At SpiderOak, we believe in protecting the world’s data.
SpiderOak has developed technology that allows for the instant provisioning of cryptographically secure collaboration spaces for use in scenarios where certainty about who has access to that space is a mission requirement.
Cryptographic segmentation based on secure private blockchain technology, utilizing FIPS 140–2 encryption, is used to enforce strong assurances of confidentiality, integrity, immutability, and authority.
I build disruptive, growth-focused businesses that leverage disruptive innovation, bleeding edge technology and simplicity focused business frameworks. In 21 years, the combination of these items has helped me grow near zero revenue businesses into $3 billion per year, profitable brands.
Practical Innovation = Innovation x Simplicity
Innovation: Combining predictive and prescriptive business models, simplicity and the three flavors of innovation, I build technology based upon the thinking of Clayton Christensen. His influence on me has gelled what I have observed but could not describe myself. Specifically, the concept of a business operating like a boat. Having a common framework that combines ‘data of the past’ with real-time data and ‘theories of the future’, driven by a common and unifying framework. Only then, can an organization thrive.
Simplicity is an anthem that allows for innovation to thrive.
The motivation of the above is driven by how digital (internet) technology is so non-human. For the last 5000 years, humans have communicated with rather primitive instruments. Digital drives many non-human activities which we are still adjusting to, likely for a long time.
Any business that ‘gets ahead’ of this is practicing ‘digital viability.’ To thrive requires something more.
Lacking a compass on how to navigate what to do with a business model is a doomsday scenario. I call it a death spiral.
My passion is to provide leadership, the compass, and framework that creates discovery, navigates digital technology and drives a company to digital viability through the art and science of practical innovation.
These are both heavy process-driven solutions. I like them if you have the time and budget. I would rather get 80% to the final answer in minutes.
According to the Strategyn website, ODI “starts with a deep understanding of the job the customer is trying to get done and the metrics they use to evaluate competing product and service offerings.
These metrics, a special type of need statement we call desired outcomes, form the basis for our innovation process. By knowing how customers measure value, companies are able to align the actions of marketing, development, and R&D with these metrics and systematically create customer value.” As may be obvious, this approach is very prescriptive.
It involves both qualitative and quantitative research and leads to market and product strategy formulation. Sound great? All you consultants out there, don’t get too excited. ODI is a proprietary approach developed and practiced by Strategyn.
If you’ve ever seen an offer to ‘learn how to run a JTBD interview’, you’re probably learning a technique developed by the Detroit-based Rewired Group. They hold in-person workshops and there’s also an online video training series to help people learn how to conduct Switch interviews.
According to the video course website, these interviews help aspiring entrepreneurs get to the real causality of why a consumer shops and buys, understand when to accept what a consumer is saying as fact, and when to challenge, and why consumer satisfaction is important, but it fails us when we’re developing new products.
The Switch interview training focuses on the gathering of insights, but does not include any discussion of how to interpret and apply the findings. As a result, it has become a fruitful starting point for a variety of different ways to interpret and apply findings.
Mission- Bandura delivers threat intelligence automation and control needed for companies of all sizes to block known threats at massive scale, operationalize threat intelligence, and get more out of your existing security resources.
Mission- Cryptonite is a leader in moving target cyber defense. CryptoniteNXT enables any network to actively shield itself from cyberattacks by preventing all attacker reconnaissance and lateral movement. Patent pending moving target cyber defense and micro-segmentation technologies protect enterprise networks from advanced cyber attackers, insider threats and ransomware. The Cryptonite customer base includes leading commercial and government customers around the world.
Mission — CyberSponse is backed by a team of self-made entrepreneurs looking to disrupt the security industry through technological innovation and the community-based inclusiveness of our offering. We look forward to collaborating with your organization and team to disrupt the status quo of cyber, and usher in an age of agile and effective incident response with true grit, hard work, hustle and last focused execution.
Mission- we are creating the ability to bring all the best cyber security learning elements and content together, from the people who are doing it, the people who have done it, the people who have learned from it and the companies that are innovating on it, and deliver that for free to anyone who needs or wants to learn from it.
Mission- Dark Cubed is an easy-to-use cyber security software as a service (SaaS) platform that deploys instantly and delivers enterprise-grade threat identification and protection at a fraction of the cost.
Mission- Our approach to signal processing design uses machine learning to learn optimized models directly from data, rather than manually designing specialized algorithms under simplified toy models. We optimize for the performance of entire systems, inclusive of hardware and channel impairments, rather than stitching together separately optimized components.
Mission- Graphus technology is the most superior social engineering detection capability in the industry. It detects sophisticated attacks that even bypass G Suite’s and Office 365’s world-class security. Underlying patented technology uses graph theory, big data algorithms, and machine learning to determine the trusted relationships and user behaviors unique to the organization. Interactions and user activities are evaluated against this profile to detect social engineering attacks and suspicious activities.
Mission — GroupSense is a leading provider of cyber intelligence services. GroupSense is not a feed, or a search engine for the dark web. GroupSense are people, empowered by proprietary technology, helping information security and intel teams realize value.
Mission- Intensity Analytics is a Virginia-based software firm that develops next-generation, physical user and entity behavioral authentication (“physical UEBA”) security software technology. Physical UEBA is a critically important layer in a defense-in-depth strategy, designed to reliably and successfully defeat cybersecurity problems arising from the most common attack vector: stolen user credentials.
Mission- This is why NS8 is not like other fraud solution companies. Not only do we see eCommerce fraud as a growing concern, we see a greater purpose for detection and scoring. By providing a full suite of fraud protection tools that use behavioral analytics and real-time user scoring, we provide businesses with global monitoring to both protect against threats and give firms a greater insight into their real customers.
Mission- Ostendio now serves a broad range of clients who have become members of the MyVCM Trust Network including healthcare providers and practitioners, digital health companies and medical device manufacturers. Ostendio’s MyVCM was created to help solve that problem by allowing companies to more easily develop an effective security and compliance program.
Mission — To employ the best minds using the best analytic technologies on the market to solve the most complex information challenges across the globe.
Mission — SecondWrite brings deep learning and forced code-execution to the battle against advanced malware. Our dynamic analysis malware detector uses patented technology to find, execute and evaluate hidden code paths that other malware detectors miss. We automatically find code sequences that characterize malware without prior signatures, thus classifying malicious program behavior and features that consistently evade competitive technology. Our product, Malware DeepView delivers deep, actionable insight into malware quickly with a lower total cost of ownership than competitive tools.
Mission — SentiGrade ™ API offers programmatic access to our automatic Sentiment Analysis engine. It is ideally suited for customers who have their own analytical and visualization solutions that could benefit from accurate sentiment scores extracted from the customer’s data. SentiGrade’s sentiment engine has been proven to work in predicting election outcomes, conflicts, and stock price fluctuations.
Mission — STEMBoard creates technologies that help advance our nation and its citizens. We believe in Integrity, Innovation and Inclusion. We seek to improve society through systematic innovation and by attracting, nurturing and developing the world’s emerging brilliance.
Mission — TrackOFF builds tools to protect users’ identities and personal lives. Our mission is to empower people to reclaim control of their data. Today’s digital environment is complex, that’s why we build easy-to-use software with the everyday consumer in mind. We also believe in the right to privacy: Your sensitive information won’t be collected, shared, or sold.
Mission — WireWheel combines machine learning, data science and cloud computing, to make it easy for CPOs and privacy teams to meet new data privacy and compliance challenges
Maybe a better question: Where are concentrations of happy people?
Our research indicates several factors contribute to what makes a happy city. We started our research by looking at what others judge as happy places. A few popular magazines list top x most happy cities, but the results are all over the place. Nothing is consistent in the selection of cities. We are working on a definition of happiness and finding out where in the US is truly happy.
It’s not bike trails or money.
It’s not the nice weather either.
What looks to be causal is use of free time and availability of places to use our free time.
There is a high causal relationship to past-focused time orientation, social process with friends, differentiation, analytical thinking, and biological and perceptual process.
What does not connect well is cognitive process, such as insight, tentativeness, and insight. How odd. Our research is not done. We are still removing subjective data.
The below chart indicating places where happiness is in high concentration.
Above is a sample of places considered happy cities. The density of human activities is inconsistent and so are the personality traits. Overall, the data could be reasonably correct (vs miserable places) but the inconsistency across 450+ activities (densities). Below is a sample of activity density.
Boulder, Co is often voted one of the happiest places in the US. It’s not the place but state of mind.
This article was written by Christopher Harrison Skinner.
Proposal #1: Augmented Reality
My idea for a tourism app is to use augmented reality to introduce tourists to history through their phones at historic locations. A company could hire reenactors to portray any event at a historical location and film it with a 360 degree camera. Then, augmented reality developers could make an app that shows this reenacted scene to the user through their electronic device. This allows the user to experience a reenactment of history up close and in any position they want and at the same historic location. The image below is a good example of what I was thinking about; I took a modern-day image of New Orleans and a historical photo and made it appear that the viewer sees the historic photo through their phone.
The user can access these historic records by scanning the area with their phone and then the phone can either lead the user to a historic location using GPS, or can show the user what this area would have looked like in the past.
This version of augmented reality could be repurposed for almost anything tourism related; haunted houses, historic battles, maps, the Hurricane Katrina flood, sports. Almost anything could be recreated with reenactors, computer generated images, and historic buildings.
We can also use Augmented Reality to go through different time periods for any historic area. Take, for instance, the Saint Louis Cathedral located in New Orleans, Louisiana. The cathedral was first constructed in 1718 and has been rebuilt many times. The app could have a slider bar at the bottom or top of the phone and the user could slide the bar depending on what time period they want to view. The cathedral could be shown as just a two-dimensional image or it could be remade using a three-dimensional model made by 3d artists.
If the user decides to linger, some quick historical facts could appear on the screen or be told to the user via speech-to-text. To gamify this experience, we can use a number of different methods:
Firstly, we can incentivise player interaction by prompting them to screenshot the AR game when they are viewing historic places and events and tag us in any relevant social media platform; we can then award the player with points to be tracked on a leaderboard that can be either local or global (or both). This work for both incentivising the player and generating free advertisements for the app. We could also award user achievements and milestones with gift cards or some other monetary prize (travel discounts or cooperation with local businesses and hotels?)
For historic events, we can have the player participate in history. Take the battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, we could have a player participate in multiple roles in the battle; they could be on either the American or British side and either be a line infantryman, an artillery crewman, an officer, or a civilian observer. The player would be awarded points if they can follow a set path and observe events within the time allotment.
This concept can easily be gamified in a number of ways: we could
To better understand the app idea, an understanding of the difference between Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) is needed. Below are two examples; Pok?mon Go (an AR app) and the Oculus Rift (a VR headset).
Pok?mon Go, developed and published by Niantic, is a game for mobile phones released in the summer of 2016. The game’s main pull is that users can find and collect digital monsters scattered around the world using their phones. As you can tell from the picture above, a 3d digital creature is superimposed on the world as seen through the camera.
Augmented reality differs from virtual reality in one major way. In virtual reality, the user’s sense of space in the world is almost completely nullified; at the least, users of virtual reality wear a headset that completely obstructs their vision of the real world. The Oculus Rift (pictured below from the front and the back) is a prime example of what a basic virtual reality headset looks like.
As you can see, the headset completely envelopes the user’s eyes, cutting off their view of the real world. Inside the headset are a pair of small screens that are directly in front of the user’s eyes. The screens work like typical screens, displaying whatever the developer has made, the pair of small screens creating a false binocular vision. Some more advanced models also come with hand controls that are able to create a digital copy of the user’s hands that track and mirror the users hand movements from the real world to the virtual world accurately using infrared sensors; additionally, they can include headphones that allow the user to hear whatever is in the virtual world. Finally, some experimental devices allow for the player to “walk” in the virtual world using a multi directional treadmill (pictured below).
All these combine to give the user the most realistic feeling of being in a virtual world apart from the real world. Unfortunately, all these devices mean that the user must be confined to a small area in the real world (as small as 2×2 meters to as large as 3×3 meters)
Augmented reality, on the other hand, primarily uses the real world and superimposes virtual assets (text, images, 3d and 2d, etc) onto the screen of whatever electronic device the camera is hooked up to. Compared to virtual reality, augmented reality is cheaper, more accessible, and allows the user to move about the real world freely.
By C. Harrison J. Skinner and Christopher J. Skinner
Summary
Dr. Ian Yeoman (PhD Management Science, Edinburgh Napier University) hosted a quarter-hour Ted Talk titled “The Future of Tourism” in 2013. In the talk, Dr. Yeoman talks about global trends in reference to tourism and makes predictions based on statistical information from the United Nation World Tourism Organization.
Opinion
Overall, Dr. Yeoman’s ideas of what the future of tourism will look like in the year 2050 seems credible; His sources are reliable and the trends that he has noted (especially the one about the increase in lifespan due to better healthcare leading to more older people than younger people) are very plausible in the future.
However, there are a few trends Dr. Yeoman states that I find harder to believe and some that are outright not true. For example, when Dr. Yeoman proclaimed that Google Glass would become massively popular have turned out to be completely false. Since its debut in 2013, Google has failed to reach mass market appeal that they were hoping their new “Smart Glasses” system would achieve. Some of Dr. Ian Yeoman’s predictions also seem implausible; his beliefs that hypersonic airplanes would replace conventional aircraft is hard to believe, considering that jet airplanes produce a disproportionate amount of carbon emissions compared to automobiles. I believe that bullet trains and larger transoceanic ships , instead of faster aircraft, are the future of the travel industry.
I also found Dr. Yeoman’s talk to be too large of a scale compared to what I am specifically focused on. My research is specifically on how video games can be a positive influence on the tourism industry.
Key takeaways
Tourism in the future will continue to exponentially grow
Tourism needs to be focused on older tourists (no bungee jumping!)
Europe and North America (as well as more developed countries) are where most tourists will come from
Tourists want something exotic and in short bursts.
Tourists of the future will want a combination of feel-good experiences, cultural foods, and environmental tourists
As wealth, resources, and technology develop, people are more likely to travel.
Tourists want cheaper and faster methods of traveling.
Action Items
Find out the future of Howtourists of the future will travel, the more we know about the method, the more we can specifically target them with games and ads.
Figure out the proportion of older people (anyone over 30) to younger people. With that data we can budget specific games according to that population ratio.
Also try to figure out more specifics of these future tourists: where will they come from? What language will they speak? What is their economic situation? Etc, these specifics will allow us to accurately advertise to people who would enjoy the gamification of tourism.
Be able to find places the tourist of the future will want to go to. Places exotic, safe, fun; something for the tourist who wants a cuisine tour, a nature walk, or to just have fun.
Gamify EVERYTHING : from the moment the potential tourist wants to even look for a place, to the moment they return. Make everything fun! Packing, planning, exploring, traveling, everything! Recurring players are acquired and maintained through user involvement and novelty.
Dr. Ian Yeoman holds a BSc (Hons) in Catering Systems from Sheffield Hallam University PhD in Management Science from Edinburgh Napier University.
In Dr. Ian Yeoman’s fourteen minute talk, he talks about trends and predictions for tourism in 2050.
In 1950, 25 million people went on vacations internationally and wore formal apparel. Today, about 1 billion people go on international vacations and do not wear formal apparel. Dr. yeoman cites this trend as a result of society getting “richer, more wealthy, more abundant in resources and mobility.” Dr. Yeoman cites the United Nations World Tourism Organization’s predictions that in 2030 1.9 billion people will have traveled internationally and 4.3 billion in 2050.
Dr. Yeoman believes that tourism is a result of three factors: resources, technology, and wealth. These three factors are what fundamentally determine the rate of tourism. He goes on to cite that, statistically, Germans are the most frequent of any traveling group in Europe, followed by the Dutch; however, the Dutch more frequently leave work sooner to travel.
Dr. Yeoman also states that the tourist of the future is a combination of an eco-tourist, a hedonist-tourist, and a food-tourist. The average tourist’s desire to travel stems from their desire to sample something new and exotic. In New Zealand and South Africa in the early 1900’s, people who wanted to play cricket had to take five days off work. Today, people who want to play cricket only have to take an afternoon off because the shortened version of the game called Twenty-20 shortened the overall playtime of the game. Dr. Yeoman states that this shortening is due to people’s desires to sample more often and in shorter periods of time.
Another prediction of Dr. Yeoman is that in the future, there will be more older people than younger people. What this means for tourism is that certain activities, such a bungee jumping for example, will not be as popular in the future. Dr. Yeoman classifies “adventurous tourism” as tourist activities that have been statistically limited to the younger audience. The hotel industry will also suffer in the future, due to the labor supply of under 25-year-olds being lower than needed to support the hotel industry, healthcare, and retail. The abundance of older people are, according to Dr. Yeoman, due to the increase in lifespan made possible by modern society.
Another major change to tourism is that more and more people are bringing their mobile phones and cameras in order to share their experiences with others.
Yet another change to tourism is exactly how people will travel in the future. From hypersonic jets that can travel to opposite ends of the globe in three to four hours, to massive floating aircraft carriers that behave like a mix between airport and hotel.
Dr. Yeoman then tries to suggest that Google Glass will become a major factor in the future of tourism (Whoops!). In my opinion, I believe that he was trying to suggest how portable electronics and the internet combine to give a traveller extensive amounts of information before they have even moved or gotten lost.
Dr. Yeoman summarizes that the future is uncertain, the only things he believes to be certain are that the tourist of the future will demand more: complexity, cheaper prices, and sophistication. It’s up to tourism businesses to try and innovate and understand what the tourist of the future will want.
My internet work started in the tourism industry, promoting small businesses in the French Quarter in 1995. That grew into building architecture and selling paid and free media for United Airlines, Hotwire, Orbitz and a number of other cities and companies.
Since those early days, my company has focused on getting to know people, why they travel and why they decide at a deep level. We know why people travel and have a different way of approaching why people pick your DMO to visit. We find insights that are different, beyond age, race, and simple demographics. We focus on the linguistics of personality through our technology and 20+ years of understanding the details of getting heads in beds.
Theories are nice but having concrete material, focused on tax revenue growth is better.
We know your team needs specific help and we never lose sight of that. This is not just how we make our money: it is truly our passion.
WHY WE ARE DIFFERENT THAN ANYONE ELSE
My background is similar to yours. I love tourism and also love figuring out why people buy, but I never liked or believed in cookies or click data. It’s not bad data but it often misleads us in the tourism world. Tourism is very much an online and offline experience. I sold a company to Google some years ago and at their suggestion, I got into the predictive CRM business. CRM is a source of truth that helps define why people buy.
If you have a really big CRM, you can figure out why large groups make decisions. Through studying the psycholinguistics of human activities, such as travel, jogging, scuba diving, etc, we form theories about why people do what they do. I have a degree in abstract mathematics and have been practicing computational linguistics for 25 years. For me, content is not just a story but deep patterns of how people think.
The idea is to find a source of truth in your studies, your city, region, visitors and your CRM. While avoiding strict data of the past methodologies, I can infer why people come to your DMO. Inferring from past sales data is fine in many situations, but it becomes powerful if you combine it with predictive data. You probably recognize some of this thinking from Clayton Christensen. He is my main influence, along with David Oreck on how to use data of the past with theories of future behavior.
I acquired two sets of data over the years. One is a CRM which represents most of the United States buying public. It’s about 233 million people and I’ve combined it with psycholinguistic calculations on why they buy. That’s the real nice theory, but it becomes powerful when you connect to research or CRM data. This allows brands to understand audiences in a whole new way, write content that is gripping, that describes your DMO well to the perfect visitor and it helps people make much better decisions about where to go and what to do.
I also have business data on 80 million people and the types of businesses they work for. This helps define the market ecosystem.
By combining all of this together along with information from your DMO, you can remove a lot of executive bias, speed up consumer research, and get content out that is profound and meaningful.
I would call it an ideation process backed by powerful technology. The idea is to limit the bias of people as much as possible and find sources of truth that are predictive in nature.
It works very well.
There’s two postulates that I’m working on:
Only 2 to 4 personality types are profitable for any given DMO. Understanding who best fits your DMO drives higher ratings, better content and more influencers. Ultimately, it means more tax revenue.
The profit differential between best customer type personality and least is at least 10x. Bringing the wrong visitor leads to lower ratings. They don’t return or buy as much as the best customer. So why “average” your efforts when we can find the ideal customer types?
When you look at conversion rates online, and how dismal they can be, you see why marketers tend to swing too wide. Conversion suffers tremendously. Your DMO is an equalizer to the machine-driven thinking that can crush a DMO.
Store conversions above 30% makes sense because the salesperson can be adaptive to the buyer and the very nature of stores is much more dimensional and visual, which aids in basket size and conversion rate.
If you can bring store conversion rates to the online experience, you have an amazing DMO. I’ve been able to increase conversion rates by focusing on who matters most and building look-alike audiences not based on clicks and cookies, but real customer desire.
Bringing a more human way to market to online drives tax revenue.
Imagine building content that speaks to the ideal customer like a National Geographic Traveler magazine with the power of data and machine learning technology. It’s is what drives focus, prioritization and tax revenue.
THE DETAILS — HOW WE CAN HELP YOU
Find what matters, empower a team, be empathetic, and focus on growth. We assist creating governance and help you define priorities while motivating and emphatically bringing a team together. We help you create process in a chaotic world. Find what matters, open eyes, and grow. Whether it is helping create governance or writing process, our passion is finding you the best visitors.
Scorecard and operationalization drives our decision-making process. We can successfully put in place a way to measure content to tax revenue. By looking at analytics, combined with tax revenue, search data, you can prioritize your next moves.
Dashboards: We help create dashboards that present meaningful information. We live in a world where too much data exists and many struggle to boil it down.
SEO and SEM: We invented ways to create traffic and can get you to 50%+ traffic from free search. We know what search engines expect and what you should expect from search engines.
Gap analysis: Find what is missing on your site using big data combined with site and app traffic. Google expects certain content in order to rank you appropriately. Gain traffic and tax revenue with relevant tactics.
Link analysis plan: This plan shows what sites are not linking to you and who should. We often see links come from easy to get places while the big sites don’t show up. That creates a gap. We have a way to reach out to journalists to promote linking and content creation, which drives traffic and tax revenue.
Content x links = great SEO and tax revenue growth. By prioritizing certain content that is relevant to your DMO, you gain certainty about what matters most.
Competitor analysis dashboard and supporting data: We don’t focus chasing what others do but it can help.
Built-out detailed studies of travelers by segment based on ‘why they buy”. Find out where they go and what they are interested in when they are in market and out of market. We can create custom studies and help define content, even down to what verbs certain segments read best. The experiential traveler is a hot topic and we understand who they are and how your content writers can best approach for your market.
We help you do real work and prioritize what matters
Authentic, real, and personal
In a day and age of ‘Machine Darwinism’, understanding who is real and who can drive value for your your DMO is difficult. Machine Darwinism is when algorithms build content based on data. Ratings, placements, and facts become traffic drivers. The ‘why’ is lost in fads. Machines and platforms can’t solve the problem. Machines might drive traffic but they often fail to persuade people. Your content writers need help to overcome this problem.
While data can’t persuade people and solve ‘why’, you need data to drive focus on who is interested and what it takes to convert them.
We have business data including the econometrics of the tourist economy of your city
We have people data, 233 million people in all and understand why they travel and what they desire about your DMO
Data is the foundation that allows your team to focus on what matters — driving tax revenue
STRATEGY
It does not take long, but getting alignment on your strategy is critical.
Understanding your customer
We have developed a scorecard methodology that looks at multiple ways to see a person and the businesses that serve your economy. Our methods do not focus on any one metric, our methods prioritize what to work on first without creating complexity. It’s important to blend many different things such as time on site, click through rate, and bounce rate to name a few.
By prioritizing the most important visitors you can better understand in and out of market priorities for each segment and build content according to their expectations.
By understanding the psycholinguistics of people, you can better build content that interests them.
Measure only what matters and what drives real value. Example: who is your best customer and do you have itineraries designed just for them?
Having a strategy that prioritizes, tests, ramps, and expands what works is important to your DMO’s future.
Building plans that work
We help you define marketplace trends using past, present, and future data sets. Prediction data helps create theories of the future. It is vital to include that data.
By using sources of truth, we can find sound evidence on where to develop plans and guidelines going forward. As people change, their demands change and your members and businesses in your market must react faster than ever.
You supply data to your stakeholders and members that can influence what is capitalized and what is invested in your market.
MORE DETAILS
Business Data
By understanding who is conducting business in your DMO, you have a sense of what exists and how well it serves the visitor ecosystem.
Revenue per person by Business Type: informs you who is profitable, who is doing well, and who is not. Who needs your help? This prioritizes which businesses can best serve what types of tourist.
Economic zones: where is the next area to develop to incentivize?
Some examples of business data that helps define the conditions in your DMO: revenue per SIC and revenue per website.
START WITH YOUR WEBSITE
What should the architecture of my website look like? Does that affect crawl and ranking? These are just two of many questions that are critical in building a website that drives traffic and visitors.
By defining what people are looking for, not looking for, and then building the site in such a way that search engine crawlings rank well, you solve one of the critical pieces in curiosity to tax revenue.
We help build and transition websites. One recent success is New Orleans.com; for over 15 years New Orleans has had multiple websites. We helped craft the agreement to have a single website entrance from multiple sites into one without negatively affecting visitor volumes and tax revenue.
We help how teams work together and how you can help prioritize and scorecard what should be the priorities for driving tax revenue.
Search research
We can gather the search terms that drive visitors to websites and help you define what are the best search terms and content to build.
What is the gap analysis?
DMOs are the great equalizers. In an age of machines ranking websites based on user ratings and social currency, a DMO can help redefine what a city and region is about fairly and responsibly. You can correct what often can be turned into a facade economy.
RESEARCH — BRING POWER TO THE TABLE, FAST
Help determine the impact of modern technology on the supply and buy side of your tourism economy.
How does Airbnb affect tourism outside of well-known areas? How does Uber contribute to driving people into different regions of your market and its impacting spend?
SEO
Determine how your website is performing, where to best get traffic, and how to yield the most from free search. If your site is not getting 50 to 60% of its traffic from search engines you might have a problem.
Write titles and descriptions as well as architecture to improve search ranking.
Determine technical issues that could be affecting crawling and indexing.
Help educate your writers on how to best combine SEO writing styles with reasons for visiting your DMO.
Backlinks and linking: how to help journalists who are influencers find material. How to get quality links that drive traffic and search ranking.
We have a unique way to measure and prioritize where you should seek backlinks. It is one of a kind and helps create a priority that can be tied to tax revenue.
Social: help determine real social influencers. Reach out to legitimate content creators that can help craft real content. How to budget for this, how to determine what value to expect.
Example: we recently worked on a website that gets less than 2% traffic from social. The particular location has great social currency, but the real value comes from traditional journalists. One article in the New York Times is worth millions of social postings. How do you determine who is authentic, who is going to drive traffic and value at a reasonable cost?
SEM
We help you determine what works and if you should buy paid search media. Often, a long tail strategy can work, but who is setting up 10,000+ phrases and how much should you pay?
We have a long history of buying media for travel sites: United Airlines, Orbitz, Hotwire to name a few. What you should buy and how you should buy it is important part of a paid media strategy.
Building content with you or for you
Because we know people at a deep level and why they want to travel, we can help you build actual content whether it be itineraries, articles, or organize things to do according to visitor types.
BIG DATA
We can perform cluster analysis of why people travel. Using linguistics software, we can ethically discover why people come to your market and what are their needs, reasons to decide, and why.
The diversity of people makes content a challenge. By understanding people at a deep level, you can segment, cluster, and better convert thought more effective creative.
We have many variables that make up your DMO’s economy. Data can help you define who to help, who should be involved.
Store density by employee size and can be configured for heat mapping revenue/employee
Density mapping customer intent by subject matter is a great way to find what people want and helps focus content and media execution.
Here is a list of variables we measure
Examples of NASICS tourist business descriptions
Example of Psycholinguistic research that helps define how to write and what to write. By connecting this data to CRM data we can help Define who is visiting and who is the target segments. That helps Define a Content schedule as well as the tonality of how to reach them best. The blow example is people that Garden in Iowa.
CONCLUSION
We are here to help DMOs grow. We understand people, specifically travelers, at a deep level that sets the foundation for content, media, prioritization and design.
We are here to help you, not take over. We are an empathetic asset to help you get ahead and grow. By empowering teams with understandable information that can be put to use right away, we remove the unknowns.
It makes the process of utilizing JTBD theory faster, easier and cheaper to execute. The Clayton Christensen theory is critical to figuring out why people buy. Dr. Christensen has been very important to my career growth and ability to “compete against luck”. By identifying your best customers’ desires and reasons for ‘hiring’ your company, you can find more, speak to them as you know them. Having software allows you to speed to market faster, have an “always on” approach two jobs to be done without invasive techniques.
By combining predictive theories of people with core business data, you can see over the horizon. Reprioritize your distribution of profits based on the ability to delight customers. Finding out what motivates your customers, and unlock the customer journey, you are no longer at the whim of media.
If you’re trying to understand your customers through media and those KPI’s, you’re going to be always disappointed in the results. Media produces minimal KPI’s while maximizing their profitability, not yours. One way to think of it.
You have to reduce your audience size using prediction.
In a recent exercise, I removed 98.5% of the audience to get to an exact look-a-like audience.
This is designed to help you see your CRM in a whole new way, a psycholinguistic way. I help you figure out why people buy long before they know what they want (predictive analytics). I look deep into what delights people (customer delight as a KPI) about your company. Having a deep understanding of people is a lot like knowing a friend. It significantly impacts conversion rates and retention.
Jeff Bezos tells Amazon staff he anticipates the company will fail someday, noting most large firms don’t last hundreds of years, reports CNBC; the comments came in response to a question about what Amazon had learned about the bankruptcy of Sears and other retailers; Bezos says it’s the company’s responsibility to ensure it delays failure for as long as possible by focusing on customers….
Obvious the man understands the theories of Clayton Christensen.
Amazon can delay its fate by understanding jobs to be done and disruptive innovation. Jeff gets it. Does the company get it?
Jeff’s focus on customer delight is solid. Now he needs to ‘own the supply chain’ to keep the company going.
