I’ve received some good feedback about my post on crowdsourcing yesterday. Some of you wanted examples of how to integrate user-generated content (UGC) in web design.

This morning I was looking for a flight out of London and visited the bmi website:

If you take a closer look, what appears to be stock photography is actually a photo from Flickr:

In a news release announcing the website design, bmi’s marketing director Katherine Gershon said:

We…wanted to break away from traditional airline website design and re-create the feeling of flying on the website itself.  The usage of flickr photography does just that and enables us to engage with online communities and we are really excited by the social networking opportunities of this relationship.

They’ve even gone a step further and included Flickr photography in their magazine. I think this is a great example of leveraging the power of content co-creation.

What do you think? Could you do something like this in your website or marketing collateral?

Most hotel websites look the same: Home, Rooms, Amenities, Reservations, Contact us.  Maybe even an dynamic flash intro or photo gallery thrown in for good measure.

“Look at us!  Aren’t we beautiful?”

BORING!!!

Here’s the hard truth: Potential guests don’t care about you.

They want to know if you have what they are looking for.
They want to know how you are going to meet their needs.
They want to know what their experience will be like.

So here’s my advice: Develop separate pages on your site for each of your target guest personas. Share your unique selling points with each group in a different way.

Without splitting up your website into separate sections, you can’t deliver this personalized, relevant information.

Focus on potential guests and their needs, not on your property.  You’ll probably end up covering the same material – but it’s how you present it that matters.

So let me ask you this: How does your hotel website provide unique content to each type of guest?

Local search: The process of seeking information online in order to find a location-specific company offline.

Since hospitality businesses are in specific geographic locations (as opposed to a web-based ecommerce site), optimizing for local searches is essential to any hotel search optimization program.

For most hotels, the most important keyword phrase to target is:

“[your city] hotel”

Begin by putting that phrase at the start of your homepage title and in other relevant areas.  It’s an important place to begin – but since it’s so easy to do, you’ll find most of your competition is probably doing it as well.

So dig a little deeper.

Include other relevant local keywords.  List nearby city names (and nicknames), neighborhoods, landmarks, and other attractions someone could use to find hotels in your area.

If you’re doing paid search marketing, you’ll want to generate a big list with two types of keywords:

1. Geocentric keyword + broad keyword (like: San Francisco Hotel)
2. Geocentric keyword + specific keyword (like: Best Nob Hill Boutique Hotel)

Getting listed in Google Maps is essential.  Many businesses are already indexed, but if your hotel is not read the instructions for including it I posted recently.  Yahoo has a similar service.  It’s standard practice to place your hotel’s address and phone number on your website anyway.

Once your hotel website is optimized for the right keywords, make sure to build your presence in popular social travel networks.  Building your ranking as the best hotel in your area requires using all available techniques.

As a hotel marketing manager, it’s your job to make it as easy for potential guests to find you.  And with many people using Google Maps to find local businesses, it’s an important place to be.  Listing your hotel is quite easy:

1) Search Google Maps and check to see if your hotel is already listed – many are.  (If the information currently in there is incorrect, you can change it by following these same steps.)

2) Prepare the basic information on the hotel you’re listing, including the address, contact information, payment information, and a picture of the hotel (if possible).

3) Visit the Local Business Center, and sign in with your Google account.

4) Follow the directions to enter your information.

5) Choose a verification method.  Google can call you or mail a postcard to your address.  Either way, you’ll enter a PIN number to confirm your entry.

After verification, your listing should show up within 48 hours.  Once it’s up, make sure to encourage guests to rate you on Google.

There is no charge for listing your hotel in Google Maps, and service currently works in Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Japan, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, the UK, and the United States.

These days, you hear a lot about the importance of social networking in hospitality marketing.  But what networks should you focus on?  It depends on your goals, but here are some of the most popular:

WikiTravel – similar to Wikipedia, this is a user-written travel guide that was launched in July 2003 by Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins. It was the recipient of a Webby Award for Best Travel Website in 2007, and recently became available in a printed version.  It’s good for providing in-depth information on obscure destinations.

TripAdvisor – the grandaddy of review websites, covering more than 212,000 hotels and 74,000 attractions in over 30,000 destinations worldwide. With more than 20 million reviews and nearly 30 million unique visitors a month, TripAdvisor is the largest travel community on the web.

VirtualTourist – purchased by TripAdvisor in July 2008, this site features user-written destination guides.

Yelp – another big review website that seems more popular with the younger, connected crowd.  (I’ll often type in reviews with my iPhone while at a cafe.)

Boots-n-All – calls itself “the ultimate resource for the independent traveler,” and offers articles and trip planning services

World66 – travel information on over 20,000 destinations, with nearly 80,000 articles written wiki-style

Lonely Planet Thorn Tree – probably the most popular discussion forum, published by the famous travel guide company

TravBuddy – provides more social networking than the others, letting you meet people and share photos, reviews, and blogs

TravelersPoint – lets 100,000+ users write travel blogs and share advice

This is part 5 of my hotel blogging best practices series.  You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, and part 4 here.

A blog with no readers is a waste of time.

If you’re going to pursue blogging as a part of your internet marketing plan, then building popularity for it needs to be a top priority.

The first step to building a popular hotel blog – whether it’s an executive or destination blog – is to view the project as a major part in your marketing mix.  Chris Brogan recently discussed the concept of making your blog a media property.  The summary: effective bloggers understand what they’re doing is serious business – so they treat it that way.

Next, understand that your writing – the blog posts themselves – is the marketing.  The quality of your entries will have a direct effect on the success of your blog. There are many reasons for this:

1. Search engines will bring the most traffic to your site.  If you’re not publishing relevant content regularly, you won’t be found.
2. When visitors do find your blog through search engines, they’ll leave in 2 seconds if it’s not relevant to what they need.
3. If your blog content is interesting, it will be linked to and shared on other websites, bringing you more traffic from those sites and through search engines.

As you can see, it’s a virtuous cycle once you begin posting good content.  What what exactly is good content for a hotel blog?

• List content
• How-to content
• Review content
• Controversial content
• News breaking content
• (Any of the ideas mentioned in part 4 of this series)

Now, publishing great content is the first step.  But there are other things you can do to increase your blog’s reader base.  If you build a better mousetrap, the world will not always beat a path to your door.  As a marketing professional, you know this.  That’s where an understanding of blog popularity building techniques is helpful.

Link liberally to other bloggers, and request they link to you (where appropriate).  Links are the currency of blogging.  Don’t be stingy here – share the love.

Comment on other blogs, especially in your industry.  The blogosphere is built on community participation.  If you want comments on your blog, take part in the discussion on other blogs.  (Just a note: there’s not need for comment spam – post intelligent responses and you’ll be rewarded.)

Integrate and encourage social media sharing. This is easy to do, and a well-written post can receive thousands of new visitors if Dugg or otherwise shared in social media.

Promote your blog on your hotel website and other advertising material.  Not doing this could cause you to miss out on valuable traffic.

Nobody likes wasting time.  Make sure people are reading what you write.  Make your blog a powerhouse in your overall web presence.

Let me ask you this: What are you doing to build your blog’s reader base?

I came across HowSociable? today – which offers a way to measure your brand’s web presence in social media.

The site is still in development, so you may not agree with their visibility score or choice of benchmarks (it’s not tailored to the travel industry), it’s another tool to use for reputation management.

To help you determine if blogging is for you, I’d like to share some of the advantages and disadvantages of using a blog in your social media marketing mix.

Advantages of blogging for your hotel include:

• The opportunity for you to develop a personal bond with potential guests
• Perceived authority on the subject you’re covering (whether it’s your local area as a destination, or a niche in the hospitality industry)
• Increased rankings and visitors to your site (Search engines love blogs)
• Increased influence and reach (Your entries can be published as RSS newsfeeds to other websites)

Disadvantages are slightly smaller, but still worth considering:

• The time factor is perhaps the biggest drawback to creating a blog.  Blogs are easy to start but difficult to maintain.  Publishing a good blog takes a significant amount of time.  Of course, writing takes the most time, but you must also allow time for interacting with your readers.
• Related to the time factor is the risk of publishing a blog that damages your brand’s reputation.  Fortunately, you can hedge against this by creating publishing guidelines for yourself and whoever is involved with the blog.

In my upcoming blogging best practices series, you’ll learn more about how to capitalize on the advantages and reduce the disadvantages of using this media.  Stay tuned….

Having a web site isn’t enough anymore.  Now, the key to online market leadership for your hotel is establishing a web presence.

A new social media research report by Universal McCann puts some hard numbers behind this trend:

• 73% of online users read a blog (what guest experiences are they reading?)
• 57% join social networks (do you have a presence there?)
• 45% have started a blog (what will they say about your hotel?)
• 83% have viewed a video online (can they find one for you?)
• 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs (does your hotel have one?)

Some more insights for hotel marketers…

1. The 3 most popular social media participation activities are watching videos, reading blogs, and viewing pictures.
2. “In the world of social media, honesty is the only policy”
3. Reputation management will become more important as social media participation grows
4. Think globally; your customers are

Here’s the full report:

A website used to be all a company needed to reach customers online.  Not anymore! Now, anyone with $15 and the right software can publish a website in less time than it takes to eat lunch.  It’s estimated that between 15 and 30 billion websites exist.  How are you going to differentiate yourself from the 14,999,999,999 other websites out there?

Having a web site is no longer enough.  You need a web presence.  

The past few years have seen a huge rise of interest in blogging and social networking.  These websites and services are largely community-centered, and encourage user participation.

As a hotelier, you need to establish a broad network of contact points for your hotel that all lead to the center: your hotel’s main site. 

Here’s a list of ideas for “spokes” in your web presence:

• Create a blog, and update it at least once each week
• Integrate social bookmarking services such as Digg and del.icio.us into your blog
  
• Comment on other relevant blogs with a link to your hotel’s site in the signature
  
• Take pictures of your facility – the rooms, the grounds – and post them to a photo-sharing service such as Flickr
• Shoot video of your hotel, and post it to video sites such as YouTube and Google Video
• Record and publish candid video interviews with guests around your hotel
• Get listed in user-written travel guides such as WikiTravel
  
• Participate in discussions about your local area in social networks such as VirtualTourist
  
• Google your name, your hotel’s name, and other relevant phrases to see where you appear when others search for these terms (It’s a great motivator to expand your web presence if you’re just starting)
• Better yet, create Google Alerts for these phrases.  You’ll receive email updates enabling you to track what’s being said about you online.

Remember, having a website isn’t enough.  You need a web presence.

Be an octopus, not an elephant.