While at Blog World I had the chance to interview Andraz Tori, co-founder and CTO of Zemanta. Here’s his explanation of how the service works:

If you’re publishing a blog or similar website, you should definitely check them out. You can learn more at Zemanta.com.

Should your hotel use Skype?

Many of the articles on ‘Skype for business’ I see talk about the cost savings potential. That’s an insignificant benefit in my mind…and not what I want to discuss today.

Instead, I see Skype as a tool for providing better service. If many of your guests come from overseas, you may want to consider using Skype to make it easy for these people to contact your hotel. Based on my work with a few hotels recently, we’ve noticed that by offering Skype — either as a phone system or simply a chat service — interaction significantly improves.

A reader recently wrote me with this common dilemma:

We are a 15-room boutique hotel, that is a bit off of the main travel area – especially during the winter months. A 103-room resort recently opened close by, which has been extremely hard on us, not to say the least about the economy problems.  Now, we are on a no-budget marketing expense lockdown, heading into the off season, and trying to attract business. Any advice?

How can you run a marketing campaign with no budget?

I covered a little bit of this in my free hotel marketing article, and you need to be very creative and resourceful.

Zero Budget Marketing Strategy

* If you’re going to promote successfully with no budget, you’re going to need to use word of mouth: people talking about you.

* Get a strategy together for guest review sites like TripAdvisor. Reviews by your past guests gives you extra online exposure, and can encourage people to stay at your hotel. Read the marketing guidelines from TripAdvisor (and Qype) before getting started.

* Build a referral system that lets your guests spread the word for you

* Partner with other businesses to refer guests. Look for ‘piggyback’ marketing opportunities.

* Get involved with your community through volunteering. (Here’s how David McConnell does it)

* Avoid mass promotion. Instead, focus on a very small market and practice mass personalization. “The smaller the target, the bigger the bulls eye.”

Zero Budget Marketing Tactics

* Start blogging (Seriously, this works) Have your own employees write the blog – readers find that much more credible.

* Repurpose your existing content in ways that help you attract new guests

* Social media may be the answer. (And it may not be.) Understand that it often takes a lot of time to promote effectively on these ‘free’ websites. Track results and see if it’s worth your while.

* Plan an email marketing system for travel agents and corporate travel planners – people who could send you lots of business

* Look into pay-for-performance tools such as MeetingsBooker

I’ll bet you have more ideas – how do you create something with nothing?

From time to time I like to profile startups in the travel industry – to help you see who could be the big players of tomorrow.

I’ve known Ciaran through our blogs and Twitter for some time, and when I heard he was traveling from Dublin to San Francisco I jumped at the chance to meetup at one of my favorite coffee spots here in the city.

For this interview, we discussed his new project, MeetingsBooker, and talked a little bit about how it can be used to increase your hotel’s meeting room revenue. Let’s get started!

Meetings Booker Homepage

As a former hotel sales and marketing director, tell us a little bit about your experience with the selling meeting rooms: Is the traditional process is flawed? What inspired you to start this company?

I was marketing director of a 1,000 room hotel near Dublin. My challenge was there were very few sites delivering meeting room bookings for us. Lots of sites provide RFPs, but these were also being sent to all my competitors so success was hit and miss. Also, I didn’t have anything on my own website to capture small meeting room sales leads or present special offers. I didn’t have the tools – there was only an inquiry form.

And then from the customer’s point of view: when I tried to book meeting rooms myself, the process was slow. The whole process of contacting hotels for pricing, then waiting to hear back from them took a long time.

Can you tell me a little bit about how your website solves these problems?

We let the end-users see a hotel’s meeting room rates instantly. Whether it’s London Heathrow, Amsterdam, or Barcelona — our users can search for dates and details and get immediate pricing. It enables them to easily shop around and book meeting rooms online in a few minutes.

Hotels can manage availability and receive immediate live bookings or provide instant online quotes. From the hotel’s perspective, when one of our website users contacts them it’s more than an inquiry — the customers already know all the details of the rooms, distance from the city, amenities, and meeting room hire special offers — and they are ready to make a booking. They’ve already made their decision on where they want to hold their meeting.

We offer the MeetingsBooker.com software for placement on the hotel’s own website. For the hotel’s sales director, it greatly reduces management time. Hotels can choose from our live meeting room booking engine with live availability or our instant quote system.

The average size of group that books on our website is 40 attendees. These smaller meetings are often the most frequent and time-consuming for the hotel. By using our software on the hotels website, the hotel’s sales team can spend more time with larger conference business, which is more profitable. The software also offers hotels meeting room yield management options. For example, if you notice Monday and Fridays are quiet days for you, you can increase revenue by offering a 15% discount for meeting rooms on those quiet days. It’s the same thing you would do with bedrooms.

Are there other benefits for hotels using your service?

The main benefit we offer hotels are meeting room bookings. In addition to this, we tend to get good natural search engine rankings for the cities we operate in, so hotels that add themselves to our website get extra visibility online. Hotels that have joined us have also noticed an increase in phone calls as a part of being on the site.

We also offer the ability to set up a loyalty program. For example if a customer spends over $2000, they might qualify for a booker reward e.g. an overnight gift voucher.

Do you have any examples of hotels that are using your service?

Holiday Inn – Leeds:

Park Plaza Belfast:

What is the process for getting started?

Hotels can begin using our website for free. They can actually begin the setup themselves… it’s a simple process. Many nation-wide hotel chains are using us, and they often do the setup at the property level. Just click on “Register for free” on our homepage and follow the instructions.

We only charge once hotels begin receiving bookings. We charge $500 (€390) for a one year listing once they receive over $650 (€450) in confirmed bookings. Our average booking is over €1000 so this fee quickly pays for itself. For hotels that want our software on their own websites, we charge a small annual license fee.

How do you plan to expand over the coming year?

We’re expanding quickly in Europe: UK, Ireland, Spain, Holland and Germany. We plan to focus on the major cities…and especially airport hotels [we get a lot of airport hotel business as a large proportion of our bookers are business travellers]. In the US, we are building a customer base in San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. In Asia, were expanding through a partner we have there.

Thanks for your time, Ciaran – and best of luck with your venture!

[You can list your property for free here]

This is a guest article from Ran, an SEO specialist and Hotel Marketing Strategies reader in the UK.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your site to increase the volume of traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AOL and Bing via natural search results. Fundamentally, the higher your site is ranking for a particular search term, the more traffic you’ll get. Therefore your goal is to increase your ranking within the search engine guidelines as it will directly influence your revenue.

Here are 10 SEO tips to get a new site off to a great start:

1. Save On the Site’s Development – Whether you will own your SEO work or hire a 3rd party agency to manage it, optimizing your site will cost you time and money. Consider launching with the absolute basic of features in order to keep a decent budget for marketing and later on for site tweaks.

2. Don’t Save on Hosting – While saving on the initial development cost could work well, investing in quality and reliable hosting is where you should not save. Ensuring your website loads quickly is crucial for your optimization success and for user experience.

3. Get the Domain Name Right – Buying the right domain name is one of the most important decisions you’ll need to make at the very start. I would suggest buying a descriptive name which unlike a generic name can make life just a little easier when optimizing the site. An example for a descriptive name will be hotelmarketingstrategies.com, while Google.com is an example of a generic domain name.

4. List the Keywords You’d Like to Rank for – Normally optimizing your site means shortlisting the keywords which you’d like to rank for and optimizing each page around one key term. You should pick the keywords which describe your product or service and most importantly pick the keywords which are likely to convert well for the business.

5. Use the Metadata Tags Correctly – Once you have shortlisted your keywords you would need to insert them into your pages using the metadata tag location. Don’t stuff all those key terms into each page, but rather insert one term per page together with descriptive information. To optimize your site for Google, limit the page title to 70 characters and the page description to 140 characters. Here’s how the metadata comes into view when users search for a specific term:

6. Invest in Content – Original content in the form of articles, reviews, guest testimonials and even elaborate FAQs are very important for your optimization success. While not to underestimate other factors, the search engines place huge weight on the level of content on your site. By adding high quality original content closely related to your keywords the search engines will associate your site with the search term and over time it will become an authority site. The best example to demonstrate this point is probably Wikipedia.

7. Consolidate Homepage Versions – Some websites have multiple versions of their homepage which will result in poorer performance as your authority will be spread across a few homepage versions. The most common issue is having non www and www versions. To test how many versions of your page exist use a content duplication checker and fix the issues found.

8. Leverage Your Image – Traffic from users searching for images such as hotel locations could benefit your site. To optimize your images for Google Image Search, make sure you use a descriptive file name so park-hotel-ca.jpg is better than 9h80.jpg, images are hosted on your site on a folder /images/park-hotel-ca.jpg and always use alt text to describe the image.

9. Find and Fix Error Pages – Ensuring that all the site’s pages are working and loading quickly will increase their chances of getting indexed. If you have Google Analytics installed you can find this information under the content tab -> contact by title. Otherwise, try the free utility xenulink. This software will verify your internal link types such as normal links, images, etc and will highlight any issues found.

10. Add Privacy Policy or Terms and Conditions – It is important for the engines to send traffic to reputable websites. Adding privacy information and terms & conditions (when applicable) can help your ranking and it won’t cost anything if you use of the free privacy policy generator.

Now you’ll be off to a great start!

- – -
Ran is the online marketing manager of hardwood flooring seller Wood and Beyond.

Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with product managers at all the major travel industry mobile players.

Interestingly, their preference for distribution options ranges from “it doesn’t really matter” to “it really DOES matter”. Without naming names, there seems to be agreement on the advantages to both platforms:

Mobile websites:

• Updates are instantly available to the user (you can’t force updates with apps)
• Cross-platform functionality
• In-house developers can use existing skill sets
• Development time can be faster

Mobile phone apps:

• People don’t usually want to inccur data roaming charges when abroad
• Can be a higher level of functional reliability (no cross-browser issues)

For many hotels – especially independent properties – it’s a resource issue. A simple mobile website can be the most effective option.

Tip: If building an app isn’t a realistic option for you, consider OTAs to be a good partner for you on this.

Mobile marketing is going to be increasingly important for hotels in the months and years ahead, so this is something to plan now – if you haven’t done so already.

What is your mobile strategy?

[Photo credit: The Lightworks]

Qype Logo

Qype is a local review website especially popular in Europe, but with reviews in cities around the world. While TripAdvisor may have more worldwide reviews at the moment, it’s important not to underestimate networks like these. While living in Europe, I found Qype more useful and informative for my own travels.

In this interview, I talk with community manager Rob Hinchcliffe on how hotels should promote themselves on the site, and use the power of guest reviews.

—

Josiah: As hotel marketing professionals, we often have to improve our position on guest review sites like yours. What are some ethical ways we can do this – that you approve of? Also, are there any promotional activities you want us to avoid?

Rob: We try very hard to make it easy for any business owner to use Qype in order to promote their business. Really it should be just as intuitive for a business owner to arrive on Qype and know what the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to go about things are as it is for a user who’s there to review something.

The first thing to know is: you can’t get away reviewing yourself in glowing terms (and you definitely shouldn’t start submitting bad reviews on your competitor’s listings!). Social networks are self-policing in that the community is acutely aware of the balance between a genuine piece of content and something that’s spam or self-promotion. And once you submit disingenuous content to a user-generated site you are asking for your honesty to be brought into question. No business owner wants that, so we’ve made it very easy for people to ‘claim’ their business on Qype. Putting your name next to your business and submitting an objective and balanced description of what you do is the best way to start a dialogue with any online community. People respect transparency and they will respond to it in a similarly objective and thoughtful way.

It’s easy to be cautious and petition your friends and colleagues to review your business with five stars and a handful of adjectives like ‘amazing’ and ’spectacular’, but be aware that users are looking for information, not hype. A genuinely informative and balanced four star review is much more likely to bring in a new customer than a five star review that reads “The best hotel in town. Why would you stay anywhere else? I loved it!!!” So don’t be afraid to ask your customers to review you. Put your Qype URL on your promotional material, send follow up emails asking for feedback, and encourage people to talk about their experiences.

Business owners ask: but what if people are nasty? And I tell them that people are very rarely nasty, and they’re much less likely to be negative if you proactively ask them for their opinion. And wouldn’t you rather find out what the things that are annoying people are now, rather than six months down the line when it’s annoyed hundreds of other people?

If a hotel has a poor reputation on Qype, what steps should they take to improve it?

To quote Douglas Adams: “Don’t panic!” Occasionally a business owners will see a bad review and go into damage limitation mode. That normally means an irate email to our customer support team threatening legal action and nasty comments on the user’s profile. That isn’t reputation management, it’s fanning the flames. Of course if you find defamatory content about your business online then you need to deal with that, but it’s far more likely that, if a customer has taken the time to compose a balanced review of his or her experiences, then they are not out to defame or damage that business, they are trying to express an opinion on a forum that has been provided for them. Luckily that platform also has space for you to respond, a mechanism which didn’t really exist a few years ago. In the past that customer would have gone away, moaned to their family and friends and never come back again. Now you have the ability to take that complaint, deal with it, and potentially win back the customer (and attract new customers into the bargain).

Qype provides a messaging service for business owners to reply privately to reviewers or you can leave a public comment on a review. We encourage people to respond publicly as it shows how willing you are to be up front and transparent about the issue. If the user has a genuine complaint then thank them for bringing it to your attention, apologise, and let them know what you’re doing to fix that problem. Ask them to come back so you can make it up to them, offer them an incentive. That one customer can turn from a detractor into your biggest fan and that two or three star review can turn into five stars with one or two emails.

We’ve spoken to our users, and they’ve told us over and over again that they are more likely to be attracted to a business by an open and friendly owner, than they are by any number of glossy photos or special offers. Once you know that, then it’s just a matter of common sense.

Is there any way we can integrate Qype content (especially our reviews) into our website and marketing materials?

Yes, once you’ve claimed your business, you can download a widget that displays your reviews on your website. They’re pretty flexible so you can choose how much information you want to show (just the star rating, a snippet from the review etc) and you change the colour scheme and size to fit the look and feel of your website.

What day-to-day actions should hotel management take to ensure their hotel has a great presence on your site?

As I mentioned before, claiming your business is the first step. It’s free, you can edit all the information on the site including address, phone numbers, opening times etc and you can start adding content like photographs and a description of the business that really make you stand out from the other business that might appear alongside you when users are browsing. Once you’ve claimed your business we’ll email you if any new, user-generated content is uploaded to your business. So if someone reviews you you’ll know about it in less than 24 hours. Awareness of reviews and the ability to respond quickly is what reputation management is all about.

It’s then up to you how you manage your listing. You can create downloadable vouchers for Qype users, and you can start getting involved in the community. We’ve had hotel owners create their own Qype Guides to the best tourist attractions in their area, the logic being: the thoughtfulness and knowledge behind that gesture is very likely to be reflected in how they run their business. We’ve also had businesses offer freebies for the best Qype review written about them. That kind of confidence and proactive encouragement can pays great dividends.

The extent to which you want to engage with the community is really up to you, but the watchwords are: be visible, be responsive, and be transparent.

How should management respond to reviews? Select ones: negative or positive feedback? Ignore them?

I don’t think ignoring them is a good idea. The internet has made it impossible for companies to bury their heads in the sand. To be blunt, the conversation is going to happen with or without you, so wouldn’t you rather know about it and get involved? I think sometimes what stops businesses engaging online is fear. People pick up on the horror stories and don’t want to put their heads above the parapet. But I can tell you from years of experience as the community manager for the biggest local review site in Europe: those fears are unjustified. The large majority of reviews we get are positive ones, people love sharing their good experiences and recommending places to their friends and extended network. They love showing off when they’ve had a great. They post photos and videos, they rave about the food and the views and the service. They are the best PR agency you could possibly have!

If you approach it with in a common sense, responsible and open-minded way then online communities can genuinely help you to grow your business. And don’t forget, there are community managers like me who are there to answer questions and give advice if you need it.

Thank you for your time, Rob.

With so many social media options available, it can be very hard to keep track of your hotel’s online presence. A software tool can make the process simpler and more effective, and Radian6 is among the industry leaders.

I recently met some of their team at Blog World Expo, and asked Tom Hasselman a few questions:

Can you tell us what you do and what the benefits would be for an individual hotel property?

Basically it’s going to give that individual hotel property manager or community evangelist an idea of what people are saying about them across all the media channels that are out there. Traditionally they would not ignore a phone call,  a suggestion in the suggestion box, so naturally they should not  ignore people who are talking about their properties across the blogosphere or the 420 video sharing sites, Twitter, forums, and mainstream news comments. Our tool tracks images — somebody can take a picture of a property and say it’s really nasty and dirty or this was a beautiful spot that I recommend: hotels need to be aware of this consumer driven content

We also track micro media such as Twitter and FriendFeed. It’s very common for people to post quick updates to share their experience at a property.  For example while I was at Bog World, I stayed at the Las Vegas Hilton, had excellent service the moment I walked into the lobby, checked in to a beautiful room so I decided to Tweet about it.  Within about 30 minutes, @LasVegasHilton followed me on Twitter and thanked me – I thought it was a nice touch.

So that’s a good example of one-on-one marketing, one-on-one sales, and really building a relationship.

The tool we have essentially allows “brands” to tune into all those conversations and make sense of it, find out where the most relevant ones are happening. Which one has the most comments, and identify viral trends –  positive or negative.

As a hotel marketing manager, why should I use your product instead of going to Twitter search (for example)?

We bring everything together in one place. So what happened before, is someone would have Twitter searches, use Google alerts, they’d have an RSS feed up on their desktop, and they’d be searching through you to manually. That works, but it’s an incredibly cumbersome and time-consuming approach.   Not to mention Twitter search covers, well, Twitter which is a great place to start but one would be limiting oneself to Twitter, Blogs, Forums, Images, Social Bookmarking Sites, Facebook discussion groups are equally important to tap into.

So, what we do is bring all this information together in one dashboard. So instead of going from platform to platform to platform, you can just make sense of all this data in one dashboard. And the beauty of it — and one of the reasons companies chose Radian6  — is that we are a real-time monitoring  service, customers can listen-measure-engage in social media.

As content is published, the end user knows about it immediately. Some of the free tools won’t update for up to 24 hours — so you won’t know about a blog post until sitting out there for 24 hours. We know that 90% of the activity on a blog post happens within the first 24 hours, it’s essential for you to be there instantly and to react to whatever is published or at least be aware of its presence.

So how do you gather this data? Do you crawl the web?

We crawl the social web with our own proprietary crawlers. We also attach ourselves to RSS feeds and APIs.

Is there anything else we should know about your tool?

We have some unique integration abilities such as being able to tie into web-analytics such as Web-trends and CRM packages like salesforce.com

Thank you for your time, Tom.

More and more hotels are seeing Twitter provide actual sales, and as we move from “ain’t it cool” to power users, it’s time we had a toolbox to match.

Here are the best tools for anyone using Twitter…and then at the end are custom Twitter buttons we made just for you.

HootSuite

HootSuite

A “professional Twitter client,” HootSuite is a web-based tool with powerful publishing and monitoring features. The ability to manage multiple accounts simultaneously make this the tool of choice for many social media managers. The “future tweet” scheduling tool is something I use extensively because of my international audience in different time zones. Since HootSuite includes many of the features from the tools below, I use this tool exclusively for all my Twitter activity.

Twitter Search

Twitter Search

I debated putting this in, since it’s on the Twitter website and not 3rd-party software. But it’s very simple & effective in producing sales…if you know how.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck

This is the preferred Twitter management tool for many ( just look around you at your next conference). Clean, simple, and intuitive.

Seesmic Desktop

Seesmic

Good power features – you can manage multiple accounts as well as Facebook, and the ability to group users into lists is handy. I find Seesmic especially helpful on my dual-monitor desk computer: you can stretch it out and monitor lots of information.

SocialOomph

SocialOomph

Formerly TweetLater, this service now provides a big list of automation tools (autofollow, autodiscover, etc)…if you’re into that sort of thing.

TweetMeme

TweetMeme

This site allows people to tweet hot stories from a Digg-style interface. The real power for most bloggers is putting a “retweet” button on their pages. (It’s my #1 source of social media traffic)

Twitter for Wordpress

Twitter for Wordpress

A good Wordpress plugin for displaying your tweets on your blog.

Twittermail

Twittermail

Send an email to your special address, and they will convert it into a tweet.

Twitpic

Twitpic

Share photos on Twitter.

Trendistic

Trendistic

Quickly view and compare popularity trends on Twitter. It’s like Google Trends.

Twellow

Twellow

“The Twitter Yellow Pages” – a directory of Twitter users.

And the bonus we created for you today….

“Follow our Hotel” Twitter Buttons

Feel free to use these on your blog or website to promote your Twitter account. (As always, we’re very grateful for any links back to this hotel marketing blog…)

Let me know: Which Twitter tools do you use?

When someone types a search query into Google, they are giving us a problem to solve. The website that answers their question in the fastest and most helpful manner will be the one that wins their attention.

At first, people don’t care about brands, URLs, or individual business names. The only thing they want is answers to their questions.

Every time someone performs a search online, they’re giving you the opportunity to provide this solution. They’re giving you a chance to earn their business.

How are you providing solutions to your guests’ problems?