Tuesday, October 20, 2009

WebInTravel: WIT presenation 2009 - Recommendations, Long Tail and EveryYou




On doctor's orders I had to cancel my trip to WebInTravel this year. Here with slides and audio is the presentation I would have given today if I had been there.

Key themes are
  1. the long tail theory is now 5 years old. That is "decades" in Internet years. It is time for a rethink;
  2. we now have access to effectively unlimited computational power (technology change);
  3. consumers are voluntarily giving us data and information about themselves - often for no obvious tangible gain (forwarding links, writing reviews, uploading photos, setting up detailed traveller profiles etc) (social change); and
  4. if we work to put together the technology change and social change we can target EveryYou rather than Everyone. Can develop specific and targeted recommendations of one for an individual. Rather than a recommendation based on demographics, a recommendation of one based on the individuals unique combination of desires, needs and interests.
PS - forgive the timing of the slides, they are not quite right but the message comes through.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Boot, there is no shame in saying my wife will not let me go

Steve Sherlock said...

was that a qantas seat that caused the back problem?

Tim Hughes said...

can blame QF for a lot but not this.....

Steve Sherlock said...

thought pravoking presentation.

i think i get the Everyyou idea - with example of business me, family me, leisure solo me, alter ego me etc

reminds me of a monty python scene from the life of brian. Brian says: “you are all individuals” and the mob replies “yes we are all individuals” and one salutary guys says “im not”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVygqjyS4CA

i guess the challenge for brands is how do they position a single brand for the everyyou, given brands traditionally have diverged into many subset categories to cater for multiple “yous” or at least narrow down to similar users, but still not the everyyou.

though given your example is related to travel search, i can imagine travel search integrating the everyyou principles into their algorithms, in similar way to itunes tries to match music to you.

Illka Gobius said...

Tim, I'll post it online at webintravel.com this week. It's a real shame you couldn't be here because no one got talking about The Every You... so I tried to start the conversation on your behalf through Twitter! cheers, illka

Craig Hewett said...

Hi Tim,

Your EveryYou concept was referenced a couple of times yesterday during discussions......certainly a shame that you were not able to make the presentation in person.

Hope that your back is on the mend

Regards

Craig

RobertKCole said...

Excellent presentation, Tim.

I wrote a blog post to reinforce that this is the future of travel. Also tried to highlight some challenges that may be encountered as the travel industry tries to move from being five years behind, to providing exceptional customer engagement.

Here is the link: http://www.rockcheetah.com/blog/marketing/multiple-persona-trip-centric-travel-name-everyyou/

Hope your back feels better. Good idea to make the podcast - the travel industry needs you to keep evangelizing the concept.

Tim Hughes said...

all - thanks for comments. Really disappointed I did not get to present live