TripAdvisor’s TripWow is a little over the top, but the idea of helping travelers create embeddable multimedia is a great one for the travelers.
The promise: Create a Slide Show that will make your friends go “Wow”.

The benefits for TripAdvisor – click throughs to TripAdvisor destination pages via keyword-laden hyperlinks to kickstart the travel planning process for TripWow slideshow viewers. Interestingly, the terms of use for the TripWow widget prohibit users from disassembling the widget and removing the keyword hyperlinks. The secondary benefit for TripAdvisor is some serious keyword SEO for TripAdvisor destination pages.

If growing traffic is your aim, make it easy for visitors to create and share media
If I was in the travel information archiving business (travel review sites, destination marketing organizations and travel associations), I’d forgo the development of my own platform and work with a company like Animoto to help folks create travel videos that more effectively focus on the photos of the traveler, with embedded music tracks.

A custom branded version of Animoto would create greater interest in your travel information site while adding a small revenue stream for Animoto, perhaps leading to the DMO, travel association or travel information site to pay for the higher resolution services of Animoto’s great travel promotion tool – making it free for travelers to create and share media promoting your website.

I’d also make sure that it was easy to geotag the photo sets and create a similar mapping graphic as shown in TripAdvisor’s TripWow tool part of the show. TripAdvisor’s map owes it’s inspiration to the likes of Indiana Jones, and the maps work well but frankly speaking, most of the other graphic elements of the video take attention away from the trip photos.

I am a fan of the social media tools that pop out from the right side of the videos. They make it easy to share the media by Twitter, Facebook and making the media easy to embed. The Video branding and destination keyword links are sure to drive serious page views for TripAdvisor.

TripWow’s bow is perhaps the inspiration you need to get into providing media production tools like this with a partner who has demonstrated expertise in creating Wow video that focuses on user generated photos and video. Page views are sure to follow.

Imagine you are traveling and you’re at an awesome restaurant or hanging out in a great resort and you become a FAN! You’ll want to tell everyone about it. Your mobile phone and the new app from GoodRec (Good Recomendations) makes it simple to bang out a short review on your phone and share it with other travelers.

While many folks travel and dining experiences are guided by the recommendations of others, its been just too much effort for travelers and diners to write reviews themselves. Until now.

The free application Good Rec for iPhone is based on the twitter norm of 140 Characters and will definitely appeal to folks who post status updates on Twitter or Facebook. The website for GoodRec also lets users push their recommendations to Twitter and Facebook.

While the vast majority of people wouldn’t take the time (especially on their handheld) to post a review, the GoodRec application simple interface driven by the universal “thumbs up/thumbs down” and 140 character burst of advice-giving, might sway many folks to remark on their great or not-so-great dining experience.

For me, Trip Advisor’s Restaurant finding app, Local Picks has been a godsend when traveling. A big part of its value is that it taps into existing restaurant reviews in a very large database of reviews that has been developed on Trip Advisor over many years. When looking for a good place to eat, I often rely on this tool to find me a local restaurant with good reviews.

140 character restaurant reviews could be a great thing once the volume of recommendations grows.

I think the best way an application like the free iPhone App, by GoodRec can make an impact is:

• make a traveler dedicated version with focused recommendations that appeal to travelers: restaurants, hotels, attractions and the like. (currently the app supports wine and book reviews)
• merge review results with an existing review database and by pulling short forms of existing restaurant reviews into its database – from/with TripAdvisor for instance.
• partner with existing review sites and merging your technology to make it easier for folks to post reviews on existing / popular review platforms

Robert Scoble interviews founder of Goodrec’s CEO, Mihir Shah about the company’s mobile recommendation service.

Related Articles:

• The value of recommendations to a traveler can’t be underestimated.

Encouraging your ideal guests to leave feedback regarding your tourism business is an important strategy in growing your business and enhancing your status on travel advice sites. A new service aims to make it easier for businesses to get the feedback they need to survive and thrive online.

Remember, a high volume of comments (whether positive or negative) increases your ranking in Search Engines and on Google.com/maps . Also, over 50% of travellers count on these reviews before making a purchase decision.

Enter LeaveFeedback.org – a new Web site that helps restaurants, hotels, indeed any kind of business grow their Internet Credibility. The free service gives tourism business an opportunity to give their ideal guests incentive to leave comments about their business. On the site, businesses can give coupons to their guests in exchange for leaving comments. Choose from any business comment site including Google.com/local , Trip Advisor, and any user defined comment site.

What’s it worth to you to foster comments on Travel Advice Web sites?

In thinking about reviews of your tourism business, consider this. About 68% of online shoppers read at least four reviews before making a purchase, according to data from joint research by PowerReviews and the e-tailing group. What are you doing to ensure that your ideal guests post favourable reviews? Direct them to at least start with reviews on Google.com/maps and Travel Review Mega site: Tripadvisor.com

5 Star TripAdvisor.com ratings can make consumers open their wallet at least 20% wider according to a TravelMole report based on a survey of over 2000 U.S. Internet Users in October 2007.
According to Steve Marshall, research director for The Kelsey Group, 5 star TripAdvisor Ratings result in the significantly higher spend over 4 Star ratings.

The study by comScore covered reputation management scores at hotels, restaurants, travel and other areas.

Interestingly, review readers are inclined to make a booking, confirming that those who seek travel reviews are much higher on the CRM ladder, with 40% of TripAdvisor hotel reviewers subsequently staying at a hotel.

More than three-quarters of TripAdvisor Ratings users in nearly every category reported that the review had a significant influence on their purchase, with hotels ranking the highest (87%).

97% of those surveyed who said they made a purchase based on an online review said that the peer-reviewed travel services matched the service offered.

As frequently noted at TourismKeys Training events users of reviews also noted that consumer reviews had a greater influence on purchasing decisions than those generated by professionals.

Recalling an oft-quoted maxim of these Internet Marketing workshops, “If your Tourism Business is not interested in providing Excellent Service, consumer reviews at sites like TripAdvisor.com (the number 2 most frequently visited travel site on the Internet )will put you out of business.

Attend an upcoming Tourism Keys workshop to learn three simple steps toward enhancing your reputation management. These changes in reputation management strategies have helped other hotel, restaurants boost their revenue by 20%.

Todd Lucier – TourismClicks.com

Social media refers to the coming together of people within a community (whether that’s an actual online community or simply a section on a travel or media Web site dedicated to giving consumers a voice) to actively participate in the creation of new and/or the management of existing content.
This could mean allowing users to post their own photos or videos, to rate and review trips and travel experiences (http://www.tripadvisor.com), to create tags for content, to write or respond to blogs, to change existing content (like wikis such as http://www.WetPaint.com), and more.

Social media has allowed travellers to feel empowered and in charge of their Web experiences, but it can be far more than that for marketers of tourism. When marketers harness social media elements, they can use the ” wisdom of the crowds” to great advantage to increase sales and to generate goodwill among visitors.

Optimization using social media is a way to allow your visitors to influence what you show other visitors. When done correctly, it offloads the work of determining relevanc to visitors. Other visitors essentially take care of the work for you.

There are several simple ways to allow your guests to engage in social media:

• Reviews – In travel, customer-written reviews have been a clear value to consumers. The key with reviews is participation — the more coverage your travel products have, the more effective the reviews will be.
• Ratings – Ratings include stars, thumbs up and down, and a myriad of other forms. Travellers register their level of approval, and the product’s rating becomes based on some form of average of responses. This type of consumer feedback is incredibly useful for optimization because it is easily rankable.
• Digg/Reddit – Social sites provide a clearinghouse for user responses. The most well-known, Digg, allows sites to put up an icon on articles that lets the reader “Digg” the content. More “Diggs” and the article shows up higher on Digg.com, a central site. Reddit is done in a similar fashion. This is cheap, but useful primarily for editorial content. It is easy to be irrelevant and undiscovered here.
• Sharing media – images, video and more, tagged with keywords can also expand the visibility of your brand. Encouraging visitors to give favourable reviews to this content can also boost exposure on sites like flickr.com and youtube.com

Optimization using social media is perfect when you have a very broad product set — for example, a travel site that may represent literally millions of combinations of locations, properties, and services.

It would be impossible for a single travel company or tourism association to build up its own database to help customers make decisions — in other words, to offer recommendations based on behavioral targeting — but by allowing consumers to do the work for you, others still get the benefit of recommendations.

Social optimization only works when travellers are willing to participate. Promoting the fact that you have recommendations and ratings when nobody has actually recommended or rated anything is as compelling as entering an empty restaurant on a Saturday night. Having nothing may, in fact, be better. Even small populations of participants can be risky, as individual negative and positive reviews can skew recommendations in a sub-optimal way.

With this in mind, perhaps the best thing we can do is refer our ideal guests to the gathering places already frequented by travellers and encouraging them to make their preference for our services known there.