Why we shouldn’t bother with blog trips

Firstly, I should probably admit that the headline to this post may be a little attention grabbing (hey, if journalists can do it, so can I) but, barring one or two exceptions it is what I think.

The blogger ideal

The conversation around sponsored blog trips is starting to look a little circular. My post earlier in the year included a fairly open invite to bloggers for assistance with trips. We didn’t get much of a return, and I went onto question whether this might be because bloggers were self-conscious about their own influence. Jeremy Head posted on the subject recently, with another open trip invite to bloggers from a tour operator, which seems (by the comments) to have been met with a similar reaction. There also seems to be increased consternation from some bloggers, who feel that to accept a trip and subsequently publish positive content would be an affront to their credibility.

I used to think this reaction sounded a bit self-important, after all the national newspaper’s travel writers have been accepting trips for years and no one (OK, almost no one) has questioned their credibility. But now I think this is to misunderstand the nature of the blog, the blog as an ideal is the independent voice – the individual who speaks from a perspective that others share. Which is why you have blogs standing up for travel consumer rights, blogs about travel tech, blogs about green travel, blogs about luxury travel – blogs about everything. That’s the appeal, the bloggers and their audience have such enthusiasm for their specific subject that really, a “sponsored” post does seem to taint the ideal.

Blogger influence

So why do we want to send bloggers on trips so badly in the first place?

A lot of blogs, as great as they may be, aren’t that influential on their own. We’re used to the format of ’send journalist, journalist comes back, writes lovely piece, piece is published in print and online, article prompts consumers to buy holiday and link boosts website up a few places in search rankings’. But even the most influential blogs hardly stand up to the national newspapers in reader numbers, even in terms of SEO value a link on a national newspaper’s website is going to be worth far more than on any blog.

A blog’s influence is generally measured in terms of their influence on other blogs, rather than traffic, which by and large is how any other kind of website’s influence is measured.

The ideal blog trip outcome

So really, a successful outcome from sending one blogger on a press trip would not just be a positive post or two on their own blog, but content that was so spectacularly interesting/funny/useful that it resulted in link backs and knock on posts from a whole variety of other blogs and a surge of interest from social media, trending on Twitter and front page of Digg etc etc.

How likely is that? Not very. The only way it could feasibly happen is if there is some fortuitous unlikely/special event while the blogger was on their trip, or if they take some really fantastic photos, or record and edit some great video footage.

Why not DIY?

So if it is the content itself that makes the trip a success, rather than where it is initially placed, why do you need the blogger in the first place? Why not create your own fantastic content, something interesting enough that blogs will want to publish it? We’ve made video content that’s subsequently been placed all over the web, and there was no blogger or journalist involved in making it.

Engagement

I’ve already talked a bit about the blogger ideal, but another element of it I’d like to mention is engagement. Where traditional media broadcasts, new media (by which I mean blogs and the social web) engages – it’s about listening as well as talking. Hence blog comment sections, trackbacks and social networking etc.

So asking a blogger to go on a trip and then broadcast your positive message afterwards is another affront to the blogging ideal.

Instead, why not engage with the blogosphere? And what better way to do that than (again): do it yourself! Start your own blog. If you’ve got a message you want to speak to people about, get yourself down to wordpress.com or .org (other blogging platforms are available) and set yourself up a blog. Read some other blogs on your subject, comment on them, write your own reaction posts, link back and get involved. We are currently getting a blog up and running for Tourism Ireland’s business tourism division – the aim being to talk about Ireland’s business tourism developments and create a place where other people want to talk about it too.

Group blog trips

I said there would be exceptions…

If your ideal outcome is several posts across several blogs then a group blog trip could work. I have seen one or two decent examples of this, as a group trip it generates conversation across the blogs as group trips naturally generate a sense of relationship through experiencing something together (if you’ve ever been on a media or trade group FAM trip you’ll know what I’m talking about). By sending bloggers together you can naturally expect them to engage with each other.

Personally I still see this as crossing the ‘independent voice’ ideal, it’s a bit too introspective – just because the bloggers are engaging each other doesn’t mean they’re engaging their readers.

The means as the end

The other way blog trips can work is by reversing the process, and making the run up to the trip the focus.

My favourite example of this is Quark Expeditions’ Blog Your Way to Antarctica. Quark launched a website inviting bloggers to ‘win’ a trip to Antarctica (a trip Quark run, and consumers can buy) and blog about their experiences. Though of course the subsequent blog was never going to be the focus. To win, the bloggers had to achieve the highest number of votes on the site, and in order to do that they had to use their influence – on their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, whatever outlets they could. Quark received hundreds of entries, and all those entries duly linked back to the website requesting their readers and friends vote for them – resulting in thousands of juicy SEO-valuable links, and untold amounts of traffic. All to the website, where a booking engine for the trip itself was very prominent. It’s a bit ‘best job’, but slightly more focussed, as the aim was at bloggers rather than the general public.

The fact that both interest in both Ben Southall and BYWTA winner Luís Monteiro has significantly declined since they won their respective competitions just goes to show that the invite was the focus, not the subsequent blog – the means was the end.

The end

Of course we can only have so many ‘best job’ or ‘blog your way to’ campaigns before it all looks a bit copy cat – particularly where social media is concerned, as as soon as anything starts to look corporate or unoriginal people will criticise and switch off. So I think sticking to engaging is the better and safer route, unless you really do have an original idea for making the means the end. I also think that if the internet really is ruining travel journalism, and that anyone who writes online will eventually be writing for marketing purposes, then why shouldn’t marketers be doing that themselves already?

So bloggers, have you, or would you, ever use content that you’d received from a PR or marketing source? Providing it was of a high quality, and interesting/funny/useful enough.

PRs/marketers, have you arranged blog trips that you would consider truly successful? If so, how and why?

Blogger FAM trips – are we nearly there yet?!

Way back in October I got involved in a debate on Alex Bainbridge’s blog about travel bloggers going on FAM trips. The discussion then seemed to focus on blogger integrity, and whether the acceptance of a ‘free holiday’ put that in jeopardy. My argument at the time was that PRs and traditional journalists have been toeing this line for quite a while, and that if an agreement has been reached between them, then surely one could be found with bloggers.

Self confessed ‘Old Hand’ travel writer Paul Mansfield explains in this great article on the truth about press trips that “few if any publications have the resources to send writers away, so instead they accept hospitality from tour operators, hotels, airlines and tourist boards in exchange for coverage.” A key commentor in the debate that raged on Alex’s blog was Darren Cronian, AKA Travel Rants, and we all know his stance against FAM trips has only hardened since! Both Darren and Alex are prolific and influential travel bloggers, but neither are (or have been) journalists, and so have had no prior experience of the media to tourist board/hotel/tour operator relationship that Paul Mansfield speaks of. (Not that either would need to, they both offer quite different editorial insights to the kind of travel features you might find in a newspaper or magazine and really, I can see why a FAM trip wouldn’t really be appropriate for either.)

So, step forward Jeremy Head, a seasoned travel journalist, editor and broadcaster with several years in the travel media industry and now blogger, too. Someone who can see both sides of the coin perhaps? Jeremy seemed a little shocked when we called him to invite him to Sydney on a FAM trip purely on the strength of his blog, so much so that he went and posted about it. The thing is, it wasn’t his ‘integrity’ stopping him from accepting (if you read the comments you’ll see that he and other bloggers come up with fairly easy ways of getting around that), it was his working diary. A trip to Sydney would take 7 – 10 days out of his time, for no monetary benefit. That in itself is unfeasible for Jeremy, but imagine if he was trying to make his blog a full time occupation! The issue once again comes back to money, and the comments from my colleague James Allen on Jeremy’s post pretty much run the idea of the PR/travel client funding blogger FAM trips into the ground too.

So, where to from here?

Jeremy also helpfully directed our attention to the US, with this post from travel writer Tim Leffel. Tim makes some very good points about how the travel PR and marketing industry needs to wake up to the influence of the web (though reading it myself I felt a little like a convert being preached to…). My comment there brings up the issue of the differences between the UK and the US. Though there I talk about how we can geographically target an audience online it’s also relevant to the payment debate we have here. The US has Gridskipper, Gadling, Jaunted, Worldhum – all established travel blogs which are professionally run, and presumably PAY their writers. That would get around the issue of PRs/travel organisations funding blogger trips wouldn’t it, if they were paid by the blog themselves? It would also solve the clunky ‘this post is sponsored by’ integrity issue.

So when are we getting a great UK based professional travel blog then? As an agency we’ve had quite a few information and even trip requests lately from journalists (many of whom we are already aware of as professional travel writers) claiming to be writing for something called Simon Seeks, which you’ll see has a holding page here. Apparently the site has heavyweight financial backing from the owners of moneysupermarket.com.

Could this be the first great professional UK based travel blog site? I certainly hope so, and reckon by the strength of the writers we know are writing for it that it should be. That said I also hope it isn’t the only one. Lets hope it sparks a whole UK based travel blog scene with the richness, integrity and intelligence that the established UK travel media already has.

In the meantime, any travel bloggers out there fancy an (unpaid) FAM trip? Just let us know and we’ll see what we can do.