Tnooz: BOOT on Lonely Planet on Tnooz

By second post for Tnooz is live titled "Tips for what Lonely Planet should do next". Contains some background on Lonely Planet's online plans over the last few years, the online and brand vision from new CEO Matt Goldberg and my recommendations on what else they could do. Check out the post here for more. He is an extract with my recommendations for Lonely Planet:

1. Content Expansion: Make more and more of the content currently only available in books available online with the aim of being the number one organic search results for every major destination search item. It might hurt some book sales but winning in organic search will be more valuable long term;
2. Open Syndication: Increase syndication capabilities by allowing bloggers, writers, transaction sites, Facebook pages and more to access content material is an open way. Similar to point #1 above, it might cost a few book sales but being the social network content source of choice will be more valuable long term.
3. Facilitate and Make EveryYou Recommendations: Invest in recommendation technology to allow the community forums and information to be combined with the editorial content, booking behaviour and other data available to put Lonely Planet at the forefront of the development of specific and targeted recommendations of one based on the unique combination of desires, needs and interests of each individual at any moment in time. See My EveryYou concept. It will cost money and development time but the future of inspiration and content sites are targeted recommendations.

Tnooz editor Kevin May has followed up with a post "We love Lonely Planet and want to see it get better says the BBC", where an interesting debate has started.