Lodging Interactive Blog

Some Perspective on Social Networks

As vice president of research at Gartner, Andrew Frank is on top of how media companies and marketers use technology. He has directed tech strategy at companies such as Omnicom-owned Organic, Viant and Ogilvy & Mather, and has a shelf full of awards, including the 2001 Webby for "Best Music Site on the Internet."

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Facebook: No. 1 Globally

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to illustrate the impact of his social network, he tells a story about several young religious militants from Lebanon who changed their view of Western culture through Facebook friendships. The subtext to the tale is that free expression of ideas, enabled by the Web, bridges deep cultural divides. But we knew that: It's one of the central concepts behind the Olympics, after all. What we didn't know is that Facebook is in Lebanon.

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Ranks of Internet-Using Seniors Grow

More than one out of 10 US consumers ages 99 and older surveyed by Gfk Roper Public Affairs & Media for Evercare said they used the Internet, and 7% used e-mail.

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Travel bookings are no longer the whole story

PhoCusWright and Hitwise recently partnered to track and analyze the online travel space. The resulting report, Search, Shop, Buy: Inside The Tangled Web of Online Travel, evaluates traffic data from Hitwise to determine how Travel 2.0, the Long Tail and search are affecting the online travel space, tracing the trends that are emerging throughout the travel search, shopping and buying processes.

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Free Web 2.0 Social Media User's Guide

We just finished our Web 2.0 Social Media User's Guide for Hotels and you can get your own copy by visiting the link below. 

While other publications communicate the importance of Social Media marketing, no other publication shows hoteliers how to deploy an effective strategy.  Our Web 2.0 Social Media User's Guide shows you how.

Free Web 2.0 Social Media User's Guide

eBay enters the hotel marketing arena

eBay and Webjet are entering a commercial arrangement for the supply, distribution and marketing of hotels online through eBay.com.au.

The partnership brings together Webjet's unique hotel services aggregator which electronically provides in excess of 50,000 worldwide hotels with year round (not just leftover) inventory with eBay's very special and enormous customer database which totals over 5 million members in Australia.

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Web sites that specialize in travel gripes

Let's say some airline, tour operator or hotel seriously bollixed your trip. Whether or not you're able to get compensation or a chargeback - or you believe that you were misled or given shabby treatment - you'd like to give that supplier a black eye. Or maybe you'd like to see if some airline, hotel or operator has generated a lot of gripes from others. Either way, the Internet makes it easy to post your gripe and check other's gripes. Here are a few places you can blow off some steam or read about other traveler's eruptions.

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A Foolproof Method for Great Blogging

I like to compare blogs to mattresses. Every mattress needs to have the right softness to support ratio. I imagine top ten posts, weekly roundups, and opinion pieces as the padding that makes mattresses soft. Meaty posts, research-based pieces and posts announcing new important information are like mattress springs. The key to a successful blog is maintaining the right ratio. Just like different people prefer different mattress ratios, audiences prefer different blog content ratios. Both kinds of posts are a subtle art form and equally important, but the second type of posts are much harder to write on a consistent basis. The following method mostly applies to writing these more in-depth (spring-like) blog posts.

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What's the Difference Between Gen X and Gen Y?

Many marketers are hard-pressed to tell the difference between Generations X and Y, which include those born between 1966 and 1979 and between 1980 and 1990, respectively.

But according to "The State of Consumers And Technology: Benchmark 2008" report from Forrester Research, telling the generations apart is relatively easy.

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35+ Examples of Corporate Social Media in Action

We’ve discussed some tactics to get your company better engaged with social media. Lest you think there’s a limit to how you can connect with business and customer facing audiences, we’ve assembled this list of more than 35 companies who are experimenting with social media in a host of different ways.

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