Instead of being the biggest shouters, we want to be the best listeners to understand consumer needs. In this White Paper, we identify key marketing components within the Travel Industry that allows us to interpret what the consumer is saying and how to design effective marketing and advertising. For more information or further White Papers, contact activelistening@wunderman.com.

1. Listening is
not Enough:
Gleaning Actionable Insights from
Online Travel Conversations
At the dawn of the 21st century, Greg Icenhower of P&G said,“We’ve been voted the best
marketer of the 20th Century, but that’s because we were the biggest shouters. In the 21st
Century, we want to be the best listeners.”1
Nearly ten years later, plenty of marketers are listening – it’s hard not to. Social media discussions
– via Facebook, Twitter and other platforms – are full of peer-to-peer conversations, particularly
around travel. 15% of these conversations are from travelers either seeking advice, or giving it2;
turning to and trusting each other rather than travel brands themselves, for authentic advice.
In addition, there is a “high” correlation between a customer’s experiences in the hotel and
airline industries and the willingness to A)make another purchase from that provider, and B)
to recommend that provider to others.3
And the phenomenon is global and increasingly mobile. By 2014, mobile Internet usage will
surpass computer usage;4 and more travelers are using social networks via mobile device during
their trips, with 37% of international leisure travelers saying they use mobile social networks.5
15% of Yet, despite the proliferation of social media use, and tools such as Radian6 and BuzzMetrics
global online that enable brands to listen, an astonishingly few companies are actively listening – of 2,100
surveyed companies, only 25% know where their most valuable customers are discussing their
conversations
experiences, and only 7% responding integrate social media into their marketing activities.6 Even
are from for those companies that are mapping and integrating social media discussions, very few have
travelers either any sense of how such efforts impact their bottom line – only 16% of marketers have any mea-
seeking advice, surements in place for understanding social media ROI.7
or giving it.
By simply listening to Internet “buzz,” companies are not getting the most out of a revolutionary
opportunity. With active listening, brands can quantifiably analyze what they’re hearing and
(Wunderman Listening
Platform, 2010, where they’re hearing it, so that those insights can be made actionable, and those actions
English language only ) made profitable.
1 Fara Warner,“Don’t Shout, Listen,” Fast Company, July 31, 2001
2 Wunderman Listening Platform, 2010, English language only
3 ”Customer Experience correlates to loyalty,” Forrester, February 17, 2009
4 Mary Meeker,“Internet Trends,” April 2010, Morgan Stanley Presentation
5 ITB World Travel Trends Report 2010/2011, December 2010
6 SAS Press Release from The Premier Business Leadership Series, Las Vegas, October 27, 2010
7 HeBS Best Practices: 2011 Social Media Resolutions
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2. Marketing to travelers starts with active listening
Active listening has long been a hallmark of successful contact-center sales operations. Indeed, training
inside call-center agents on active listening skills was one element of an effort that drove a 41% increase in
sales conversion and a 31% increase in average order revenue for a technology client.8 Imagine applying
the same skills to social media discourse.
Social media gives us the largest database of unstructured consumer data that has ever existed, and it is
continually evolving. From picking a vacation destination to booking hotels – all the way through to the
in-flight experience – travelers are talking to and trusting each other, and taking action based on peer advice.
Combine those conversations with the feedback travelers are giving directly to marketers through thousands
of call center and email conversations, and you have an enormous amount of minable data.
The travel planning process is complex and presents multiple hurdles. Active listening can help identify opportunities that simplify the process for consumers.
Clearly, some carriers want you to Start thinking Look at the private suites on this airplane!!! Went to Chicago last week on old-tech
about Europe in the fall. Aer Lingus kicked off I am excited for mytrip to Dubai next year. American airlines. Next trip I’ll opt for wifi/
a fall Ireland airfare sale, the Lufthansa fal Enjoy SINGAPORE AIRLINES SUITES A380 VIDEO personal screen on @VirginAmerica or jetBlue
Europe airfare sale is up and running, and
now Icelandaic is Offering fall airfare deals. Love this JetBlue website. Navigation very Think I’m having the worst customer Experience
simple and great. right now with British Airways. I’m never buying
We’re off to Italy in Aug and the cheapest seats flights from them again.
seem to beDelta/KLM. The flights arecode- Why is it that when I’m ready to go on vacation
shared so they can bebooked through either the airlines have doubled their ticket prices I’m going home Monday! Flying @JetBlue
company,but going through Amsterdam uses from a month ago? Southwest doesn’t go purchased my ticket earlier can’t wait to
KLM equipment vs. the others using Delta where I wanna go and all the other airlines sleep in my bed...thanks @JetBlueCheeps
equipment. Does anyone have an opinion charge you for your bags. Who can go on
on which would be better? a vacation and just take carry on luggage? Seat on flight #LH4225 Paris - Istanbul Lufthansa
Not me! just rated 5/20
Blogs/Forums
How social media platforms play different roles in the experience.
Clearly there’s a lot to learn from actively listening, and certainly the unstructured social and voice data
is there, but unless a rigorous process is applied to categorizing conversation content and identifying key
trends and correlations, the task can be an overwhelming and, ultimately, an unfruitful one.
8 Wunderman Client Case Study, Personal Computing, 2002
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3. Making sense of travel conversations
via active listening
From building communities, to crisis communications, to offering discount fares and rates, many
travel companies have established a social media presence via popular social channels such
as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And while monitoring and responding to conversations within
one’s own social channels is a natural first step, an exponential leap occurs when you begin
to make sense of the myriad of travel conversations happening elsewhere, and the potential
discovery of previously unknown venues where people are talking about your brand.
There are four immediate opportunities that can come from actively listening to travelers’
conversations
Opportunity 1: Categorizing and Benchmarking Topics
Any listening initiative must start with a set of assumptions on what topics travelers are conversing
about. As shown, this will likely range from upfront travel planning and destination selection,
to the purchasing process, and finally the travel experience itself. Indeed, nearly 84,000 travelers
Tweet about their airport check-in and in-flight experiences every month.9 A similar number
Tweet about their hotel check-in and in-room experiences. And post-trip, travel forums like
those found on Trip Advisor and Expedia give users the opportunity to review their entire
experience, from start to finish. Where does your brand show up in these conversations?
What key themes are most closely correlated to your airline, your rental car agency? What
are fliers saying about your loyalty program? Your competitors’?
Intuition will guide you to the likely starting points to examine, but we often find that the deep-
est insights come from unexpected topics associated with your brand – the “unknown un-
knowns.”
Opportunity 2: Mapping the Ecosystem
The output from a well-executed listening initiative will identify the “Where” and the “Who” so
vitally important to begin active listening. In what categories and specific domains and social
media platforms are you and your competitors being discussed? Who is doing the talking,
Over 83,000 and how are others responding? Identifying content authors and matching their posts with
comment counts, re-tweets, and other measures of engagement will begin to give you a list of
tweets about who is most influential in any particular topic area. These influencers may vary widely based
the boarding on the stage of travel planning they’re most aligned with.
and inflight Overlaying reach data or network size with listening output tied to individual authors can pro-
experience vide your brand with a targeted list of real or potential brand advocates, as well as detractors.
every month. Similarly, mapping the key domains where these influencers (and those they influence) tend to
gather is critical in targeting where your brand needs to participate in conversations. Again,
this output will often bring obvious results – frequent fliers converse on sites like flyertalk.com,
(Wunderman Listening
Platform, February, 2011, but may also bring surprises – a significant amount of travel advice seeking and advice giving
English Language only.) happens on domains like cafemom.com.
9 Wunderman Listening Platform, February 2011
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4. Opportunity 3: Measuring Sentiment
Scoring “sentiment” in individual social media posts is, at best, fraught with pitfalls. Consider
the following Tweet that was scored as “positive” by a popular listening tool: “Oh great, I’m on
hold with [airline] AGAIN.”
Sarcasm is one of the great barriers to accurate sentiment analysis, which is why human
vetting of any single post is necessary before taking action based purely on scoring. That said,
it is possible, with a fair degree of accuracy, to measure sentiment around a broader topic
(like your hotel’s customer service) if there is sufficient volume of conversations on that topic.
A better method, though, is to map attributes – whether they relate to customer experience,
pricing, or any other measure, based on keyword proximity to your brand and your competi-
tors’ brands. This typically requires deeper analytics than provided by most listening dash-
boards, butis well worth the effort. Data visualization of this type of data can bring quick
insights that enable you to pinpoint areas that require closer examination.
Opportunity 4: Assessing Topic Relationships
Beyond focusing just on your brand and your competitors’ brands, social listening provides a
window into the customer travel experience as a whole – from planning all the way through to
the return home. Looking at how key themes and topics relate to one another in peer to peer
conversations can yield surprising insights. For example, we recently looked at the pre-event
discussions for a client in the entertainment industry. In addition to the expected themes of
excitement and anticipation, we also found a lot of language around fear, dread, and remorse.
The same may likely hold true for travelers – once a trip is booked, the expected emotional
language “can’t wait to get to Jamaica!” may also be surrounded by anxiety around getting
to the airport, keeping the kids in line on the plane, exchanging currency, and understanding
local customs.
Virgin Atlantic was onto something when they realized that the flight experience begins when
the traveler wakes up at home on the day of departure – and thus began offering door-to-
door service via chauffeured car to its Upper Class Service passengers. Understanding how
the customer mindset manifests itself in conversations about pain points, needs, and wants
can help bring deeper insight into your customers’ experiences.
A global ear to a global travel conversation
Travel has become more global than ever, fueled by the globalization of business, growing
migration, rising consumer affluence and the cost of travel more accessible to many. It is
estimated that the total number of overseas trips taken by tourists from the top 15 traveling
nations will almost double by 2020 from 433 million to 837 million.10
Actively listening to the global traveler requires a global solution like Wunderman’s Listening
Platform, with the scale and scope to work locally, regionally and with geographic specificity.
For example, an airliner seeking to cater to the emerging Chinese traveler could use the
Listening Platform as a cost-effective means of gathering market insight including targeting
opportunities, identifying unmet market needs, measuring brand awareness and understanding
specific barriers to consideration and conversion.
10 Mintel Press Release, ”World’s leading outbound markets,” March 2006
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5. For our global engagement with a large telecommunications company, the Listening Platform
actively gathers and mines social media in 17 markets and 11 languages. Working with local
in-market analysts, actionable insights are generated on a weekly or monthly cadence. For
the North American market, the Listening Platform was leveraged to generate insights around
consumer language, mindset and passion points for smartphone usage. The subsequent
launch campaign helped to propel the smartphone to the top sales position for the carrier.
Connecting travel conversations
to business outcomes
Rationalizing investments in social media is dependent on the travel enterprise’s business goals,
strategy and the key performance indicators that will be developed as an ongoing measure of
success. Investments typically include the tools/technology and human resources.
LISTENING PLATFORM REPORTS & DASHBOARDS
Action Plan Creation
CLIENT BRIEF BUSINESS & MARKETING OBJECTVES
6 1
IMPLICATIONS PLANNING
Objectives & Hypotheses
WHAT Alignment between objectives and
Topics
Topic Relationships
recommendations
Data Filter Deinition
HOW 5 2
Sentiment/Polarity TOPIC & SOURCE DATA Geo/ Language Filters
ANALYSIS COLLECTION* Data Collection
WHERE
Domains Data Extraction
WHO
Influencers
WHAT’S NEW
Momentum Loading
4 3
CONTENT DATA LOADING & De-duplication
CATEGORIZATION 4 HYGIENE SPAM Removal
Tokenization
Taxonomy Creation Word/Phrase Analysis
Scoring
Listening Platform Tools & Processes 3rd Party Social/Search/
Voice Recognition Technologies
A well defined process can help clients connect active listening to business outcomes.
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6. Unlike other solutions, The Listening Platform is not just a tool, as any social tool can collect data and
generate reports. It is the interpretation and translation of data into actionable strategies and tactics
that provides the greatest benefit to a travel company. For illustrative purposes, below are some potential
marketing actions and business outcomes which can be generated from each of the four listening
opportunities previously described:
Listening Opportunity Marketing Action Business Outcome
Categorizing and Input to the creative and agency briefing process Improved insights/
Benchmarking Topics relevance/speed/cost
Example: Actively monitoring topic trending can
• Topic presence and significance enable an airline to proactively address FFP issues
• Competitive activity before they snowball, enabling immediate email
• Campaign propagation and social media communications to address
• Market trends those issues
Mapping the Ecosystem Influencer outreach Advanced targeting and
efficiency in media spend:
• Domains – where are Media strategy – bought/owned/earned higher response and
conversations taking place conversion rates
• Influencers (reach, pull) Example: Identifying advocates of your hotel chain
• Influencers/domain sentiment and matching them to your loyalty database can
• Participants – who are they enable high touch, shareable communications to
• How this changes by topic those potential “brand champions”
Measuring Sentiment Benchmark/measure propagation in key
marketing themes Improved customer
• Negative areas experience
• Positive areas Identify passion/pain points
• Competitive opportunity
• Effects of partnership Example: Actively listening to negative language
around the auto rental process may lead a brand
to hone in on widespread process issues, or issues
specific to a particular rental location
Assessing Topic Relationships Identify key strategic opportunity areas New product or service
(Client/competitor strengths/weaknesses) opportunities
• Consumer language
• Consumer mindset Example: An hotelier might identify that customer
• Attitudes experience with a competitor’s property in a
• Needs and wants particular city is lacking, and present an offer to its
• Pain/passion points own loyalty members who travel to that city. The
hotelier might also target a referral program to its
members who live in that city, making the offer
shareable for those advice givers
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7. Summary
As we progress through the 21st century, one can only anticipate the continuing transformation
of the travel industry. Today, social media discourse provides us with the largest database of
travel conversations that has ever existed. Active listening can help find the meaning behind
these conversations and make those conversations actionable. And as travel conversations
become more global in nature, any social solution must take geographic scale and scope
into consideration.
The Listening Platform enables active listening, driving actionable outcomes for travel marketers
on a global scale. Listen actively. Take action. Connect actions to business outcomes. These
are the requisites for success in today’s online travel marketplace.
Contact us
To learn more and preview The Listening Platform case studies, email:
activelistening@wunderman.com
Businesses that are using The Listening Platform
Financial Services • Understand the impact of economic crisis on consumer attitude towards financial institutions
• Determine how best to communicate changing regulations
Insurance
• Measure the impact of large sponsorship effort (relationship between the brand and the fans)
Mobile Devices • Understand smart phone usage and attitudes
• Identify key influencers and domains to drive social media strategy
• Link traditional brand tracking research with social media analytics
Consumer Electronics • Key barriers for product adoption to drive product re-launch
B2B Technology • Key barriers and opportunities for “Cloud Computing” to drive overall launch strategy
Young Mothers Segment • Insights around diapering and nutrition to drive CRM communications
Entertainment • Leverage tour momentum (conversations) to drive additional CD sales
Understand key motivations and barriers for concert attendance
Healthcare • Conversations regarding various conditions
(e.g. High Blood Pressure) to drive messaging and segmentation
About Wunderman
Wunderman is the original architect of response-driven marketing, an estimated trillion dollar
global industry. Today, with 50+ years of innovation, creativity, and insight, Wunderman stands
as the first name in advertising that delivers measurable results. Throughout its network of 130+
offices in 55+ countries and 15+ specialized companies, Wunderman speaks the customer’s
language—whatever the dialect—at the right time, creating profitable conversations that
build brands and generate sales. Visit us at www.wunderman.com.
©2011 Wunderman. All Rights Reserved.
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