Facebook Unveils a Service to Announce Where Users Are

Facebook introduced a long-anticipated service called Places on Wednesday that could help the company tap local and small-business advertisers and sharpen its competition with Google.

Facebook’s Places borrows heavily from location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow users to check in at places and broadcast their location to friends. But those companies, as well as others like Yelp, said they saw Facebook’s Places as a complement to their own services and as an opportunity to gain additional distribution.

Read more via www.nytimes.com

SEO and Integration With Social Media

"Social media has forced its way into the world of marketing, and it's here to stay. Social networks and blogs are among the most popular online activities, and their popularity will continue to grow as more businesses utilize them to directly engage customers.

• Facebook currently has over 500 million users - more than the combined populations of the United States, Germany, and Japan.
• There are currently 133 million blogs that average 900,000 posts a day, according to Technorati.
• YouTube will serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors this year. Users now upload more than 24 hours of content every minute, according to YouTube.

Social media is big - and getting bigger. Use the power of social media to support your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy by integrating basic SEO best practices and using the same keywords you know work in SEO, in those environments to engage a wider audience and improve your online presence."

Read more via www.clickz.com

Social Media Is Not Free: Here's Why

"Twitter is free. Facebook is free. Foursquare is free. TweetDeck is (still) free. Google Alerts is free. So, social media is free, right? Wrong. Beyond even the obvious costs - designing and building a Foursquare application, or stepping up to a fee-based listening platform like Alterian, Collective Intellect, Cymfony, BuzzMetrics, or Lithium's Scout Labs, social media is far from free.

In fact, social media-based marketing costs real money. While it may not be millions of dollars for 30 seconds of air time, making sense of the social Web and really getting it right takes planning, creative insight, product management, and other internal resources, all of which have costs associated with them that you may not see at the outset."

Read more via www.clickz.com

Yahoo Switches to Bing for Organic Search Results | ClickZ

Following the search alliance it formed with Microsoft last year, Yahoo has announced that Bing is now officially powering all of its organic search results in the U.S. and Canada, meaning webmasters and search-engine optimization professionals need only focus their efforts on one major engine besides market leader Google.

via www.clickz.com

Google's Set to Launch Google Me: Should Facebook Be Worried?

There has long been talk that Google is ready to give Facebook a run for its money in terms of the social network space. Now, ZDnet reports that Google is just about ready to launch its "Google Me" social network - should Facebook be worried?

Read more via www.tmcnet.com

Guest Satisfaction - July 2010 Chatter Guard Benchmark Report Is Released

PARSIPPANY, NJ , August 23, 2010 - Lodging Interactive, a leading interactive marketing agency servicing the hospitality industry and the publisher of the free Chatter Guard Monthly Benchmark Monitor Report has released its July 2010 report.

To receive the full report, sign up for our newsletter at LodgingInteractive.com.

 July was a lackluster month for the hospitality industry, with sluggish consumer ratings in almost every segment and category. While the losses were generally mild, the lack of gains was particularly evident across the board. Perhaps the hot weather is affecting the customers’ moods? On a scale of 1-5, 5 being “fantastic” and 1 being “poor,” the only positive category for the average hotel lodger was in Dining, which rose a scant 0.71% (from 3.27 to 3.26). The rest of the average hotel performances were single digit losses: July saw a 2.73% drop in Resultant Quality Score (3.39 to 3.28), a 2.30% decrease in Facilities ratings (3.74 to 3.64), a 7.49% loss in Housekeeping (3.53 to 3.16). Room satisfaction saw a 1.35% decline (3.21 to 3.15), a 1.63% decrease in Staff reviews (3.49 to 3.42), and a 2.31% dip in Value (3.13 to 3.06).

To receive the full report, sign up for our newsletter at LodgingInteractive.com.

Welcome to the future, where hotel operations and marketing are one

It is official; the walls on every hotel worldwide are now made of glass and are completely transparent; the outside world can now see into your hotel lobby and witness how real guest are treated in the real-world daily. For those who thought that TripAdvisor had revolutionized the hospitality industry, be assured that we have so far only seen just the beginning.

Read more via www.hotelmarketing.com

CoMMingle Offers Free Social Media Engagement Report To Hotels

PARSIPPANY, NJ , August 17, 2010 - CoMMingle by Lodging Interactive, an award winning leading interactive and social media marketing agency servicing the hospitality industry, today announced that it is offering its Social Media Engagement Report at no cost to the first 200 hotels that sign up on its website. The CoMMingle Social Media Engagement Report captures a hotel’s social engagement on Facebook and Twitter and is delivered bi-weekly via email.

“We’re offering our CoMMingle Social Media Engagement Report to hotels in an effort to encourage hoteliers to advance their social media marketing activities on Facebook and Twitter to the next level and drive more business,” stated Mr. DJ Vallauri, Lodging Interactive’s Founder & President. “The report pulls in all the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) of the hotel’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and presents them in an informative engagement level report.”

Below are the KPI’s measured in the CoMMingle Social Media Engagement Report which also compares KPI’s month-over-month:

 

 

 

Hotel properties can request their own CoMMingle Social Media Engagement Report online at:

http://commingle.me/free_social_engagement_report.shtml.

 

The first 200 hotels can receive the report at no cost for 1 year.

Making customer satisfaction pay in the hotel industry

"In recent years, reports in the business press have questioned the value of measuring customer satisfaction, suggesting that such research does not explain or predict financial performance. A new Cornell University research paper demonstrates now the contrary.

In this report, Cornell University demonstrates that customer satisfaction research, when designed and executed with the prerequisite psychometric and statistical rigor, does in fact yield actionable insights and show clear linkages to actual financial outcomes"

Read more via www.hotelmarketing.com

25 "P"s of Social and New Media Marketing

You probably heard about the 5 "P"s of Marketing:

•     * Product: The products or services offered to your customers/clients.
•     * Price: The pricing strategy for the desired profit margin.
•     * Place: Distribution --getting your product/service to your target market.
•     * Promotion: Communicating with your customers.
•     * People: The value of your people and people at large (i.e. influencers)

Now with the New Media the same list has been re-purposed for the social media channels such as twitter, facebook, linkedin, foursquare etc. etc.  Some folks talk about the 3 P's some talk about the 4 P's...

But if you think about it, Social Media is different; with Web 2.0 it is no longer a monologue, it's now a dialogue, so there really are more than just a handful P's in Social Media and Social Media Marketing.

read more via socialmediatoday.com