad itself regardless of how many animation screens there are within the gadget ad or can you have a maximum of 15 seconds for each screen?

Jeremy: In theory it is per animation. What we are seeing right now is that people typically are not confusing the user by having too many things going on at the same time. If you take yourself from one part to the next part and there is a flash animation to continue that 15 seconds. It is all about the user experience and you don’t want to overwhelm them with gizmos because you can.

Jacqui: It is about the user experience, so if the user does not flash enabled on their browser what do they see instead?

Jeremy: That’s a great point. Basically they will see a back fill image and we encourage the gadget developers to have that sort of alt source in place so that people can at least see a static frame. We are seeing the rates of flash enabled browsers are phenomenally high so there is extremely a small proportion of users that may not have the full user experience that you are hoping to get out of Gadget Ads.

Jacqui: Do you see at some point launching its own cookie type system to track the user experience at all?

Jeremy: I can’t really comment on that at this stage. This is the very early stages of this. We’re taking on feedback, we’re developing and we’re moving forward with a whole bunch of initiatives in the next little while so it is best to stay tuned at this stage.

Jacqui: For the foreseeable future, what is the future of Gadget Ads over the next 6 to 12 months?

Jeremy: What I would like to see are the developers themselves coming back to us. We want to work with the user community and see what people can do with them. And if there are any restraints working with those people to build that out and make it a function in future version of Gadget Ads. I would like to see people getting out of the mindset that it is just a flash ad and take it to next level and really take advantage of the open source platform to do something that is out of this world. Really from a creative element that is what I am hoping to see over the next 6-12 months. They can do anything they want with it.

Jeremy Wood sent me an email a few days later after the interview. He wanted to add the following to ensure OnlineMarketer.co.nz readers have the right information:

“The question was around what the user might see if they didn’t have flash installed. So the answer is basically the same as what they would see on any site that required flash and the user didn’t have it installed in their browser, and that is the little icon in the middle of movie area asking you to install the Flash plugin. The same issue would be encountered for an AJAX-based gadget where the user has javascript switched off. Gadget Ads are essentially a web page within an iframe. In terms of best practice, it is recommended that you have some sort of placeholder text in case Flash or JS is not rendering.”

I was passing through our living room on my way to enjoy some afternoon summer sun outside on the deck, when I happened to glance at the telly on my way out. The sound on the TV was muted, but I did catch a quick glimpse of an advert for a web site called vouchermate.co.nz. on C4 and thought I’d better check them out.

Vouchermate is a web site where companies display downloadable vouchers for discounts on their goods and services. You can either print them off for free, or send a textcode and have a voucher sent to your phone at a cost of 50c per voucher.

So, it’s a pretty simple idea. You can’t go wrong if you want to get some discounts. My initial thoughts on this web site concept is…. are people really going to bother to go to the effort of doing this just to save a few pingers? For me personally, I probably would go to the effort if I thought I was getting a pretty good discount. So, for the sake of my curiousity and research, my search begins.

Within in my local area, I find six vouchers available. Four vouchers for Beaurepaires, two for the National Combat Simulation Centre and one 10% discount for Gr8 SHUZ Footwear. I ‘m not really interested in any of their promoted discounts. I search other areas around where I live as well, but still don’t find that much that I would be interested in. The only two vouchers that I may be currently interested in is a 10% discount on flowers from All Season Flowers and the ‘Bring a friend free of charge when you buy a Friends of the Zoo membership’. So, doing the math…. if I bought a $25 bunch of flowers (and lets be honest you can’t really get much in the way of flowers for under $25) with a 10% voucher discount, that would be a $2.50 discount on the flowers. Well, I really don’t think I would go to the effort to use that voucher, purely because I don’t think the $2.50 (minus the 50 cents if you use the text option) is that it’s that much of an amazing discount. Honestly would you really bother. I think I would go to the effort if I found a voucher for something I wanted that had a discount of 20% or more. These kind of 20% or more discounts are available from some companies on vouchermate.

Even so, I don’t know if I’m convinced that I would go out of my way to use Vouchermate. Maybe I would, if I happen to remember to check the site before I got out shopping next time, but then again maybe I won’t remember. My thoughts at the moment is that Vouchermate is a bit, well, boring. It needs more than just come check out the vouchers available. Looking at their blog, the March 12 post talks about their biggest ever surge in site traffic since their TV advertisements started on TV3 and C4. Getting people to the site is one thing, but getting people to do a repeat visit is even harder. How about some bigger incentives to revisit the site, like maybe some competitions where you can win some fancy prizes or something?

We received our first question on OnlineMarketer.co.nz today posed by Mike Kittendaal of Kittendaal Ltd whom I suspect is not a real person and is only an alias.  His asked the following:

“Hi there I am looking for some information on InPageAds in New Zealand and was wondering if you can assist. www.inpage.co.nz do not provide statistical data on the penetration of their ads in specific markets, the information they do provide is limited to Asia Pacific as a whole. I was wondering if you have access to any statistical information for NZ?”

Mike, I would like to ask you a question. Are you the owner of www.inpage.co.nz or do you have insider knowledge? When I did a search for InPage I came across a comment that you had posted on Jim Boykin’s blog associating you with this advertising product.

When participating in the blogosphere it is highly important to remain transparent, otherwise you can really shoot yourself in the foot. It’s like John Keys of the National party saying different things to different audiences and not realising that journalists will pick up on the anomalies. I recommend in future for you to simply ask for your product to be reviewed or something to that effect. Honesty goes a long way online. It’s all about making friends, turning those friends into customers then into advocates.

The concept of InPage advertising is an interesting one though. On the surface it looks like a good advertising product as it is akin to television ad breaks throughout tv show content. Even though ad agencies and advertisers may go for it, what’s in it for the website visitor? Most people hate advertising on the Internet unless it is highly relevant to what they are searching for or viewing online.

My gut feeling is that InPage may not work for all media websites. A publisher has to consider what affect an advertising product may have on its audience. Will the ads be shown in between every single page? Or are the ads simply displayed once or twice throughout the user session? A product like InPage must be used sparingly otherwise you will experience “ad burnout” rather quickly and people will not visit the site again.

Will the ads be contextual? The more relevant the advertising is, the more likely it will be perceived as content rather than an ad. You will need some pretty smart technology to do this. Perhaps you could partner with DoubleClick rather than reinventing the wheel?

In regards to the penetration of InPage type advertising I am not really sure. I have not seen this type of online advertising in New Zealand at all to date. Mike, or who ever you are, I’d be interested in knowing how advertisers and publishers are responding to InPage if you are keen to share this. 

March usually means it is time for end of previous year research and figures.  We now have plenty of statistics on offer from 2007!  Very few people like statistical figures, but I love them :-)

There were 6.6 billion world population in 2007 and about 1.15 billion (17.5%) were regular Internet users.

In 2008, Asia Pacific region will top 500 million Internet users and we’ll see China overtake the US as the most popular Internet nation in the world.

According to eMarketer, by 2012, almost 50% of the world’s Internet population will live in the Asia Pacific area. The share of the world’s Internet users in North American and Europe will fall, although absolute numbers will continue to grow, as the share of users in Latin America and the Asia Pacific region both grow.

Countries including China, Russia, India, Brazil and Mexico will be the primary drivers of worldwide Internet user growth over the next five years.  As I manage international PPC campaigns, I have found strong growth in those countries in the last couple of years.

Let’s take a look at the New Zealand online market…  Online advertising spending in 2007 hit $135.16 million, or 5.8% of the total advertising market, according to IAB. However, online advertising share is over 10% in the US and over 15% in UK. Well, we’re growing, but still have plenty of room to catch up!

In New Zealand, online advertising is now the fifth largest advertising channel after newspaper (35.4%), TV (28%), radio (11.7%) and magazines (10.9%).

We’re confident that in 2008 there will be continued growth in online advertising.  We believe that online advertising spend will continue to grow in NZ and the Asia Pacific region will become stronger and stronger in the online world market. Go NZ! Go Asia Pacific!

Images by Onlinemarketer

The Energy Drink V has a profile on the social networking site Bebo called the People’s Republic of V.  V held a competition where people had to come up with an idea on how V was to spend $100k and a pallet of V. People were encouraged to submit their ideas according to the idea criteria and free prizes were up for grabs too.

When it came to deciding which idea was the winning idea, V decided to get the people to vote online using the poll section. I returned to the site at a later date to see whether they had announced the final winning idea from the poll, but you got the idea that there had been some cheating going on and the poll had been scraped.

V proceeded to hold a second poll to let people help decide on how they were going to determine a winner. So once again I waited for the results of the second poll and subsequently returned back to the site.  V stated… ‘the polls says let the judges decide’ which idea is the winner. So, then we had to wait for the judges to make their final decision and this seems to take forever.

By this stage I had lost interest and many weeks later returned to the site to see if the judges had made a final decision as to which idea won the competition. The results were not immediately apparent. I checked the blog section but didn’t find a post regarding the final winning idea. Looking through the photo section I saw photos of the judges actually judging the $100k competition, one of the judges doodles and 14 photos with captions on a few $100k competition entries.

There was a video posted in the video section that says ‘$100k idea - Brazilian street party‘. A Brazilian street party would be cool, but there were also other great ideas. For example one ‘idea of the day‘ was to throw a pallet of V from the back of a Hercules plane and let the people know that it’s raining V.

Back to the matter in hand, I was still at a loss as to the winning idea.

Eventually, I received an email from the People’s Republic of V saying: “A couple of months ago we asked you, the People’s Republic of V what we should do with $100k and a pallet of V. Gary’s idea was that we should throw away the $100K! And he won. So we’re going to do it soon…very soon…” Aha, at last, confirmation of the winning idea - phew! So, the $100,000 is to be divided into three and thrown in to the wind in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin.

The competitions in the Republic of V are relentless for their worshipers. I say worshipers rather than followers because looking at some of the comments they really do appear to worship the V product and appear to be true brand advocates. They recently had a few more competitions including: Be in to win a pimped out V ride, and a Big Day Out double pass competition. Another prize you could win was a case of V.

V wanted to hear from people as to what they thought about V by answering three questions. 1) When I drink V it makes me feel? 2) If I were to describe V as a person I would say they were? 3) If I were in charge of V, my brand slogan for V would be? The winners got a case of V on their door step.

V work hard to engage their target market with all these competitions and freebies. They aren’t afraid to ask their V members what they really want and the people who frequent the People’s Republic of V are more than happy to oblige. They are very happy to express themselves through comments, forums, polls, photos and more.

V in return gain insight into their customers’ perception of their brand and are able to carry out low cost market research.  Unfortunately, their marketing team appeared to be slow on the uptake of managing the “How to spend $100K and a pallet of V” competition, which could have resulted in their brand advocates being frustrated or disappointed.    It’s important that when marketers carry out such competitions and campaigns online that they have the technical expertise to ensure a smooth running campaign and its delivered in a timely manner.

There are so many hopefuls on the Internet. They hear of the get-rich-quick schemes and think that they can do it too. And yes, it is possible to make your millions on the Internet, but you do need a pretty smart plan to get there.

Many of the ideas that are bantered around include starting a blog, a social network or community site. Many still think that if you build it, they will come. If you plan to become an Internet publisher, it is time for a reality check. It’s great having wonderful content on the site and when the community is passionate about the topics within, but at the end of the day, being an online publisher is all about the numbers…. if you want to build a business empire or just make a living from it that is.

Ways of generating revenue from a site are in the forms of banner advertising, pay-per-click advertising, sponsorship, licensing your content to a media marketplace, selling products or services or participating in affiliate marketing programs (where you get a small commission if you recommend a product and people buy it).

Let’s just say that you want to generate $10K per month from advertising on your site. To reach your target revenue, you need to work backwards to understand how many people are actually required to visit your site and the number of pages they need to each view.

Most banner advertising programs are sold at varying CPM rate cards (cost per thousand impressions). Banner advertising is good for brand building, but not necessarily the cheapest way to drive traffic to one’s own site since click rates are quite low. Banner display ads can be bought for as low as US$0.25 CPM, with an average being US$5 CPM in the US market.

In New Zealand, CPM costs vary between NZ$0.50 and NZ$80, but typically only a few sites in this market enjoy the traffic levels that are required to employ a team of people and hopefully generate some profit.

Based on a CPM of $5, to reach $10K per month you would need approximately 200,000 to 400,000 visitors to the site per month, viewing approximately 5-10 pages each, with all inventory sold. By placing more ads on the page, would mean a smaller number of visitors or page views required to reach the target.

For a community site, banner advertising is a good way to monetise this opportunity, because members are less likely to click on ads and therefore a pay-per-click performance ad network may not maximise revenues.

From Netconcepts own media sites, we have generated between US$0.09 to US$0.46 per click. Our average is approx. US$0.20 per click with approx. 1-2% click rate. This is dependent on the type of advertiser that is on the site. Some industries like insurance are likely to pay higher per click costs, but click rates may be much lower due to the type of product being advertised.

Participating in a pay-per-click performance ad network is beneficial when visitors are searching for something. For example, they land on your site from being found in search engine result pages, and then they see an ad that meets their needs, so they click and leave again. A site that is built to reach a searcher’s needs inevitably gain higher click rates on their ads if they are highly targeted. For every click, you make some coinage.

These are just a couple of ways of generating revenue from website adverting, plus there are numerous others that can be explored.

With any type of business you are juggling several balls at the same time and you must not drop one. For publishers, activities such as content creation, community building, marketing of the site (including natural search marketing, paid search, link building, online pr and more) plus the monetisation all must be managed simultaneously in order to reach your targets. Without this, a website is merely just a hobby.

Travel is a fiercely competitive industry and this couldn’t be more evident than when searching for travel online. The web has become inundated with travel related services and aggregators all vying for our attention and competing for traffic and top rankings in both organic and paid search for highly competitive key terms.

For the saturated travel industry, it has become increasingly important to look beyond traditional online marketing efforts in order to stand out from the masses and reach us, the increasingly sophisticated and web-savvy consumers. It is now essential that travel companies embrace new technologies if they’re serious about developing a strong brand, engaging with consumers and growing business online.

Travel2.0 is the Travel Industry’s collective acknowledgment of Web2.0 and embodies how travel companies are using emergent trends online to differentiate themselves in such a vast, competitive and dynamic space.

So what is Travel2.0 exactly? It’s all about empowering us, the users, and encouraging us to participate, create and share travel content with other users on the web. It’s about building communities and enabling a rich, interactive, user-friendly online experience.

We are no longer just looking for the lowest airfare prices or destination information. Instead we’re more interested in finding the opinions and reviews of our fellow travelers over professional travel advice. We want control to create our perfect trip, interact with other travelers and share our own experiences and stories. In response, the travel industry has seen a proliferation of Travel2.0 sites which encourage users to contribute and share opinions, reviews, travelogues, itineraries, photos and videos about places they’ve been to all over the world.

In using and reviewing a number of Travel2.0 sites, the following are among my favourites in terms of offering original, creative and compelling content. Their use of wiki’s, mashups, tagging, blogging and networking provide an experience far out-shining the earlier, stale, booking-oriented travel sites:

TripAdvisor is the original Travel2.0 site with over five million hotel, destination and attraction reviews written by travelers for travelers. This site is great because you can share videos and photos, ‘rant and rave’ about anything you want, or plan and book your next trip with trusted advice and great deals. The site includes a wikis section - material written by a user that can be corrected, altered, or added to by others. TripAdivsor has also recently added a social networking component, basically a mini-Facebook for travelers, enabling you to invite friends to join your network, offer advice on future trips and pinpoint places you’ve visited on Google-powered maps.

Gusto is a travel social networking site which basically combines elements of Facebook/Myspace and del.icio.us. Along with the usual stuff like travel guides, travel deals, maps and a blog, members can bookmark their favourite travel places with a feature called the ‘Grabber’ which allows you to gather, store and share information from any page on the web and save it back to your ‘MyGusto’ profile page.

Rrove is a social bookmarking site for places with a pin map creation tool that mashes up with Google or Yahoo Maps. With Rrove, you can share new places by bookmarking and tagging any destination on the planet, write reviews and create and embed maps on your own blogs, web pages or MySpace profiles.

Flagr is a similar travel bookmarking tool where you’re able to ‘flag’ popular destinations around the world on Google Maps, then add tags, addresses, descriptions, photos and even embed videos for other users to see. You can, for example, create a map to a certain theme such as top ski resorts in North America or favourite New York cafes. You can create private or public maps, ‘flag’ online or from your mobile phone and then send picture or text messages to your friends.

Simpatigo is an attraction mapping site which generates a personalised trip itinerary that includes driving directions as well as short descriptions on attractions that you will pass enroute. Their catch phrase sums it up nicely: ‘We don’t tell you where to go - we just tell you how to get there and what you’ll see along the way’. Great for planning road trips in foreign countries.

Flight Club goes a step further. It’s an air travel social networking community where you can search for the perfect seat mate on your next flight, a travel companion on an upcoming trip, or for those with a painfully lengthy airport transit wait, you can even make a friend who is waiting at any airport at the same time.

This is just a small sampling of the growing number of Travel2.0 sites now available online. New Travel2.0 sites are emerging weekly and offer new and improved forms of interactive content. Travel companies embracing Travel2.0 are engaging with us, joining our conversations, building communities, and leaving those that aren’t missing an important opportunity to reach potential customers in new and exciting ways.