To some, doing business on Facebook might seem about as likely as doing business in Candyland. But for a new breed of business travellers, all those party pictures were merely prologue. Social media have matured, and they've become an efficient way to do business on the road.
According to the most recent quarterly report from the U.S. Travel Association and marketing consultancy YPartnership, Facebook has overtaken both TripAdvisor and LinkedIn as the most-used site by business travellers.
Ypartnership executive vice-president Greg Dunn says this is a very significant shift: Not only are business travellers using social media now, they're also using it with greater frequency than the general population. "Facebook has moved beyond just a social space and into a network space," he says.
Whether you're on a laptop or a smart phone, a simple Facebook status update is a way to communicate with everyone on your network at once, keeping home office, clients, family and friends up to date with your progress. And businesses are increasingly establishing their own Facebook pages, creating easy-to-find gateways for initial contact.
But another wave of change is already happening. For some savvy (or just especially busy) business travellers, even Facebook's interface is too cumbersome. For them, it's all about the tweeting.
Twitter has "become a major part of what I do when I travel, and I travel a lot," says Kevin O'Leary, principal at O'Leary Funds and host of the CBC's The Lang and O'Leary Exchange and Dragons' Den and ABC's Shark Tank. "When you're travelling, your day is jam-packed. I just don't have time to whip out a PC all the time. But I can whip out a BlackBerry and tweet. I keep a constant diary of where I'm at and why I'm there."
Travelling as a global investor, checking out markets, O'Leary has found that his clients value the instant updates and observations he can provide through Twitter.
"They can track me," he says. "They can get my perceptions directly. Is Spain really the basket case it's being made out to be? I don't trust the media; I'm going to go and find out, and so now, my clients don't have to trust the media either."
For O'Leary, Twitter has as much over Facebook as Facebook had over e-mail: It's fast, and was designed with the mobile platform in mind.
"As far as I'm concerned, Twitter has wiped out Facebook," he says. "I'm done with Facebook. My teenage daughter's not, but I am."
Alexandra Samuel is still casting her social-media net a little more widely. The director of the Social and Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University in B.C. has fairly broad tastes. Samuel says she uses social media to help pack all her meetings and appointments into one trip a month. "There are three main ways that I use social media as part of my travel routine," she says. "One is planning travel, [the second]is making the most of it when I'm on the road, and the third is to make travel easier in terms of logistics."
In addition to keeping in touch through Twitter, Samuel uses TripIt and SeatGuru. She feeds her online flight booking into TripIt, which is accessible online or through her phone, and it gives her a direct link to online check-in, as well as SeatGuru, a crowd-sourced guide to the best seats on planes from about 100 fleets. TripIt also alerts you when you're planning on being in the vicinity of other people in your social networks. Samuel does the same on LinkedIn, despite recent findings that it may be in decline.
"When I'm going to a city…I'll do a search on LinkedIn for first- and second-degree connections," she says, explaining one of her primary ways of drumming up business through LinkedIn's degree-of-separation networking system. "I'll do it in a focused way: If I figure my sales are linked to vice-presidents of marketing, then I'll just search for 'VP marketing' in, say, Chicago."
She points out that the geographic search on LinkedIn seems to be underused, but she finds it very useful. She suggests that tools such as this will be part of every corporate traveller's vocabulary. "Social media is going to stop being a [trend]in about five minutes. It's just going to become the air. The medium is only interesting to talk about because it's new, but soon we're going to stop talking about it as a thing and start talking about strategy for making it more effective."
With Wi-Fi's increasing penetration into air and rail travel, business travellers will be able to use social media more effectively. Now all we need is to persuade some slow-thinking hotel chains to think of Wi-Fi as a necessity, like towels, and to charge us accordingly.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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