Social media programs tend to start with a flurry of activity and then either take over our life or fade into obscurity. At one end of the spectrum is the coordinator who’s issuing updates every thirteen seconds and neglecting her other duties. At the other end is the manager who resents social media’s insatiable appetite for time and creative energy and is neglecting it in favor of other duties.

[ Read more → ]

As a regular feature we will be posting articles written by industry leaders with thought provoking ideas and tips. Journalist, editor and author Frank Corr, the first of our ‘guest bloggers’, posted our first guest blog post ‘What to do with Zombie Hotels’ which was extremely well received. This article is his second contribution and is sure to be equally as highly regarded. Keep an eye out for more ‘guest blogger’ posts in the future.

[ Read more → ]

In the hospitality industry, word of mouth is everything. Many praised the day social networks were born as these vastly expanded the online potential of this form of indirect marketing. Forrester Marketing recently presented findings on the current state of word of mouth marketing and peer influence in the digital domain which also included many tips for marketers.

[ Read more → ]

Video can be a very powerful tool for businesses of any size, but YouTube’s free-to-use business model, ease of use, and mass market audience means it’s a great channel for small businesses. However, like any tool, in order to get the most of it, it needs to be used well.

[ Read more → ]

Most of us already know that twitter can be used for customer service, recruiting, contents, giveaways and promotions for your hotel. There are, however, more business opportunities that aren’t quite as obvious. Mashable have looked a little deeper than most and have come up with 5 unique ways to use twitter as a business tool for your hotel.

[ Read more → ]

Good news for Facebook users – your profiles are set to become a lot more dynamic. Facebook are in the process of rolling out new profile features which will allow users to display the pages they’re connected to as ‘likes or interests’. This announcement coincides with Facebooks move to ‘liking’ Pages instead of becoming a ‘fan’ which was first introduced in March.

[ Read more → ]

Putting a face to your hotel using social media networks definitely has its advantages. It allows your customers to converse with a face rather than an anonymous employee while at the same time giving your hotel a voice. Allowing your customers to connect with your hotel on this level will create a much deeper, more meaningful relationship. So if you decide to go down this route and have your hotel represented by a ‘face’, it’s important that that ‘face’ represents exactly what you want your hotel to represent.

[ Read more → ]

Google have just activated a new improvement to their real-time search function. Starting from today, users will not only be able to search all the real-time content out there (from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Buzz) but will be able to sort the tweets by the time at which they were posted. This handy new feature will allow users to see what people were talking about at a specific moment in time as far back as the first tweet on March 21st 2006.

[ Read more → ]

Twitter will begin rolling out paid advertising on it’s social networking platform later today. The ads will appear as ‘promoted tweets’ and will initially only appear in twitter search results. Initially the ads will be charged per thousand impressions but the company plans to create a charging method based on what they call ‘resonance’ which will look at the interaction and importance of the ad and price it accordingly.

[ Read more → ]