Scrapblog Powering Carnival Cruise Scrapbooks

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Scrapblog Powering Carnival Cruise Scrapbooks

Stephanie Leavitt: Social Media Strategist is interviewed by networlding

Carnival’s very own Stephanie Leavitt, Social Media Strategist to the stars, is interviewed by social networking blog Networlding.

Check it out here:

http://networlding.typepad.com/networlding/2008/04/social-networki.html 

 

Congratulations, Steph!

The Webby Awards

A big Congratulations to the Carnival Cruise Lines interactive team and Avenue A|Razor Fish teams for the fantastic distinction of Official Honoree at the Webby Awards for Funshipisland.com !

The Official Honoree distinction is awarded to work that scores in the top 15% of all work entered into the Webby Awards.  With nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 states and over 60 countries, this is an outstanding accomplishment our teams.

Congratulations!

The first marketing comic strip in a “series” made on Bitstrips.com

Marketing a comic strip by jordan.corredera.

Found this great site while at SXSW called bitstirips.com. It allows you to create your own comic strips, characters etc. Below you’ll find my first effort with the tool. For a moment, I imagined that this would be the first in a long and very funny series… Don’t hold your breath, I’m what they call ”enthusiastic” or what my father used to call “fantazma productions”. Enjoy.

South by Southwest 2008 – Highlights and pictures.

 

What do you mean?!? What’s the deal with twitter!? I thought we covered this? Fine, @mywitsend jumping in front of a bus.

 

Fellow Miami native Alex Cavalo and I – He has no idea who I am. (Alex was there to seal the ScrapBlog/Carnival Deal with me in ‘07)

 

Walter Anasagasti, Thomas Ainslie and I – Representing the Carnival Cruise Lines contingent at SXSW ‘08.

 

Too artsy for my taste…

 

Master Chief and I.

 

Robert Scoble and I — Learn about it…

 

Shel Isreal and I — Learn, learn about it…(2 cause he’s older)

 

What do you mean The Flip only has one button? I don’t get it…

 

The End…

Carnival Senior Cruise Directer John Heald’s blog mentioned in USA Today article

Carnival’s very own blogging phenom John Heald was mentioned in a USA Today piece on corporate blogging last Friday. The article also mentions a few other corporate blogs in the travel space like the TSA, Southwest Airlines and Mariott. Southewest Air and Mariott seem to be the stand bys when it comes to travel and blogging, nice they included CCL in the bunch. Check out the article here.

Mad Money’s – Cramer calls Carnival Corp a protected stock

Unfortunetly, I only have a handfull CCL stock, because Mad Money’s Jim Cramer called Carnival Corporation a buy. He followed up with calling CCL a “protected stock”. Sounds good to me, check it out here. http://www.cnbc.com/id/23592455

AdSoak » Blog Archive » Funship Island

Quick article I found on Carnival’s Funship island web site.

AdSoak » Blog Archive » Funship Island

Carnival Cruise Lines online marketing – a look back at 2007

As we say good bye to another wonderful year, I thought I would take a moment to look back and go through a few of Carnival’s online initiatives in 2007. We launched quite a few sites. Here are some of the highlights:

Fun Ship Island – Millions of visitors can’t be wrong! If you have never been on a Carnival Cruise or want to be reminded of the fun you had, hands down this is the place to check out first. Funshipisland.com is as close as you can get to a Carnival Cruise without packing your bags. Just a heads up though, an experience as realistic as fun ship island has slightly longer page load times, but believe me the high definition Fun is well worth the wait. Explore every nook and cranny and you can find many freebies like: relaxing MP3’s for your iPod; a beautiful beach screen saver with live weather from the Caribbean; a Carnival ring tone you can customize to your liking; a “Fun Ship” Freddy Iron-on for the kids; and so much more. (Check it out and let us know what you think)

Carnival Connections 2.0 – Connections is the hub for all things community at Carnival. You can plan a group cruise and add photos and videos to your posts and profiles. With the addition of the Carnival Channel, all of the our blogs can be easily found in one organized area here,  But there’s so much more- check it out.

Speaking of blogs we’ve launched quite a few this year:

John Heald’s Blog – Life onboard a Carnival Cruise Ship by Carnival’s Senior Cruise Director. John’s blog is always entertaining and gives a real behind the scenes look at life aboard a Carnival Cruise ship. Join the millions of visitors on John Heald’s fantastic blog here. 

The Carnival Channel Blog – Get to know the driving force behind Carnival’s award winning cruise vacations. On the Carnival Cannel you’ll find lots of great video interviews from the folks that put the “Fun” in Carnival’s “Fun Ships”.

Splendid Things in Life – Here you’ll find lots of great guest generated content as Carnival passengers tell it like it is right after taking a fabulous Carnival Cruise. You could be the next guest blogger. Click here to find out more.

News from Carnival Cruise Lines Blog – With 22 ships (soon to be more) in the Carnival Cruise Lines fleet, sometimes it’s hard to keep up with the latest cruising news. That’s why we launched the news blog! Read about the latest updates to our ships, itineraries, onboard activities and more or find out what other bloggers and online publications have to say about your favorite cruise line.

As far as Micro-Sites 2007 kept us busy.

Carnival Splendor Micro-Site – Web pages dedicated to the upcoming Carnival Splendor.

Carnival Freedom Micro-Site – Web pages dedicated to our newest Funship the Carnival Freedom.

“Evolutions of Fun” Micro-Site – Web pages dedicated to our amazing Multi-million dollar Fantasy class refurbishment Program.

You know Carnival has always been social and as you can expect we were all over the social networks in 2007…

Twitter – A cross between blogging and instant messaging, check out our Twitter account for short updates on the latest happenings at Carnival Cruise Lines. 

YouTube – Lots of great Carnival video content, including crew interviews, tours of the ships, peeks at what our shore side employees are up to, and much more!

Flickr – Browse our collection of fantastic photos.  From ship and destination images to photos taken by Senior Cruise Director John Heald, you’re sure to feel like you’re back onboard.

Facebook Fan Page – Facebook users can now become “official” fans of the Fun Ships by adding our Fan Page!  Post a message in the forum thread, watch a video, or check out our photos.

“I love Carnival Cruise Lines” Facebook Group – Another great way for Facebook users to stay connected with Carnival and other Fun Ship fans.

And that’s only the half of it. Just wait till you see what we have in store for you in 2008! There are lots of surprises coming so, stay tuned!

From all of us here at Carnival, have a wonderful New Year!

Let’s start with the home page.

The interactive marketing team at Carnival has been focused on redesigning carnival.com for some time now. Just to be clear, we realize that there are more than a few areas of opportunity across the site. The good news is that we’re absolutely dedicated to being the best on the web for all of our customers and partners. Now being the best is a lofty goal for sure, but the team here at Carnival is committed to making that happen across all areas of the company. For now I will start with one of the most important parts of our site the home page.

There are many different types of visitors on our home page with many different goals. So, we do not take this redesign lightly. The team started by defining the goals for the next version of the site and assess how to best meet the many masters we serve on carnival.com. In future posts I will delve deeper into the various stakeholders and their effect on our overall site design. For now lets focus on a few key reasons people visit the home page:

1. Research a Carnival cruise vacation

2. Purchase a Carnival cruise vacation

3. Manage a Carnival cruise they have already booked

With this in mind we realized that no redesign could be successful without getting feedback directly from the millions of visitors we serve. That said, we asked all of the creative folks and developers to stop the presses immediately before we went too far. We wanted this feedback program to be meaningful. So, we felt we needed to get the community involved as early in the process as possible. With that said I present to you our current redesigns and ask that you give us your true feedback good or bad so that when we do replace the current version of carnival.com it will be the best Carnival site for and designed by you – our guests. Below you will find an early mock up of our new home page design. Expect many more posts on all sections of the site. Additionally, this blog will be a great place to watch as we respond to your suggestions and implement them as fast as we can. We have set up a forum on Carnival Connections specifically for this redesign here. By the way, we have code named the next version of carnival.com “HD” (story on the name, coming soon). To comment specifically on the new home page image below go here.

 

Click the image for a full scale version. 

Additionally, please let us know if you like the idea of taking part in our redesign effort and just leave some comments on the blog.

Thanks again for participating. We are excited to hear your feedback.