P@SSPORT kicks off 2010 by picking three key trends that will shape the way the travel industry markets itself to the changing customer. The first trend? Getting serious about social media. P@SSPORT takes you into the growing world of social media and why you should care about it.

Suddenly, everyone's talking about social media and how it is influencing travellers' decision on who to fly with, where to travel and who to stay with.

At ITB Asia, Mr Arthur Kiong, Vice-President of Marketing for Banyan Tree Group, said that Trip Advisor reviews had become more important than the Conde Nast awards and there was a direct co-relation between revenues and positive reviews.

The big and growing world of social media is one that cannot be ignored by the travel industry, says Mr Morris Sim, co-founder of Circos Brand Karma, a Singapore-based start-up that analyses reviews for the hospitality sector.

According to Mr Sim, possibly one of the most in-demand speakers at travel conferences last year, there has been an explosion in the last 12 months.

The numbers don't lie

Citing Alexa statistics, he said that as of October 2009, Facebook is the second most popular website in the world. In that same period, Facebook was the number one site in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Bangladesh. Moreover, of the top 20 sites ranked in the last 12 months, eight of them were powered by social media.

Stating that AirAsia has 74,000 fans, JetBlue has 1.3 million followers on Twitter and there are 5,000 photos on Peninsula Hong Kong on Flickr, Mr Sim continued to cite numbers to prove his point that "the amount of content" and "the number of people talking" is incredible.

Moving on to commerce, he said that one out of every 20 users who visit Singapore Airlines' website, or travel retail sites such as Wotif, Asiarooms, Webjet and other OTAs, had visited Facebook before visiting those sites.

The age of the machines...

Mr Sim explained that a battle has been going on for a very long time and it has to do with "our fundamental need to access information in an efficient manner."

Traditional media had previously dominated this access, which was in turn controlled by man, until 10 to 15 years ago when a company called Google kicked the apple cart over. It put together a bunch of machines, scoured the web, compiled the information and asked the user to ask questions to which it responded with a list of answers.

It worked like a research model - "the way academics would look for material," said Mr Sim.

"In that sense, when Google came in, it set up a battle between machine and man (traditional media). The machine won from the viewership and advertising dollar perspectives. That left a vacuum, data was moving to machines and information was moving back."

.and man makes his return

A counterpoint was needed and a classic battle is now ensuing between man and machine, said Mr Sim. "We as human beings are inherently empathetic - we need to relate to each other and one of the biggest actions we take is to share what we do and what we are thinking."

To illustrate his point, Mr Sim fell back on numbers again, citing the four billion photos on Flickr, 100 million videos on YouTube and 269 languages on Wikipedia as examples. Facebook is "all about sharing, sharing, sharing," he says - two billion photos and 14 million videos are uploaded a month, 40 million status updates are posted a day, and six billion minutes are spent in viewership per year, with an average of 30 minutes per day.

"You pick the people you trust and you see only the content you want - the people are the filter for the content. The context is personal to you. You toss out the question and you get the recommendations and referrals," Mr Sim explained.

And to add to this list of numbers, 74 per cent of users trust peer reviews.

I need information, and I need it now

So why is man going to win this latest battle? Mr Sim shares a story. "On April 18, 1775, a 40-year-old man, Paul Revere, rode from Boston to Lexington to tell everyone that the British were coming. What the ride did was emphasise the importance of the timing of receipt of information - man has a fundamental awareness of timing in a different way to machines."

It is this awareness of time that explains the importance of Twitter, argues Mr Sim. "Twitter is all about relevance; breaking news illustrates this, explaining its meteoric rise from thousandth most popular website to 13th in one year. 60 per cent of its users are now from outside the US.

"It's a utility to get relevant information out in a timely manner," he adds.

Looking at it from another perspective, Twitter enables you to pick who you would want your editorial staff to be, by following their tweets and unfollowing them as you wish.

However, man's deficiency is that "we cannot process large amounts of data. Machines are optimized to gather, collect and organise data - that has become its weakness in this era of the information glut. Social media and social networks have made it so much easier to process information and recommendations from friends - four answers as opposed to four million," said Mr Sim.

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