Our target audience

I am all for Myvawny's idea of writing the feature as a kind of 'how to' guide for travellers using online media.

Bibek's idea of the 'top ten' mistake posts also sounds really interesting, and is exactly the kind of thing young travellers are going to want to read about.

Now, onto our target audience. 

Hint - it isn't the woman in red...

Given the 'how to' interactive style of our blog, I think we need to target young people who are clearly interested in travel  - whether they are travellers themselves, or plan to travel in the near future.

While gender won't come into play, I believe we should target our audience as approximately 18 to 30 year olds. This would take into account the age at which young Australians are most likely to travel for the first time, which the ABS has conveniently broken down for us here as those in their mid to late twenties.

This audience is prolific with social media, but may not have such a comprehensive understanding of online travel platforms, and therefore our 'how to' style will be both practical and interesting.

The importance of targeting a niche online audience has been comprehensively explored,but this article by Ember Television gives a good rundown of how more narrowly defined interests will satisfy a smaller, but more likely loyal and economically productive, following online.

This also buys into the Web 2.0 idea that the internet is increasingly becoming based around - and expectant of - highly personalised experiences.

Therefore, for our purposes of satisfying an appropriately niche audience, we would be best served targeting Australian travellers aged 18 to 30. Given our geography, young Australians, unlike those from other parts of the world,  usually have to commit to spending serious dollars to get overseas in the first place and are thus also more likely to also do some serious planning.

Our peripheral audience could be people from outside Australia who are interested in understanding how online travel platforms have changed the way we travel, as well as the 'how to' guides we will provide. Older age groups could also form part of this wider audience.

Like all successful blogs, we will need to make sure our tone and style reflects our target audience. It should be funny, lighthearted and very conversational. It will be vital our blog doesn't take itself too seriously, or risk alienating our target audience.

Some great examples of blogs that use tone and style to connect with their target audiences are author Zoe Foster's very amusing blog and gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who, love him or hate him, has the fifth most popular blog IN THE WORLD.

Check out the top 15 here if you don't believe me. HuffingtonPost came in at number one with approximately 54 million unique visitors every month.

Of course, I have no doubt that A Not So Lonely Planet will soon be in that league.

Sam 

Telling our story

I’ve been thinking about the media we can employ to communicate our ideas and the form we want our feature to take. With regards to Myvawny’s suggestion about gearing the feature towards the travelers themselves, I’m for it all the way. I think this approach will give our project more momentum; when we decide on something, at the back of our minds we should consider the question ‘Would your average tech-savvy 21^st century traveller want to read this? Would they benefit from it?’ In that vein we could write cheeky articles like ’10 Biggest Mistakes First-Time Back-Packers Make,’ or get a veteran traveller to guest write a post to divulge their years of hard won wisdom. 

It's supposed to look like luggage.

Some possible ways we could utilise video: as we discussed, we could find a couch surfer who is coming down to Sydney and document their experience – from how they got connected to their host and how what the host and guest felt about the whole experiment. We could talk to other people who are involved in the scene – I have an acquaintance that is a serial couch host (not sure what the nomenclature is). She can give us frank insights into the good, bad and very ugly side of this sub-culture and how social media has made this whole thing possible. As a whim, I’m also thinking of doing a short 30-second video about social media and how truly revolutionary it is. It’ll be done in the style of those 1920’s newsreels where they would talk about amazing new technology like the automobile or the toaster. 

An example of said newsreels.

Another thing we could do is use social media itself to tell our story. Perhaps we could start hash tags like #travellerstips or #travellinghorrorstories or #bestadventureever.  Maybe a Facebook page, where we invite people to share their stories and even engage in real time dialogue with our audience. 

Going forward, there's really lot we could do that is within our reach. And I'm pretty stoked to see what we can create.

Online media is changing the way we travel

Based on our group meeting, I think we have all landed on producing our feature as an independent blog on the way online media is changing travel. 

Essentially, our feature will investigate how online media platforms are changing the way we travel, with a specific focus on TripAdvisor, Thorntree, Couch Surfer, CoLunching and Airbnb.

This has been narrowed down from our original plan, where we considered also looking at social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 

Now, instead of using social media in our analysis, we will focus on the online platforms I have listed above, looking at the way in which they have changed the way people travel, engage with travel and connect with other travellers.

Including social media in our analysis would have just been too much content for the purposes of our web feature. However, social media still offers some exciting opportunities to engage with other travelers and attract our target audience to our blog.

By focusing our research on online platforms, we can use case studies, comparisons and interviews to explore how they are changing travel.

We could manipulate an image like this for our web feature presentation?

We can also focus on engaging with travellers, experts and bloggers via interviews and case studies for the purposes of our research, as well as offering them advice through our independent, practical analysis of each online travel platform.

This isn't something that any other travel blog actually does - as they tend to focus on the destination, as opposed to using online travel sites to plan a trip, connect with travellers, and review a trip afterwards. This will be our key point of difference.

Moving on, we need to confirm our target audience, research existing publications and features, develop a plan to engage with our target audience via social media and work out our design plan for the blog.

Given we will be providing independent travel advice via the 'how to' guides, it is vital we also establish ourselves as legitimate travel advisers like they do at the Lonely Planet for example. Here is a link to their author page. We could copy this sort of format and give a background of our own travel experiences and amusing stories as well.

Cheers,
Sam

Our feature: A 'how-to' guide for online travel services

One possibility I wanted to run by you is that maybe we could make the web feature a service in itself for travellers. Obviously there has to be an element of research etc, but we could possibly frame the whole thing around being a one-stop destination for travellers that want to know how to best utilise the Internet to make their travels better. For example, when discussing a site such as Couch Surfing we could write a 'how-to' guide for it instead of just writing a summary of it - and the same for how best to use Trip Advisor, Twitter etcetera. I think this way we would have a much better chance of engaging with our audience and actually getting people to visit and contribute to the site.  We could also interview people who have personally benefitted from all of these networks while travelling. For example, I have a cousin who runs a travel blog called Curious Cat on the Run and I think she would make a really good interview subject. I am sure we would all know other people who have used these kind of travel services or may have used them ourselves. I was also thinking it could be an interesting experiment to 'test out' some of these services. Obviously given the time constraints we won't be able to do any Couch Surfing overseas, but we could definitely give CoLunching a go. To that end, we could also analyse Trip Advisor in terms of what it says about Sydney.

For example, this screenshot of the 'Things To Do in Sydney' ranks Sydney Harbour as the number 1 thing to do, followed by The Opera House Walk, etcetera. One fun article could be to actually do the top ten/top five activities (time permitting) and discuss whether or not the voters on Trip Advisor have it right. We could easily incorporate video/photos into this piece as well.


The possibilities are endless really, I think the hard thing will be deciding what to cut out!