Having done an exhaustive Social Media Analysis of the the Indian Elections 2009, we shifted focus to the Travel sector in India. The focus of this monitoring exercise was to extract information and learning which might be useful to Travel Agencies as well as Travel Portals based in India. We wanted to explore Social Media Monitoring as a method of generating leads and identifying prospective clients. We also wanted to see whether it can be used as a feedback mechanism by players in this sector. For the purpose of this exercise, we restricted the search to the 5 day period of 1^st June to 5^th June 2009 (which is towards the waning end of the travel/holiday season).

Objectives:

1. Extract data related to Travel sector in India using Social Media Monitoring tools

2. Using human intervention, validate whether the search results are relevant/useful for travel agencies of travel portals.

3. Categorize the data in a manner which will make it easier to consume/easier to base decisions on.

4. Derive conclusions/learning, if any.

Process:

For performing the initial search, we used industry leading Social Media Monitoring tools. We set up queries for looking up some of the travel websites/portals from India (cleartrip, makemytrip etc.). Apart from this, we set up searches which focused on generic travel related words and phrases (‘travel’, ‘vacation’, ‘journey’, ‘trip’ etc.).

We then came up with a categorization strategy, with the focus being categories which we thought might be useful to the various Travel Agencies (online or offline) as well as Travel Portals.

As mentioned previously, we restricted the search only for items (content created) between the 1^st and 5^th of June 2009.

Our Content Analysts then looked at the data retrieved by the monitoring tool. The activities performed by the Content Analysts included:

1. Identifying relevant and non relevant items from within the returned search results, and classifying them as such.

2. Categorizing content on the basis of the source of the content.

3. Categorizing all the content pieces according to the categorization strategy mentioned previously.

4. After human intervention, doing a before-after comparison on the data.

5. Extracting conclusions from this higher quality data.

Results and Findings:

In the time frame of 1^st June to 5^th June, the total number of results picked up by the tool was 672. The first finding, of course is the number of relevant and irrelevant results. Fully 86.75 % of the results were deemed irrelevant, from the Point of view of value to travel agencies and portals. The remaining 13.25% of results were deemed to be relevant.

Comparison: Irrelevant, Relevant results volume

From the relevant results, we drilled down further, by the categories we had set up. The results are tabulated below:

Category	Number (percentage) of relevant results
Planning Stage of travel
Early	1 (1.1%)
Mid	1 (1.1%)
Planned (late)	1 (1.1%)
Promotions	10 (11%)
Prospects
India Travel	3 (3.3%)
International Travel	0 (0%)
Travel Reason*
Business	0 (0%)
Pleasure	1 (1.1%)
Religious	2 (2.2%)
Unknown	1 (1.1%)

*Travel can be for multiple reasons

Here are the snippets of the posts/tweets which were classified in different planning stages (early, mid and planned):

Planning Stage: Early

Planning Stage: Mid

Planning Stage: Planned

Finally, we did an analysis of how much is the chatter around various Online Travel brands in the Social Media space. Here are the results of that analysis:

Comparison of level of chatter for various Online Travel brands

Conclusions Drawn and Learnings:

1. The percentage of relevant results in the total number of results retrieved in 13.25%. Using search results (even from industry leading tools) without a layer of human intervention will not be very efficient, or even very accurate.
2. Realistic leads (at various stages of planning) can be generated from Social Media. While the percentage may seen small, it must be kept in mind that the search was restricted to a 5 day period, from 1^st June to 5^th June (which is towards the end of the holiday season.)
3. There is a large difference between the amount of chatter around the larger Indian travel portals in the social media space.

Comments are of course, invited.

If you wish to download the White Paper for this study (PDF), you can visit the Resources Page on our website.