The digital hub that is Doggett's

I’ve already posted about the background to the Travel Blog Camp (here), so I’m not going to go into too much detail here. What I’ll do is just highlight some of the key speakers’ quotes. For more analysis, there are some links to other reviews at the end of this post. Also, thanks to Darren Cronin (aka Travel Rants) for organsing the event…

So who said what?

Alex Bainbridge from Tour CMS

“I don’t like to be called a blogger… A blog isn’t just about creating a media site. It’s just me, I just want to have conversations. No one wants to read news on a blog. If there are five sites with the same news, no one is going to read them. I want an enjoyable conversation.”

“People want your opinion of the product. The reason I have my name there is because it’s me! It’s not that I’m vain… I’ve watched the traffic come from other firms’ offices, their legal teams, their brand representatives, and I wonder why they don’t write anything! Maybe something will arrive in the post.”

“I haven’t got the bandwidth in my brain to cope with Twitter.”

“I see comments as a bit of currency. If I see someone putting in effort, I’ll go and write a comment. This is my means of saying thank you for your post.”

“Blogging has driven me to extreme posting – it’s a bit like being an alcoholic!”

Karen Bryan from Europe a la Carte

“There are three types of blog:

1. Personal diary, for a traveller to let family and friends know they’re safe, and where they are

2. Interactive travel magazines, which aren’t geeky – it’s just a different publishing platform e.g. Guardian travel blog

3. Blogs used as a marketing tool e.g. Mr & Mrs Smith Blog, or B2B”

“So what about their futures? The personal diary blog will continue to grow, but they need quality content. Interactive travel magazines have a harder future, financially speaking, and they need to be manually edited to keep up quality. The marketing tool blog has lots of potential, but only if businesses realise that it’s a lot of time and effort – they can’t just jump on the blog bandwagon.”

“It’s also OK to give quality links to other websites. The readers will hold you in high regard, and come back to you.”

Molly Flat from STA Travel

“People will pile in and slaughter companies that have their CEO going ‘Hey guys, LOL’ etc…”

“Brands want to know what consumers think. STA Travel Buzz is a ‘non-blog blog’. We aggregate the STA Travel-related content. It’s transparent – everything goes up there. So instead of people trawling trough Google, all the info is in STA Travel Buzz.”

“STA Travel is interested in word of mouth – not press releases, banners etc. They said ‘Be on Twitter, Facebook, FlickR.’ So we spread the brand, take it away from a corporate point of view, and put it on to another social media platform.”

Kevin May from Travolution

Kevin asked a lot of questions, so was tough to get down the various comments hurtling back and forth.

But, as I mentioned before, read about Kevin’s talk, and other thoughts on the evening, at these blogs:

Trailbeater

Roamingtales

Travel Rants