My sabbatical ends!
Posted on January 20, 2006
Filed Under Business, New Zealand, Travel |
Wow, I have just finished my first week as Online Marketing Manager for New Zealands largest independant travel agency, House Of Travel. Maybe it was a week of concentrating hard all day trying to soak up a lot of information, or maybe I just ain’t used to working all day…whatevs, I slept in this morning.
The last 3.5 months have been something of a sabbatical for me, during which time I have had a chance to really think about where I want to go and what I want to achieve.
One thing that has been very clear all along is I want to stay in the web. I am more bullish than ever about online commerce, and while I am not a true technologist, I am definitely an evangelist for the ways tech (the web especially) can simplify process, amplify competitive advantage, and enhance the customer experience. That last bit sounds a bit hokey, but when you start thinking about how a brand grows out of the experience of customers you can understand where brand managment and marketing intersect with technology…and you’ll understand why I am so excited about working for HOT, they get it.
Having said all that Surfarama is not going to become a forum for talking about House Of Travel, mostly because the line between what is and isn’t appropriate is fine and I don’t want to approach it. But I will say that travel is a long tail business if ever there was one…on the supply side an almost unlimited number of possible destinations and experiences, while the demand side is characterized by an endless variety of personalities and expectations. The web totally plays a part in providing for the long tail. Yipee.
You can expect Surfarama to continue as an irregular dispatch of stuff that I find interesting, aswell as my experiements on the fringes of RSS as time allows. For example, right now I am hoping to find time to create serialized podcast feeds of Cory Doctorow’s short story recordings.
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