Tripadvisor.com's Jim Brody

The eTourism Conference this year was another successful event with some great motivating speakers that were respected experts in their field.

It's great comming away from a conference feeling motivated with some new ideas to inject into your business.

One of the highlights was to meet and hear presentations from Jim Brody, head of the destination and marketing outreach efforts of Tripadvisor.com.

Tripadvisor has rapidly grown into the world's biggest travel site. In July 2010 over 35 million users visited Tripadvisor and over 1.4 million users visited pages with New Zealand content.

One of the latest innovations for Tripadvisor was their recent partnership with Facebook that allows over 50 million Facebook users to share trip information with their friends with an application they have called Trip Friends. 

Along with the surge in popularity of location based social media that includes Foursquare and the potential of Facesbook's recently released Facebook Places, accommodation providers have a challenge and an opportunity to take part in the conversations that online communities are having about their travel experiences.  

Although one of the exciting dynamics of the internet is that the future is almost impossible to predict, Tripadvisor.com is unlikely to lose dominance anytime soon. In fact, the smart money would be on Tripadvisor increasing their influence on how the traveling public choose accommodation in the foreseeable future.

This may require some accommodation providers to adopt a radical attitude change;-)

A version of Jim Brody's powerpoint presentation on "Maintaining your reprutation online" follows:
Maintaining Your Reputation Online - Jim Brody from Tripadvisor.com