Social Media News

2010 is going to be a much better year for travel industry, says Travel Insights 100.  They’re an interesting group: a panel of 100 travel experts that includes activists, traditional media, independent travelers, and airline and hotel experts who have banded together to monitor travel insights and trends.

They’ve  made some predictions about travel in 2010:

• Travel will begin to recover driven in part by a pent-up demand from those who have put off traveling due to economic concerns.
• These eager travelers will still be looking for discounts and promotional pricing.
• The big change? Where they’ll be looking.  Social media will be the game-changer for travel in 2010.

“Social media (Twitter in particular) will continue to reshape how destinations are promoted and companies will increase their participation in and creative use of social media.”

If that’s the case many  hotels have their work cut out for them.  We recently did an analysis of the top 50 hotel chains’ websites and social media activity  – only 21% are currently on Twitter and a scant 16% are engaging with their community.

That does not take into account the smaller hotel groups, bed and breakfasts or tour operators.

If you are in the travel business  now would be the time to update your Travel PR strategy.

And once you get your content out into the social web, update your site with a social media newsroom.

Image credit:  Idle type

Social media is tipped to be the marketing trend of 2010 – and not just in the hospitality industry.  Coke and Unilever are shiftng their budgets to social media this year.

Nick Rich, Intercontinental Hotels director of consumer insights for Europe, the Middle East and Africa says that with consumer technology continuing to evolve at a rate of knots and the average person carrying £850 of gadgets every day, keeping in touch is key for travelers.

“As a business, we understand the power of social media,” says Rich. “In 2010, there won’t be a hotelier anywhere in the world who doesn’t appreciate the influence and power of TripAdvisor. We monitor review sites like TripAdvisor to understand what we’re doing right and where we can improve. We know that an unhappy guest can become a loyal guest if we address their issues properly, even if it’s after their stay.  Twitter offers hotels an opportunity to reach more guests. A number of our hotels tweet special offers at their restaurants and spas for the first people to respond to tweets.”

Yet our study of the top 50 hotel brands reveals some interesting results:

• 26% have news feeds available
• 21% are on Twitter
• 43% are on Facebook
• 45% are on LinkedIn
• 98% have videos about their hotels on YouTube
• 36% have their own YouTube channel
• Only 16% are actively engaging with their community – the rest are using social media as a broadcast medium (New media – same old marketing techniques)

We are way past the stage of wondering whether or not you need a social media presence.  If you are not on these major platforms it should be high on your list of priorities for 2010.

Get the social media “starter package” up and running:

• A blog that has interesting and valuable information about your venue and destination.  Encourage comments and start a conversation
• Monitoring software to keep track of all mentions of the brand
• A news feed for your press releases and articles
• A Facebook Page
• A custom designed and branded Twitter feed
• A branded YouTube channel where you host short, interesting video clips about the venue and the destination
• A Social Media Newsroom to house your social content and post social media news releases

And make sure you are actually participating in the conversations, not just sending out more corporate messaging.

If 2008 was the year of dipping the toes in the water and 2009 was the social media checklist approach, companies need to move up to the next level and start to integrate social media into their overall PR and marketing plans. It’s time to move beyond a social media presence, get strategic and really engage with your community.

“Resembling any in-person exchange, socializing requires more than just being there — you have to interact with others, instigate discussions, and respond during conversations. Our study implies value in social engagement on top of social presence — it pays to actively and continually participate and invest in your networks.”  Engagementdb study.

We’ve put together a social media resource page for PR people interested in the latest research and successful case studies.

And once you have engagement happening on all your social media networks, be sure to publish your company news in this format too – and gather all your social content on your own site in a social media newsroom.

If you’re interested in better Google ranking put your content into RSS feeds.

We’ve long suspected that Google pays attention to RSS Feeds and a recent post on  their Webmaster Central blog confirms they have a feature that uses feeds for the discovery of new webpages.

“Using feeds for discovery allows us to get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods. We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds.”

If you do not yet have your news content in RSS Feeds it should be top of your list of action items for 2010.  In fact, get them set up now and be ready for the new year.  

The blog post also has advice on how the feeds and the site are programmed: In order for us to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, it’s important that crawling these files is not disallowed by your robots.txt. To find out if Googlebot can crawl your feeds and find your pages as fast as possible, test your feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools.

We’ve seen many a feed incorrectly programmed, so make sure your webmaster or IT department is up to speed on the latest RSS technology.  Not only should the feed be crawlable it should also be immediately visible to search engines and your site visitors.  If they don’t see the feed on your site it can’t be used to get you faster indexing.

All feed content should be optimized for search and the feed should automatically notify the major feed aggregators when new content is entered. (Notification services is one way Google finds your feeds.)

If you have audio and video content, the feed has to have specific tags added so that your multimedia content gets indexed not only by search engines, but also by sites like iTunes.

Need help with your feeds?  Give Ryan a call on 626 793 4911.

Image Credit:  Derek Kwa/Flickr

Online newsrooms first made their debut about 5 or 6 years ago.  Only the very early adopters had one back then, but over the years we’ve seen a rapid increase in the number of journalists who say a newsroom on a company website is absolutely essential.

Three years ago the idea of a social media press release was first discussed at the inaugural meeting of Social Media Club in Palo Alto.  The handful of us who attended that meeting,  including Tom Foremski who wrote the blog post Die! Press Release Die! debated the need for a new format.

Soon after that meeting Todd Defren of Shift Communications created the first Social Media Release Template, which got tons of downloads.  And he got lots of calls asking how to use the template – How can I fill this in?  Most PR peple are not geeks – we don’t know how to code.

Smart wire services started to offer the format as an alternative. But there still remained the problem of how to get a social media press release onto your own website.  Unless you had programming skills this was not possible.

If you have programming skills, or your IT department has the time and the inclination, you can customize a blog platform like Wordpress and make a nice social media newsroom.  But it can take several months, sometimes even more than a year,  to get it  done.

Or you can use one of the media room platforms on the market and get one up in a few weeks.

Many of them are now adding social media elements. The one feature that tops the wish-list is the ability to easily make a social media press release with multimedia elements that a journalist can take and use. 

Journalists are increasingly expected to supply multimedia elements with a story.  Bloggers always want images and video.

If your social media newsroom offers them content in this format, with images andvideo that have embed code that journalists and bloggers can just cut and paste, your chance of getting coverage is that much better. And it’s one thing to have it on the wire, but you need it on your website too.

Nine out of ten reporters use the Internet to search for information when they write a story.  And they say they find the information they need less than 75 percent of the time. 

Make your newsroom more user and search friendly – get your press releases out of those PDFs.  Google does not like them and neither do journalists and bloggers.

In a recent survey from Middleberg Communications and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR),70% of journalists said they use social networks to assist in reporting, compared to 41% in last year’s survey.

69 percent of respondents go to company websites to assist in their reporting, while 66 percent use blogs, 51 percent use Wikipedia, 48 percent go to online videos, and 47 percent use Twitter and other microblogging services.

A big part of this jump is the result of newsroom cuts. Journalists have to wera more hats, they have less help to do their jobs, and they’re required to produce more content across various formats in near real-time. Journalists have no choice but to use these tools to find information fast.

Why not offer them everything they could possibly need and want in one place on your own website. It may seem like nonsense to many died-in-the-wool PR people.  But a social media newsroom has become a necessity in this new world of real-time access to information and news and changing communication models.

And as the media landscape changes, the practice of PR has to change too.

 Image Credit: Rabbie Radio

Many businesses budget tens of thousands of dollars a month, or more, for public relations programs, but ignore the most effective PR resource in a company’s arsenal: its own web site, says EcontentMag.com

As the news cycle gets shorter and shorter, journalists, editors and bloggers are often looking for information about a company when the PR contact is not available.   A very high percentage of news writers today visit online news rooms in search of data.

Why not make it easy for them to find all your social media content in one place?

What you need in a good social media newsroom:

1. Ease of use - if they can’t find you, you won’t be getting coverage.  Make it really easy to cut and paste the data.  Offer embed codes.
2. It’s a fast news cycle – with micro blogging we’re near real-time.  Put your latest news upfront and syndicate it.
3. Give them support  data -  add profiles, bios, fact sheets
4. Link to all social media content – make it easy to find your Twitter feed, Facebook page and any other relevant sites where you have content.
5. Add news feeds (RSS) to all your corporate news releases.
6. Feature your media coverage
7. Feature blog coverage
8. Add other interesting content - your blog, articles, tips, recipes.  Listen to your customers onlilne and find out what kind of content would be of interest to them.

Online PR has been in the spotlight recently and many companies are scrambling to get their PR campaigns integrated with social media.  Remember to  also upgrade your own website and put all that good content in a social media  newsroom.

DigitalVisitor.com, has been shortlisted for an online travel award alongside industry giants such as Air France, Lastminute.com and Kuoni.  Their social media solution, Visitor Review, features in the ‘Best Online Application’ category at this year’s Travolution Awards.

“Social media has become a huge area of importance for the travel industry,”  said Digital Visitor’s Managing Director Anthony Rawlins.  “Visitor Review was developed to enable businesses to take advantage of the benefits of user generated content whilst keeping clients in their own branded environment.  As a white-labelled solution each platform is tailored to reflect a company’s own branding, allowing users to upload text, photo and video.”

Now that is a smart idea.

Another smart idea would be to syndicate this content in a feed.

A report from eMarketer shows that 260,000 small businesses in the US and Canada are using some form of social media in their marketing activities. That’s only about 1% of all small businesses in those two countries.

Yet there are many stories of how small businesses that are involved in social media are getting great results.  Even local businesses.

One is Boston Court Theater in Pasadena, CA.  They are interested in building a community of art and theater lovers in the Pasadena area and they’ve used sites like Twitter to build that support.  They tweet the back stage “insider stories” that let people get a glimpse into the world of the theater. They’ve built up a loyal following of over 600 local folk.

Another is Naked Pizza in New Orleans. Reuters reports that this small company has 4,300 followers on Twitter and a recent online promotion brought in 69& of their business on that day.  They’re now seeing a sustained 20% of sales volume coming from their social media marketing.

There’s an excellent post about how small businesses can use social media at Search  Engine Land

They suggest:

1. Start a blog
2. Comment on other blogs that talk about your industry or subject
3. Get active on Yahoo Answers
4. Make and share videos
5. Take and share pictures
6. Try the social  news aite StumbleUpon
7. Find and join relevant groups

4, 5, & 6 are particularly good ideas.  However, if you want people to share your content you have to make it easy to do so. That means #8 should be ‘add your content to feeds.”  Feeds are the blood vessels of the social web -  they keep all this content flowing.

Make it easy to socialize your content so that people can save and share it.

Microsoft’s new search tool Bing has a travel section (http://www.bing.com/travel) that makes it less complicated to navigate through booking a vacation or business trip.  They offer flight bookings, hotel selections and comparative searches.

Since Bing calls itself a decision engine they strive to offer the searcher as many pieces of information as possible to help the person searching find all they need to make that decision.

If you are a travel website you’ll want to make sure that you have these kinds of content available to Bing so they can display it to their searchers.

Companies looking for better travel PR should look into their online footprint.

Add new content about your destination with images and video. Encourage comments and reviews on your site.  Syndicate this content a feed. That way more people see the content, they can add it to social sites and search engines like Bing can easily find and index your content.

The long tail has come to travel. If your search strategy is focused on one or two word keywords, you’re probably missing the target right now.

“Google recently stated that most of the recent growth in travel query volume has come from the tail. In fact, the average number of terms in a travel-related search phrase has increased from 2.5 to 4+. Conversely, the head’s query volume has dropped sharply. Consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated searchers, and it is important for search marketers to embrace this opportunity to provide more relevant ads for long tail keywords.” Kayak.com’s manager, search marketing, Shehzad Daredia in an interview with EyeforTravel,

Most marketers are looking at how to use this information to adjust their SEM/paid search strategies

However, the best way to reach long tail searchers is with content marketing – write good articles about your resort, cruise or destination.  Add images and video.  Syndicate the content with RSS feeds, so it gets seen by search engines, news aggregators, bloggers, journalists and new audiences.

The feeds help to raise your organic search visibility on many longer phrases. And it occurs naturally.  Just keep writing and syndicating with feeds and the long tail phrases start to show up in search.

The very best part of this online travel PR strategy is that is that it is easy and affordable to implement, and it gets excellent ROI.