Travel Trends - Delta, Sweden, Ad Agencies, TripIt

Planeguage from Delta - Delta and Delta.com, who have been rapidly adopting to some of the latest interactive trends since emerging from bankrupcy, (see Delta SiteSeer Challenge, Delta SiteSeer Video and Under the Wing) have just launched a series of short, animated videos titled 'Planeguage.' The videos put a humorous spin on some of the most common challenges/hassles of airline travel. You can view the first video above or, if reading via email/rss, view the video online.

Personally, I think the videos are fantastic, from the intro music to the characters to the stories, and the spots appear to be a great way to create a viral marketing campaign around the new Delta brand. Notice that the videos are already on YouTube, and in the case of the one above, have been viewed 10,000+ times. While the videos themselves are entertaining, it will be interesting to see if consumer response is 'that is creative and fun' or 'so they are telling me they have no room on there planes.' Communicating with consumers online, what a tricky endeavor.
http://blog.delta.com/

Community of Sweden - Always under the radar, those Swedes have been busy. Visit Sweden has just introduced what it is calling the 'Community of Sweden', the ' the official online community for Sweden,' where visitors can 'share and enjoy photos, travel stories tips and more from friends in Sweden and all over the world.' Think of it as it MySpace for people who love traveling to Sweden. As numerous DMOs begin to experiment in the UGC / Social Networking space, look for more of these communities to begin appearing. Hands down, the best feature of the site is the fantastic flash map / update tool on the homepage. Great execution on the map.
http://communityofsweden.com

Forrester: Web Shops Not Ready to Lead - During the recent HSMAI Internet Marketing Strategy Conference, which I attended last Monday, one of the topics brought up by the attendees was what the ad agency of the future looks like. The popular answer was that the ad agency of the future has a deeper understanding of the interactive world with a solid background of 'traditional' advertising. While several interactive / online agencies are getting closer to this ideal situation, it would appear...according to this report...that we still have a while to go.
http://www.adweek.com/

TripIt Is In Sync With You - Semantic Web here we come. Travel planning service TripIt...introduced to the blog a few months ago...has launched a new service that will automatically sync your travel plans with your calendar such as Office, iCal, Google, etc. So, no more manually entering your travel dates into the calendar, TripIt does it for you. Just as a refresher, the 'hook' of TripIt is that you can forward your confirmation email to the service, which will automatically create a complete trip itinerary for you. Convenient.
http://www.tripit.com/

Travel Trends - TripIt, Click Here

Tripit - Travel planning service Tripit has entered into beta testing, allowing consumers to try out the new service. Tripit does not actually allow you to book travel, rather it organizes all of your itineraries, schedules and travel plans into one, easy-to-read page...all you have to do is email you confirmation emails to Tripit and allow it to create the page. As one report said, this is the first hint of a semantic web (I will explain what that means another time).
http://www.tripit.com/

Click Here - or don't. A very interesting study from Marketing Sherpa on which type of 'click here' text actually makes people click. Using a quick A/B test, they came up with these results:

...As in many tests, not all of the answers to our questions were clear cut, but the most important ones were. For example, we discovered that the incumbent, "Continue here ...," wasn't doing our clickthrough rates any favors (well, so much for going with your gut).

Here were the differences in clickthroughs:
"Click to continue": 8.53%
"Continue to article": 3.3%
"Read more": (-)1.8%

With these results, we had a strong feeling that the front-runner, "Click to continue," would win in the A/B test, and it did -- producing 3.5% more clicks than "Continue to article." Needless to say, we immediately switched the words in our link in all of our newsletters...

An excellent reason to test the effectiveness and content of your interactive marketing campaigns...even the smallest words can make a big difference.
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/

Travel Trends - 2-D Barcodes, TripIt, Ricoh 500SE

Smartpox - Create a 'pox' (2-d barcode, see the image above) with any information you like...restaurant review, link to a song, scavenger hunt clue...and stick it on a sign, wall, anywhere. Then, when users see your barcode, they can take a picture of it with their cell phone and download the review or song. Pretty much any type of text-based information can be contained in the barcode.
http://www.smartpox.com/

Semapedia.org - Using the same technology as Smartpox, Semapedia.org is a non-profit, community-driven project that allows users to create and distribute Semapedia-Tags (again, think barcodes) that link to the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. So, for example, you could be walking past Chase Field, see a 'barcode' and take a picture of it with your cell phone. Your phone would then pull up the Wikipedia page about Chase Field, telling you everything you need to know about the stadium.
http://semapedia.com/

TripIt - A new travel site from Hotwire co-founder Gregg Brockway, TripIt wants to help users keep all of their travel-related materials in one place, regardless of where they book online. Once a user enters a flight reservation (for example), TripIt will automatically add basic info for your trip (maps, weather, directions) as well as allow you to share the info with friends, family, etc...plus, the service is aiming to be widely accessible via the web, mobile or in your calendar.
http://www.tripit.com/

Ricoh 500SE - Map all of your photos with the GPS enabled, Ricoh 500SE. A glimpse into what is coming for the mainstream...GPS information embedded into portable, electronic devices. With this camera, you can download your images to create custom maps with pin-points for all of your photos. Never have to ask the question 'where was that photo taken?' again.
http://www.ricohsolutions.com/