We are now on the second day of the ENTER conference, and today’s keynote was by Forrester Research and Google. Both obvious giants in their respective fields. If you’ve read the Groundswell book from Forrester you have pretty good idea what I mean. And since you are reading this blog I’ll assume you also know about Google Maps and Earth.

As it turns out 37 % of ALL tourists research their trips online. 59 % percent of “regular internet users” do so. According to Rebecca Jennings from Forrester this means that you NEED to be online. At the same time almost all people start their search on Google, so you NEED to be at the top of Google. You can either pay you way out of that, or you can start blogging and using a forum, because these often show up at the top of searches. That happens because of how Google works – site position is based on links in and out, and bloggers link a lot.

Consumers trust online reviews: A trust score of 3.1 out of 5. Because of this social, computing can bring very tangible benefits in:

Revenue generation
Market research
Crisis management
Audience engagement and evangelism

As mentioned before, people who use these types of media are attractive consumers. They often have a high level of income and spend a great deal of it when traveling. Podcast listeners, for instance, are a very attractive group, according to Forrester.  Five quick points:

Do dedicate staff to social media initiatives
Do tie hard metrics to succes (hard though)
Do involve your non virtual community – show that you appreciate their effort!
Don’t lead with tech for tech’s sake
Don’t expect overnight success. It takes time.

Ed Parsons, who is a geospatial technologist with Google, spoke of how Google wished to index the world’s information with geography. Information is ambient today, he said, we just have to know how to find it. This can be done with traditional methods, but increasingly we arrange things according to use and to situations. This is why Google is trying to take the user’s context in to account. This is of course a nod towards web 3.0 or what’s called the semantic web.

An easy example here is geo-tagging your photos. This means you let you computer know where you took the photos you are storing. In the future your camera will have a built in GPS, and it will do it for you. Today they iPhone already does that.

At the same time Google’s Streetview function allows you to see you destination virtually before you go there. At street level. Take a walk around the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum before you go there. Soon this type of information will be expected from all sources. According to Parsons our children will always know where they are going. We will be the last generation, who knows what it’s like to be lost!