Second Life - Life for Tourism?
March 6, 2008
Marketing Travel In Second Life
Daniele Mancini, corporate E-Business Director, Costa Crociere S.p.A. had a great presentation at PhoCusWright. He opened my eyes to the level of large corporate web 2.0 marketing.
Costa is a massive cruise supplier, they have 18 ships and 11 more being built. They are pioneers (for a large company anyways) in utilizing online marketing to connect with their consumers. Their b2c marketing efforts included blogs, Youtube contests, online community interaction, and a Second Life presence including owning property and cruise ships.
This post focuses on their Second Life efforts. Costa utilized this new world in an innovative way, they reproduced a press conference and ship launch within Second Life and paired it with a real world launch, fireworks and all.
Their Second Life developments included:
B2C
- Offer a virtual experience for residents
- evnets
- contests
B2B
- Training for travel agents
- Lesson for 15 minutes
- Guided tour of the shop
Kevin May, editor of Travolution had the insight to ask “So ow many people attended the launch?” There was not a quantitative answer, but Daniele claimed that Second Life “offers good value for advertising” when compared to traditional media. Daniele then stated that he has changed his Secondlife marketing efforts from B2C to strictly B2B. This hardly seems like there was a good ROI if they have canceled their B2C campaign all together.
Gregory Turley, CEO of CarTrawler.com was discussing this online marketing phenomenon with me; we both agreed that the people who invest much time in Secondlife, are probably not likely to be interested in the Travel Industry. I pointed out that most of the people that are integrated in a Second Life may be more interested in technology and have less of an interest in real world experiences, but maybe I am wrong. What do you think? Have you found that Second Life offers a good return on your marketing investment?
Stephen Joyce - Profile
February 19, 2008
Mr. Joyce has been working as a travel & tourism technology consultant since 1995. In 2005 Mr. Joyce and his company, Sentias Software Corp., began development on Rezgo.com, a next generation Web 2.0 tour and activity booking engine for small and medium sized tour operators. In June of 2007, Rezgo.com was officially released and now boasts a user base of 500+ companies. Mr. Joyce is also very active in fostering tourism technology and is the founding President of the North American Chapter of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT North America). He is also on the judging committee for the first Canadian E-Tourism Awards and is the publisher of the Tips from the T-List book. In addition to his tourism initiatives, Mr. Joyce is also on the Board of Directors of the North Vancouver Chamber of Commerce.
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