WordLift and the Tourism Industry. Let the users talk.

Huge investments made by Google, Facebook, BBC, and other big players on graph databases, linked data, and semantic search are shaping the online world, but mid/small size content owners, bloggers and news publishers struggle to adjust their existing information systems to take full advantage of these technologies.

With WordLift we want to democratize this field, offering an easy-to-use plug-in and the power of Artificial Intelligence to every blogger on WordPress.

WordLift Information Architecture Increases Unique Pageviews

As seen on both this blog and our tester’s blog WordLift’s smart permalinks increase the monthly unique pageviews

Since last October we’ve been testing WordLift’s value proposition and results with a set of over 20 beta-testers, which have been crucial to inform the latest product improvements and confirm the value that the plug-in brings to its users. This post is a direct translation of an article posted by one of our testers, sharing his WordLift experience with his community. Hearing from our beta-testers gave us the confidence to open WordLift to the whole WordPress community and getting it ready for its market launch soon to be announced.

Seeing a small hiking organization taking advantage of and contributing to the web of data, makes us proud of what we accomplished so far. Helping this association promote their strategy with much bigger institutions for the development of the whole area, give us great confidence in our higher mission: organize internet knowledge from the bottom-up, leaving the full value of content production in the hands of those who produce it.

We want to thank the team of CamminandoCon for their contribution to the development of WordLift and for sharing their journey with all of us.

If you’re in the tourism industry as well and want to know more about what WordLift can do for you, contact us anytime! For now, let the users talk!


CommunicandoCon: WordLift for Tourism in the Turano Valley

We’re happy to witness many efforts around us to initiate communication strategies to promote the Turano Valley. A few weeks ago we gladly participated a workshop organized by the Riserva Naturale Monte Navegna e Monte Cervia, together with Life Go Park, to give participants basic notions of digital communication, placing training and education first among the many activities necessary to develop a touristic offer. With many other associations and commercial venues, we begun a collaborative path with the editorial team of ConfineLive.it, to open the attractions of the Turano Valley to all the provinces nearby.

Since the beginning of our journey, we’ve been building our online presence, leveraging a new website and our Facebook page, according to an editorial calendar, and creating partnerships with similar sites to share our weekly events with the broadest possible audience.

To offer a wider contribution to the development of new communication strategies which could benefit the Turano valley as a whole, the team of Camminando Con is proud to announce that, since the launch of our website camminandocon.org, we’ve been part of the testing group of WordLift.io, a platform for editing and publishing content online leveraging artificial intelligence technologies.

Without the need of knowing any particular technical skills, this technology allowed us:

  • to create interactive pages, rich of images and links to contextual info about topics, places, and people of the valley, and interactive widgets to connect our stories with yours
  • to optimize our content for search engines like Google, where in just a few months, and with no SEO efforts, we reached page 1 for searches of our interest (such as Escursioni Turano, Borgo Antuni) and for the promotion of our weekly events.
  • to implement a smart navigation system, aggregating our content dynamically on pages dedicated to events and to the territory and disseminating it on third parties communication platforms such as Telegram and Facebook Messenger
  • above all, to create, curate and publish a system of open data mapping all data related to the Turano valley, available in the near future to anyone who wants to promote their business on the web and to wider project such as the Open Data portal of the Lazio Region.

WordLift Graph - Turano Valley

At the end of this test phase, we want to thank the WordLift’s team for letting us use this technology and for the guidance we needed to extend this approach to and collaborate with players bigger than us.

In the wake of a project being implemented by the Tourism Agency of Salzburg, we have proposed the adoption of this technology, integrated with a multi-year communication plan, to a group of stakeholders interested in the development the Turano valley including administrators of Castel di Tora, Colle di Tora, Rocca Sinibalda and Paganico, and representatives of the Riserva Naturale dei Monti Navegna e Cervia, the Lega Navale of the Turano Lake, the Pro Loco of Colle di Tora and the association Andar per Lago, Monti e Castelli. A very fruitful meeting with which we have started a process aimed to enrich the communication of everything that the Turano Valley has to offer.

In the next few months, we would like to expand this project to organizations promoting naturalistic and eco-friendly activities and tourism, beginning with the FederTrek community, which we’re happy to be part of, with the aim to include, in a structural way, the hiking offer of the Turano valley within a national circuit.

It’s an ambitious project: to develop our core mission as part of a larger network, enriching while being enriched by, the whole touristic offerings of the Turano Valley and of hiking organizations on a national scale.

Networking means being available to the network, increasing its value with every activity, aware that the success of all coincide, and it is indeed instrumental, to our own success. Transforming this network into a platform allows everyone to become effectively part of it, and to enjoy the benefits that new technologies and online communication strategies offer today. If you want to be part of this project , help us in the editorial effort it entails, or enrich it with your business, please contact us. We will be happy to meet you, perhaps during one of our escursions. See you soon!

 

Video, Advertising and Social Media the Magical Trio for Online Business!

The clock is ticking fast the world of digital is transforming at the glimpse of an eye!

The biggest trend in digital right now is video…Online video advertising to grow to nearly $10 billion this year:

Video Spending 2

Digital video advertising will drive nearly $10 billion in ad spend this year. This is a remarkable 28% increase over 2015, making video digital’s fastest-growing ad format. It remains the gold standard for many brand advertisers that have relied on television for years. As audiences and devices digitize, The demand for video on all screens is quickly multiplying

Today’s digital publisher can turn a single video into a scalable marketing asset that serves across TV and various owned and unowned digital channels.”

facebook dominates

Sources:

mixpo report “The State of Digital Advertising for publishers”

2016 IAB Video Ad spend study

Video, Advertising and Social Media the Magical Trio for Online Business!

With all recent reports highlighting the ongoing growth of Digital Video and the increasing share of Ad spending and as we see this year the integration between social networks, video and advertising is very clear.

All social networks are extremely focused on two aspects advertising (simply this is where the money is) including Facebook ads, Instagram ads, twitter ads, etc and the second aspect is video with the big fight between them as well (Youtube vs Facebook videos, etc)

so we decided to dedicate our upcoming meetup to deeply dive in this area, also focusing on the local market in Egypt and trying to analyze the ads spending and user behavior over social media and watching videos online, especially what was booming in Ramadan this year!

This meetup in 6th in a row of our “Online Content Creators meetup series” that we have started earlier in 2015 focusing on online content especially video.

meetup august option 4

Join #OCCEgypt meetup on August 1st at the greek campus, register your seat here

Be part of our Online content Creators Meetup community Learn, share knowledge and network with like-minded pears

 

Ramadan Social Media Behavior

Ramadan is a great opportunity to attract more customers because of the huge increase in social media usage we consistently see during Ramadan specially Twitter!

One of the hottest topics discussed on Social Media each Ramadan is TV commercials, TV series, TV shows and good initiatives

We had a set of interesting activities to monitor Social Media Behavior and discussions during the month of Ramadan as follows:

1. As Telecom is Egypt’s #1 influencer industry online and offline so we worked on monitoring the advertisements of the 3 Big Telecom companies “Vodafone, Etisalat and Orange” to see who won Ramadan 2016 Media Race over social media? 

Ramadan Infographic 2

2. We worked on collecting the top trending hashtags to monitor what people are discussing on social media during the first 15 days of Ramadan 

What topics do people discuss most during Ramadan? 

 

3. And Continuing our Series of #IOTTT Twitter Chat we had today a very interesting chat with Lewa AbuKhait – Social Media Strategist discussing Ramadan Social Media Behavior and this is part 2 of the chat as last Ramadan we had a very interesting chat discussing the same topic 

Lewa chat ramadan 2016

And one of the very interesting points highlighted during the #IOTTT Chat that “this year some of the Media entities are switching to their own Online video platforms which is a great step for working towards understanding the consumer behavior online and sustaining their revenue” 

4

Conclusion:

In order to optimise social media best practices for brand engagement during Ramadan,  make your content shareable, engageable, unique and always  work on your offline and online marketing strategy according to the customer needs and always consider that the strategy needs to be adapted to the audience’s changed beahvior during Ramadan