Dan Sherman is Director of Marketing Communications at Ski.com

Ski.com is North America’s largest provider of mountain vacations
My day-to-day changes every day
I wear a lot of hats: the two largest are public relations and social media
The link between social media and PR is managing messages and keeping the dialog going
You skip the middleman and go direct to your target audience
Unlike PR, with social media you can somewhat control your message
When you’re pitching media, you just hope they write about what you want
Facebook and Twitter are two different vehicles for two different purposes
I do more offers on Twitter than Facebook
Facebook is more engaging in my opinion – it lets you have more of a dialog with more people in one place
Twitter is better for lead generation, driving traffic to a website
If I do a sales message, I don’t get a lot of action
But if it’s just relevant information, like a photo of new snow, people like to engage with that
When people comment on anything on Facebook, all their friends see that
Through this method, we got a $70,000 booking from someone who had never heard of us before
I generally do all the Facebook updates myself – and I manage multiple pages
The last thing I want to do is post too much, and have people hide us in their newsfeed
Our business is seasonal, so I want to be tapping people on the shoulder, but not too much
Facebook Connect may become a thing of the past
I have very high expectations for putting Facebook functionality on our own website, allowing their friends to see they’re engaging with Ski.com
We just implemented ‘like’ buttons on all of our resort pages
When people click that, on their friends’ newsfeed they’ll see John Doe likes Ski.com
Advice from strangers on TripAdvisor is great, but people really trust their own circle of friends
Recommendations from friends are more likely to encourage a buying decision
People have always been influenced by what other people like, but Facebook makes this much more visible

See Dan this October at EyeforTravel’s Travel Distribution Summit North America 2010.

According to research from Dan Zarrella, your hotel will get a lot more interaction on Facebook updates made on the weekend (especially on Saturday):

Is your social media ambassador not working during the weekend? Not to worry: just use a tool like HootSuite that allows scheduled future posting on Facebook.

A few colleagues and I are starting a new community to encourage innovation around social responsibility and environmental sustainability.

Here’s the video intro:

This community will start out on this Facebook page: I invite you join here. In fact, I’ll make it super-easy for you by including the Facebook widget here – just click the “like” button below:

A note about Facebook privacy: Joining does not open up your personal network. We’re just using the Facebook Connect platform to get as many people involved as possible. It’s just to let you plug into the community without separate registration.

Once you’ve “liked” our page, please share links, articles, or examples that you think would inspire innovation in this space.

Need to make some direct revenue off Facebook? Here’s four ways hotels are generating bookings that can be attributed directly to Facebook.

Email signup

With a little bit of FBML code, you can embed an email signup form on your page. On the right, you can see how email marketing provider VerticalResponse does it on their page:

Once you build up this list, you can create special email promotions targeted directly to your Facebook audience.

Special deals module

Swiss-Belhotel uses Facebook to drive people to their “Red Hot Deals” landing page:

From here, they are sent to a highly-optimized landing page that probably earns high conversion rates:

Custom landing pages

Or you can go a step further. By setting up your page so that visitors see the “promotions” tab first, you can highlight a special offer or package. Here’s how Hard Rock Las Vegas does it:

Booking module

Over the past couple months, I’ve seen more and more hotels adding booking modules directly to their fan pages. Here’s how Design Hotels added their reservations tool:

How are you making money on Facebook?

(For step-by-step assistance setting up these features on your Facebook page, join our Insider’s Circle)

Megan Harrod is the director of marketing for Mosaic House. I’ve been watching them develop a new website for their soon-to-be-opened property for a while now. When they added Facebook Connect to the homepage, I knew we had to talk…

Josiah: What were some of your goals when redeveloping the website?

Megan: We wanted to focus on the things that makes Mosaic House, Mosaic House. For us, the biggest thing is the atmosphere created by all the communal areas in the building. For the website, we really wanted to show this element. We’re still building out the full website – it’s in progress right now.

Design is also important to us. We wanted that to come through in the imagery.

You mentioned one of the key selling points of your brand is the social aspect. How do you communicate this through design?

The biggest thing for us is the addition of the Facebook Connect feature. What I was talking to the designer in the planning stage, we decided to add this because it’s all about engagement. We haven’t even opened yet, but have nearly 800 fans on Facebook.

The Mosaic House is all about bringing people together. So adding Facebook Connect to the website enables us to bring people together online. We have further integration planned as we rollout the full version of the site. So when people land on the home page, they see a whole mosaic of faces…and then we can direct people to our Facebook page where we encourage further interaction.

I love how you’re integrating Facebook into the website – I don’t see a lot of hotels doing that. Very few hotels are able to reach 800 fans so quickly. Can you talk a little bit about how you promote your Facebook page? How did you get so many people signing up?

Read more…

Over the past few months, I’ve seen hotels creatively use Facebook to successfully attract new guests and connect with past ones. This has led me to recommend a new situational approach to using Facebook: what works for some hospitality companies may not work for others. It seems you must have clear goals for being on the site before you can succeed.

The Pros & Cons of using Facebook

Pros

• It can serve as a rich media sharing platform for collecting and distributing photos and video of special events at your hotel
• You can extend your page functionality through various applications
• It can serve as a good social media hub, sharing content from various sites around the web
• The new enhanced wall feature encourages interactivity and creates a sort of “lifestream” around your hotel
• Event promotion seems to be something that works very well – considering how people tend to use Facebook
• You can rally people around a cause
• Access to statistics has improved over the past few months, making it easier to track metrics

Cons

• Your potential guests may not be using it
• Your guests may not want to use it to interact with a hotel
• People may even get annoyed by receiving marketing messages from a hotel on Facebook

“I thought Beverly Hilton was an old girlfriend, but then realized I’d been friended by a hotel. #HiltonFail” @simmonet

But perhaps the most powerful argument I hear against using Facebook is that is doesn’t reach people in the decision making stage of the travel planning process. This is something you must consider carefully if you are starting a brand-new Internet marketing campaign with limited resources. You may get a higher return on investment by focusing on online reputation building and search marketing.

Should your hotel have a Facebook presence?

Here are some questions to ask yourself Read more…

My post last week about Facebook for hotel marketing attracted a lot of interest. There was some helpful discussion by hotel marketers with real-world examples, and I’d like to share some of the comments with you…

Nuno Valinhas of Tiara Hotels:

Our strategy of promotion in the social media environment is no more than “to get outside”, “to be visible” and to try to reach more and more potential clients. Beside our offline Marketing campaigns and actions, the social media networks able us with a cost of ZERO to somehow influence and engage more people to get to know our brand/name as well as our hotel, and their locations. We’ve a facebook fan page that is still starting. Personally I share the same opinion than you, Facebook isn’t the best tool to generate more reservations. But in the same way that you become a fan of anything, you also can be a fan of Tiara Hotels & Resorts, and with that, your friends and connections will get to know us.

My reply: I’m not yet convinced that this type of awareness will increase reservations. I have hundreds of Facebook ‘friends’ and most of them are fans of several organizations. Am I aware when they become a fan of a new business? Usually not. Does it influence my travel plans? Never.

John Beckley of SortedSites:

I think facebook business pages should be on the portfolio of Social Media sites that Hotels use. I disagree that this is for a younger crowd, one of our Resort clients facebook page has 60% over 35years old. Interestingly enough 70% are women.

Too many times I see Facebook pages being too dormant. Hotel staff should be involved, upload photos, videos, create events and make sure that this is another place for your guests to leave a review or offer feedback.

My reply: Yes, business pages should be in the toolkit of any social media marketer…just maybe lower on the priority list. I also agree that if Facebook is going to be used, it needs interaction. Thanks for sharing your resort client example. There are older people using Facebook, and if your target demographic uses it – then by all means you need to be there.

Michael Hraba of Hraba Consulting:

I ran some low level ad experiments with some fairly reputable boutique hotels I work with, and the results of FB “highly targeted” marketing with their ad model was… laughable. People just don’t click on internet ads anymore. There is actually something called “banner blindness” to the ad guys.

Only when I stopped trying to promote it and let them sit, organically get discovered, and now have 100’s of fans. But still…. they don’t actually *DO* anything. They don’t interact in meaningful ways. They certainly don’t book rooms off the FB page. They might book elsewhere, then chat about their next stay on FB…. but there isn’t any meaningful traffic through to the booking engine, to say the least. I wouldn’t spend a dime, but I think you need to at least have a page there. Just let it reinforce the brand, be another place with your link, and another point of accessibility for guests.

My reply: Interesting campaign result with Facebook PPC ads. I’ve had the same results, and I think hoteliers should avoid running paid campaigns there.

In summary, I know Facebook can be used to communicate with guests and build your web presence, I just think it’s not most efficient way of doing that. If you have the time, by all means put up a page: it can’t hurt. Just be realistic on the benefits you will receive, and don’t rely on it for increasing your bookings.

I love Facebook…for personal use. It’s a great way for me to stay in touch with friends and family around the world. Its media sharing tools have greatly improved over the last few years, and it has taken the place of the majority of my personal email.

So why don’t I like Facebook for hotel marketing? Because I look at the numbers, and it’s not effective in generating new bookings. Most hotels we’ve worked with at Gradigio achieve much higher ROI from other social media networks.

With that in mind, there are a couple cases when Facebook may be a viable marketing option for your organization.

1) If you’re a hostel or targeting the under-30 crowd. In social media marketing, it’s all about demographics. You need to know who your target audience is, and then build a presence on those networks. Facebook has grown from the days when you needed an academic email address to join, but it remains a younger network. Quantcast shows 78% of the sites’ users are under 34 years old. If you are a luxury leisure property, this probably isn’t the place to be.

Chart courtesy of Quantcast.com

2) If you’re a larger hotel chain looking to build an application. Several travel companies have built very successful apps for the Facebook platform that spread quickly virally. But due to development cost and market size, this would only work well if you have a number of properties over a large geographic area. Users won’t install an app from one hotel unless it helped them elsewhere.

Recent updates in the Facebook interface have made the platform more conducive to the real-time sharing of information and media. This is a positive development for hotel marketers, but the platform still remains not the best time investment for most properties.

Hotels can achieve higher ROI by focusing on social media networks that reach potential guests in the decision making stage of the buying cycle. Not many travel planners use Facebook in their research process. They do check guest-written hotel reviews and user-produced media. Efforts to cultivate those are much more effective.