My Edward Woodward moment

Lots of RIP Edward Woodward tweets today, so here is my anecdote.

My career started in the theatre. In the late eighties when I'd moved into radio, I used to use my Equity membership to do 'walk-on' work on TV and movie shoots in the west country on an almost weekly basis.

This one time, my friend (presenter on local tv) & I, with around 50 other extras, were taken by coach early in the morning to a country house where a TV company was filming.

It was a bright sunny morning and we assembled in front of the house, where the director explained they were shooting a spy thriller and we were all going to be members of the public visiting the gardens while a covert meeting was going on.

Then he and his assistant studied the group and to our surprise, picked out my friend & I.

"Come this way", said the director leading us into the gloomy hallway. "We want you two to be MI5 men, and you'll be playing a couple of scenes with Richard and Edward here."

As my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I found myself shaking hands with Richard E. Grant and Edward Woodward.... who were both charming & generous to us :)

(The show by the way was called Codename Kyril)

Social media tips at Travel Blog Camp

It was an interesting session at last night's TravelBlogCamp. I picked up a few nuggets and came away feeling rather pleased that I've stuck with 'pre-moderation' on blog comments - even though I generally get very few comments on this blog and like to fool myself that the main reason for that is they're pre-moderated and not that I'm a crap blogger!

I've had some self-indulgent 'esprit d'escaliers' thoughts...

• Several people noted during the event, and today, that we talked a lot about Twitter.
  
  I'm not surprised. I think of Twitter as the 'Senior Service', and that's because it has become the index to so much of what is going on in social media. It's from the live "conversation" on Twitter that everyone gets directed to blogs, comments, forum posts, youtube clips, twitpics, facebook pages, etc etc. Ask yourself, in a normal day which live update system do you visit more: Twitter (Tweetdeck, Monitter, etc) or your RSS reader? I bet it's Twitter. How many times did 'RSS' - THE buzzword only a few years ago - get mentioned last night? Not once.
  
  
  And speaking of things that were not spoken about... I only heard one mention (in a list of social media) of Bebo. We know that the typical middle class family holiday choice might be initiated by (for example) an excellent article about a Mark Warner holiday (probably written by a BGTW member and published by @TimesTravel , hehe!) , but what 'seals the deal' is not what dad subsequently reads on Tripadvisor, nor what mum learns from Mumsnet.... it's what the kids hear about Mark Warner hols from their mates on Bebo or Msn!
  
  
• Like many of us, I enjoyed Murray's animated talk but I wasn't sure whether I just missed his conclusions, or that he hadn't drawn any. I wanted to ask him if he'd noticed a pattern of 'returnees' to traditional travel agencies, but felt I'd already talked enough and it was probably time to shut up.
  
  I was thinking that when the online travel agency industry took off, everyone got carried away with it... forgetting that while e-commerce is brilliant at the simple stuff - selling packets of cornflakes, DVDs, flights and hotel rooms - it is no so hot when it comes to the complicated stuff - selling fruit that you can't prod, architectural services, or family holidays "with auntie and her boyfriend who live in Aberdeen and will be joining us in our Menorca villa a couple of days later" (you know...real life).
  
  In those days (when they first started) OTAs could barely manage anything more complicated than city-pair flights and a few room nights in a single hotel. It's only thanks to clever people like @alexbainbridge and some of the others there last night, that they can now handle quite sophisticated multi-leg itineraries and small group tours, but the basics still hold true: travel e-commerce can only 'build' itineraries from simple, non-prod-able components.
  
  Which is why I've always argued that traditional travel agents and tour operators can dabble in direct online sales on their website if they want to, but should focus on providing detailed destination & product info for the vast bulk of visitors who use the internet primarily for travel research, and then take their enquiries and sales by phone.
  
  And now is a good time for that. I think the shine has very definitely gone off DIY holidays. A year ago I talked to a young couple on the Explore Worldwide stand at the Daily Telegraph (?) Destinations exhibition in Earls Court, who seemed to me to be a classic example of what I'm talking about. The year before they organised their own trip to South America themselves, online. "The trouble was", they said, "it took a huge amount of effort, research and planning, and even when we had got it all sorted we didn't really relax and enjoy it as much as could have done, because at the back of our minds' was the nagging doubt that we might have missed something - got a travel connection wrong or something. And, were we staying in the best hotels or B&Bs? We couldn't be sure. So, this year we're going to spend a little bit more and leave it all up to Explore!"
  
  I had to bite my tongue and not say "Yeah, DUH! That's what travel agents were invented for! Somebody who knows the ropes. The fundamentals have not really changed since the early days of Thomas Cook and Cox & Kings!"
  
  So my ...late.. question to Murray is "have you noticed a trend of consumers returning to traditional agents and how might you/do you use social media to seek them out and engage with them?"



• Finally, at the risk of pissing off @uktraveleditor ("#tbcamp has denigrated into Murdoch/pay 4 content discussion. Yawn. Here's a pic out the window.") sorry. A couple of people asked me afterwards about my comment about content subscription wholesalers, which makes me think I probably didn't explain it very well. It's better explained here.

TankAway - a concept for UK travel writers and tourism organisations?

I've started noticing (probably years after the event!) a new concept creeping into the travel pages of the local press in the USA - the 'one tank (of gas) trip'.

I haven't found a definition yet - Are we talking one tank there & back? What's the average mileage of an American car these days, and the average petrol tank capacity? - but the concept seems pretty straight-forward: travel features and promotions about destinations roughly within 100-200 miles of home.

It feels very much like a sign of the times. In a post-Fannie Mae/Freddie Mack/Lehman Bros induced recession, Americans, like us, are looking for economic breaks nearer to home.

So, for all those travel writer colleagues in the BGTW and on Twitter who have recently railed against the over-used "staycation"... how do you feel about promoting TankAways?

...Responsible/green travel issues not withstanding!

Unsure about Twitter? Tweet or Delete

I was a bit horrid to @carolmarlow last night on Twitter. I quoted her latest tweet and added "#twitterusefail" as a hash tag.

In Twitter-speak that means "Lame tweet".

In truth, it was. But my reaction was more out of disappointment than irritation.

Carol (who I've met once) is an extremely capable MD of a huge cruise company, which is probably why she doesn't have much time to tweet more than once every 20 days, and when she does, she clearly doesn't have anything much to say. Correct me if I'm wrong Carol, but it feels like one of your bright young things in marketing has told you you need to tweet, and you've been trying to but your heart is not really in it....?

T'was ever thus.

The point about Twitter is the same one that teachers and parents told you about life: the more you put into it, the more you get out. Or put another way: unless you fully engage, you're wasting your time.

... and ours.

Here are some stats from Purewire (now those of you who follow me will know how I stumbled across Tweetgrade last night!)...

• 40% of Twitter users have not tweeted since their first day on Twitter.


• Almost 80% of the users have less than 10 tweets.


• Approx 30% of Twitter users do not have any followers, and 80% of Twitter users have less than 10 followers.

That's an awful lot of people using Twitter resources but not using Twitter.

It's a bit like the global email system - 90% of the traffic is spam. Just imagine how wizzy it would be if there weren't any spam.

These days Twitter has been really flaky at around 5.00pm BST when California starts coming online. It is straining at the seams and posting "Too many tweets. Try again in a moment" notices every few clicks.

So my, harsh, message to part-time Twitterers is: If you're not really using it - and like Bovril, Twitter is not to everyone's taste - there's no shame in deleting your account and leaving. Try Facebook, or Linked In. Or just stick to emails and newsreaders.

Tweet or Delete!

Am I being too arsey?

The lure of snow

Hmm, puzzled by this one...

Visitors to SE1 were welcomed by the sight of snow yesterday as Potters Field Park was transformed into a wintery scene. The surprise snowfall was down to Aer Lingus who were celebrating the launch of their new winter flights from Gatwick by engaging 130 people in a mammoth snowball fight.

The 130 descended on the snow to take part in the fight which lasted an impressive thirty minutes.

In total, 1,600 people registered to take part in the stunt after a three week social media campaign. The first 300 who registered were invited to participate with the lure of the snow proving so tempting that many travelled from all over the UK to take part - London, Liverpool, Newcastle and Huddersfield.

I can't quite bring myself to believe that as many as 1,600 people would be excited enough about a few minutes of snowball fighting in a London park... especially to come long-distance for it.

So what was it? The lure of cameras (everyone wants to be a celeb apparently)? Job enhancement (how many were Aer Lingus staff?)? Or was it that social media thing... people just desperately wanting to belong to something, be part of something...?

Prob a combination of all three. Hope they thought it was worth it.