Lodging Interactive Blog

The travel industry goes social

"Welcome to Facebook — population 500 million. That’s about as many users as there are females in India.

So it's not surprising that companies would get around to exploiting the house that Mark Zuckerberg built sooner or later. That goes triple for travel-related industries, whose clientele tend to be extremely active on social networks.

Portland-based Second Porch — an online vacation rental site that lists 4,000 properties in more than 100 countries — existed wholly as a Facebook app until it launched its own base of operations, secondporch.com, in June. Browse its listings, and you’re able to navigate between Facebook profiles of owners and past renters, or see which properties your current Facebook friends recommend. And likewise, if you make an inquiry, owners are able to sniff around your profile"

Read more via www.nypost.com

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

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

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

Flickr Rolls Out Photo Overhaul to All Users

After three weeks of testing, Flickr is rolling out its massively redesigned photo pages to all of its users.

The redesign overhaul focuses three key aspects of the photo page: the navigation, the context behind photos and the size of photos themselves. Flickr has increased the default view size of photos “by 28%” — that’s 640 pixels wide. You can also darken the background around photos so you can enjoy the images and nothing else.

Navigation has been revamped as well. There are new navigation buttons above each photo to help you browse from one photo to the next. You can also switch between contexts via the new film strip in the sidebar. Finally, photos now carry the “who, what, when, where, and how” of each photo. The company uses this information to help create photostreams and to facilitate photosharing and storytelling via the website’s massive database of images.

via www.mashable.com

Are Companies Missing Their Opportunity to Connect with Customers?

Imagine that it’s November 1994

A new company launches a website. It is a new venture, starting out with an innovative idea, solid funding, and a lot of ambition. There’s only one major challenge – the market is well established and filled to capacity with companies serving every niche.

Eleven months later a competitive company launches a website. The new entry has 100 years plus history of serving customers through catalogs and bricks and mortar stores. There’s an established database, regular mailings, and heavy foot traffic to introduce to online shopping.

Conventional wisdom would say that the second company had an advantage over the first even though it was fashionably late to the ecommerce party.

Conventional wisdom is wrong.

read more via socialmediatoday.com

TripAdvisor + Facebook = TripFriends

It seems like social media, and Facebook in particular, is the topic of every hospitality conference these days. It's no wonder: with half a billion Facebook user accounts created, it's become the tool many travelers use to keep in touch with friends around the world, sharing photos, making plans, and giving advice. Surely, hotels and inns are going to come up in these conversations.

TripAdvisor has just introduced a new tool to make these conversations easier for travelers: TripFriends. With TripFriends, travelers researching a destination on TripAdvisor can now see which of their Facebook friends have been there, and which consider themselves an expert. They can post a travel question for all of their friends to see, or they can send a personal message to a particular friend, all without leaving TripAdvisor.

via tripadvisor.com

6 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Tracking

When thinking about your social media strategy, you should be planning for 6 important metrics. What are the six? There are 3 different levels of social media participation and 2 different types of metrics. Put them in a 3 x 2 metrics, and you get six.

Here’s the rundown on the 3 social media engagement aspects to measure:

• Activity - Any metrics relating to actions your organization is taking on social media: blogging, tweeting, posting, promoting, etc.
• Interaction - This category’s metrics focus on how your audience is engaging with your social media presence: followers, comments, likes, sharing, user created content, etc.
• Returns - This group accounts for where your social media activities directly or indirectly support measures driving successful organizations: revenue creation (and the activities that lead up to it), cost minimization (along with activities to help achieve it), and other critical financial performance metrics.

via www.socialmediatoday.com

More than half of travelers share vacation info on social media sites

Travelocity’s most recent poll shows more than half of all travelers share vacation information through social media. Nearly 30 percent of travelers have either never thought about precautions or do not take any precautions when posting about vacation on social media websites.

With summer vacations in full swing, many travelers are looking forward to sharing the details of their trips with friends and family. In today’s world, the easiest way to share is through social media, but people should be conscious of when and what they share to avoid giving away too much information about when they’ll be away from home.

Nearly 30 percent of travelers have either never thought about precautions or do not take any precautions when posting about vacation on social media web sites. Twenty-seven percent post limited vacation information; the rest do not allow any vacation posts.

via www.hotelmarketing.com