Christa Degnan Manning
Half of 90 people identifying themselves as "actively involved in corporate travel management" use social media to support travel management, according to an American Express Business Travel/AMR Research poll conducted in February and March. The percentage rose to 59 percent for employees of "midsize" firms--those spending between $3 million and $10 million on air travel. The survey also found that 88 percent of respondents in travel management use social media for personal reasons, compared with 70 percent of those in procurement and 71 percent of HR/finance department members. Respondents identified internal sites (59 percent), Facebook (51 percent), LinkedIn (45 percent), Twitter (45 percent) and TripAdvisor (45 percent) as the most popular social media tools used to support travel. Meanwhile, the barriers cited by those who do not use social media included: productivity issues, company policies and mistrust of content. Management.travelasked report co-author Christa Degnan Manning, American Express Business Travel Global Advisory Services Group director of research and media, for her impressions during an interview excerpted here.
What results most surprised you?
What really jumped out at me was that social media is in such high use amongst travel managers, although what we're hearing is that travel category managers and travel professionals are saying, "We're people too. We use these tools in our personal lives, so it makes sense to extend those into our professional lives." So you have the use of social media in terms of professional development to gather information on the industry, as well as the creative use to work with their traveler constituencies. That was also striking to me, particularly when you saw that the midsize corporate travel manager was more active in using social media. They have to be more creative, and a lot of it was opportunistic: They may not have had money to support their programs, but they were looking at anything and everything they could use to drive their program objectives.
Why do you think more travel people said they make personal use of social media than those in procurement or HR?
One of the things we tried to do in the report was help educate people on the evolution of social media in general, if they weren't familiar with it. What we found was that if you look at some of the early killer applications for social media, they actually were in the travel space. You had features of travel supplier sites making a community around their brands, or you had the evolution of sites like TripAdvisor that exclusively take the power of social media to bear in talking about traveling and what people enjoy in terms of connecting with other cultures, destinations and people. Most travel managers, in my experience, have a love of travel, so I think their use of social media is probably stemming from embracing it in the travel industry as consumers or fans of travel, and that translated into their professional lives.
How do you respond to the concerns about productivity impacts, company policies against the use of social media for privacy and other reasons, and the integrity of user-generated content?
I think they are entirely valid. With the evolution of the Internet, there's lots of content out there and you have to take everything with a grain of salt. Certainly with the explosion of Web pages and online content, you can't believe everything you read, and, with social media and the Internet overall, you have to bring a certain level of common sense and scrutiny. There's quite a bit of content overload. People observe and monitor sites, and [sites] have to build up credibility over time. A healthy bit of skepticism around online media is important to have.
Some are concerned that if corporate professionals say they don't trust the content, or don't have time for social media, they end up ignoring it. But at the same time, travelers are not ignoring it. What do you recommend?
In 2010, with the pervasiveness of social media in everyone's personal lives, it's not surprising that it's going to apply to the business world, and one of the things I took away from this survey is that travel managers have had to be resourceful as the Internet has taken off, because their control points with the traveler have been more fluid. There's a gravity toward online booking and getting content on destinations to make the travelers' lives more productive. What I have been hearing in the industry is that within the corporate culture and compliance rules, travel managers are getting creative to figure out where they can have an impact and influence travelers, maybe indirectly, so the path of least resistance becomes compliance to preferred policies and suppliers and the demand management rules or approaches they're looking at pursuing. Also, the people who impact travel from more of an IT perspective have more of the budget and resources to invest in these tools, whereas people in the travel departments were taking advantage of public sites and being more entrepreneurial. Overall, ignoring social media in today's travel management environment makes no sense. It's a helpful and, in many cases, inexpensive and easy-to-use mechanism to supplement your travel management program.
The survey found that some people feel there are "too many sites." Do you have advice for them?
Yes. Start small. Something as simple as a blog is a new way to have an ongoing communication channel to your travelers. Everyone has email overload. Simply having a blog on your travel management home page around things that are happening--like the ash cloud--is a way for the travel manager to provide a helpful information-sharing service to the traveler in the dynamic travel environment that is always complex and changing and crazy. [This enables] communicating more directly and frequently to the traveler and, most importantly, opening up that feedback mechanism. Feedback from the traveler really gets to the root of why you might have noncompliance, so you can put all kinds of time and effort into crafting a really clear policy and negotiating great discounts, but if the travelers don't comply, there's no savings. Usually there's a reason. It may be something as straightforward as poor service, but there hasn't really been a good mechanism to communicate that back to the travel manager. It's just the way of the world in that there are new, constant, ongoing communications options that go both ways and for a travel manager to shut themselves off from that, just for being a Luddite, is contrary to the openness of travel. With travel, you're out in the world--you're interacting with people. To say, "I will only deal with face to face interactions" these days is akin to saying, "I won't consider alternatives to travel." And it's an interesting continuum, from online communications to new things like video and telepresence all the way to face to face. One of the biggest challenges will be the alignment between travel management and technology, in that mobile devices, social networking, videoconferencing, webinars, telepresence, all the way up to face to face--it's all really about connecting people. Procurement and travel category managers need to provide their customers, the employees, the options to connect.