Carnival putting fun into social media

Praise to Carnival Cruise lines on their launch of Funville!

This launch shows a couple strategic moves by Carnvial’s marketing strategy for social media integration online. Overall the Funville section is embedded in the main site and is easy to navigate within integrating many sub-sections such as a forum/blog, game area, video library and more. It’s good to see a clean UI and an approchable navigation system that includes share features such as following the blog, Carnival tagged photos in Flickr and a twitter opt-in button.

This is a great first step towards consolidating user driven content around the brand and within the main brand site. Really looking forward to see how the Funville section will evolve as more content is added. For example, the forum is more attractive to look at but it still does not really provide “Web 2.0″ best practices on threaded conversations such as Digg interface. Also, I strongly believe roll calling is a big thing as the forums on CruiseCritic show. The view traffic is most popular on people looking at roll call posts by itinerary. Why not? People are excited about their cruise and want to start talking about it. This is the opportunity a brand like Carnival should try to own.

Thoughts?