Welcome to the Royal Caribbean Blog podcast, a weekly look into the world of Royal Caribbean cruising.

I'm your host, Matt Hachberg, and this is episode number 102.

These days, a big part of the cruise experience, both before the cruise and during the cruise,

is sharing your cruise vacation with friends and family.

Social media has become a really big way that we get to bring others along virtually

and show up how much fun

we're having. This week, I'm happy to have Joe Talley on the podcast to talk about how folks

can use social media to enhance their own cruise experience as well and also share in the ways

in which Royal Caribbean is looking to get more and more guests using it as well. Here we go.

If you were to ask me the biggest change of vacationing in the last five years, I would

say it has to be the advent and proliferation of social media among vacationers.

Think about it.

When you book Royal Caribbean Cruise, probably one of the first things that many people do is

go on Facebook or Twitter or MySpace, I suppose, and make a post to tell everyone they have their next vacation

book. It's a source of pride, excitement, and it's the first part of leveraging social media

to bring our friends and family into the experience with us. Now, this is just one example of how

important social media has become, I think, to cruisers. And so this week, I wanted to take a deeper

look at how all of us can use social

media to enhance our Royal Caribbean Cruise experience. And when we talk social media on this

podcast, I have to bring a man on who is the Grand Puba posting the Maharaja of Media and

the purveyor of Periscope. It's Joe Talley of Cruzehangout.com. Welcome back to the podcast, Joe.

Thanks, man. Thanks for having me back.

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