Pinterest-Like Social Travel Planner Trippy Inks Deals With 6 Major Brands

Thinking you are looking at Pinterest? Actually this webpage is a new social travel planner Trippy, which debuted last fall. When we are discussing the business model of Pinterest in our final exam, Trippy already launched their brand profile pages and a dozen brands were  lining up in the wing.

According the Trippy founder J.R. Johnson, “A lot of companies want to engage around the idea of travel,” and, he adds, “each one of their motivations for wanting to get involved is a little bit different. But it’s all designed around this idea of having their brand in the social conversation when people are thinking about and talking about travel.”

So as the travel specific version of Pinterest, Trippy will begin seeding the brand’s content into both its web app and iPad starting today, but iPhone app users will only see the brands’ imagery and shared items if they first save it to one of their travel boards for now. This will change with a forthcoming update to the iPhone version.

For some of the brands, it’s about content distribution, for others, brand distribution, or it’s about attracting new users. Or, more likely, it’s a good mix of all that and more. Some brand relationships here are more obvious than others, too. For example, hotels and tourists bureaus are obvious fits, while with Brides magazine, it can be about associating its brand with those who are researching destination weddings or honeymoons, perhaps, and with Chase it’s about highlighting their travel rewards. By including themselves in Trippy’s social travel planning platform, the brands are tapping into a tool for social distribution – that is, it’s a tool for getting their brand shared on Facebook, without the need for a “Like” or cut-and-pasted URL.

Article: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/31/pinterest-like-social-travel-planner-trippy-inks-deals-with-6-major-brands-20-more-to-come/