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

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

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!  

Stealth travel startup buys Kayak's TravelPost, adopts name

The secretive online travel startup created by Rich Barton and other former Expedia executives has a new moniker, logo and Web site. The heavily-funded company -- formed earlier this year under the placeholder name of NewTravelco -- recently purchased the online hotel review site TravelPost from travel search powerhouse Kayak. As part of the acquisition, the company is adopting the TravelPost name.

via www.techflash.com

Travel Weekly - Hotels struggle to harness the power of social media

By: Jeri Clausing April 21, 2010

Chaos. For hoteliers, the word denotes not the elegant mathematical theory that's become a buzzword in high finance but rather the old-fashioned, general disarray they face as they struggle to remain competitive in an era when the tricks and tools of marketing are changing at warp speed.

It's been just a few short years since social media took the Internet age to another level, imposing on marketers a new and constantly growing list of questions that go far beyond whether or how to use Facebook or Twitter.

"We're in a really interesting period of upheaval and chaos within the interface between travel suppliers and travelers," said Douglas Quinby, senior director of research at PhoCusWright and author of that group's new report, "Social Media in Travel: Traffic & Activity."

via www.travelweekly.com

Facebook is more popular than Google @ work

Business employees are visiting Facebook from the workplace more than any other internet site, including Google, Managed Security Services company Network Box discovered in a recent study.

The company looked at 13 billion URLs used by businesses in the first quarter of 2010 and found that 6.8% of all business Internet traffic goes to Facebook, which is double the amount of business traffic that goes to Google and nearly triple the amount that Yahoo gets.

Network Box also found that Facebook consumes a significant portion of business bandwidth: 4.5% of all bandwidth. However, YouTube reigns supreme in that department, accounting for 10% of all business bandwidth used. An accompanying survey showed that 43% respondents are concerned about this seemingly excessive use of social media in the workplace.

Facebook certainly appears to dominate business users’ attention while at work. If previous findings that Facebook is the fourth largest destination site for news are accurate, then perhaps we can safely assume that in-office use of Facebook is for more than just social networking. We can only hope that the YouTube video viewing is as educational in nature.

Business Traffic and Bandwidth
Top five websites visited by businesses:

1. Facebook – 6.8 per cent of all traffic
2. Google – 3.4 per cent of all traffic
3. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.8 per cent of all traffic
4. Yahoo – 2.4 per cent of all traffic
5. Doubleclick – 1.7 per cent of all traffic
Top five business bandwidth sites:

1. YouTube – 10 per cent of all bandwidth used
2. Facebook – 4.5 per cent of all bandwidth used
3. Windows Update – 3.3 per cent of all bandwidth used
4. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.7 per cent of all bandwidth used
5. Google – 2.5 per cent of all bandwidth used

Google Search Rankings Now Consider Site Speed

Back in November, we started hearing murmurs that Google was considering whether or not to factor site speed into its search ranking algorithm. In a blog post today, the search giant confirms it is now adding site speed to its list of criteria that could affect your Google ranking.

via mashable.com

Chatter Guard Lite Social Monitoring With Sentiment Scoring

 

We're very excited to announce the roll out of our Chatter Guard Lite Social Media Monitoring service for hotels.  Just like our flagship Chatter Guard service, we're combining proprietary technologies with human review and comment sentiment scoring.  

Unlike others that just "screen scrape" or use RSS feed and make your hotel do all the work, we do the sentiment scoring for you!

Check it out - read more about Chatter Guard Lite - Social Media Sentiment Monitoring for Hotels

Google Maps Surfacing Hotel Prices to Battle Bing

Google's experiments with integrating more of its search advertising experience within Google Maps continued March 22 with the revelation that the company is now serving up prices for some hotel listings.

via googlewatch.eweek.com