Travel Blog Camp 08: hoorah for heated debate
So, a bit of a late post about Tuesday night’s Travel Blog Camp meet-up in Blackfriars, but I’ve been in bed with the flu (and in fact probably managed to pass it on to most of the people there). Despite my phlegm-filled haze, I very much enjoyed both speaking about STA travelbuzz and the STA Explorers, as well as participating in the other debates.
It was very blog-centric (the clue’s in the title, Moll), so I definitely felt we were coming from a slightly different angle, seeing as STA travelbuzz isn’t really a blog, but a WOM aggregator - and seeing as we put great emphasis on encouraging our STA Explorers to use all the varied tools across social media, not just the infamous weblog. But lots of people seemed really interested in how STA Travel are getting involved in social media in a way that puts their customers, not their ‘brand voice’, at the centre of the conversation. There was a particularly good debates about journalists vs bloggers too.
Big respect to Darren from Travel Rants for organising it, to fellow speakers Alex Bainbridge from TourCMS, Karen Ryan from Europe a la Carte and Kevin May from Travolution, and of course to all the friendly and lively attendees. Here’s hoping there’ll be plenty more to come.
Comments
Hi Molly
I found Tuesday evening’s discussions very interesting, especially the debate surrounding your presentation. My feeling (from having worked in both a branded environment and now on a start up) is that the blogging and brand worlds have quite a way to go until they can reach a stage of peaceful and mutual co-existence in the social media world.
Hope to bump into you at another event, in the meantime, we have posted our take on the evening on our blog.
Hope you get well soon
Anna
Hi Molly
Thanks for speaking last night. I was present as a blogger, who in previous lifetimes has written for Thomas Cook and edited guidebooks etc, etc. The online world meeting the branded world will always bring up issues of independence of voice and the use of a medium that emerged for the purpose of free speech being used for the dark art of corporate PR. Respect to STA for their transparency and good luck with the Buzz and Travellers. If anyone can pull this off properly and genuinely it must be STA’s network of travellers young enough to trust the net and trust the strength of their own voices.
Take a look at http://sandwagon.blogspot.com/2008/11/travel-blogcamp-london-2008-pints-and.html
Anna, Kelly, thanks so much for your comments and yes it was a really stimulating evening, partly because everyone was coming from such different angles. As I said in my speech, we were coming from quite a different angle - most other people seemed to be talking about corporate blogging, whereas we are all about consumer word of mouth - two very different things (and it doesn’t mean I dissaprove of the former - it would just be out of place on STA travelbuzz!)
Love both your articles and it’s great to start actually meeting some others in the travel blogging community - may it only be the start!
Finally managed to write a post about the night: http://matthewparsons.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/in-quotes-travel-blog-camp/
Was a great night…
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