Check out the video below, which gives an interesting overview of Google Search — where it’s been and where it’s going. A notable absence: social search, which is the most significant new development in search today.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Five social media tips for hoteliers from Sofitel Luxury Hotels:

1. Be local
Appoint a social media coordinator for each property. This person will be the eyes and ears to what is happening on the property level, including sharing specials at the spa or menu changes at the restaurant. They will coordinate with sales, marketing, weddings, meetings & events and the concierge to share the updates so their social media team can get the message out.

2. Be authentic
Customers don’t want to read updates that sound like a robot has written them. Sofitel is a unique upscale brand known for its stellar service and French style, so the social media updates stay true to the product.

3. Target your demographics
For Sofitel, targeting discerning travellers and gourmet diners remains a top priority.

4. Sprinkle in local events
Show off your concierge skills by becoming the local inside source for events, parties and festivals. Sofitel Los Angeles, for example, tweeted live from their recent Golden Globe Gifting Suite.

5. Engage with your audience, don’t just sell
The quickest way to lose a consumer is to ‘bang them over the head’ with product information. Sofitel Washington DC, for example, asked their Facebook fans what DC tips they would like to receive – consumers responded that they wanted to hear more about museums, family travel, luxury dining & romantic tips for couples.

Three Tips on catering to Chinese travellers
China is one of the fastest-growing sources of outbound tourists, keen to see the rest of the world. Some tips to help you get your share of those traveller dollars:

6. Language
Add Chinese language pages to your online marketing sites and booking engines.

7. Culture
Teach your employees a basic understanding of Chinese manners and culture.

8. Welcome
Train your staff to speak a few passable words of Mandarin associated with hospitality.

Sharpen up your website (tips mostly from marketingtourguide.com):

9. Highly Visible Phone Number
It is so important to make your phone number easy to find on your website. If you haven’t captured your audience within the first seven seconds, you’re not in the race.

10. Instant Notification
You need to be able to tell the customer if your tour or accommodation is booked out or close to being booked out immediately. A calendar with available dates is an easy way to address this. Alternatively having an instant message service or a live chat option would also help. Whatever option you offer you must respond without delay.

11. Customer Service Links
Be sure your customer service links and contact information is large and clearly marked, so your client does not have to dig around to find how to get in touch. It’s important to be accessible before, during and after the booking process so the more obvious it is on how your customer contacts you the better off you are.

12. About Us
Provide an ‘About Us’ section or a section about your policies. If you have privacy statements and customer satisfaction policies, your customer will feel better about ‘shopping’ with you.

13. Testimonials
You definitely want to have customer quotes and references on the ‘storefront’ page, that is, your home page, as well, to let your prospective client know that others are happy with your service, your accommodation or your activity or attraction.

14. FAQ Page
Provide FAQ pages with information about refund policies, guarantees, taxes and all other questions guests and online queries most often ask you. Use FAQs to put your customers mind at rest since most FAQ’s answer all those ‘buying’ questions a customer is usually asking him or herself.

15. Download PDF Brochure
Consider offering a downloadable PDF brochure. While many people are researching online they are also collecting documents or brochures that they can read while seated elsewhere, that is, not in front of their computer. Or, they want to share further information with a friend or partner.

For accommodation providers, from TNOOZ.com:

16. Details, Details, Details
Make sure your website copy has all the details guests want about location, rooms, services, in-house dining and more. If you have washers and dryers in the rooms, clearly state that on the room’s page.

If you have free coffee in the lobby, make it known. Guests research and make decisions based on amenities, so leaving something out doesn’t give the guest the full picture of what your hotel offers.

Leading SEO site Seomoz calls this definitive content.

“Definitive Content educates people so, with their expanded knowledge can engage in conversation and make informed decisions. This content is educational. People who are searching for information have already identified that they’re not comfortable making uninformed decisions. They’re looking for ‘the answer’.”

17. Local area and transportation
The first thing most travellers want to know when arriving in a new city is where they are staying in relation to the rest of the city. Is the hotel in the northeast section of the city? The arts district? Downtown?

Help orient your guests by providing destination content about your location and providing public transportation options, including the nearest bus, train, or underground stops.

18. Local activities and events
Take time to research the hotel’s local area and include nearby attractions and activities that guests can enjoy during their free time. Be sure to include local events and remember to update events at least quarterly.

From TourismKeys.ca, the most common reasons why many tourism folks haven’t started working on a handheld version of their website for mobiles (despite the fact that Travelport reports more than half of business customers now use mobile technology for researching and booking hotels):

19. You don’t know where to start
You are hesitating because you don’t know what to do or how to do it.   So ask your guests what kind of info would be helpful.  Think like a traveller.  That’s a good start. Then:

• Start with a map
• Add your phone number
• Add your SMS text number

20. You think your site looks just fine on the tiny screens
Get real.  Even with those fancy phones that zoom in, traditional websites are a poor substitute to a well designed mobile website.  Take care of simple things for your traveler with a clean minimalist site.

21. You don’t have the time to get working on your mobile site
You will soon have lots of time — when all the business is going to those who make the time to create their mobile site.

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Latest Facebook folly: “Sponsored Stories”, which the social giant describes as:

“word-of-mouth recommendations about brands that come from your News Feed. Examples of the types of stories that can be surfaced in Sponsored Stories include: Page Likes, Page posts, app interactions and Place check-ins. For example, if your friends like a Page, in addition to seeing that story in your News Feed, you may see the same story on the right-hand column on Facebook.”

If you want to see how Facebook thinks marketers can exploit consumer interest for commercial gain, take a look at this video spelling it all out in painful detail.

Apart from such minor issues as privacy, Sponsored Stories have the potential to change consumer behaviour on the site.

Why on earth would you mention a brand in any post if that brand was suddenly going to pop-up on all your friends’ newsfeeds, proclaiming your championing of their brand as if you were suddenly their greatest evangelist?

Immediate side-effects of this latest crass commercialisation: consumers unliking your brands en masse, and going out of their way to avoid using any sponsored apps or checking-in at any major location.

Not to mention class-action lawsuits from those whose privacy (and reputation with their friends and followers) is threatened. Oh yeah, and a deliberate strategy by disgruntled users of posting negative comments about participating brands, to taint their Sponsored Stories ….

Who dreams up these ideas?

Oh, right, saw it on “The Social Network” — anti-socialites.

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Interestingly, each had their own take on the subject, with branding attributes the most common overlap.

Here are their various views on key partnership elements (with our own additions in parentheses where we consider it appropriate).

IEG

• Form partnerships through dialogue, not proposals (look for Win-Win by being flexible and taking account of your potential partners’ desires and needs}
• Determine brand fit (do the brands have common values and target markets?)
• Establish key objectives of the partnership (what is each partner trying to achieve and are they mutually compatible goals?)
• Over-deliver on value
• Define, measure and deliver ROI

NSBA

• Customer service
• Mutually beneficial relationship
• Access to key leadership
• Exclusivity
• Voice for corporate partners

FedEx Services

• Support/advance global brand?
• Make sense in the marketing plan?
• Access to target audience?
• Partner position in the industry?
• Metrics? Measurement? ROI?

PCMA

• Brand alignment – Principles of strong brands
• Commitment – Multiple stakeholders
• Value – Measurement and exchange
• Delivery – Manage expectations
• Accountability – Metrics, reporting, business reviews and ROI

Gaylord

• Prospect research – Proper alignment
• Brand development opportunities
• Business objectives – Total value
• Flawless delivery – Over-deliver
• Accurate & timely metrics – Business reviews

If you are actively considering sponsorship of any property, we encourage you to check out the Sponsorship Evaluation Checklist, which lists a wide range of considerations you should review when evaluating a sponsorship.

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In that spirit, UK freecaster ITV has just aired a countdown of viewer-selected favourite TV ads. Top of the list for 2010, an admirable advertisement for British department store chain John Lewis:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Performics, a Publicis-owned unit, wanted to find out the same thing so it conducted an online survey of U.S. consumers who access at least one social network regularly. The objective: to determine what kind of impact social networking has on the purchase process.

Here’s what they found out, from 3011 consumers:

• 34% have used a search engine to find information on a product/service/brand after seeing an advertisement on a social networking site
• 30% have learned about a new product, service and/or brand from a social networking site
• 27% are receptive to invitations to events, special offers or promotions from advertisers communicated to me through social networking sites
• 25% have gone directly to an online retailer or ecommerce site after learning about a product/service/brand via a social networking site
• 25% have recommended a product/service/brand to their friends via a social networking site
• 20% have discussed products/services/brands on social networking sites after seeing an ad elsewhere

If you’d like to tap into this social revenue stream but are not sure where to start, grab the free ebook on “Adventures Into The Unknown World of Social Media” from http://MarketersFears.com

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So at least half of us can now be found hanging out on social networks. Should marketers be there too? Absolutely, notes eMarketer, channeling the results of a February 2010 survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey, a market research firm. According to their data, 33% of U.S. Facebook users have become fans of brands on the network.

And plenty more social network users are talking about brands online. Whether it’s good news or bad news, if it’s hot it spreads in milliseconds across the social networks.

An unfortunate example? On September 26 2009 Kraft Australia launched its glorious new line extension to the iconic Australian Vegemite brand. Vegemite iSnack 2.0 was launched in the quarter-time adbreak of the Australian Football League Grand Final (roughly equivalent to the Superbowl in terms of national sporting importance) down under.

Before the adbreak was even over, tweets of death were resounding across Australia and thence across the world:

NO! Vegemite cream cheese product CANNOT POSSIBLY be called “Vegemite iSnack 2.0″. Bad joke or most epic FAIL in FMCG branding history” - tweeted by downesy

I said “do you speaka my language?” She just smiled and gave me an iSnack 2.0 sandwich. #vegefail – tweeted by jmappellekim

On the rather more positive side, a recent Nielsen/Facebook joint study showed significant uplift in Advertising Recall, Awareness and Purchase Intent amongst those brands “liked” in Social Media.

Nervous yet? Worried about your brand? Or just eager to take advantage of the added value if fans ‘love you’ socially?

It’s time to upskill yourself on social media — it’s too late to be an early adopter, but now would be a good time to start getting yourself socially adept.

For many marketers, however, the social media space is fraught with danger. Recent studies have shown that marketers have three basic fears about social media — and those fears can be crippling (on a professional level if not personally) if the right actions aren’t taken to deal with the problems.

Author and marketing specialist Michael Carney has put together an ebook on “Marketers’ Fears About Social Media (and how to overcome them)”, based on the Social Media Marketing course he’s been running for the past few months.

It’s available free of charge from www.MarketersFears.com, and it’s already attracting attention (and praise):

• “amazing and awesome”
• “That’s the best looking social media document I’ve ever seen”
• “love the comic art”

Michael has made the ebook available at no charge to our readers. Simply go to http://MarketersFears.com and organise your copy.

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Now a large chunk of that misplaced attention threatens to migrate to the iSuite. Be afraid.

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Here’s the official word from BBC News web editor Steve Herman:

“As the [UK] Times moves into online subscription and others consider the options … there is likely to be a changing landscape with some sites and stories behind paywalls, some not, and some which are in between – a certain number of visits or part of an article free, all depending on the user’s individual circumstances.

“Some said they’d like us also to flag links which require subscription if you follow them.  That is broadly the direction we are going in. We will, where practical, aim to tell you if the link is going to a subscription site. Our automated Newstracker module, for example, should be able to do this and already signals when registration is required.”

What’s of particular interest is that the Beeb is actually planning to link to paid content with a caveat, rather than simply ignoring stories that aren’t freely available.

In the past, the few paid content providers that have existed out there (in particular, the Wall Street Journal) have often been excluded from news aggregators and search engines such as Google because their content hasn’t been readily accessible.

If this new BBC News policy becomes a new standard for online linking, the whole dynamic of paid content will become much more viable: instead of losing public awareness by switching to paid content, news sites will remain linkable (and thus able to benefit from passing mention in other articles) as well as searchable.

What, we wonder, will Google do?

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As is often the case (though not always wisely), almost half of the respondents (48.6%) said their main customer aim in 2010 will be to generate new leads, although one quarter of the response said they will concentrate on retaining the ones they’ve got.

Two-thirds of respondents suggested that they concentrate more on customers’ lifetime value rather than attempting to make a profit out of them from the first transaction; this good intention was unfortunately philosophical rather than actual — more than half those interviewed don’t track customers’ lifetime value by channel, making it somewhat difficult to hold the focus on their avowed longterm goals.

WHAT OFFERS?
Discounts were the big lure in economy-ravaged 2009, with 92.2% of marketers favouring this as the most used prospecting offer. Amongst the drawcards planned for business-getting in 2010:

• 94.9% Information Content (eg White Papers, Webinars)
• 93.7% Extra Services
• 93.0% Free Shipping
• 92.9% Entertainment Content (eg ringtones)
• 91.5% Contests or sweepstakes
• 89.0% Discounts
• 88.1% Gift With Purchase

Whether marketers can actually hold themselves back from price-cutting in 2010 remains to be seen.

Asked specifically if higher-value incentives will be required in 2010 to bring in fresh prospects, almost half the survey said no — but neary a third hedged their bets and said the answer is still uncertain. Taken with the “yes” vote, that’s a large proportion of marketers who believe that finding new customers may get even more costly this year.

Online & Social Expected to Boom
When it comes to what they’ll do more of in 2010 to uncover leads, survey respondents are undoubtedly thinking social and online. More than half expressed interest in deploying Web strategies to draw prospects, and almost three out of five said they intend to pursue social marketing.

Overall, respondents are pretty equally interested in using social connectivity to define their brand image (51.7%) and in creating customer relations that may lead to sales conversions at a later date (50.3%).

Only about a third said they use social media as a tactic to drive traffic to their Web site, and only 13.5% said they market products directly in social media, whether through e-commerce or clickthrough ads or apps.

Those relative proportions hold for all revenue segments. But it’s interesting to note that a higher proportion of small companies (54%) are using social media in the hope of turning friends or followers into future shoppers.

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