My team at Halpern Cowan have started the process of collating our expertise on what exactly makes a the best possible online booking user journey and hotel website. We’re now engaged in a research process asking consumers what puts them off making a booking on a website to add to the knowledge base. We’ve analysed the top hotel and booking sites to see how well they fair from an audience point of view.

The results that we’re seeing paint a fairly consistent picture – for a whole variety of reasons, some of the UK’s major hotel chains are losing business by failing to provide their customers with an optimised online experiences.

There is so much for brands to consider when it comes to developing a website that will have a direct impact on conversions, to name just a few:

• the right message on the landing page

• positioning & accessibility of the search & advanced search functions

• Search Engines results display

• Pricing display

• Booking options

• Login sections

• Purchase information display

• Functionality enabling customers to easily compare different options and change their demands.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The above criteria may seem pretty straightforward on paper but it is amazing how many brands overlook or don’t prioritise the little things which all add up to have a significant impact on their sales.

I will post full details of our Online Hotel Usability Report soon – watch this space…

• The most cybersquatted housemate is Caoimhe Guilfoyle, giving an indicator of who the speculators are backing to win. Over the last week, cybersquatters have registered domains such as: www.caoimheguilfoyle.com, www.caoimheguilfoyle.co.uk, www.caoimheguilfoyle.net and www.caoimheguilfoyle.info

• The next most popular are Josie Gibson, Ife Kuku, Rachael White, Corin Forshaw and Mario Mugan who, in the past week have each had  a combination of three potential domain names registered (.com,.co.uk, .net, .info)

• Only two housemates have escaped – Ben Duncan and Dave Vaughan – a sign that speculators don’t rate their chances of winning

Beyond speculators, some unofficial online fan groups and blogs are growing for the housemates but, without moderation, these are receiving negative as well as positive comment: Josie, Mario, Rachael and Corin also have the dubious honour of having gained unofficial blogs since going into the house, which feature blog posts such as ‘Corin Forshaw’s bisexual romps’ and ‘Rachael White likes skinny ginger guys’
It seems ironic that the producers of a show about monitoring people 24/7 has failed to monitor the basic online profiles of its contestants.

Endemol has obviously done some work in advising the housemates on how to protect their online reputations as none have publicly viewable social networking profiles, but it seems clear that it  has not done much to advise them how they will be able to manage their fifteen minutes of fame online once out of the house.

For a company who have made a lot of noise about Big Brother’s influence on the web, they have missed a fairly obvious trick here. It is easy to buy a domain name but much harder to get it back once someone else owns it.

There is no reason why a non-tech savvy and – before they entered the house – non-celebrity housemate should know what steps to take to protect their celebrity personas online. Contestants on a public show should really have received more professional advice on how to protect their online reputation.

Ubiquitous Internet
The web will be accessible anywhere all the time. WiFi, WiMax, 3G & 4G will all take their part to allow us to use the internet everywhere all the time.

Mobile
Smartphone usage will continue to increase.
Mobile payments will become one of the preferred methods for payment. The iTunes Store has lead the way and there are interesting services like Square (www.squareup.com) surfacing to change how you and I can utilize our phones to pay for stuff while on the move.

Media consumption
Consumers are empowered. Combine this with further advances in technology, will mean the media will become more:

• distributed as the same content will pop up in multiple locations, formats and channels
• personalised as media will be tailored to reflect what consumers have watched, read, experienced and shared.
• contextualised as when, where and how consumers get their information will dictate its format, which will shape how they interact with and share the information.

Big Screens
The emergence of Google TV demonstrates two things:

• humans understand the best way to find things (read TV show for now) is to use the familiar simple search interface rather than sift though hundred of choices
• computer screens are going to grow rather than shrink

Brand engagement
Brands will need to figure out how to engage the community so they have two way conversations rather than marketing by interruption.

Social Media will become the largest component of web usage
Neilson reports that social media use grew by 82% in the last year becuase the web has become an efficient platform for communication. As the significance of social networks continues to grow, businesses must invest more in community building as a marketing driver. According to the recent “Tribalization of Business” study released by Deloitte, 94% of businesses will increase their investment in online communities and social media.

Keyboards will move towards extinction
Text-based interactions are going to become a minor component of our web experience. Touchscreen interfaces and motion sensors are driving alternatives to the keyboard and mouse which means, our reliance on: videos, social games like FarmVille, and interactive delivery interfaces like the iPhone OS will grow rapidly.

- average total number of unit sales for apps is 101,024 copies

- 1m UK iPhone Units passed on 27 Feb 2009

- 7% of users have only free apps

- 38% of iphone app purchases are in the entertainment category

If anybody has any similar statistics please share with me….

I’ll add sources in due course.

The Liberal Democrats came a distant second to Labour with a celebrity reach of 74,121 Twitter-users, followed by the Green Party on 18,366, and the Conservatives on 11,138. Political campaigner and stand-up comedian Mark Thomas, who is using his Twitter feed to support Bristol independent Danny Kushlick, for whom he has written/compiled a manifesto, has 12,244 followers.

In assessing the political leanings of 150 celebri-twits, Halpern Cowan have found that the majority of Britain’s top celebrities are deliberately avoiding getting involved in political debates online, but that a core of very vocal celebrities are wielding considerable influence. Celebrity endorsements for Labour on Twitter come courtesy of Eddie Izzard (who has just recorded a television spot for the party), actor and comedian Alan Davies, and Duncan Bannatyne. Prominent Lib Dem supporters on Twitter include Boy George and actor and presenter Robert Llewellyn. Comedian Marcus Brigstocke is publicly backing the Green Party in his constituency of Brighton.

We’ve seen politicians take to Twitter like ducks to water for a ‘social media election’ but they can still only dream of getting as much of a popularity surge as celebrities do from the platform; people follow the politicians whose views they already agree with, so candidates using Twitter are just preaching to the choir. Celebrities, on the other hand are trusted ‘faces’ who can influence voters across the political spectrum and across the country, get the apathetic to vote, swing the undecideds, and give politicians a much-needed boost to their online reputation.

Of course, celebs also have a lot to lose by announcing their politics on Twitter. If you’re famous and want to stay that way you need to appeal to as much of the public as possible, but taking sides on the kind of divisive issues at stake in the election is likely to turn a lot of people off, which is probably why most keep mum or stick to making jokes about Britain’s politics. Nevertheless, as it stands if the celebrity con-twit-uency went to the polls today, it would be a Labour landslide.

At lunch time today at The Body Holiday (the amazing St Lucia Spa Fitness & Wellness Vacation / Holiday destination) Andrew, Craig and I witnessed a High Sun Parhelic circle alternatively known as a Circular Halo

According to wikipedia it is formed by the refraction of sunlight through cloud suspended ice crystals rather than raindrops. I had my doubts about the ice crystals as the air temperature was in the 90s today and there was a distinct lack of wind, but thanks to the internet I have found a similar example from La Silla astronomical observatory in Chile on 27 January 1990.

Apparently, only arc sections are usually visible so there are very few pictures of the full circle. So we were very lucky that our 22 degree halo had the full effect of red on the inside and blue on the outside.

Check out the red and blue dot on a couple of the pictures. My guess is that they are Mercury and Venus. If there anybody out there who knows better please let me know.

22 degree Halo

If you have any more pictures please send them to me so that I can add them to this collection

Halo 2 - Le Sport

Halo St Lucia

Sun Halo with Planets as seen from Le Sport Body Holiday

My thoughts on this personal and brand reputation management issue on this are….

While Manchester United’s decision to ban its players from Twitter will prevent leaking sensitive information and reduce the risk to its reputation from ill-considered player tweets, simply banning everyone from the platform is a myopic, draconian measure.

What Sir Alex Ferguson has failed to realise is the positive impact that allowing players to engage with fans online in the right way can have for the Manchester United brand, especially in light of their current financial challenges. People respond most passionately to other people online, and Twitter provides such a huge opportunity for teams to really tap into their fan-base support. A more progressive approach would have aimed to educate players about Twitter and other social media platforms and put in place common sense guidelines for their usage, harnessing the positive opportunities rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

With a massive upside for businesses that successfully use social media, it is perhaps surprising that many employers are wary of getting involved. This may be attributable to a lack of appreciation of that potential or due to the fact that these employers do not fully understand how to use the social media tools available.

Ignorance is not longer an excuse. In the Internet Age, businesses cannot hide behind indifference or an unmanned customer services phone-line; no brand is off-limits, all are open to potentially hostile discussion. Even if your company isn’t engaging with online communities, it is very likely that someone else out there is talking about you online and this could be damaging to your reputation, especially if you are not in a position to respond.

Using social media involves engaging with potential customers, businesses and stakeholders online as well as with anyone else who has an opinion on your company.

It is important to remember that successful social media is an on-going process: reputations are created, established, and need to be maintained. It is also a two-way process. Businesses are expected to have interactive conversations with members of the online public; a brand which simply exists online as a faceless and uncommunicative ‘presence’ will not succeed in reducing the threats to its reputation.

The positives and negatives of employees online

The danger for businesses attempting to build an online presence is that employees may harm the project by using the Internet to post their feelings or worse, vent their frustrations. What an employee posts online, even via a personal account, can have direct implications for the reputation of their employer. Time and time again, the national media has published stories in which employees have damaged their employer’s brand: the policeman sacked by The Met for posting naked photos on a dating website, retail staff in Currys / PC World insulting customers online, and NHS works sacked because of a Facebook game are all salient examples.

There are now also legal implications for anyone posting inappropriate content to sites such as Facebook and Wikipedia which, as an employer, it is vital that you make your employees aware of.

Businesses are not investing enough resources in educating their staff on online reputation management and the consequences of their online actions for the company that they work for. Businesses must take a proactive approach to educating their employees about online literacy or they risk causing irreparable damage to their brand.

Don’t let this put you off building an online presence however; a company’s employee can be its most effective advocate, and can directly sway the opinion of customers and stakeholders. Customers buy a product or use a service if they feel good about the company that they’re buying from, which can be directly impacted by staff actively posting positive sentiment online.

How to educate employees to use the internet appropriately and effectively

Having a more digitally literate employee base will help your company be better equipped to protect its online reputation.  To make social media work for a company, employers must:

• Discuss it; social media is about engagement, so talk about it
• Introduce social media standards as part of a company code of conduct, whilst giving individuals room to communicate their ideas
• Make sure all employees are aware of privacy setting options available to them on their online profiles
• Ask colleagues to take down any unprofessional pictures, videos or content of themselves, you or other employees in the company
• Empower employees to use social media to help the company
• Train key members of staff as social media tsars (perhaps with some younger staff who understand the digital landscape)
• Provide training as part of annual and introductory reviews for all staff

Social media is about being responsible for and engaging with a network. By being proactive, educating your employees, and taking charge of your company’s online presence, you can effectively manage your reputation online for the better.

As CEO of a digital agency, and a parent myself, I’ve always been vocal about the need to educate not just our children, but also parents, and how youngsters can safely and sensibly make the most of the online world that is available to them.

Where adults have tended to be in the dark about what their kids do online, seeing it as risky and to some extent unproductive, young people have always been highly motivated to participate and engage with digital platforms. Unlike adults however, they’re not streetwise, they don’t understand the threats.

In order to get a picture of how UK parents’ perceptions to their children’s online activity, we commissioned the first ever Digital Literacy Report, launched today.

In the poll with research specialists YouGov, we were pleased to find that the majority of parents see a need to teach their children about how to conduct themselves online, and have demanded the Government introduce lessons to improve young people’s understanding of online privacy and the value of their personal reputation with 69 per cent of parents calling for compulsory lessons to be introduced as part of the national curriculum.

This in part is born of the fact that almost half (48%) of adults asked admitted they were worried that their children’s online actions will potentially harm their future chances of getting into a chosen university or landing a first job. Parents recognise that online comment or mistakes made by young people on sites such as Facebook, Bebo and YouTube will go on to impact their adult lives.

Unfortunately the report also showed there is a lack of control among parents over what exactly children are doing when they log onto the web. With more children accessing sites like Facebook through their mobile phones instead of family PCs, parents are struggling to stay on top of what their children do online, with 44 per cent conceding they don’t ever check the content their kids are accessing or what they are posting online.

If we do not proactively teach young people about the impact of their online activity how can they better protect and promote themselves? There needs to dialogue between parents and their children, as well as at school, where online socialising is recognised as a social and technical skill for contemporary society. Schools as well should be looking to ways to encourage children to use the online tools at their disposal in a positive way, such as setting homework that is based around hosting and reporting a group discussion online.

If we want to see a generation of digitally ‘literate’ adults emerge in years to come, it is our responsibility to ensure it.

It’s an interesting dilemma. Children should be allowed explore the world whoever they are. However, I can also see that if you are a celebrity or a billionaire, then you have a different set of concerns to us mere mortals. My advice was:

• Encourage them to create an account
• Discuss if they are also on other services such as MySpace, Bebo, etc
• Really, really only accept friends they actually know
• Learn about the privacy settings
• Set the privacy settings to the maximum
• Think very carefully about the picture you put on your profile

Encourage them to create an account

You wouldn’t want them to be cut off from the rest of their real world friends. If you exclude them from these places then you are socially inhibiting them. Remember kids wonder how we ever managed to arrange to have a life before we had instant messaging, social networks, etc.

Discuss if they are also on other services

Most adults are aware of Facebook. A lot of grown-ups are on Twitter too. Well I have some news for those who are not in the digital communications business: there are lots of other social networking websites that your kids could and probably will want to use. The same sets of principles apply to these places too.

Really, really only accept friends they actually know

We all have acquaintances. Facebook encourages one to rate oneself by how many people are our friends. This blurs the boundaries. Quite rightly I was asked at dinner for this piece of reputation management advice because of the risk of acquaintances not being friends in anyway.

I advised that the real discussion my high profile friend should have with his kids is what is a friend? Whose house do they go to? Who comes to their house? And lots of similar questions – these are are criteria for accepting people as friends for this group (and perhaps everybody else).    If you want to be a bit extreme then tell the kids not to accept any inbound request, but my view is that we’re establishing some rules about being streetwise, which frankly, everybody needs to be.   Establish this and remember because of their unique concerns it is not rude to unfriend people too.

Privacy Settings

For these Celeb kids I think that the privacy and profile settings should be set to only “friends”. It’s no fun if your friends can’t see your pictures, posts, etc, but at the risk of being boring I’ll repeat myself – only accept those people as friends who are really your friends.

These guys have very valid security concerns, so one thing that’s very important is to monitor what other people are saying about them. The notifications settings are a very useful for this on Facebook in particular. My advice was to make sure that every time my friend’s kids are tagged they get an alert. They may even want to explain to their friend that they don’t want to be tagged as they have unusual concerns about their privacy. You can also limit who sees your pictures in the settings, that should be thought about too.

And the picture

In the case of my friend he’s not as paranoid as Michael Jackson, putting blankets over his kids’ faces when appearing in public. But there is still a desire in this case to limit the kids’ exposure, so obviously you should use the privacy settings so that only friends can see your picture and your profile can’t be found in searches. My advice is to be cautious here too. All your friends can see your picture and whilst they know what you look like, why not remove the temptation to cut and paste.