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Joobili Loves Athens

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 07:27:59 +0000

We are excited to officially announce our partnership with Athens Tourism. As you can see from the video, we feel pretty lucky to be working with such a dynamic destination. The team from Athens is really eager to jump headfirst into marketing their destination online and through social media. Joobili will be promoting Athens’ top events and festivals, as well as boosting Athens’ activities on Facebook and Twitter. Government back tourism agencies have a bad reputation for being the last to adopt new technologies, but Athens and a few others stand out to us as few examples where this reputation just doesn’t fit. Just another reason why Joobili loves Athens.

Joobili on BBC – Social Media ROI?

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 06:29:15 +0000

Is Social Media a waste of time or an powerful networking tool? I don’t think anyone really knows the answer to this question yet. When I put my MBA hat on I start spitting out words like ‘ROI’ and I feel the urge to divide Twitter-hours by estimated-promotion-value to arrive at some fancy effectiveness ratio. There are all kinds of Twitter and Facebook tools claiming to make a science out of Social Media. But honestly I’m okay with the ambiguity. I don’t expect Social Media to have the direct cause and effect relationship we’ve come to expect with other forms of online advertising. I believe that if you are out there interacting and genuinely engaging with the community then good things will happen…but it will never be easy to measure.

I still don’t know if Twitter is an effective use of my time, but I do know we have Twitter to thank for Joobili being featured on the BBC this weekend. BBC presenter Carmen Roberts was doing some research for her upcoming segment on the best travel websites. She posted a tweet and Darren Cronin from Travel Rants responded by recommending Joobili. I happened to meet Daren at a travel conference and we’ve exchanged tweets a few times over the past year. He has no financial motivation for promoting Joobili, it’s was just a case of Daren being a helpful guy. To make a long story short, the conversation was picked up on my Twitter search and before I knew it I was talking with Carmen directly and Joobili was featured on the BBC. The point is that on the one hand it would have never happened without social media and on the other hand I could never replicate this “success” or measure its exact cause. Herein lies the contradiction of social media that people find so frustrating. For me, I just accept it for what it is and enjoy the “ROI”…whatever that means!

Click on the link below to view our BBC debut. Joobili appears near the 2:15 mark on this video.

Travel Blog Camp 2009

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:10:40 +0000

The best part of today’s World Travel Market adventure actually had nothing to do with the WTM. It was the Travel Blog Camp I attended tonight hosted by Darren Cronian of Travel Rants fame. I was one of the lucky few who attended the inaugural event last year and it was one of my first posts on the fledgling Joobili blog. What I liked about the 2008 event was the open discussion – even heated debate – that is common at startup conferences but unfortunately missing from most travel industry events. The 2009 edition Travel Blog Camp came with corporate sponsors and free food, the first signs that a cool event has sold-out and lost its vibe. Then the four sponsors were invited to address the audience. Here it comes, the deluge of corporate-speak. Didn’t happen. Congrats to Kevin May and Darren for keeping to the script that made the previous event such a success. Present some ideas, challenge those ideas, rinse and repeat. Below are a few of the topics we discussed, but here is the more detailed account if you enjoy piecing together fragments of a conversation.

Twitter: Early discussions seemed to focus on Twitter rather than blogs or other forms of social media. Actually Facebook dwarfs Twitter in both total consumer reach and in tools for interacting with your audience. But who cares about utility, Facebook was so 2008, right? What will it be in 2010?

Paid Content: Is content a commodity (nearly free) or is Rupert Murdoch maybe not as senile as we all think? The room seemed to be split on the issue. It’s hard to define which content is worth paying for, but clearly the status quo of free content is not sustainable either. You might enjoyed reading Mark Cuban’s take on this debate here.

Libel: Simply stated, you are responsible for the content appearing on your blog. The ability to create a (free) blog that can potentially reach thousands of people is truly a revolutionary shift in communication. But with power comes responsibility and you can’t have one without the other. Some bloggers are learning the hard way. The basic advice was to understand what is considered libel, pre-moderate comments on your blog and create a comments policy. The discussion got me thinking about Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. Are you responsible for libel that appears on these platforms?