GigaOM » TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor gets more social by buying Wanderfly

Ryan Kim — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 15:32:10 +0000

TripAdvisor’s VP of Global Product Adam Medros was just at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference talking about how TripAdvisor was looking at adding more social features. Now the world’s largest travel site is putting its money where its mouth is by buying Wanderfly, a social travel recommendation site. The terms of the deal announced Tuesday were not disclosed.

The purchase gives TripAdvisor more travel inspiration tools that help users discover new trip ideas. Wanderfly, like some of its social travel competitors, moved to a more Pinterest for travel format earlier this year, allowing users to recommend places, add photos and save their favorite spots.

The acquisition makes sense for TripAdvisor. Medros said at Mobilize that TripAdvisor would like to develop ways for people to record their travels in journals and share them with others. And he said the company was also looking at ways for users to get more real-time recommendations from friends and strangers while on a trip. Wanderfly, which has raised $1.4 million to date, doesn’t do all of that but it’s a nice foundation for TripAdvisor to build upon. And TripAdvisor can use Wanderfly’s tools to enhance its mobile apps, something Wanderfly didn’t have.

It makes you wonder if other social travel sites will be able to survive as standalone businesses. As we’ve mentioned, it’s hard to be in the social planning and inspiration market when people just don’t travel that much. I’ll be interested to see what happens to other companies like GTrot, Trippy, Tripl, Tripbirds, Twigmore and even bigger names like Gogobot. It might be that some can survive but I’m doubtful they can all make it by themselves.

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TripAdvisor sees opportunities in going deep on mobile

Ryan Kim — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 17:17:32 +0000

The challenge for many web companies looking to go mobile is how to replicate features found on their desktop sites while still taking advantage of mobile’s unique traits. TripAdvisor has found a happy medium, building a hybrid TripAdvisor app that combines web data with a native wrapper while focusing completely on native mobile development with its City Guides app.

Adam Medros, VP of Global Product, TripAdvisor spoke at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference Thursday and said the company’s primary app reproduces many of the main features of the desktop service and was easier for them to create. But the app is also less responsive than a dedicated native app.

But with its TripAdvisor City Guides apps, which covers 50 cities and provides downloadable data, TripAdvisor has the ability to provide a true mobile-first experience that has both a lot of features and is snappy, he said. That has translated into a lot more engagement. Users of the City Guides app click through 50 pages on average per session, compared to about 30 for the main app. The City Guides app uses a lot of dedicated mobile features such as guided tours, a nearby business finder and a Point Me There tool that acts like a walking turn-by-turn navigation service.

Medros said while TripAdvisor first looked at duplicating its desktop site with its primary mobile app, the focus now is on how to add unique tools aren’t possible anywhere but on a mobile device.

He said he’s looking at more ways for users to record their travels in journals, which can be shared with others. And Medros sees opportunities in helping travelers get real-time recommendations from friends and strangers while on a trip. The company is also looking at connecting to more services, perhaps something like Uber for transportation; providing offers for check-ins or adding payments inside the TripAdvisor apps.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:55:19 +0000

Media issues like advertising and discovery along with commerce dominated the activity in social and real-time Web technologies during the first quarter of 2012. Google raised some hackles, Facebook responded to demands from traditional advertisers, and Yahoo got a new chief executive. The quarter also saw Pinterest, the newest social media star, showing signs of staying power; it is starting to be a force in content discovery. This report examines these trends and more, as well as provides a near-term outlook for the next 12 to 18 months.

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Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem

Mike Dover — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:28:05 +0000

The recruiting ecosystem is changing, led by professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo and companies like Jobvite and BranchOut, which are building Facebook apps for hiring and career development. This report examines that new ecosystem and how the above and more companies are changing the way businesses find and retain their employees. Small- and medium-sized businesses can benefit from innovative technology that will help their recruiting efforts, and the cost for doing so is reasonable (and decreasing). The bottom line is that technology enables the recruiting process to be more streamlined, scientific and democratic. This report provides examples and recommendations for employers.

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Facebook store flops demand a shift in emphasis

David Card — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 01:06:30 +0000

Last week, a negative Bloomberg story about Facebook storefronts described how GameStop, Gap, J.C. Penney and Nordstrom had closed their Facebook stores. That doesn’t mean retailers should give up. Instead, they should put their Facebook stores in the hands of their marketing and promotions staff and prioritize marketing objectives over sales.

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The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:01:22 +0000

As our demand for data increases, so too do the number of mobile devices and services. Add to that the infrastructure needed to support such connectivity, and a wide, complex picture of the mobile industry emerges. This report examines the various sectors of the mobile landscape and what the future holds for each. Hardware, cloud services, mobile search, advertising, location-based services and the growing ubiquity of the Internet of Things will all play an important role in the concept of mobility as it shifts and evolves over the next several years. With the help of more than a dozen contributors, GigaOM Pro presents a comprehensive analysis of the companies and trends that will lead us into the next era of mobile.

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The TripAdvisor effect: Are online reviews making brands irrelevant?

Nathan Labenz — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 16:00:14 +0000

TripAdvisor, the leading hotel and travel reviews site, will be spun out from its parent Expedia this month, and shareholders are giddy. With 50 million reviews and counting, the site is shaking the travel industry to its core.

Underlying TripAdvisor’s success is a powerful long-term trend: ratings websites threaten to make many brands irrelevant.

Historically, brands were built on the assumption of limited information. As mass production made it possible to sell soap and soup nationwide, companies developed brands to represent quality and cultivate product loyalty. Brands were a natural fit for radio and TV advertising, and brands thrived with the proliferation of cable channels, which kept advertising costs down while offering unprecedented demographic targeting.

With the rise of user-generated content, however, brands have faced challenges. People are talking about brands on social media sites in ways that brand managers can’t control and often can’t even detect. Facebook and Twitter get most of the attention for brand disruption, but the biggest problems for brands are in search and e-commerce.

Take this Google search for Super 8 Motels, for example. On the front page, you’ll see ratings that hotel guests have written about particular Super 8s on TripAdvisor, Yahoo Travel and Yelp. Importantly, the reviews vary widely. When I checked, a New Mexico location was rated 4.5 stars, while a Los Angeles location was at 3.5 stars and one in British Columbia had only 2 stars. Such location-specific information undermines brands’ ability to affect consumers’ purchasing decisions with 30-second TV spots and gives TripAdvisor a powerful position.

TripAdvisor is ahead of other travel sites thanks in part to their use of Facebook-connected recommendations, which help websites make sales by establishing instant trust with visitors. As a potential hotel guest, I am interested in the consensus among previous guests, but I am especially interested in what my friends have said. Reviews can be intensely personal — for example, here’s my TripAdvisor review of a beach resort in Mexico — and if you know the author, it makes a huge difference in how reliable you consider the review.

For the Super 8 brand, the end game could be scary: as TripAdvisor accumulates more and more trusted reviews, the best-performing Super 8s, all of which are independent franchises, may eventually realize that their business is suffering from their association with lesser motels. At that point, we might see a “brand run,” wherein the best locations leave the chain, lowering the brand’s value and ultimately leading to its collapse.

For brand managers, it’s going to get tougher before it gets easier, but our advice is simple:

Recognize that you’ve lost “control” of your brand and can’t get it back — the Mad Men era is history and the micro-reputation era is upon us.
Start working with your customer service department to find and fix the worst-reviewed locations or people in your company.
Start building your own online recommendation and review content so that you have a say in the broader conversation. Identify happy customers and ask them to review the specific location (or professional) that pleased them. You can direct them to your own internal review site, or to an aggregator like TripAdvisor, but make sure you give them a direct link and emphasize that recommendations help the individual people that the customer interacted with. At Stik.com, we’ve found that satisfied customers are happy to spend two minutes to help someone who did a good job, but are generally less motivated to help a faceless company.

For everyone else, sit back and enjoy the ride. The loss of some familiar brands is a small price to pay for more informed purchasing decisions and fewer unpleasant surprises.

Nathan Labenz is a co-founder of Stik.com, a startup that helps people do business with professionals that their friends recommend.

Image courtesy of Flickr user sushiesque.

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Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:26:15 +0000

Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past

Om Malik — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 03:09:26 +0000

In Silicon Valley, history often repeats itself. Most often it’s the tale of a startup that captures the attention of millions and topples its bigger, incumbent competitors. Then it becomes hated monopoly, despised for the control it wields. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, this tale belonged to Microsoft. Now, a current wave of anti-Google sentiment — both inside Silicon Valley and inside the Beltway — is on the rise, and the search giant is in danger of becoming Public Enemy Number One.

When Social Replaces Search, What Can You Do to Monetize?

Liz Gannes — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:00:59 +0000

When you read an interesting article or visit a new web site, it’s increasingly because a friend sent you a link or mentioned it online. And when you have a question about where to eat or what to buy, you ask your contacts on Facebook or Twitter, or head to a site like Yelp or TripAdvisor to seek the wisdom of the crowd.

This kind of behavior leaves a site like Google out in the cold. Google’s monetary metrics of success still trend in the right direction, but its “search, seek, and consume” model — the core of its business — is clearly threatened by the rise in popularity of online social activities that replace search. According to Hitwise, U.S. visits to Facebook.com surpassed visits to Google.com for the first time last week (that reportedly doesn’t include non-search Google properties). The search giant is plainly feeling the heat, as as seen in its recent rushed and botched rollout of Google Buzz, and by its purchase of Aardvark, a social search company started three years ago by former employees, for a reported $50 million.

So what does that mean for web advertising? You can’t just slap something like AdWords on a social site and expect it to monetize like search. It’s with that premise in mind that I took a deeper dive into social media monetization in a feature-length story for GigaOM Pro, our premium research service (a subscription is required). After dozens of interviews with companies in the space, I highlighted areas such as affiliate advertising, incentives, real-time engagement, local marketing and advertising, native ad formats and behavioral targeting. One trend that emerged is that brand advertising is often a better fit for social networks than Google’s sweet spot of performance advertising. But we don’t have a new AdWords-type product to turn all this social activity into gold — yet.

Companies mentioned in this story: Bunchball, eXelate, Appssavy, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, TripAdvisor, VigLink, MyLikes, Shiny Orb, Vente-Privee, Hunch, OneRiot, Foursquare, Groupon, Digg. Read the full story here.