Posted: January 19th, 2010 | Author: Ed | Filed under: Carnival Cruise Lines | No Comments »
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?
Posted: January 5th, 2010 | Author: Ed | Filed under: Carnival Cruise Lines, Social Media Policy | No Comments »
UPDATE: CCL still not final social media policy
Carnival Cruise Lines, as an industry leader is making some interesting moves for 2010:
- Carnival’s Policy Prohibits Travel Agents From Using Its Trademark on Any Social Networking Website or Blog.
- Travel Agents May Share Publicly Available Carnival Specials, But Should Seek Written Permission to Share Carnival Videos & Photos
- Carnival Cruise lines to restrict third-party bidding on search terms, which includes travel agents from bidding on paid search terms like Google Ad Words.
It makes sense that Carnvial Cruises prohibits the bidding of certain branded keywords by third parties, but limiting the use of branded video and related content from being embedded on third parties, why?
Working with cruise management, the key business topic is how to maximize bookings online. Travel agents continue to own a large footprint of booking sales with their clients, why limit their ability to sell online?
Rich media content is a proven vehicle to feature the cruise experience. After Celebrity Cruises launched a branded content campaign in Fall ‘08 with video on the home page more premium and luxury cruise lines followed suit such as Holland America and Princess Cruise lines (which are Carnival owned). It makes sense to empower your travel agents and travel geeks to embed this content on their pages to maintain consistent branded look and feel when selling the cruise experience.
More info:
Hubspot: http://bit.ly/5E3ls3
Travel Weekly: http://bit.ly/8Hick5