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.

Its an accepted fact of business life that Search Engines (and by that we mean mostly Google) play a huge role in driving business to sites. It could even be said to have become conventional wisdom that this needs to be managed by a process, and that processes is ‘SEO’.

But like the tune ‘Clouds’ might have said, had it been written by geeks: I’ve looked at search engines from both sides now, and I’m pretty sure the most effective approach is one of good webmastering. Why?

• Google tell you what to do. They talk about quality of content and how to structure it. They WANT users to get good results so they don’t go elsewhere.
• We built traffic for one client to 1.5million visitors a year, with high conversion rates, without using any Pay Per Click.

How did we do this? The client was pursuing a strategy of putting very high quality media in accessible structures. We watched the kind of searches that people made, and specified content to answer their  questions. The volume of different search queries was huge.

But what’s the future got in store for us?

Well, SEO is now ubiquitious, and the cultural advantage that Google used to enjoy is being eroded.

The ’secret’ algorithm that Google use to rank pages and return the right results to the user is now quite widely understood, at least to a level which allows accurate campaign targetting. I will go into what the key criteria are in a later post, but these two can be used illustrate the key issues:

1. High quality content results in longer visit lengths to sites, and less ’short turn around times’ where people return to the same search engine and click another link

2. Large rises in anchor text links featuring a given phrase pointing to a particular page from external sites can move a site up the rankings for a search on that phrase

So sites that wish to attract business based on their search ranking either have the choice of putting out targetted high quality website product (a good focussed site) or by optimised anchor text link building (‘polishing the turd’).

Good common sense dictates the first approach will be the best in the long term in terms of reputation and conversion, but in the real world these things work out differently, how will the results pages suffer over time, given the rise of the SEOs?

They are already suffering, it’s a numbers game based on the value of the results and it’s inevitable that people will learn to game it.

Google as you would expect from a resourceful PLC, have a plan for dealing with this.

The battle for your attention is now migrating to the application space, and they’re following their own advice: make something useful that people will use, and keep using even while you get some subtle, relevant marketing.

Apple are jumping in too. And they’re not shy about where they’re going to sit in the market:

“We weren’t the first to this party but we’re going to be the best,” – Steve Jobs

The (iPad) update includes a mobile advertising platform called iAd that will be used to place adverts in applications made by third parties.

iAd marks Apple’s first foray into a potentially lucrative new market, and pits it directly against Google’s search engine advertising model.

Apple will allow external developers to pocket 60% of ad revenue from iAd.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8610610.stm

Will Apple take a bite out of the Google online advertising? As application developers, they have our attention.

It’s not fashionable to have a favourite economist, but I do. It’s JK Galbraith, and he has some useful lessons for the Hotel Sector right now.

From his 1958 book ‘ The Affluent Society’:

‘…we are guided, in part, by ideas that are relevant to another world, and as a further result, we do many things that are unnecessary, some that are unwise, and a few that are insane.’

He was talking about the way policy of the time was influenced by theories formulated at a time when poverty was widespread and how we needed to move on from this position or risk regressing.

It was true during the boom but in an evolved form.

The boom was inflationary: driven by banks that took ‘insane’ risks. The amount of activity in the property sector and an inflationary market meant outsourcing key functions was critical to rapid growth. Sustaining growth took precedence over building the right structures and pricing into the outsourcing agreements.

This means that there is scope for efficiencies and managers are performing supplier reviews, and doing what they can to bring costs down.

In this blog we’ll want to do our bit to update the ideas that are relied upon to make our decisions. There’s been a democratization of technology and it’s time to update the purchasing methods and thinking accordingly.

Vinyl Matt Media is an independent media company offering a number of niche services to the property sector, in the areas of Photography, Videography, Hotel Booking Engine, Publishing Services, Multilingual Site Hosting & Maintenance. We serve clients in UK & Irl, France, Belgium, Bosnia & Italy. Our services are offered as bundles or as individual offerings and we are happy to work clearly and transparently with existing vendors.

In the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a study of the top areas of waste that we have identified, so please subscribe for updates.