social media

Tips for Keeping Your Identity Safe On the Road

Published July 16, 2015 | By Clark Norton

Protect your mobile phones like your wallet.

How careful are you about protecting your vital information while traveling? If you’re like me, you’ve left yourself vulnerable from time to time — maybe tapping into someone’s else’s unsecured network to use their Wi-Fi, or using an ATM on a busy street that presents an easy target for thieves to steal your PIN number, if they’re lurking nearby.

So far I’ve managed to avoid those types of disasters, but I came across this list of tips for protecting your personal information on the road that convinces me I’ve been more lucky than smart about it. The list comes courtesy of Experian’s ProtectMyID (www.protectmyid.com), and I’m going to start paying closer attention to its warnings:

Get Your Own Hotspot: Consider a portable router to create your own Wi-Fi hotspot for your electronic devices and that of any… Continue reading →

Posted in Baby boomer travel, Electronics, Travel gadgets, Travel safety | Tagged ATMs, debit cards, Experian, hackers, protectmyid.com, social media, travel safety, travel tips | 2 Comments

A Homemade Recipe For You, Miley Cyrus: Chocolate Chicken With Butter

Published August 11, 2014 | By Clark Norton

First, the recipe:

Chocolate Chicken

Ingredients:

Two boneless chicken breasts, cut thin

1 tsp. unsweetened or semisweet cocoa powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp. paprika

a dash of cayenne pepper or chili flakes

Chocolate, a key ingredient in Chocolate Chicken.

lemon juice (enough to make mix “goopy”)

some cilantro or basil, chopped

melted butter (you choose the amount)

optional: cumin or garlic powder

whiskey for flambeing

Instructions:

Mix above ingredients together (except whiskey if flambeing).

Wash chicken and coat thoroughly with mix.

Let sit for awhile while you figure out what to serve with it, or have a cocktail (optional, but if flambeing, don’t use up all your whiskey).

Cook chicken — grill it, fry it, bake it, saute it, stir-fry it, flambe it, whatever you like, but do make sure to apply sufficient heat that it isn’t raw and you get sick from it. I don’t want that… Continue reading →

Posted in Baby boomer travel, food, Marketing, Restaurants | Tagged butter, chicken, ChocoChicken, chocolate, recipe, social media | 2 Comments

Women, Boomers Dominate Social Media

Published March 11, 2014 | By Clark Norton

Boomers — especially boomer women — book more travel online than any other group. Photo from Adventure Women

I’ve come across some statistics that should of interest to any travel marketers who wonder whether to reach out to women, boomers — and boomer women in particular.

In a previous post, I wrote about how boomer women spend the most money on travel.

Now, new findings show that if you’re basing a travel marketing campaign on social media, it pays to aim it toward women.

With the exception of Linked In, where the majority of users are men, women dominate social media in the U.S., according to findings published at FinancesOnline.com (compiled from reports by the Pew Research Center and others).

Here are the stats: about three-quarters of adult women in the U.S. use Facebook, compared to two-thirds of the adult men.

For Pinterest, women outnumber men 33 percent… Continue reading →

Posted in Baby boomer travel, Marketing, Women travelers | Tagged baby boomer marketing strategies, baby boomer travel, baby boomer travelers, marketing baby boomer travel, social media, social media marketing, travel marketing | 2 Comments

Now Hotels Are Really Getting Personal

Published January 8, 2014 | By Clark Norton

Besides these standard amenities, Loews Vanderbilt Hotel might have a birthday cake waiting in your room when you arrive.

A few months ago on this blog I posed the question, “Is ‘Personalization’ the Next Big Trend in Hotels?”

The blog post laid out the vision of Starwood Hotels CEO Frits van Passchen that emerging technology would soon allow hotels to know in advance what their guests are looking for and like — much as Amazon.com, Facebook, and, as I recently wrote about, Pandora, the internet music service, know about their customers through mining their vast data banks.

It turns out that several luxury hotels are already using social media to do just that.

According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, hotels in the Loews chain are checking out the Facebook pages of future arrivals to add those little personal touches to their rooms that will be memorable enough… Continue reading →

Posted in Baby boomer travel, Hotels, Marketing, Technology | Tagged baby boomer travel, baby boomers, boomers, hotel trends, social media, travel marketing | Leave a comment

According to government and private surveys:

Leading-edge baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1955) and seniors account for four out of every five dollars spent on luxury travel today.
Roughly half the consumer spending money in the U.S.--more than $2 trillion--is in the hands of leading-edge baby boomers and seniors.
Baby boomers (born 1946-1964) travel more than any other age group.
When asked what they would most like to spend their money on, baby boomers answered “travel” more than any other category, including improving their health or finances.