The keyword research is broken down into 3 main sections: overview, keyword ideas, and SERP analysis.
The overview looks like this:
The first section is a graph that breaks down the search volume over time.
You can see the search volume for any keyword in any country and language over the course of the last 12 months.
The graph will show you if the keyword is gaining or declining in popularity or if it has seasonality.
In addition to that, it breaks down the cost per click, the SEO difficulty, and the paid difficulty.
The difficulty scores are from 1 to 100. The higher the number the harder it will be to compete for that keyword. And the lower the number the easier it is to compete.
Keyword Ideas
The second part of the keyword research is the ideas section.
This is the section that is most similar to the prior Ubersuggest but with a few more features.
You’ll see a list of keyword ideas.
The keywords are pulled using both Google Suggest and AdWords recommendations. This way you can get a comprehensive list of potential keywords you may want to rank for.
And similar to the overview section, you’ll also be able to see volume data for each keyword as well as cost per click (CPC), paid difficulty (PD), and SEO difficulty (SD) data.
Now on the right side of the keyword ideas report you’ll see all of the sites that rank in the top 100 for that term.
This is my favorite part of the keyword ideas report because you can easily see the estimated visit count based on rankings.
This metric looks at whether a keyword has seasonality and if there are any rich snippets or paid listings for the term.
In addition to showing you the estimated visits based on rank, you’ll also see how many social shares each URL has and its domain score.
Domain score is a metric between 1 and 100. The higher the number, the more authoritative a domain is and the harder it will be to beat that site.
As for the social shares, this will tell you how much people loved that particular web page. If more people are sharing it, they must have really enjoyed it.
The last feature in the keywords idea report (other than the exporting to CSV feature which doesn’t need much of an explanation) is the filtering.
This is where you can filter the keyword results based on any data point you want. From limiting the results to just Google Suggest or AdWords or by filtering keywords based on their popularity and competition.
If there are also too many results like the screenshot above, you can exclude or include certain terms or phrases. This will help you filter the results even faster.
And if you want to focus on long tail terms, just “uncheck” the “Google Ads” option and you will see all of the long tail terms.
SERP Analysis
The last section, SERP analysis, shows you a simple view of the top 100 sites that rank for any given term.
I know many of you are doing keyword research in different languages and regions and you’ll be able to do that with all of the reports, including the SERP analysis.
Eventually, I’ll showcase rich snippets and paid advertising data in this report.
We are already taking those two things into account when we run our calculations on estimated visits.
And of course, you’ll also see social share data and domain score.
So, what’s next?
I wish I was able to release everything at once, but development is never easy or fast. I have an amazing team… but good things just take time.
A few of the features I want to release over the next few months include a traffic analyzer report, which shows how much traffic a domain receives from Google.
Another feature I will release will be a report that showcases top pages for any given website and the search terms that each of those pages rank for.
Once I release the traffic analyzer report, the team will be focusing on the content ideas report.
The content ideas will be part of the keyword research section.
When you research any keywords, you’ll be able to see the most popular articles on that subject based on search traffic and social shares (similar to Buzzsumo).
Conclusion
What do you think about the new Ubersuggest? If you haven’t used it, go check it out.
And if you find any bugs, please email them to support@neilpatel.com so my team and I can work on fixing them.
Like I mentioned earlier, this is a work in progress and other amazing features are already being worked on for future release. A lot of these ideas come from you guys so, please, the more feedback the better.
Nowadays everyone tells me there is no point in even sharing content on Facebook.
But you know what? You can still generate traffic from Facebook.
Yes, traffic has declined. Even so, in the last 31 days, I’ve generated 20,420 visits from Facebook.
That’s not too shabby considering I’m only publishing 4 articles a month. That’s an average of 5,105 visitors per article from Facebook.
And because I’ve been building the ultimate SEO tool, I’ve been gathering social sharing data on over 9 billion URLs.
But a large portion of the URLs in our database aren’t articles. So, for this analysis, we looked at 5,860,631,392 articles.
Before I dive into what we have learned, there are few things you ought to know about the data:
Technically we have gathered social sharing data on 11,721,262,784 articles. For each URL we gather data on the HTTP and the HTTPS version to get an accurate count as more sites have transitioned to HTTPS over time.
We only looked at articles. A lot of URLs such as nike.com have over a million Facebook shares, but they aren’t articles.
We looked at articles in multiple languages as English isn’t the main language everyone speaks in the world.
When I say “social shares”, that includes reactions, comments, and shares from Facebook.
We excluded scraper sites. A lot of the articles shared on Facebook are scraper sites. They barely have any shares and it skews the data.
In total, the 5,860,631,392 articles came from 163,968,722 domains.
Our list of articles started with Google search results. Because we have data on 507,348,976 search engine results from 64 different countries, we were then able to find the sites that you read on a regular basis, which then helped us crawl and find more articles that you may read.
Let’s dive into the learnings.
What type of content generates the most Facebook likes overtime?
And that makes sense because who doesn’t love a visual piece of content such as an infographic?
But what if you want social shares over time?
By looking at how many social shares each article generates on a monthly basis, we were able to see the growth rate and the types of article that generate the most social shares over time.
Here’s the share growth rate over time per article type:
If you want a quick boost in Facebook traffic, consider creating infographics.
But if you want more consistent Facebook traffic each and every month, focus on “how to” articles. They don’t do as well right off the bat, but over time they produce more consistent Facebook traffic.
The reason for this is that infographics are harder to rank on Google because they don’t contain a lot of text.
By creating content like “how to” articles that tend to get searched frequently, you can get consistent traffic to your articles which will cause more social shares.
How long (or short) should your headlines be?
Do Facebook users prefer short or long headlines? If you had to take a guess, what would you think?
Most people think the shorter the better…
Let’s look at the data:
Users prefer headlines that are roughly 7, 8 or 9 words.
You can’t really explain what an article is about in 4 words. By having your headline long enough, it will allow you to be more descriptive.
Don’t focus on making your headlines as short as possible, focus on making them descriptive.
How do images impact shares?
You already know people love images. If they didn’t, Facebook wouldn’t be as popular.
But the question is, how many images do you really need per article to get the maximum number of social shares?
In general, the more images the better.
The one thing to note is that a lot of the articles that had over 7 images weren’t really articles per se.
A lot of them were articles that have a clear objective of getting you to browse through an image gallery, such as someone showing off stunning images of the Milky Way or image galleries of silly cats.
When writing content, consider including images to describe your message. The more the better.
How long should your lists be?
Based on our data, most people prefer writing list-based articles with the number 10. In other words, their lists only have 10 items.
When we looked at the average share count based on list size, it was clear that lists that were 10 items long won.
But there is a problem: the data is skewed because everyone focuses on smaller lists.
When we started to look at the median share count per list size, the data got interesting.
The more detailed the list, the better.
If you ever decide to write a list-based post that is over 100 items, there is a good chance people will share it assuming it is super detailed.
Shortlists have been beaten to death for years. That’s why longer ones that leverage the skyscraper technique perform better these days.
How long should your articles be?
Should you write short articles or long ones? And how short or long should they be?
This question has been asked and discussed in marketing circles for years.
The data shows, the longer the better.
If you were to write 10,000-word blog posts that are super actionable, you would generate more social shares than if you wrote 2,000-word blog posts.
So for a nice balance, I would still stick with the advice I gave in that article, which is to write roughly 2,000-word blog posts. Then expand upon it over time. And every time you expand upon the article, you can share it again on Facebook.
If you don’t care about Google and you only want to focus on Facebook, then just go for that 10,000-word article.
You’ll also notice that 1,000-word articles generate more shares than 2,000-word articles.
We were curious why this was so we dug into the data a bit more and found that articles that contained less than 1,000 words in many cases contained more images than 2,000-word articles.
In addition to that, many of the shorter articles were also news based.
And speaking of news…
Is it better to write news-based content or evergreen content?
Over time, evergreen content gets more traffic. It’s not just because of Facebook, it’s that they rank better in Google and get more consistent traffic over the years.
No one is Googling about what happened in the news a year ago.
None-the-less, let’s look at the first hour of when an article is published.
News based articles win in the short run. I already discussed above how “how to” articles will get you the most consistent search traffic over time, but if you want a quick hit, consider covering news related topics.
Do emotions affect social sharing?
I used to love writing articles that pushed fear because they generated a lot of traffic for me. But the issue with doing this is that I used to get emails from people asking me if I was depressed or needed help.
I’ve always been fine, but many of you told me how you don’t like when I push fear in my articles. So, I naturally stopped.
And although fear is an effective way to generate more social shares, it isn’t the most powerful emotion (at least when it comes to Facebook).
People love content with laughter, awe, and joy. Or at least, that’s what people prefer sharing, as opposed to fear.
You can clearly see by the image above that people prefer laughter roughly 3 times more than they prefer fear.
When should you post your content?
Writing an amazing article isn’t enough. If you write content on a bad day and release it during a time when no one is online, then you won’t go viral on Facebook.
People prefer sharing content on Tuesday over any other day.
If you are going to write only one article a week, release it on Tuesday. If you are writing multiple articles a week, focus on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday as they are the most popular days.
And as for the time of day…
You tend to share content between 11 am and 1 pm.
That’s right before you are about to leave for your lunch break and it’s right when you come back. A lot of people get tired during the middle of the day and they need a break.
That’s why you will see many people within your office on Facebook during the afternoon.
If you miss the 1 pm publishing window, you can always shoot for the 6 pm slot. The share count goes back up around the time people are finishing up with work.
Conclusion
Yes, it is hard to get traffic from Facebook. They do limit your reach compared to 4 or 5 years ago because they don’t want you driving people from Facebook off to your website. That and they want you to boost posts to increase your reach (and their revenue).
The longer people stay on Facebook the more money they make. That’s why they love video content.
But that doesn’t mean you still can’t do well. If you follow the data above it will give you the best shot of getting the most traffic from Facebook.
What do you think about the data and stats? Are you going to follow it?
The furor over whether brand attitudes predict or follow behavior made me take a step back and re-examine my own beliefs about how attitudes and behavior interact. Assuming that ‘it’s complicated’ is not helpful, I have tried to map out a framework for thinking about how the two affect each other.
In most cases people do not have strong attitudes about a brand prior to having direct experience of it. Instead, they will register an implicit impression of the brand and may consciously remember a few claims made about it, even if they discount those claims as ‘that’s what they say’. As a result, people’s willingness to endorse a brand on various attributes in a survey before trying that brand is in part dependent on how easily ‘testable’ they are. I might be more willing to believe that brand X is ‘the most popular choice in America’ but less likely to believe it is ‘the best thing you ever tasted’.
This is not to say that people reserve judgement in all cases; it is a matter of degree. There will always be brands that that people feel are so obviously meaningful that they are willing to say good things about them before trial. I have related elsewhere that when it launched the iPhone was anticipated by some to meet their needs even though they had not yet bought one. But, for most people positive attitudes remain latent until search, shopping, and subsequent usage confirm or deny them.
Even if people have strong attitudes toward a brand before checking it out, then the actual experience will trump those expectations. Of course, experience is a malleable thing, particularly when it comes to how an experience is remembered. Good advertising and positive word-of-mouth can shape how you experience a brand, highlighting positives and distracting from negatives, but they will not overcome obvious weaknesses that are readily apparent during usage.
Continued usage of a brand will consolidate early impressions, confirming attitudes, and habituating people to the brand. Even if the experience is not that great then users will tend to agree with positive statements in a survey because it is the brand they use. Most people do not care that much about the brands they use, but they do like to be able to easily justify why they use them, so you end up with a basic split where users tend to say good things about a brand and non-users say little. It will take a really bad experience to get a brand user to start saying bad things, but then they might be so upset they resort to Twitter to share their story.
Taking this back to the argument over the value of brand attitudes and whether they lead or lag behavior, it becomes obvious that behavior leads attitudes in all cases (even if experience simply confirms a positive expectation) but that in some cases attitudes can lead behavior. However, to lead behavior an attitude must be supported by evidence of relevance and advantage convincing enough that some people accept the claim at face value. However, just because advertising does not shift attitudes ahead of trial does not mean it is ineffective provided it does leave a positive impression that can be confirmed during usage. This is why we monitor advertising claims and impressions. It gives an early indication of whether advertising is likely to trigger a positive influence during search, shopping, or usage.
My experience suggests that attitudes are more likely to lead behavior in categories where people are more likely to deliberate on their purchase decisions and the decision-making window is longer. For instance, most people put a bit of thought into buying a new car and start thinking about which make to buy months ahead of making the final purchase decision, so the chances that reported attitudes will lead behavior are greater.
None of this thinking is new. Gordon Brown, co-founder of Millward Brown, long ago pointed out that people register advertising claims as just that, claims, but it seems that over the intervening years we have forgotten that people do not have to believe a claim prior to trial for it to have an effect; it is the interaction between the claim and experience that matters. But what do you think? Please share your thoughts.
After a dinner at which I sounded off about the inability of big companies to innovate, my friend sent me a link to this article, ‘Why Big Companies Squander Good Ideas’ . It is another interesting read and it strikes a chord with me because it does not buy into the typical disruption model or assume that everyone is an idiot.
The Financial Times article by Tim Harford lays out a number of cases where successful companies had failed to take advantage of or respond to disruption. After dismissing the belief that idiocy was at fault (tempting though it may be), Harford focuses in on why these companies failed to make the necessary changes. He quotes Joshua Gans, an economist at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto and author of ‘The Disruption Dilemma’, as follows,
“Disruption describes what happens when firms fail because they keep making the kinds of choices that made them successful.”
Gans believes that incumbents often realize the implications of new technology, they are simply unable to adjust their organization to leverage it successfully. Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia were all stuck in the comfort zone where it was easier to do more of the same than do something different.
Referencing work by Rebecca Henderson, Harford suggests that companies are most likely to fail innovate if the innovation requires a change in organization. Structures and capabilities that had once served the company well now become a hindrance not a help. Harford cites the example of Xerox Parc, which, he says,
“[they] developed or assembled most of the features of a user-friendly personal computer, but Xerox itself did not have the organisational architecture to manufacture and market it. Xerox Parc did develop the laser printer, a product that matched the company’s expertise nicely.”
Once you start looking at the world through this lens of organisational structure and capabilities you start to see it everywhere. Harford cites the inability of big oil companies to adjust to a world of cheap solar power, but we can see it in the world of marketing too; particularly when companies seek to enter new markets and fail to adapt their offering to meet local market needs. As I have noted elsewhere, it seems to be particularly prevalent among retailers, as witnessed by the failure of Tesco’s Fresh and Easy and so many more.
For that matter, you could argue that the advent of digital, social, and mobile technology has disrupted marketing and most companies are still trying to change their organisational structure to cope with it. But what do you think? Please share your thoughts.
“Service design can feel less tangible at times, because it’s such a human interaction, but we all know the benefits of getting it right can have lasting effects for your org or brand.” —Melanie Bell-Mayeda, Partner and Managing Director at IDEO SF
In our most recent Creative Confidence Series chat, IDEO Managing Director and Human-Centered Service Design instructor Melanie Bell-Mayeda and IDEO U’s Coe Leta Stafford shared stories and tips about how to use service design to bring more meaningful experiences to customers and organizations.
Just before leaving on a recent business trip, Melanie caught a bad cold. So she made an appointment with her doctor right away, “I was very stressed out, and wanted to prove I wasn’t feeling that well,” she says.
At the end of the appointment, after clearing her for travel, the nurse said something that took her aback. “I’d like to thank you for coming in,” she said. “Because actually having the meds you need and knowing you feel well before going on a trip is the best way that we can help to take care of you.”
Normally, Melanie would have worried that she was wasting the nurse’s time, or had made an unnecessary appointment. But not after that comment. “That struck me as an important service moment,” she says. “She flipped the script on me by saying thank you.” It was the perfect example of good service design—finding the negative points of an experience and changing them up to make it better for the user.
Start with a Customer Journey Map
For Melanie, that process starts with a journey map, breaking down a service or experience to figure out exactly how it works, and what delights or frustrates a user. “You have to be hands-on,” Melanie says. “It makes such a big difference. That’s really the way I learn, by mapping things out and trying them on my own.”
When you dive into an experience yourself, you’ll discover what users know: that not all moments are equal. “You want to identify those moments that are sticky for individuals, that help them think about you and your service in a differentiated way, and give them that positive memory of the experience,” she says.
For example, when the company Wholesome Wave wanted to find a way to encourage people with food stamps to use them and to buy healthier food, they thought about the actual process. “The food stamp experience is actually quite broken,” Melanie says. “Most transactions happen with credit or cash.” But with food stamps, “you can’t use them as easily as you can money. There are things you can spend them on or can’t spend them on. So often, at that moment of purchase, it’s uncomfortable for the person using them.” On top of that, the healthiest foods a family can buy are fruits and vegetables, which are also the most expensive, and tend to eat up users’ limited food budgets.
To address these two broken pieces of the system, the company negotiated with fruit stands and farmers markets to make food stamps stretch a little further; if families bought fruits and vegetables, they could get a two for one deal. It encouraged them to try healthier foods they might not have otherwise and got them away from that traditional supermarket cashier experience. It was a very different solution than say, sending an email to get people to use their benefits. It’s a good reminder that a journey map isn’t just about the user—it can be about the other partners that come into play and things that happen immediately before or after an experience. “It really does help to unpack those moments that are the most critical and look at them more expansively, to see different solutions, and creative ways of expressing them,” she says.
“You want to identify those moments that are sticky for individuals, that help them think about you and your service in a differentiated way, and give them that positive memory of the experience.” Melanie Bell-Mayeda
Prototype Your Service: Smart, Scrappy, and in a Real Context
Prototyping a service may seem a bit tricky, or less straightforward then testing a physical product, but it’s a quick, scrappy way to see if your ideas might stick. “You really have to think about the mindset and the experience someone is in, and how you replicate that in the prototype you’re going to do,” Melanie says.
On one project, she and her team were working with a customer service division that was helping answer questions by phone and email. As new people came to work there, they had a hard time answering questions, because there was so much to learn. “They needed help,” Melanie says, “but they didn’t want to ask for it, because they wanted to perform well in the job.”
“The (prototyping) mindset is about learning. It’s not about getting it perfect.” Melanie Bell-Mayeda
To kick things off, the team prototyped a solution. Every time someone needed help, they would hit a flashing red light, so their boss would know to come over and answer questions. It turned out to be a terrible idea—not particularly practical and a bit embarrassing. But it did exactly what they wanted it to do. “The point of that exercise was to tell people, ‘It’s not about being perfect, it’s about trying.’ It was about involving a whole group of people in an exercise that could be fun and funny. And it took a really short amount of time to see what didn’t work, so we could start seeing what ideas did work.”
Service design prototypes don’t have to be expensive or high tech. In a project with a shopping mall, Melanie and her team worked to find out if they could create an interesting and engaging experience for people who had just grabbed coffee or food and couldn’t take it into a store. Was there a way to engage those folks who weren’t sitting in the food court, but couldn’t shop, either?
The team started with a small experiment that cost a few hundred dollars pulling clothing from retail stores, assembling a nice area with low budget furniture and a rug, and creating a place where people could check out goods, but also relax.
“You can move quickly with prototypes, especially when you have prototypes in the beginning. You have one or two simple questions and simple ways of measuring them. The risk/reward is right-sized.” Melanie Bell-Mayeda
The team made some hypotheses about how they thought behavior might shift, and captured simple metrics—checking to see if people sat down, for how long, and if the merchandise in the area—or even a picture of it—would help drive would-be shoppers into stores. Even short-term experiments gave them real data that helped them figure out which direction to push it.
As prototypes became more complex, so did the metrics. Did some stores have an uptick in sales? Could those be connected to the pop-up space?
Co-Create Your Service
Users aren’t the only partners that can help with service design. Co-creation is when you invite users, key stakeholders, people who actually deliver a service, and clients to be a part of the process. “People use what they create,” Melanie says. The earlier on you bring people into the process, the more that they share in the ideas, and the solutions, the more likely they are to implement them. Be collaborative in that process, because you may learn things from your customers, your employees, or people who work on the front line, that you might not see yourself.”
“Bring other people into the process. Be collaborative, because you may learn things from your customers, employees, or people who work on the front line, that you might not see yourself.” Melanie Bell-Mayeda
When it’s time to bring executives in, have them participate and observe a prototype so they can see it in action. It’s also a great way to get feedback earlier. Too hard to get them there? Give them audio or video of the prototype, with enough context to explain what’s happening.
If bringing a solution to colleagues is proving tough, start by sharing the customer’s point of view, or the problems that your team has had that have led you here. “At the end of the day, everyone wants the customer to have a great experience,” Melanie says. “If you start from that place, it gives everyone a common ground, and it lets you shed new light on the question in a way they may not have seen it.”
Learn more from IDEO Designers and get hands-on practice alongside a global community in our new Human-Centered Service Design online course.
from IDEO U - News https://ift.tt/2CFJ2na
via IFTTT
In our latest Creative Confidence Series Chat, Suzanne Gibbs Howard, Dean of IDEO U, chatted with Mathew Chow, Director of Organizational Design at IDEO San Francisco, about prototyping organizational change.
Mathew Chow is one of IDEO’s first formal organizational designers, helping clients create and define the values, incentives, rituals, teams, and spaces that help shape their culture and behavior. It’s a process that he says starts with understanding the human needs at an organization, and learning how they play into its ultimate goals.
Mobilize: Get people inspired and on board with the notion of change.
Pioneer: Create manifestations of the change that show what it could look like inside a company or organization.
Scale: Grow capabilities, tools, and systems to transform a company and a culture.
When you’re first starting out on an org design project, it’s easy to think about how changing one piece of an existing structure might affect the whole, but as Mat explains, that approach is just guesswork. Instead of making predictions and adjusting what already exists, he thinks about org design like jumping into a game of pinball. Like any established organization, a game of pinball comes with complexity, bumpers, and nooks and crannies that can help you gain points, or pose a challenge. No matter what, though, “you don’t sit and stare at the pinball game to see where to place the pinball.” Instead, you learn by playing the game.
How to Prototype Org Change
But how, exactly, do you jump in? Cheaply and quickly, Mat says. In the design world, you’ll see the term MVP thrown around a lot. It means minimum viable product, and it’s basically the least designed version of a new product that still works. When Mat goes into org design projects, he’s looking for the MVO—minimum viable organization. How can you make change with as few people and as little money as possible? At a big organization, like an airport, that might mean 12 people across 12 different agencies; at a smaller company, it might mean a team of two. But the question he’s trying to answer is: How can we make meaningful change with few people and a small budget, then scale that across the organization?
“Just like you can create MVPs to redesign products, you can create MVOs to redesign organizations.” Mat Chow
Prototype through Role Play
To get to that answer, it’s best to start small, with a one-hour role-play exercise. In a recent project with a non-profit that was considering moving into the for-profit space, Mat’s team decided to test out what the most extreme version of that transition might look like: what if the non-profit became a VC firm? The team enlisted five key people who represented a cross-section of the organization and asked them what they would need to make it happen. The important questions—as they are for any project—were:
Where do we have the capabilities?
Where do we almost have them?
Where do we lack the capabilities?
The team created a fake pitch book for a fake company and had a couple of key people from the organization consider what they would do to evaluate an investment. By considering the most extreme version of the shift, the team was able to see where the hardest part of the transition might be, and test their hunches about what might be most important.
“As you scale, telling the story of the evidence through your previous prototypes is very important. That’s how you engage stakeholder feedback and have fewer people who will push back.” Mat Chow
Create Minimum Viable Organizations
In Mat’s view, any new project or product is an opportunity to design a minimum viable organization alongside it that can scale and grow and learn at the same time. When it comes to defining an MVO, it’s best to start by dropping what Mat calls “free or cheap pinballs.” In a smaller organization, it could just be an hour of time and a couple of brains focusing on what kind of team it would take to support a different kind of product. After all, “the same mindsets of prototyping a product or service definitely apply in terms of identifying what your key assumptions are.”
In a project with an international airport, Mat and his team took a look at changing the baggage service delivery experience. They decided to add a feature that would show travelers when their baggage was expected to arrive. Because it was an international airport with a lot of logistical and security concerns, it was an extraordinarily complex project across many siloed teams. In the beginning, the team started by bringing in no fewer than 80 or 90 people, from baggage crews, airlines, and customs and immigration. From there, they asked, “If we’re going to organize around the work, instead of working around the org, who do we need to be involved in this prototype? That really resonated as a guiding principle as they scaled as well,” Mat says.
Their initial prototype started with one airline employee with a stopwatch who could time how long it would take for bags to arrive, and a small, cross-sectional team. “We were very intentional about representation from different groups,” Mat says. The small team was able to test the prototype, build evidence that it would have an impact, and create fodder for leadership buy-in.
By designing with an MVO mindset, you can:
Get started sooner, fail quickly, succeed faster.
Work radically interdisciplinarily across silos.
Help ground change in the tasks you're trying to accomplish.
“How can we make meaningful change with few people and a small budget, then scale that across the organization?” Mat Chow
Moving Beyond Prototypes
In a project with a law firm, working to design its employee feedback process, Mat and his team came up with what they thought were really good solutions, but they weren’t quite sure about how to scale. So they called a cross-sectional group into a room to figure out which influences they could tap into to encourage uptake, and tried out an exercise. If they wanted everyone at the firm to start wearing a blue hat to work, how would they encourage that behavior? It was a great way to answer the question about how influence actually happens. You have to ask, “What are they levers you’re playing with to cement a new shift,” Mat says. “As you get to a bigger and bigger scale, those levers become different.”
One of the best ways to keep change moving is with quick wins and bold moves. (What can you push forward with $50 and three people?) You want to make sure you have evidence of what your org changes can provide for people, and how you can tell that story. “Make sure it’s a visible thing, and you capture it in the right aways, and bring the right people in,” Mat says. “Make it quick and cheap, and also a win.”
If you’re curious to learn IDEO’s tools and mindsets for organizational design, join our Designing for Change online course.
from IDEO U - News https://ift.tt/2QKxy4R
via IFTTT
Now more than ever, it’s imperative that companies align around their customers and designers have the tools to lead the way. Harry West shares insights on designing around your customer in his recent CFSI Emerge Keynote.
“Sometimes in order to truly see, you have to learn not to see,” says frog CEO Harry West on finding ways to solve for new challenges. This is especially pertinent today, as customer expectations across our biggest markets are rapidly shifting. The ways in which people are interacting with brands are completely different than we’ve ever experienced before–customers are sharing more information in return for more personalization. Companies like Facebook and Amazon are already capitalizing on this flood of customer data, but the financial industry has a unique opportunity to development smart, personalized financial products and services that meet their customers where they are, while also keeping their best interests in mind.
But creating the right product for your customer is not always as simple as it sounds. At his 2018 EMERGE Keynote, Harry shared some apt examples of how even the smartest products are rendered useless if they do not speak directly to their customers. And as we’ve seen in the news, companies who mishandle customer data face possibly irreversible breaches in trust.
This is why design plays such an important role: we are the partner on the ground watching people interact with products and services in order to pick up on behaviors and patterns that may open up entirely new areas of value outside of a business’s core offering. Design has always been able to reinvent products and transform experiences via 2D interactions or and 3D space. Today, as Harry says: “we’re adding a new dimension to design — you.” By utilizing emerging technologies like AI and machine learning algorithms, we are augmenting experiences to be hyper-personal and accessible. But we’re doing so in thoughtful, human-centered ways.
“We have to watch out for the balance between the simplicity that good design brings to an experience, versus the seduction or manipulation of our customers.” –Harry West
With the right design tools, this balance is possible to strike. We strive for it everyday by designing experiences that bring ease and joy to customers, while providing new value opportunities to brands and clients.
To survive in today’s competitive retail environment, companies must focus on one aspect of the customer journey to differentiate with unique new experiences. It’s all about finding that magic moment—not attempting to own the entire journey.
Moving Beyond a Linear Journey
The traditional customer journey for retail has been a predominantly linear one, starting with the inspiration or desire to buy, and concluding with a consumer living with the purchased product.
But the advent of online and mobile shopping, coupled with social media has changed the traditional shopping journey so that it is no longer linear. We can jump around the journey, join and leave at mid points, or bypass entire steps. For instance, while shopping on Amazon, we can be inspired at the checkout (in the moment of purchase) by recommendations for complementary products to go with the items in our baskets, sending us back to the start of a new purchase journey. Or while checking into a flight on the United Airlines, we might circumvent considering options for getting to the airport, such as using a taxi, ridesharing, or driving ourselves by using the embedded “Order Uber” button in their check-in app. Indeed, a complete stranger’s negative review on TripAdvisor may change our planning process or derail a hotel booking entirely.
Finding Your Magic Moment
In light of the changing landscape and evolving customer needs and expectations, companies are now doubling down on specific moments of the shopping journey, choosing to differentiate themselves on that step. For example, Amazon was early to optimize and ultimately own the “Buy” moment of the customer journey by famously patenting its one-click ordering system allowing consumers to buy without going through a digital shopping cart. It was all about convenience, speed and efficiency, optimizing the experience for shoppers who want to get in and out as quickly as they can.
This was a major game-changer as early as 1999, but in the decades since, we’ve seen shopper archetypes expand beyond the buyer who simply knows what they want and wants to get it as quickly as possible. We have seen retailers and CPG companies succeeding in a world of Amazon by focusing a different moment in the retail journey in order to offer a memorable, differentiated, competitive customer experience. Let’s break down the customer journey and look at how retailers can optimize each stage.
1. Inspire
Perhaps one of the most saturated points on the journey, many companies are working to capitalize on social media and influencer culture by owning the moment of inspiration. Houzz does this well, crowdsourcing inspiring photos of interior designs and monetizing that inspiration by linking to third party firms that sell furnishings, fittings and services. Retailers who curate towards specific lifestyles, from Uncrate to Bonobos are also striving to optimize on the inspire portion of the journey, selling products and services within the context of their customer’s lifestyle or through social media platforms like Instagram.
2. Consider
Marketers have historically focused on getting their brands into the consideration sets of consumers with a need or desire. Creativity and money is poured into advertising to make a product or brand top of mind. The trouble is that most consumers have very little time to think about the many brands vying for their attention. In many so called “low involvement” categories, consumers really don’t care which product or brand they use and are happy to switch. Tools like Amazon Dash buttons or Amazon subscribe & save attempt to cash in on this lack of interest by taking the thinking out of re-ordering, thereby preventing other brands from being considered. Companies like Progressive are competing on the same insight in a very different way, by trying to push out competitors in the consideration moment with their price comparison tool. The proliferation of options to meet a need, coupled with the accessibility of information through search engines such as Google and Baidu is eroding loyalty, opening doors to compete in the moment that consumers consider their options.
3. Plan & Research
This stage was another fairly early entrant in online and mobile retail. Travel sites such as Expedia and Hipmunk, as well as more recent entrants such as Google Travel have found ways to monetize the research phase of the purchasing journey. Other comparison shopping sites have since surfaced in retails areas from clothing to cars. These sites are optimized for the plan moment of the journey, positioning themselves as the helpful guide in what can often seem like the endless options now available in the world of online retail—so much so that many would not even think of buying something without consulting one of these sites.
4. Receive
This stage is one that has up until recently been rather neglected in the transition from in-store to online retail. What has emerged is a new class of white-label brands that offer non-sexy items like mattresses, toothbrushes or razors, in well-packaged and branded experiences. Mattress seller Casper competes for this moment, delighting shoppers with the unboxing experience to such an extent that there are thousands of youtube videos of people opening the unfeasibly small Casper mattress box and watching the mattress take shape. Premium and luxury product makers have struggled with the receive moment of ecommerce because it removes the in-store experience or the fancy 5th Avenue address. Net-a-porter has capitalized on this hole in the luxury ecommerce market by creating a same-day delivery service that arrives right to your door in an oversized luxe shopping bag, rather than a brown cardboard box. And in China, JD.com has taken this idea one step further with a
5. Live
Product makers have always thought about how their customers will live with their product, and have optimized for it. After all, a company’s reputation will live or die by how their products perform. But some firms are doubling down on maintaining a relationship with customers beyond the transaction. Patagonia offers repair services for its clothing as an effort to minimize their environmental footprint while maintaining relationships with customers. Connected products offer opportunities to enhance the ownership experience. For example, phones, computers and cars receive “over the air” upgrades to their software, often enhancing the product long after it was purchases. Another example of a firm doing this well is smart speaker maker Sonos, who historically ensured that all of its speakers were “backwards compatible” with new software tools they brought out, ensuring that their customer’s investments in speakers are protected.
Companies looking to differentiate themselves in retail should start by selecting one or two steps in the customer journey to focus on, and ideate around ways to offer unique experiences in those moments. Figuring out where to compete, and how this fits with your brand, is fundamentally a creative question, and one that the tools of design are well suited to address. At frog, we often address this as part of customer experience design projects, not only thinking through new products and services but also how those fit into a wider system of customer engagement.
A guide to the companies, ingredients, and consumers driving the “clean” beauty trend
Demand for healthier ingredients has spread beyond the dinner plate. Interest in cosmetics and skincare products claiming to be “clean” and “natural” has grown in the past two years, with no regulation around either term. “Natural” personal care and beauty products generated more than $1.5 billion in U.S. sales in 2017, according to Nielsen. And the trend isn’t slowing down. A new report from Grand View Research predicts that the global organic personal care industry will reach nearly $25 billion by 2025.
Tourism boards ask a lot of their websites: They must include updated, accurate information. They have to show off a destination in the best light. And they need to cater to diverse audiences while increasingly making each visitor feel like a site was designed specifically for them.
Even as the trend toward more personalized websites has taken root, concern about data security is growing around the world. Despite near-constant news cycles of data breaches and cybersecurity threats, many tourism boards are still betting that travelers want to share information about themselves on destination websites to help plan their trips — and more websites are being redesigned accordingly.
Most of the information that some newly redesigned tourism board websites ask travelers to share isn’t too personal, such as whether they prefer sun over snow or adrenaline to relaxation. But cookies, for example, are used to track how travelers engage with a site and analyze their online behaviors.
Skift has tracked the world’s best tourism websites since we launched six years ago. Our past coverage has focused on sites that add new bells and whistles as they get redesigned but continue to make it simple to plan a trip. As consumer technology gets more advanced, tourism boards are trying to keep up with redesigned websites and content that prioritizes personalization. Skift examined a handful of sites that were redesigned this year – and talked to one group developing a brand new site – to explore the latest trends and the way privacy is playing a part in redesign conversations.
“Our new site will allow for hyper-customization,” said Rolando Aedo, chief operating officer of the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. “Beyond using typical cookies, we will then empower the user to go deeper and let them tell us a little bit about themselves so that content they’re served, the visuals they see, and the mapping they see will be driven by their customization.”
If a site isn’t mobile-friendly, or images are dated, or answers take too many clicks to get to, it’s virtually game over for a tourism website.
Miami last redesigned its website about six years ago. Considering nearly 60 percent of site visitors are on a mobile device, the site was long overdue for an upgrade. “When you look at a destination, you want to ensure that the experience you’re paying significant dollars to have aligns with your expectations,” said Aedo.
The new site has chatbots for meeting planners to message the organization, and the bots could be available for leisure travel depending on how travelers use the new site.
The organization shot video and photos in 43 locations around the destination and leveraged its ongoing #FoundInMiami campaign in doing so. Some 20 writers are also writing articles for the site.
Part of the website’s redesign is a “Personalize Your Experience” feature that lets travelers decide how much 10 categories, such as family-friendliness and nightlife, apply to them by dragging a dot along a scale under each category (pictured below). Travelers then submit their results and can create an account on the site to get their personalized itinerary results.
Aedo said Miami’s site is fully compliant with various privacy laws, such as Europe’s GDPR and California’s new privacy law, and doesn’t believe any privacy backlashes will pose a concern.
A personalization feature of the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau’s new website.
Being Transparent
Discover Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico’s month-old tourism board, is an anomaly as Puerto Rico is a mature destination and the tourism board is creating a brand new destination website — a rarity in 2018. Puerto Rico is still trying to overcome the devastation of Hurricane Maria as it marks the one-year anniversary of the storm in September.
After Puerto Rico’s tourism industry was restructured earlier this year, the new tourism board inherited two sites, one for leisure and another for meetings and events, that had both been underperforming. Discover Puerto Rico is in the early stages of integrating both sites and cleaning up the back ends while the current version of discoverpuertorico.com is a placeholder.
Due to political drama and funding shortfalls, the old websites hadn’t been updated since 2010, said Leah Chandler, chief marketing officer of Discover Puerto Rico. The organization essentially had no insight into how travelers used the old sites. Its research shows that about 30 percent of visitors to Puerto Rico currently visit discoverpuertorico.com.
The old websites were directly run by the government, which led to lots of political tussling over what they should include, Chandler said. “Research that we’ve done so far showed that there was no equity in the old sites and the bounce rate was 87 percent because of lack of content,” she said. “We had no Google authority whatsoever.”
Personalization will be a cornerstone of the user experience for the new site.
“There are many tools that allow DMOs to assess information about consumers without directly asking them for personal information, and we intend to explore those,” she said. “Certainly, if we decide to pursue a route in which we ask consumers to supply the DMO with personal data, we would take every precaution to ensure that information was protected and secure.”
Visit Bend, the tourism board for Bend, Oregon, did a soft launch for its redesigned website in May and has since seen a 15 percent increase on returning site visitors, said Nate Wyeth, vice president of sales and marketing for the organization.
Wyeth said part of the redesign also involved some personalization for Bend’s hotels, restaurants, and attractions. Local tourism businesses can create their own branded landing page within visitbend.com for the first time, and the site currently has about 3,700 branded pages.
“One of the nice things about being a non-membership organization is that we’re not beholden to our members,” said Wyeth. “We can really promote what’s best for the user and not what’s best for members.”
Starting next month, Wyeth said Visit Bend plans to tell its site visitors exactly how their data is being used. Bend is working on its privacy policy and will let visitors access their data and delete anything they don’t want the tourism board to hold onto.
Bend is working with Boston-based [customer data platform] agency BlueConic on making its site compliant with current and future privacy legislation. “BlueConic’s tool allows us to collect and manage all user profiles in one database,” said Wyeth. “This tool also will allow us to deliver personalized sessions on our website.”
“Our soon-to-be beefed up privacy page will cover everything from how we collect and use their data, to what we collect, who we share it with (no one right now), how long we keep it, and who they can contact with any privacy questions,” said Wyeth.
Being relevant
Visit Philadelphia, the city’s tourism board, took its own approach to personalization when it launched its You Wish You Knew blog in 2007, which is designed specifically for Philadelphians and people who live in the region.
The organization created a blog specifically for locals because half of its main visitphilly.com site traffic has historically been local. “So unlike other places where it’s all visitor, locals look at our stuff,” said Meryl Levitz, president and CEO of Visit Philadelphia. “So VisitPhilly.com is a little more visitor-focused. Then the blog is more locals and what to do this week.”
The website was redesigned earlier this year with new elements such as better responsive design for mobile devices, simplified navigation, and more blog integration. In 2017, visitphilly.com had 29 million page views, 3.5 million clicks to restaurant, hotel, and attractions partners, and generated some 35,000 new email subscribers.
Travelers want to know where the rooftop bars are, new brunch spots, and how to eat famous Philly foods, said Levitz. “At first, I thought, that’s news? she said. “And so our team had to educate our hotels and restaurants on that. People want to know the ten most popular ice cream flavors in Philadelphia right now. The most popular video viewed on our site is how to eat a Philly cheese steak.”
For Puerto Rico’s new tourism website, Chandler feels the organization has some advantages by building from the ground up. She said just 30 percent of visitors to Puerto Rico currently visit discoverpuertorico.com before they arrive. “We’re not having to overcome a site people use in a certain way,” she said. “We don’t want to get too far out in the realm of what will be cool and what will be relevant to the user. Generally, you land somewhere in the middle.”
Puerto Rico is considering testing voice-activated interfaces, still in experimental mode with many brands, for its new site.
The organization also worked with Miles Partnership, a marketing company, to visit 50 places around the island to capture photos and videos for new content. “When you’re in clay, you get to try some things like this,” said Chandler.
Destination D.C., Washington, D.C.’s tourism board, is automatically targeting its New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles markets. Washington.org visitors with IP addresses from those four cities currently get customized content to inspire them to use some summer vacation time on a trip to D.C.
When someone from New York City visits the site, they’re shown a box that tells them to click to view the ultimate summer D.C. guide for New Yorkers. While it’s not individually personalized, it makes New Yorkers feel like valued customers and the site includes content such as “what to do this weekend” since Washington, D.C. is an ideal weekend trip from New York City. D.C. also created customized landing pages for the four markets, such as showing Los Angeles travelers D.C.’s waterfronts.
Getting Google on Board
Another challenge tourism boards continue to face is keeping their websites and content in the good graces of Google.
Keeping up with Google’s algorithms is never-ending, said Aedo, but it’s often beneficial for tourism boards to work with the search giant. More destinations are supplying content to Google Destinations, a product rolled out in 2016 that puts destination content such as local attractions high up in Google results.
If a tourism board has an ace SEO strategy, its own website should be one of the first Google results to appear for general destination search terms. But a link alone isn’t enticing enough for some travelers who are visually stimulated, which is where Google comes into play.
For a generic “Miami” Google search, travelers click on the destination guide like the one for Miami, one of the top results, and navigate to a page with current photos, flights, hotels, articles, and videos of the destination, all of which are uploaded by a tourism board. Google doesn’t charge for the content.
“I’ve been a little suspect of Google in the past, but now they’re allowing DMOs to understand how relevant content is even if it’s not on their websites,” said Aedo. “We are proud of where we rank in almost all combination of various search terms. We’ve partnered with them now on a few different programs, which doesn’t hurt to bump us up.”
Part of a Google Destinations search result for Miami.
websites setting the bar
Here are some other tourism sites from different regions that we think represent a trend and speak to how destinations want to get more data from travelers:
MyHelsinki: The website of Helsinki Marketing, the city’s tourism board, lets travelers save events and things to do that they like and also prioritizes locals and reads more like a site that people who live in Helsinki would use. Travelers who want to get a glimpse of what local life is like have found their portal.
Chile.travel: This is a visually compelling site that demonstrates how Chile has grown up as a destination on the world stage. Beautiful images and video capture your attention and show how diverse the country is. It’s unclear how useful the site actually is to plan a trip or quickly access pertinent information. But for a destination still building name recognition in markets like North America, it’s pulling us in.
For Africa, we’ll include Zimbabwe and Rwanda together to highlight how more countries in sub-Saharan Africa are turning to tourism to grow their economies. Zimbabwe is still dealing with political unrest and Rwanda continues to overcome images of ethnic cleansing from 20 years ago, but both countries are maturing as destinations. Both sites also have some elements of personalization and highlight how to do business and invest in the country as well.
In a Google search Friday of “Trump news” — the query he cited before unleashing his Twitter rant — the only search results visible on the first page on desktop were from ABC News, the Washington Post and The Hill, along with three Trump tweets. On the second page were videos from CNN, Fox News, and a Fox News video on YouTube. The next five links were from ABC News (two), CNBC, Fox News, and the Washington Post.
While partisans on both sides and techies who understand search may debate political bias, one thing that is as clear as bottled water is that Google gives preference to its own products, such as Google Hotels and Google Flights, to the detriment of competitors, and squeezes out travel sites’ organic links in favor of paid advertisements.
“We see Google preferencing its own content to the detriment of consumers in travel and local search,” TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer said in a statement. “We’ve been consistent in our desire to help consumers have unfettered and equal access to the most relevant answers to their searches.”
Under the Obama administration, amid reports of heavy Google lobbying, the Federal Trade Commission looked into Google’s search practices but declined to take any action. The commission’s decision in in 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported, came despite the fact that key antitrust staffers wanted to sue after concluding that Google’s search and advertising practices harmed consumers and slowed innovation.
“Google has been unwavering in leveraging their dominance in search to squeeze competition in verticals like travel, local, and shopping,” said Travis Katz, vice president of product at flight search engine Skyscanner. “Fifteen years ago, Google built its reputation on scouring the web to help people find the best possible information. Today, however, whether looking for a cheap hotel in New York or the best flight to Chicago, Google restricts its first page to the companies that pay Google the most, or to Google’s own travel products, which are again pay-to-play.”
A Google search for “Chicago hotels” on desktop shows only paid ads above Google’s own hotel-search business, Google Hotels, which sneaks into view at the bottom of the first screen.
The Google Hotels interface then takes up the entire second screen:
Google claims that the above hotel listings are organically generated, but clicking on any of them navigates users into the Google Hotels pay-to-play environment. While some users may click on the free links in the left-most column below, many will click on the paid ads in the center from Hotels.com, Expedia, Suiteness, Priceline, and Travelocity.
The point is that Google places Google Hotels front and center in its search results, and you won’t find TripAdvisor, Kayak, Hotelscombined, Hotels.com or Booking.com getting similar treatment. Free links from TripAdvisor, Hotels.com, and Kayak, for example, only appeared on the third screen on desktop.
Google biases its paid advertisements and its own travel businesses in a similar fashion on mobile.
Katz of Skyscanner argued that restricting the first page on Google to paid advertisers harms consumers as well as competitors.
“For consumers, this is bad news,” Katz said. “It makes sites like Skyscanner, which prides itself on always showing consumers the lowest price, harder for consumers to find. And when providers need to pay Google ever-increasing sums for people to find their service, these costs are ultimately passed on to the consumer.”
Like TripAdvisor, business and dining review site Yelp has long criticized Google for its search practices.
“There is no question that Google is guilty of self-serving bias,” said Luther Lowe, Yelp’s senior vice president of public policy. “Google is steering unwitting users into its own local search results sandbox even though those results are objectively inferior according to Google’s own quality scores.”
In addition to the European Union, Russia fined Google over its Android practices, and Italy levied a penalty over the lack of identification of Google Street View cars.
Lowe said Brazil antitrust officials have also focused on Google.
“When Brazilian antitrust authorities recently asked Google why they’re mismatching users with bad information in the most common form of search, Google simply broke the test so people wouldn’t be able to see how egregious their self-dealing actually is,” Lowe said. “By directly harming consumers and extending their dominance from general search into adjacent markets, Google is violating U.S. antitrust laws.”
Google, of course, vehemently denies that it is violating antitrust laws, and argues that it is doing everything possible to benefit consumers looking for the right answers. Products such as Google Flights and Hotels, which are embedded prominently into Google search results, benefit consumers in part because they save travelers much of the hassle of having to navigate over to third-party sites, Google says.
Google is also constantly making improvements to its wide variety of travel products, including Google Hotels, Google Flights, Google Maps, and Google Trips.
There has been no word on whether the Federal Trade Commission is taking a new look at Google’s search practices, including its travel businesses.
Many of Google’s critics in travel would likely welcome a U.S. crackdown on Google’s business practices, European Union-style. The conundrum might be regulatory overreach if such enforcement were to be swept up in the Trump administration’s anti-big-tech and alleged political bias fervor.
Andreas Reiffen, founder and CEO of retail performance-advertisement firm Crealytics, said the way the European Union has implemented its regulation of Google’s shopping business has “changed nothing for nobody in the market.” He said Google is now required to pay incentives to comparison shopping services when they meet a certain spending threshold with Google, and this has just led to a proliferation of poor quality metasearch shopping services, creating little value.
Reiffen does believe, though, that the tech backlash and Trump’s comments have created a climate in the U.S. where there will be a lot of discussion of breaking up big tech in the next 20 years. However, the U.S. should not follow the regulatory path that the European Union took, he added.
Said Reiffen: “The European Union didn’t move the needle.”
Photo Credit: Google's logo is shown on a smartphone. The search giant gives preference to its own travel business, but claims of political bias are unfounded. Bloomberg
The Skift New Luxury newsletter is our weekly newsletter focused on the business of selling luxury travel, the people and companies creating and selling experiences, emerging trends, and the changing consumer habits around the sector.
The media is in crisis and there aren’t many sectors suffering more than consumer travel. Publications, including luxury magazines, that for years had grown fat on the back of juicy print advertising have struggled since the tap started running dry in the early 2000s.
So, what to do? Well, publisher Andrew Harper thinks the answer is going back to where it all started. The company has sold extraneous bits that once subsidized the editorial operation and now has to figure out other ways of making money.
It may sound like pie in the sky, but Andrew Harper has one big thing going: honesty, or at least an attempt at being genuine. The publication doesn’t accept advertising or include paid content — the two things most publications still live for — while also footing the bill for writers’ trips.
In a world of commoditized content and questionable ethics, doing something different is probably the only way you’re going to survive.
Decades-Old Travel Media Company Andrew Harper Goes Back to Basics: Truth in consumer travel coverage is a rare commodity in this day and age of influencers, paid content, and the pursuit of profit. But one bespoke media company thinks it can succeed solely by sending writers around the world, paying the travel bills along the way.
Tourism Websites Are Being Redesigned to Get Way More Personal: Destinations need data to know how to help their hotels, restaurants, and attractions market themselves. While they don’t need to know anything too intimate about travelers, they’re still making sure all their t’s are crossed as more privacy rights laws take effect.
When Winter Tourism Getaways Become Summer Attractions: While once seen as just cold weather destinations, certain mountain towns in the Alps, the United States, and beyond are evolving their cultures and economies into year-round destinations with no compromise on things to do. Can they handle the crowds?
Luxury Travel Agencies Begin to Enlist Teens to Plan Family Itineraries: Grandparents may be footing the bill, but teenagers are the most important demographic for travel agents to please. TCS World Travel, a Seattle-based luxury agency, is leading a trend in asking teenagers for trip creation tips with the launch of a Teen Advisory Panel. Interesting!
Photo Credit: The San Clemente Palace Kempinski Venice. The property was named most family friendly in Andrew Harpers' list of hotel standouts. Kempinski
