Lodging Interactive Blog

Link2Brand Empowers Branded Hotels To Manage Their Own Marketing Campaigns – No Website Needed

Lodging Interactive, an award winning interactive and social media marketing agency servicing the hospitality industry, today announced Link2Brand an innovative marketing solution for branded hotels. With Link2Brand hotels can launch their own marketing campaigns without the need of a dedicated hotel website; Link2Brand links directly to the brand's website.

“Our innovative Link2Brand marketing tool solves a long standing issue for branded hotels – how to create short, personalized and descriptive promotional links that seamlessly pass through brand SRP booking codes,” said Mr. DJ Vallauri, Lodging Interactive’s Founder and President. “Link2Brand empowers hotels to provide their own local web marketing for events and groups such as soccer tournaments, military reunions and to offer local businesses their own branded links to easily make online reservations. Link2Brand enables hotels to deep link into the hotel brand’s booking engine.”

For example this SHORT link with the hotel’s name:

http://myhotelpackages.com/SheratonBirmingham/Midweek

Sends visitors to this LONG link, deep into the brand’s booking engine and passes through the SRP code “DAYBAR”:

 http://www.starwoodhotels.com/sheraton/search/pre_decider_all.html?propertyID=115&ratePlanName=DAYBAR&IM=SOP_TITLE_179WD_SI_115_ATL

Complete ROI Tracking – With Link2Brand every link counts. All clicks are recorded in real time, and the hotel can simply log into its online dashboard to view click results. Monthly brand website referral reports will detail the number of Link2Brand referrals and revenue.

“We’ve made using Link2Brand so easy to use, hotels and marketers can create their personalized links in less than 60 seconds. Link2Brand can be used on Twitter, Facebook and blogs or micro-sites to drive business,” added Richard Walsh, V.P. Business Development for Lodging Interactive. “Additionally each hotel account can have up to 10 sub-users who can create and track their own unique links.”

Try Link2Brand Free For Ten Days

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

Americans Head to Travel Sites for Vacation Planning

Americans Click It to Book It

Travel site categories experienced a gain in activity in June as Americans entered the heat of travel season. More than 100 million Americans visited the category during the month, affecting the following travel sub-categories: Transactions, Hotels/Resorts, Ground/Cruise, and Airplanes.

Travel - Transactions sites ranked as the top gaining category for the month of June, growing 32 percent to 5.2 million visitors. Viator.com ranked #1 in the category with 1.1 million visitors, followed closely by TravelPN.com with 1.1 million. OneTime.com grew to 853 million unique visitors, while WWTE.com attracted 457 million visitors.

Hotels/Resorts sites also saw strong growth during the month with 36.6 million Americans turning to these sites for lodging options. Marriott ranked as the top property, growing 16 percent to 6.5 million visitors. Hilton Hotels attracted 6.0 million visitors (up 13 percent), followed by InterContinental Hotels Group with 5.1 million (up 14 percent), Wyndham Worldwide with 4.0 million (up 9 percent), and Disney Travel with 3.6 million (up 5 percent).

via www.prnewswire.com

Chatter Guard Social Media Monitor Report - June 2010 - Has been Published

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 May 2010 report.

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

Without May’s extraordinary performance for Extended Stay hotels, there wasn’t much left to buoy up the overall averages for June. Just as we saw in May, June saw a notable dip in almost every category. Hopefully, customer satisfaction will heat up with the weather. On a scale of 1-5, 5 being “fantastic” and 1 being “poor,” the average lodger indicated a 6.87% drop in Resultant Quality Score (3.64 to 3.39), a 12.57% decrease in Dining (3.74 to 3.27), and a 5.74% drop in Facilities ratings (4.01 to 3.78). The only improvement was in the category of Housekeeping (last month’s loser), which rose 3.52% (3.41 to 3.53).Room satisfaction saw an 8.55% decline (3.51 to 3.21), a 7.67% decrease in Staff reviews (3.78 to 3.49), and a 7.12% dip in Value (3.37 to 3.13).

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

CoMMingle Offers Free Social Media Marketing Audit

CoMMingle by Lodging Interactive, an award winning leading interactive and social media marketing agency servicing the hospitality industry, today announced it is offering a free social media marketing audit service to hotels.

To get your free social media marketing audit, visit www.CoMMingle.me

It's FREE! It's Powerful! Listen Up! Lodging Interactive's HotelCast 2.0 - A Hospitality Marketing Podcast Powerhouse

Lodging Interactive’s HotelCast 2.0 - keeping you “in the know” and “in the now” on industry and consumer online marketing trends with our latest podcast.

With many years of podcast resources online via our website, you'll find a wealth of helpful hints, tips and up to date information to keep your finger on the pulse of hospitality internet marketing.

Listen to the newest release, The Hottest 11 Minutes in Hotel and Hospitality Marketing, HotelCast 2.0 where you can hear about the ever changing marketing component of "Social Media", measure your Social Media footprint, tips on local reviews, making your property relevant for searches on Yahoo, Google, Bing and others. Also learn how CoMMIngle can help you through the maze of Social Media!

It's all here on HotelCast 2.0!  

Podcast: CoMMingle Social Media Marketing For Hotels

Hot out of the studio, we're pleased to release our CoMMingle Social Media Marketing for Hotels podcast.  Twelve minutes you can listen to online or download into your iPod!

Lodging Interactive  makes sure your ears and eyes are tuned into the ever changing, ever important marketing component of "Social Media" and the impact it can have on your property.  Get Tips on how to measure the reach of your Social Media footprint.

Visit CoMMingle  and see how we can assist you in the jungle of Social Media vines most hoteliers get tangled in...It's all here on HotelCast 2.0! 

  

Your hotel's social media digital footprint is too important to be wandering aimlessly.

Social media can prove to be overwhelming to any business. Before you even start, here are some things that you will need to consider:

• Develop a social media marketing strategy for your hotel.
• Find competent personnel to create, develop and manage the multiple social media accounts for the best social impact.
• Find responsible personnel to engage interaction from your hotel on all the various social media sites.
• Develop tools to measure results.

With a recent report released last week by R2integrated, 65% of businesses surveyed did not see any measurable results using social media claiming it was because of the lack of valid metrics and data. What were the other 35% doing that made it successful?

They had a plan.

Of course having a plan without the personnel, time or resources to implement the plan or the tools to measure the results would render the whole effort useless.  The "free" sites, inexpensive intern and inexperience in what works in social media for hotels and what does not, can end up costing a  great deal with reputation, effort, time and effective results.

Define and develop your hotel's digital footprint on the right track, professionally, responsibility and effectively. Don't wander aimlessly. Your hotel's digital footprint is not something to be left to chance when it will linger on the web forever.

Plan your strategy, become part of the 35% of those who have made it a success. 

Until next time,

Rosella

CoMMingle Social Media Marketing Manager

Plan. Socialize. Engage. Measure.