If you’ve never heard of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace or Youtube, establishing a presence for your hotel on these social networking platforms may seem a little daunting. Yet fear not, you are not alone! Mashable have come up with 5 top tips for when your hotel is starting its social networking life.

I think the most important point to take from the tips is to allocate time specifically for social networking. Things will start off slowly but the viral nature of the social networking world will soon start to pay its dividends. The more time you can afford to allocate to social media, the greater the impact of the presence. That’s not to say that if you spend all day on twitter you’ll gain thousands of followers overnight. There is a balance to be obtained here and this can only be achieved through the tried and tested method of trial and error.

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An article I recently read highlighted what I had been suspecting for quite some time. We’ve all sent emails regarding a specific topic only to recieve an automated email containing answers to absolutely nothing that you’ve requested information about. We’ve also pressed numerous buttons on the phone in an attempt to actually talk to someone other than a robot, only to be told to see their website for more information. It’s now emerging that users are turning to the social networking platforms to converse directly with bussinesses online. There are no forms to fill in, no extra buttons to press. Customers can simply find the company they wish to contact and send them a message right there and then.

Here’s hoping that social media platforms are becoming the knights in shining armour for a new era in more personal customer service and support.

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Brian Solis published a very interesting article today about search and the ‘real-time’ web.

In summary, Google recently integrated real-time search into their technology to pull in tweets, blog posts and news content as its being published, dramatically improving the time to crawl down to minutes.

In the eyes of Google, the adaptation of PageRank for Social Media essentially creates a human algorithm of sorts that may eventually serve as a foundation for assessing the authority of an individual in the social Web.

Are we seeing the start of something new, a PeopleRank?

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