Social Media News

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 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.

Google’s Year-End Zeitgeist list shows us what  our collective minds have been on in 2008.

“Zeitgeist means ‘the spirit of the times,’ and we strive to capture this spirit through exploring the year’s new and exciting search terms,” a Google spokesperson explained to Thomas Claburn of Information Week.

Many of the search terms were phrased as a question – what is….?

What is RSS? is on that list at #5!  Nice to know that more and more people want to know what RSS is and what it can do.

If you are one of the folk who needs help with understanding feeds, read the RSS tutorial or What is RSS on the PRESSfeed site.

Image by: Photopia

Seventy percent of BtoB technology marketers are not using RSS Feeds. A recent study of 300 websites showed that only 3 out of 10 have feeds and of those a mere 10 percent offer more than one feed so that their visitors can choose targeted information updates.

According to Marketing Sherpa and Knowledge Storm 71% of technology buyers assign value to their RSS use.

“RSS offers B2B technology marketing and PR professionals a golden opportunity to establish ongoing relationships with their target audiences and become a trusted source of valuable information on topics buyers care about most,” stated Kim Cornwall Malseed, Principal, MarCom Ink. “Our survey revealed that although 30% of companies are providing RSS, only 10% have multiple targeted feeds enabling visitors to choose from a variety of topics to subscribe to, so almost all of the companies surveyed could benefit from developing an effective RSS strategy.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.  I come across many feeds on BtoC and BtoB sites that obviously have no strategy behind them.

In this economy every marketing action has to be goal oriented and show results.  A content strategy based on feeds and syndication is very effective – if it’s done right.

Follow me on Twitter.

The guys at Mashable hit the nail on the head once again – take a look at their post about Forrester’s recent report on RSS usage.  The real takeaway is reaching beyond your subscribers, says Mashable:

Content producers who push out their work via RSS need to think beyond marketing directly to the user. It’s more important to market to the devices and the networks now.

There are so many websites and networks that use content in an RSS feed. It is important to make your feed available and useful to individuals, but it’s time to start thinking in terms of how your content can be reused and resyndicated.

What exactly does this mean:

• Some influential bloggers have had their feeds picked up and used by mainstream newspapers
• With the right content and frequency, it is possible to have your feed indexed by Google News
• Make your content readable and accessible on devices like the new smart phones

There have been some new reports out about the behavior of people who purchase travel online.

Prophis eResearch shows that travel 2.0 has become firmly entrenched in the travel industry. An estimated 19 million Americans have visited one of the top ten travel 2.0 traveler community based sites such as TripAdvisor in the past 12 months, bearing out the research from eMarketer that rates word of mouth – consumer reviews and opinions - as the most trusted form of advertising online.

Creating great content about your destination and syndicating it in RSS Feeds, with rich media – images and video – can increase your online visibility. 

Add interesting content on a regular basis. Include reviews and experiences from people who have been to your hotel or venue.  RSS and content syndication is a great Web 2.0 marketing tool for travel sites.

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In the analysis seciton of the recent BtoB marketers survey about measuring and monitoring online reputation and brand building, Paul Dunay of Buzz Marketing for Technology made this comment:

“B2B marketers should consider how to syndicate their content,and widgets could be a very good way of doing that. A recent Forrester article noted that 80% of Web traffic comes through the homepage and 20% comes in to very specific pages. Forrester now is recommending that you plan for 20% of traffic to come from your homepage and 80% to come from very specific pages in your site. That means start syndicating your content!”

RSS is what you need.- One of the quickest and easiest ways to syndicate and socialize your content (make it easy to share) is to use a tool like PRESSfeed. You can be up and running in less than a week.

One of the advantages of the social web is that people share content that they find online.  But they wast fresh content.  No-one is interested in tagging or sharing a story that’s weeks old.

FLOR recently launched a new Inspiration Gallery for Martha Stewart Floor Designs.  To get the word out to design bloggers a sneak peek blogger info page went up on their news feed on Friday.

The IT department was up to their eyeballs preparing for this launch and having a way for the PR folk to quickly and easily add and share content was a bonus.