Top 10 Travel Innovations of the past 10 years

Budget Travel asked you to tell us what the best travel innovation of the past decade were. So many ideas came in — with convincing explanations — that they put the 20 finalists to a vote at BudgetTravel.com. (This is an election year, after all.)

10. Online maps
MapQuest provides “such detailed turn-by-turn directions” that even people who “don’t know how to read a map” are able to find their way. Google Earth has also revolutionized maps by letting you “zoom in and take a closer look” at a location and “see exactly where you’re going and what’s around you.” This online mapping tool “makes any first-time visitor a seasoned traveler” before he or she even arrives in a place.

9. Digital photography
You can “take hundreds of photos” with a digital camera and “see right away whether you got the right shot” — so you don’t have to “pay heaps of money to develop a ton of photos that didn’t turn out.” Moreover, photo-sharing Web sites like Snapfish and Flickr allow you to upload all your photos and “send them to your family and friends while you’re still having your adventure.” Without these sites, you’d have to “put your photos on a CD and mail it or send e-mails with large attachments.”

8. Online flight check-in
Nothing has helped “shorten wait times at airports” like the ability to “bypass lines at the ticket counter” by checking in for your flight on the Internet and “printing your boarding pass at home.” You still have to deal with security lines, but at least “you can get ahead of everyone who didn’t go online before leaving for the airport.” Another plus: You can go on the airline’s Web site to select or change your seat “right when the exit-row and bulkhead seats open up.”

Get the remaining 7 top travel innovations.

50 Ways Marketers Can Use Social media to Improve Their Marketing

This is a pretty extensive list of ideas and strategies to consider in your business social media plan by Chris Brogan:

1. Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
2. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
3. For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
4. Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
5. Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.
6. Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.
7. Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.

Get the full list of 50 ideas here.

ROE – Return on Engagment

Of course, in everything we do as marketers, we are looking for ways to measure results and document our Return on Investment. Metrics such as website impressions, unique visitors, click-through rates, CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and conversion rates have dominated the discussion.

Now, with the continued growth in social media components, this topic has been turned upside down. How do you measure your engagement with your audience in the realm of social media? A new term was born: Return on Engagement.

Patrick Schaber discusses some good insights on the evolution of measuring social media initiatives in business. Most importantly, he says, do not isolate social media, but instead position social media as a component of your overall marketing plan. If you engage in print advertising, you’re used to making the case that print advertising is a branding component that is used to support your overall marketing messaging. Like social media, the ROI from print advertising is very hard to measure. Social Media should be one medium you’re using among many in your communication with your audience and customers.

He predicts that within 2 years, there will be measurements in place to measure the “Return on Engagement”.