Brian points out an eye-opening study recently conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation for Cone.  According to the online survey, 93% of social media users thought companies should be using social networks.

What do these people want from a company engaging in social media networks?  The top three responses were Problem Solve (43%), Solicit Feedback (41%) and Provide new ways to interact with brand (37%).

If you’re thinking about getting involved in social media, hopefully this will give you some direction on the path to take.  Clearly, your potential customers want to interact with you – but they’re not looking for another sales pitch.

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

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

That’s the opening paragraph in a recent article by Wired that suggests blogging is dead.  Obsolete. More suited to 2004 than 2008.

I disagree.

Now, the author does raise a few valid points:

Writing a blog today isn’t the same as four years ago. This is true.  The blogosphere has become far more crowded than it used to be. Publishing a blog isn’t as unique as it once was, and you may not receive the same attention.

When blogging was young…posts quickly skyrocketed to the top of Google’s search results. Again, true.  I remember blogging during that time, and it was far more common for posts to achieve top rankings (along with the traffic and links that come with that).

Text-based websites aren’t where the buzz is anymore. Maybe, but buzz doesn’t always equal effectiveness. Besides, blogs should only be one part of your social media strategy and overall web presence.

These arguments against blogging fail to recognize how blogs can still be foundational to an effective hotel marketing plan.

The more useful information you publish, the larger your web presence will be. A blog is one of the most search-friendly publishing methods, and you can increase the number of visitors to your site by writing prolifically on useful topics.

Blogs provide the opportunity to be an authority of the subject you cover, whether it’s a destination or a niche in the hospitality industry.  Your writing is compiled into a library of knowledge that visitors can browse through, and you can re-use in future marketing material.

The popularity of social multimedia websites like Flickr and YouTube do not mean an end of blogging.  In fact, I recommend embedding photos and video content into your hotel blog, making it a destination resource.

So while blogging’s buzz factor may have worn off, its usefulness to a hotel marketer has not. (Just look at Bill Marriot, whose blog has brought in $5 million in additional revenue.)  This is just another reminder not to jump on the blogging bandwagon without carefully considering the advantages and disadvantages of hotel blogging.