Any chance at all of being able to send totaltravel e-cards?
Viral Marketing: Worth Catching: "Viral marketing exploits common motivations and behaviors. Put human nature to work for you. People love getting something for nothing, and they want to be popular. MeMail.com uses this to its advantage. It's a newsletter publisher with more than 100,000 subscribers, 90 percent of them coming from referrals. Subscribers pass along news items and jokes while spreading word of the site. Blue Mountain Arts"

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Guest Comment: Funding Crisis in Domestic Tourism - 28 Oct 2003: "ironically, we are in danger of having a central fund created for marketing England through VisitEngland and no funds locally to make it work! "

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Email marketing report & stats 2002-3

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This week's Travel Insider newsletter brief extracts

The key challenges for online travel companies is that they are selling a generic product to a clientele that has no loyalty but extreme price sensitivity. Doesn't sound like a great business environment to me.
Online travel sites face turbulence - Oct. 3, 2003: "NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - First there was the dot.com bust. Then the nation was at war. Neither scenario, however, damaged the online travel industry's explosive growth and rapid consolidation.
But now industry watchers say the boomtime for the companies and their stocks may be over. "

Customer care - Not!
My love-hate relationship with the internet continues. I was booking a hotel in London through the British discount hotel site lastminute.com earlier in the week. Somehow, their website made a mistake (truly it was not my mistake) and forgot about the arrival and departure dates I'd entered, and instead defaulted to arriving on the same day I was making the booking. This only became apparent after I'd paid for the hotel room with my credit card, on a no changes no refunds type arrangement.

Do you think there was a phone number I could use to then call some sort of customer service person? No, nowhere on the site was there any way to contact a real person. There is no way that anyone would agree to work on this basis with a regular travel agency. So why do we willingly subject ourselves to such ridiculously hostile customer disservice on the internet?

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DMNews.com | News | Article: "Travelweb LLC, an online seller of discount hotel rooms, will use search engine and affiliate marketing to get the word out on its brand amid stiff competition from rivals like Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity and TravelZoo."

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Another exhibition for Mike's diary:
EyeforTravel Europe 2004

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Search Engine Optimization Toolbox: "Make Sense of the Metrics Morass
ClickZ, Nov. 27, 2002
http://www.clickz.com/search/opt/article.php/1548781
A rundown on the key stats that search engine marketers should consider when evaluating the success of their campaigns. You've probably heard of ROI, but do you know your CPO, CPA and ROAS?"

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Merits looking at why they are No 1 Citysearch Appoints Andy Shenkler As Vice President of Search & Product Development: "Citysearch is both the number one provider of in-depth restaurant information on the web, influencing more than a million people a month about where to eat, and the number three local directory, supplying information for every domestic zip code."

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We can learn a lot from smart brands participating in paid search that not only are embracing the space but also manage conflicts effectively. Here’s an overview of the situation and how a few industry leaders approach conflicts in search.
Dialing in on Channel Conflicts: "The single most annoying component of paid search marketing is self-competition. The single most annoying aspect of search for the consuming public is not being able to find what they are seeking. Multiple vendors selling the same product while bidding on the same keywords not only confuse shoppers, they drive up click costs thereby making a mockery of the free enterprise system. "

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Not all search marketing is created equal
InternetRetailer.com - Daily News for Thursday,�October�2, 2003

Search engine advertising specifically involves pay-per-click placements, she notes. With pay-per-click search advertising, sites are guaranteed top placement in the search engine and in its distribution network. “MSN Search, which uses Overture, and Google AdWords add the extra punch of giving higher priority to ads that are frequently clicked on, deeming them more relevant...

contextual ads that both Overture and Google offer, called Content Match by Overture and AdSense by Google. “With contextual ads, when a user is looking at a web page, the ads showing on that page are going to be very targeted and, from the advertiser`s standpoint, very relevant to what the user is looking for,” Thurow says. “The ads are text-based and not intrusive...

Thurow urges retailers to balance their needs when considering search advertising and search engine optimization. “With search advertising, when you run out of money, you lose your position,” she says. “But if you optimize correctly the benefit can last for years.” The drawback to optimization, however, is that there it can take a long time to show up in results and there’s no guarantee as to where a retailer’s site will place in results ”

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Any use ? Online stats, SEO news....
netimperative: "A basic RSS feed of the latest news headlines is available from www.netimperative.com/cmn/rss.jsp
This feed displays the titles of the latest netimperative headlines, which are updated throughout the day, and which link through to the article held on the netimperative site"

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Introductory post got lost somewhere...

Marketing is a broad title covering both on & offline (trad)campaigns. Search engine marketing (SEM) has some crossover with search engine optimisation (SEO) above all in its continual change. Campaigns online can be tracked & analysed to a degree never possible before - this is going to be the key to maintaining & increasing site visitors - give them what they want.
See entry for Contextual & Inquiry marketing & advertising "Mon Oct 06 Contextual Advertising What it is & why it is important" in SEO blog.

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