older, conducted by Infogroup | ORC on July 22‐23, 2010. Respondents for this survey
were selected from among those who have volunteered to participate in online
surveys and polls. The data have been weighted to reflect the demographic
composition of the 18+ population. Because the sample is based on those who
initially self‐selected for participation, no estimates of sampling error can be
calculated.
Report Date: August 5, 2010
IN-DEPTH: Interview with Anil Aggarwal, CEO of Milestone Internet Marketing
Social Media continues to grow in importance. It has not only become a critical tool to interact with customers, but is also a key element that impacts organic search rankings for your hotel. Hotels that take advantage of this hot trend are seeing significant benefits in terms of online placement and revenue.
“The most common question that we get asked in the hospitality industry is why I should be concerned about social media and how will I benefit from social media elements. An essential follow-up to these questions is how should I go about optimising for social media and measure ROI? In this article, we give tips about some of the key initiatives that you could undertake to maximise the gain on social media channels. The content in this article is gathered from several years of practical experience working on social media optimisation strategies for our clients,” says Anil Aggarwal, CEO of Milestone Internet Marketing.
Aggarwal, who is scheduled to speak at the forthcoming Travel Distribution Summit North America 2010, to be held in Chicago (13-14 October), spoke to EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta about the significance of social media strategy and practical tips for the same.
Anil Aggarwal:
While we make our best efforts to bring you the most effective channels and strategies, given the rate at which the social media space is evolving, it is likely that things may evolve and the channels we mention today may have changed. Few people had heard about Twitter and understood the effectiveness of the “tweeting” model until the presidential election at the end of the 2008. By summer 2009, it had became a hot raging media. One thing we are certain of is that social media is here to stay and is the next generation of Internet Marketing. Hotels and companies taking advantage of this trend will emerge ahead of the game just like hotels who adopted search engine marketing in early 2000s. Before we delve deeper into top 10 ideas for social media, let’s take a look at why you should even consider investing in social media.
Why Social Media?
Here are the top reasons why every business interested in Internet marketing should be looking at social media:
1. Saturate the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for your brand name – All the major search engines are moving towards displaying search results from your website and all the major social media and news channels. It is imperative that the hotel has presence in all these channels to dominate the search engine results page. The example below shows you the Universal Search Results page from Google when “Milestone Internet” is typed in the search engine. In our opinion, social media optimisation is the next generation of Internet marketing. Search Engines give higher relevance to businesses connected through different social media channels resulting in higher placement in search engines.
Figure 1: Social media helps dominate the Search Engine Results Page
2.Social Media is the fastest growing category of Internet Marketing in terms of attracting new users. For example, Facebook has more than 500M users (source: www.facebook.com). It is the next generation of Internet marketing and can drive traffic to your website and blog from different social media channels.
3.Social Media allows you to establish a relationship with your customer like no other media has previously allowed. It enables you to establish a 1-1 relationship where you get regular feedback on how your customers are reacting to your marketing messages.
4.Social Media offers an opportunity for you to establish yourself as an expert in your market. Use of blogs, Twitter, etc. can help you establish yourself as an expert in your destination. People like to buy from experts and like to follow experts on their blogs post, tweets, etc.
5.Rank in Search Engine’s Latest Real Time Search Algorithm – Gain additional exposure and traffic when social conversations rank in real time search on Google, Yahoo, Bing.
Now, that we have made a strong case of why you should be investing in Social Media, the obvious question that pops up is “how should I go about doing social media optimisation?”
Social Media Marketing Value Chain
All the efforts that a hotel puts into social media marketing can be bundled into the following 3 categories. We will segment the top 10 things to promote on social media channels into these categories so that the hotels can use them as practical tips.
Figure 2: Social Media Optimization Value Chain Top 10 Ways to Promote on Social Media Create
1.Create and Upload Custom Facebook pages – Facebook allows the hotel to customise the tabs to tailor it to your specific hotel or business. Some best practices to follow while creating Facebook page are:
a.Integrate Reservation widgets
b.Have event pages
c.Create custom tabs to highlight hotel specific items such as meetings and conferences, things to do, etc.
d.Sample Facebook Pages for a hotel http://www.facebook.com/pages/Red-Lion-Hotel-Denver-Southeast/167741797528
2.Create/ Promote Destination Blogs showcasing local events, news, and specials. Information posted on the blog gets index right away.
a.Example of Destination Blog – http://blog.aquaresorts.com/
b.Example of destination blog – http://blog.rivernorthhotel.com/
3. Search Optimised video
a.Create and promote a search optimised video about your destination, local attractions and upload them on Video Search engines such as Youtube. Youtube is the fourth largest search engine and drives significant traffic.
b.Example of search optimized video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HraOIiqdIn4/
4. Photo Sharing
a.Create a channel or an account on photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picassa and post hotel and destination photos on the sites. Tag the pictures with relevant keyword phrases. Pictures about the destination that convey information to potential viewers are more likely to produce better results
b.Example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8209088@N07/
5. Twitter
a.Create Custom Twitter Profiles with hotel phone number in the background
b.Example: http://twitter.com/vallartagv
Manage and Promote
6. Integrating and Cross-Linking Channels Once your channels are set up, it is crucial to integrate and cross network all your channels. Make sure that the social media icons are displayed clearly on your website so that consumers can get to those channels. Cross-link Flickr, Twitter and YouTube to your Facebook account. Integrating and Cross-linking the channels will help you in optimisation, keeping it fresh as well as in expanding your network. Bring live feeds from your social media channels into your website. Example: http://www.nickhotel.com/html/social-media.asp
Figure 3 Integrate live feeds from social media channels on your website
7.Grow Fan-base
a.Facebook – Be My Friend – Become friends with organisation which are most important for your business
b.Promote Facebook Profile Page – Upload email list of your customers, business associates and ask them to become friends with you on Facebook
c.Convert your friends on Facebook by offering time sensitive specials
d.Network with local organizations and grow fan base
e.Twitter Follow – Stay connected and current by finding out relevant businesses in your area and following them
8. Press Releases and Articles – Using online news channels such as Business Wire and PR Web to release Articles and news information enhances search engine optimisation and web.
Monitor
9. Create Social Media Reviews Platform on your website to encourage users to upload viral content on your website. Example: http://www.nickhotel.com/guestreviews/orlando-hotel-guest-reviews.aspx
Figure 4 Encourage users to post viral user generated content on your website
10.Monitor Social Media Channels and Review Site We recommend hotels should actively monitor social media channels and review sites. The success of social media efforts can be measured in many different ways:
a. Awareness
– Number of friends & followers
– Social media mentions
– New relevant links
b. Conversion
– Track through promo codes
– Google Analytics
c. Relationships
– How much interaction
– Who is initiating
d. Engagement
– Unique visitors
– Time on site
– Frequency of visit
There are many options available for hoteliers to monitor the social media activity.
a. Analytics –hotels can integrate Google Analytics code on Facebook pages, blog pages and track the activity on these channels. In addition, Youtube, Flickr, provide reporting tools that can help you gauge activity on those channels.
b.Using sophisticated social media and reputation management software such as eBuzz Connect. These tools tell you what people are saying about your property on different channels, video views, photo views, etc., and can benchmark your performance month-over-month to determine whether the social media strategies are effective. These tools also help in proactively respond to negative /positive reviews and minimize the risk of not knowing what people are saying about your hotel online. Here is a screen shot of one such tool from Milestone Internet Marketing, Inc. http://www.milestoneinternet.com/html/online-social-media-management-system-for-hotels.asp
Figure 5 eBuzz Connect Social Media and Review Monitoring Tool
Summary
Social Media is an integral part of the real-time search algorithm. Social media creates real connection between companies and customers, and that connection equals purchase intent. Ongoing connection and relationship with your customers will eventually turn them into a volunteer marketing army. Make sure that social media is an integral part of your overall marketing plan. If you are limited on budget and resources, still keep monitoring the social media domain and do the best you can. Hoteliers who want to be ahead of the curve, should invest today in the media that is fast emerging as the future of internet marketing.
Travel Distribution Summit North America 2010
http://www.m-travel.com/news/2010/08/top-10-strategies-to-promote-hotels-on-social-media-channels.html
By MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — You’ve got to hand it to Walt Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger. He is not afraid to shake up a corporate culture when he spies an opportunity to achieve a higher rate of return for his stockholders.
Disney (DIS 33.77, +0.06, +0.18%) is essentially swapping the movie business — by selling off Miramax for some $660 million — for the bright lights of … social media, by agreeing earlier this week to acquire Playdom, a social-gaming destination on the Internet, for about $563 million.
Presto! Disney said Friday it would sell Miramax to businessman Ron Tutor and his partners, and a new culture is born at Iger’s shop. And it is a good idea, too. The movie business is as volatile as ever. Someone smart like Iger concludes that there is no good reason for a media behemoth to roll the dice time after time on a big-budget extravaganza which fails to make a profit.
The new media present opportunities and challenges for executives everywhere. In the entertainment industry, brand names matter. More than ever. There are so many platforms available to present content. “Snow White” will be as vital — and potentially lucrative — on some youngster’s iPad (AAPL 258.31, +0.20, +0.08%) as it ever was in a movie theater or on home television.
Social media are increasingly the most exciting developments in the communications industry. Facebook can influence the population’s culture, the economy and politics. Twitter has clout, too.
Disney is shrewd to flex its muscle in this area. Hooray for … social media.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/disney-swaps-hollywood-for-social-media-2010-07-30
The growth of social media is incredible. Facebook tops google for weekly traffic, Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the web, 1 out of 8 people married in the US met via social media,etc
Making Your Biz Media Savvy
by Romy Ribitzky Jul 29 2010
It’s important not to bombard your Twitter, Facebook, and other social-media platforms just with information about your brand. Rather, find out where people are already talking about a similar product or need and give them information of value.
“Your audience is actively seeking you, or your product, through online research. Make sure you’re active in their arena so you can be found,” says Katherine O’Hara, vice president of New Jersey-based S3, an advertising, media, and public relations firm. “Blogging creates HTML-based text that is tapped by search engines and smiled upon given its constant refreshing of content.”
http://www.portfolio.com/resources/2010/07/29/tips-for-small-business-on-getting-media-attention
Interesting article by Maria Ogneva at Mashable…http://mashable.com/2010/07/29/monitor-measure-brand-social-media/
Social Media Monitoring
Monitoring (or perhaps the more evocative definition is “listening”) is the process of continuous and immediate discovery of conversations with the purpose of learning, engaging, helping and collaborating. You can do this with anyone, whether it’s your customers, prospects, industry thought leaders, former customers, partners or others. There are also different cues to listen for and different ways to engage. Typically, monitoring has a stronger real-time implication than measurement, as one of the purposes is to track keywords as they appear, with the goal of quick reaction.
How it works: Typically, monitoring is performed on a keywords basis. Relevant keywords include your brand name, product name, etc. Based on your keywords, your monitoring system of choice goes out to the social networks you specify, grabs the relevant articles and messages, and hopefully arranges them for easier digestion and action.
Why it’s important: My favorite analogy for social media is that it’s like the “largest cocktail party in the world.” It’s a room filled with people driven by one desire to communicate, share, digest and relate, while carrying on many independent conversations. Some of these conversations can be about you, your competitors or your industry. Some of these conversations could be people looking for a product like yours. They will talk about all these topics regardless of whether you are listening or not. However, you wouldn’t know any of this if you weren’t listening.
Social Media Measurement
Unlike monitoring, measurement is more concerned with metrics over a specified time period. Whereas monitoring answers the question “Who is talking about [insert keyword] right now and what are they saying?” measurement answers questions of “How did my keywords perform over time?” “How does that compare to my competitors?” and “What are some trends I can glean to make my product more usable by these people who are giving me feedback?”
How it works: Similar to monitoring, your system of choice goes out and looks for articles where that specific combination of keywords occurs. It then tabulates these occurrences and presents them to you in relevant data reports. You need to be able to slice and dice the data by source, date, and other dimensions, as well as drill down to the social media “atom” level — the individual message — if you need to.
Why it’s important: Unless you are immune from management or client accountability, you will probably be expected to provide some metrics that justify your company’s social media marketing or listening program. But that’s only a part of the story. Constant benchmarking is the only surefire way to know if things are working. Social media is a quickly evolving beast, so if you don’t routinely measure and course-correct, you could be marching down the wrong path. The idea is to “fail fast.”
Mayo Clinic has been taking advantage of social media — including Facebook, Twitter and patient and employee blogs — for several years.
Today Mayo announced the launch of a Center for Social Media, which it says will expand social media tools beyond the traditional P.R. and marketing functions to use by staff, physicians and patients. We chatted by phone with Lee Aase, currently manager of syndications and social media at Mayo, who will be one of the center’s leaders.
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:
What does this involve?
The real focus is looking for ways to increase the use of social media throughout the practice at Mayo — to provide in-depth information for patients in a much more comprehensive way, and to create connections between researchers, physicians and staff. Up until now we’ve had the equivalent of a person and a half working through the P.R. department, and we want to take that same model to the whole enterprise at Mayo. We’ll have the equivalent of about eight full-time employees, including a medical director.
Why would a busy doctor want to spend the time to learn how to use YouTube?
This is building on the interest that we’ve already had. There is immense interest from clinical departments — they want to be able to harness these tools to do their business. We want to create a curriculum that’s scalable and enables us to provide them with training when they want it.
Can you give me an example?
We’ve done an introduction video for the head of our dental specialties department, Dr. Sreenivas Koka, with some background information — where he’s from, his history. And it talks about the things patients are looking to fix, and asks what’s most important for them. The idea is that it will make the consultations more efficient by getting the preliminaries out of the way. What Dr. Koka has found is that the patients feel they know him a little bit before they come. We want to study the impact of that — so far we’ve sent it out to a few dozen patients but we want to study it [more formally].
And you’d also offer this to other institutions, advocacy groups and other organizations?
We’ve informally been consulting and providing advice to other medical providers and organizations; now there’s a formal relationship we can have with other hospitals. We’ll charge nominal fees to cover the cost of the center. We’re planning to create a blogging platform, for example, that we may offer to other hospitals or to patient foundations.
What’s the goal?
To help patients. Sometimes that means providing information directly to them, and sometimes it means disseminating information more rapidly to the medical community.
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/07/27/health-blog-qa-mayo-clinics-new-center-for-social-media/
The world has changed, and social media is here to stay. The challenge is to find ways to take advantage of the new medium. There are great opportunities to get very detailed information out in an informative way. It’s exciting to think about what this could mean to business, politics and culture!
http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2009/07/30/n_ss_mediacom_social_media.cnnmoney/
Although this campaign has flaws as pointed out in the article, it shows a change in direction in terms of major automobile makers adapting and adjusting to a new environment – social media
As a calculated strategy, this first-time event is drawing a lot more eyeballs to the Facebook site than would ever consider visiting a Auto Show. According to a Mashable report, they’ve already surpassed 30,000 fans prior to the reveal, which apparently was the threshold to be reached in order for one lucky random fan to win an Explorer of their own.
Rich Timmons, Founder of Timmons&Company, said “by engaging in social media, the company will now be able to connect with their current and prospective clients online. Our social media will serve as a resource of entertaining and educational information through sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and our blog.”
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/07/prweb4292944.htm
Dan Dubelman 