eTravel Project

I am a news junkie. I do lots of my weekly reading on my subway commute to and from work. I was going through my copy of the Economist and my attention was totally caught in this week’s special report: “A world of connections“. The article argues that social networking is here to stay and will influence our life even greater in the future. However, what intrigued me more of this study was the graph shown on the left. The countries with the highest social networking traffic are: 1) Australia; 2) Britain; 3) Italy; 4) United States. So, this morning I conducted a little survey in the office. My Australian colleague thinks that Australia ranks first because of the remoteness of her country. This does not explain why Britain, Italy and the United States are in the top four though. It is a surprise that Italy ranks third since bandwidth penetration is relatively low and 49,9% of Italian families do not own a personal computer.

I have been an advocate of the Internet since the early days. Most of my adult life has been lived abroad and I have always tried to find efficient ways to keep in touch with family and friends. Back in 1997, email was a good way to do so, but my countrymen in Italy actually never really got charmed by the medium. I could wait days before receiving a reply in my inbox or never receive it. All this changed with the advent of social networking and I can state specifically of  Facebook.

Last year when I worked on the Fifth Edition of PhoCusWright’s European Online Travel Overview for Italy, I noticed this trend but I did not have quantitative data. When I look for friends on Facebook, they answer within minutes when they are awake since they are six hours ahead from New York. The fact that other social networking sites have not picked up in the country makes Italians even more “sociable types” than other people: they only go  where everybody is. If I were a destination marketer in Italy, I would exactly know how to spend part of my budget and would keep my hopes for Twitter Italy low since Italians need more than 140 characters to express themselves.