WTM and the new wired world

I’m back at World Travel Mart and on the train home after a long first day of chatting, meeting old and new faces, and walking many miles across London’s ExCel centre. It is my fourth year here, and there are now few surprises. The exhibitors occupy the same spaces, and even the guy who last year got stuck with the stand in the corner where no-one goes is still there this year. So is my  initial experience at WTM different from previous years?

For a start, I am attending as the owner of 501 Places, and not as Andy Jarosz, Director of a crisis management consultancy. Whereas in previous years I was selling my services by painting a potential nightmare to my unwilling prospects, this year my business focuses on something more positive. While protecting companies from the impact of a disaster is of course a worthy activity, it is instinctively easier to offer something more positive: a different approach that can promote them to a new market.

It is encouraging to hear so many companies are engaging with social media. Many who I spoke to have appointed someone internally to ‘learn the ropes’ and they plan to evaluate the value of this mode of communication after a period of  trial and error. Whether this is the best way to approach this is debatable. What is surely not in debate however is the compelling case for travel companies to be familiar with blogging, micro-blogging and photo sharing sites. An ever increasing consumer base is now actively using Twitter, Facebook and blogs to gather their information in preference to more traditional channels. For any company who is ignoring these tools are potentially giving a direct competitor an immediate advantage in winning business from them.

It is no longer enough to be good at what you do. Businesses now need to make it easy for their happy customers to spread the word to potential new customers who are researching their service. Setting up a fan page, encouraging customers to use Tripadvisor or enabling them to upload their photos to Flickr and link them back to your brand are all valuable parts of a marketing strategy.

Can anyone afford to ignore this new trend? Yes, no doubt the businesses who have too much demand for their capacity and are happy with current levels of business. Others too, who have found their own way of growing their market share. I suspect that they are in a small minority. For the rest of us, whether hoteliers, tour operators, tourism offices or even writers, refusing to engage in social media is akin to someone refusing to get a telephone in the 1970s or to get a website 5 years ago. You can survive, but you are choosing to swim upstream with one hand tied behind your back.