Time was, the only technological connection was a phone, not pulled from your pocket but attached to the wall. Don’t even get me started on the whole world having the same ring tone.
Even in the Dark Ages the trick to stay connected (assuming you could write and moved outside your village) was to have a little black book (LBB) with contacts. See it’s older than you think and not just about the girlfriends. Segue to the 20th Century and these were contacts you guarded with your life and occasionally attacked with whiteout when someone fell off your radar. In today’s technology, the more contacts you have, the more connected you are and the more important you become as a networker.
Metcalf’s Law stated that the value of the network increases with the number of nodes (beats me) on the network. Okay, so Bob Metcalf invented the Ethernet, which enabled computers to be wired together to become a network. A pre Apple example would be the fax. A single fax is useless, so the more faxes the more effective the network.
So the more people I have on my network the more valuable it is along with the greater productivity I gain via increased communication savings. No, Uncle Bob doesn’t count unless he can get you a foot in the door.
We used to fly to stay connected but now we surf.
What does this mean to the travel industry? Does the average (?) travel agent realise the urgency in finding new avenues of connection and communication? The airlines and online players certainly do and they’ll take as many clients off the agents as they can, via aggregated booking tools, social commerce sites, frequent flyer initiatives and any new net solutions they can find.
The agency network needs to realise it is selling, no matter how you do it, by phone, face to face, email or on the net. You cannot hope to increase your face to face interactions with only a finite number of hours in the day. That LBB needs to be transferable to all avenues so that agents retain their relevance while increasing their connections in the face of stiff opposition.
Don’t be Rolling Stone Magazine. They should have realised the change coming and become MTV, and yet they didn’t.
Find new relevance in new channels to reconnect and nurture those connections and don’t be afraid to communicate your views. It would be unusual, not to find everyone of importance, to your business, on the net.
Hey I just found Kevin Bacon on Linked In, talk about six degrees.
Now about that global ring?
1 comment:
Spot on Ollie. Here in Oz, many in the retail travel industry are busy moaning about being pushed aside by the airlines own websites and web based travel providers but no one is really doing anything proactive to engage with people in new ways. If you are still using only the old Outbound Marketing techniques (ie, TV, radio, newspapers) to reach the public you are going to find that in a few short years no one is going to be listening to you. Even email marketing is being seen by some consumers as invasive and the “unsubscribe” button is used with greater frequency. So why not engage with people who want to hear what you have to say? Why not let them come to you and to do so in ways that they are comfortable with? Social Media is not a fad, it isn’t going away anytime soon and we need to be proactive and embrace it. Your comparison of Rolling Stone Magazine and MTV are just so apt! Our LBB of the future are the subscribers to our profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, etc. A company near and dear to us showed remarkable foresight in having Big Dave speak to owners & managers recently but where is the encouragement from the top level to embrace his strategies? Maybe not everyone is ready to do so but those of us who are should be given support and encouragement, yes? Okay end of rant :-)
Cheers, Gail
Post a Comment