The Corner Office: Searching for Results?
• What is Fodor’s doing to boost Web traffic and beat out the competition?
Lauren Palmer: … We do a newsletter once a week, which is very well received. We just completed a photo contest where we invited our users to submit photos of a recent trip to Alaska, [and] we plan to use some of the photos in our upcoming Alaska 2009 guidebook as well as on our Web site. … We think this creates a much stronger connection with the destination. … One of our strongest assets is our Travel Talk forums (Fodors.com/forums) … . If you ask a question about planning an upcoming trip, you’re likely to get a response in minutes. I think we realize that, in addition to our professionally generated content, our forums offer a wealth of information and practical advice from seasoned travelers … . We’re taking steps to showcase this content throughout the Web site, not just siloing it in the forums. … Currently, we pull in relevant topics from our forums to the Destination Guides … . We’re going to expand this and include more user-generated content integrated with our professional content. …