Lonely Planet Head of Content job

This one is gonna be right up someone’s alley (my italics):

Head of Content (Digital)

At Lonely Planet we live to travel. Everything we do is designed to inspire and enable travellers to get out there and connect with the world beyond personal and geographical boundaries. Across all areas of Lonely Planet, we look for talented people who share our passion.
We are currently looking for the Head of Content for our Digital team. Based in our Melbourne office this opportunity is offered as a permanent role.

The Head of Content (Digital) has primary responsibility for the quality, timeliness and appropriateness of all online content – destination and thematic, free and paid text, images, audio and maps plus lonleyplanet.com use of video content. The position involves developing a content strategy in collaboration with the Publisher Online and Print Publishers, destination expertise will also be harnessed from the Regional Publishing Managers and their teams.

The role involves developing and communicating plans for the reuse of existing Lonely Planet content in an online environment, and for developing plans for new content and content enhancements in line with the online product and commercial strategy. An advocate for excellence in a user’s online content and application experience, this role drives the ‘attitude and authority’ that is integral to the online content offer. Commissioning of new content and the management of casual staff and freelance contractors is also a feature of this role, as is commercial accountability for paid content products, and an understanding of the advertising drivers of free content.

Applications close 19th Jan. Now Lonely Planet had a great opportunity (as did Lastminute.com) to create an awesome online community around travel. But, for me anyway, the lonely planet’s The Thorn Tree just didn’t make the grade. In fact I’ve seen better communities (British based) around travel books – intriguing how quickly questions like “I’m going to Italy in 3 months, what books should I read” becomes “Where should I stay, where to eat, what to do?” The potential for advertising and marketing into these communities are awesome. Their user generated classifieds could be a lot better patronised (simply by introducing a prize of a book once a month might do it), their blog with 326 authors in 173 countries has barely 1 or 2 comments per post, and they make little to no use of user gen in video or foto content. I mean, WhereTheHellIsMatt YouTube bizo should’ve been top of Lonely Planets list to sponsor, no? Ah well, lots of work there for someone with vision and understanding.

Definitely high street travel agencies should be paying attention to these potential communities. In London, the big problem for umm Flight Centre(?) – y’know the red and white company – was that people would come in, ask questions, get the brochures and then order online. No concerted effort was made to ensure the potential customer understood the concerns with booking online – such as the security of a ‘package’ versus buying flights/transfers/hotels seperately. Did you know that high street shops started talking about charging 5 pounds for *entry fee*. Of course that wasn’t going to work, just pee off the potential customer more! I don’t know if they eventually did it or not.

But back to the job.

The successful candidate will have proven experience in content strategy development, demonstrated team leadership skills in managing media or content teams, and an understanding of user generated content trend. The ability to write for digital media audiences, experience or training in a journalistic discipline, sound project management skills and a good understanding of travel industry concepts, practises and procedures.

You have to apply at seek.com.au. As usual, seek.com.au have an icky user experience and totally fail to understand the distributive nature of Web 2.0 age, so you will have to go the main page and do your own search for JobID=8381889 as anything I post here will give you an “expired session” error. Grrr.
Ciao. (Oh and the usual – tell us how you get on, don’t forget to mention my name, good luck!) 🙂