Ah the irony. As a technical service provider we’re familiar to the archetypical image of the techie:

gruff
difficult to understand
enthusiastic about stuff that ordinary people couldn’t possibly care about

While we object to the stereotyping,  we contain ourselves to the technical aspects of the social media landscape, and leave the actual socialising to our clients.

Accordingly, we’re prototyping the next stage of  integration of our multilingual content management system for hotels with the major players: starting with Facebook and Twitter. It’s in development now, and you can help by ‘liking’ some of the content, and thereby helping us to test the components.

As an extra inducement, we will be offering a discount to people that help us test, so if your site content is compelling enough to make people want to share it, jump in and have a look at the demos.

The links to the demos are below:

Facebook Like Button. Nice and compact

Facebook  Like Box. Latest info from the facebook wall and a like button.

Facebook  Recent Activity. The history of all facebook activity on the site.

Facebook  Recommendations. A subset of facebook  recent activity.

Facebook Comment Box. Very early stages of testing

Twitter Box: Display latest tweets on own site webpage

Have fun!

(Thanks to Tessa is Space Group for allowing us to use her logo and colour scheme from this Hotel in Serre Chevalier)

I hate it when my friends try and punt me stuff, it’s soooo last decade.

I accept soliciting to my email, and get a spam guard. I live with the occasional Skype private message offering me expired viagra, but I’m not about to voluntarily  subscribe myself to anything which is going to bombard me with generic messages inciting me to read the latest dinner for 2 special.

But there are exceptions, rare, but becoming more frequent. I can only illustrate with an example:

Amsterdam is a beautiful city, with a concentration of ‘tourist activity’ in the centre. Most Dutch people I have met regard it with tolerant amusement, but most definitely consider themselves above it. Consequently, all the best ‘Dutch’ places to go are outside that area.

If you need to get out of the area around central station, the best way to tour is by bike. There is one dominant bike hire called Mac Bike, and they feature a 6inch round target advertising sign on the front of the bike.

Cycle as far out of Centrum as you want: you’re still a tourist when anyone see that big yellow bike.

Compare this with Henry: He operates a vintage bike restoration business for the old steel bikes, perfect cruisers for the cobbles. He has about 8 ’special’ bikes that he rents. From his website:

We also have a handful of city bikes with real Amsterdam charm. We don’t do yellow, orange or red “I’m a tourist” rental bikes. No, at WorkCycles you can go local on a bike painted with flowers, stripes, in five colors, totally matte black… or who knows what we’ll have waiting for you. `

I’ve met Henry, with his perspective on the city, he’s worth knowing. He’s social and so is his business. He’s works with a niche of customers, a niche which is probably will pay a little more, and take a little more care of the bike.

What’s our advice on social media? If you’re a social business: go for it, but treat the network the way you would your friends.

Next Article: Vinyl Matt Labs: Technical mechanisms to encourage social media interaction in Hotel Websites.