• by Tameka Kee , June 26, 2008

Carnival Cruise Lines has partnered with Scrapblog to add digital scrapbooks to its CarnivalConnections.com property. Now Carnival cruisers can share multimedia memories of their vacation experience, complete with content imported from sites like Flickr, Photobucket and YouTube. Miami-based Scrapblog hosts the online scrapbook platform, and supplies creative materials like banners, backgrounds and audio files.

It's the latest social media tool that Carnival has added to its CarnivalConnections.com online community--which, according to company brass, was designed to foster feedback and experience-sharing from its onset. "It's about a dialogue between the company and the guests," said Stephanie Leavitt, social media strategist at Carnival. "Of course it helps to reinforce the brand, but we don't use CarnivalConnections as a direct sales tool."

And while Carnival isn't judging the site by its ability to drive bookings, the cruise company does track stats like page views and time spent per visit. Performance metrics for the scrapblogs in particular include how many are created, how many visitors return to their creation, and the number of people who end up registering to become CarnivalConnections.com members simply because they made (or were drawn to someone else's) scrapblog.

The scrapblogs on CarnivalConnections.com feature one of five Carnival Cruise themes, and while users need to access them from the site at first, they can be ported to various social networks. Bloggers using WordPress or Google's Blogger can also embed a scrapblog directly into their page, or add it to Flickr as a photo set.

"A Carnival cruiser comes back and has pics and video that are essentially already branded," said Carlos Garcia, CEO and co-founder of Scrapblog. "When they share it with friends and family, they're sharing the brand. Allowing them to create a scrapbook online increases the number of people that can interact with the brand exponentially."

Since its launch in early 2007, Garcia said that about a third of the scrapblogs crafted on Scrapblog.com were travel-related, so the Carnival partnership made perfect sense. And Carnival had already begun upgrading the social media features on CarnivalConnections.com, including adding a video news channel and a blog penned by the company's Senior Cruise Director John Heald.

Carnival joins ABC as a brand that has partnered with Scrapblog. In December, the media giant tapped the online scrapbook company so that fans of shows like "Ugly Betty" and "Samantha Who?" could create scrapblogs at ABC.com. Disney's Steamboat Ventures invested in Scrapblog during a round of funding in December.