Recently the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) asked me to do a webinar on building a dashboard to aid in online reputation monitoring. I had read a really good article on the topic a year or so ago, so put some of that information to good use, added a bit of my own, and created the presentation.

The presentation (slightly adapted) is below. One note from the audio (which isn’t included) is that at the time of the presentation the TweetBeep.com site was not responding. Since I haven’t actively used it in a while, I don’t know if it is still in operation.

At this week’s 2010 PAII Innkeeping Conference, we presented a workshop on Reputation Management. The slides from that presentation are below.

Some of the attendees at the session had specific questions, and the audio will reflect those questions and answers. The audio will be available for purchase from the PAII website.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact us or leave a comment.

A recurring concern that I hear from innkeepers is how to understand all the different online marketing opportunities, and how they can be used profitably.

Though the conversation often starts with Facebook or Twitter, it also encompasses other social sites such as MySpace, Plurk, and many other communities. It also includes YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sites, WordPress, Blogger and other blogging sites, delicious, StumbleUpon and other bookmarking sites. The list can go on and on.

How does all this fit with your website, your directory listings, and all the other ways that vendors to the industry have come up with to separate you from your marketing dollars?

Like an optical illusion, using these tools can give the appearance that you are doing something productive, while they may just be taking up time (and possibly money, as well).

Is the Answer a Social Media Strategy?

There are many knowledgeable people who have written excellent articles saying that, before you plunge into the Social Media world you should develop a Social Media strategy.

Sometimes it sounds like these social media plans and marketing plans are only for large organizations. However, whether you take time to formalize the plan, or whether you shoot from the hip, you DO have an approach to marketing and to social media that we could call a strategy. So we agree and we also disagree with creating a social media strategy. We do agree that you should develop a social media strategy, but that will never help you make sense of all the different moving parts, and will not help you to see how social media fits into the big picture of marketing your business.

If one of your objectives in engaging in social media is to promote awareness of your property (and we suggest that this should be the case), then it is important that you see how social media fits (if at all) in with your overall marketing strategy. You do have a marketing strategy, don’t you? Good!

The Bigger Picture

For most small lodging properties, the marketing approach is similar:

1. Create awareness of your property
2. Generate reservations
3. Educate potential guests
4. Provide responses to specific questions or concerns

You may phrase them differently, and perhaps you would add something we’ve missed, but for most of us, that covers the main objectives.

We try to accomplish these objectives with

• Print advertising
• Web site
• Online paid advertising (directories, pay per click, banners, etc.)
• Any non-paid advertising such as being mentioned in a travel article, or the like

Where do the newer avenues, like social media marketing fit in? What should the priorities be for social media? Which ones should you choose, and how much time should you devote to them? Should you hire someone to blog/tweet/post for you?

Order From Chaos

The first step in making sense of all the different avenues is to place things in categories. We’ll deal only with the online portion, so we won’t comment on your print advertising at this time. Broadly speaking, your online presence falls into

• Web site
• Paid advertising
• Social media

For your web site, we’ll consider only the primary site, not your blog — even if it is actually a part of your web site. We also include any search engine optimization (SEO) you do, as well as local listings (listings on Yahoo Local, Google Local Business Listings, or Bing’s Local Business Center).

Paid advertising includes paid listings on lodging directories, pay per click (PPC) ads, or any other form of online paid advertising.

Sample table of online marketing networks and purposes

The list for social media is lengthy. For many of the most used sites, divided into categories, visit KnowEm. The most commonly used for lodging properties are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, TripAdvisor, Flickr, Panoramio, and a few others. Next, create a chart of the various media you use (or are considering), with the type and specific network on one axis, and the marketing objective on the other. We’ve created a sample chart (click on the image to bring up a full-size version).

Mark the purpose opposite each medium and see how well you are accomplishing your objectives.

Bear in mind that there will be some duplication and overlap. For example, your website or your blog may serve almost the same purposes as your Facebook fan page. That doesn’t always mean you should eliminate one of them.

Consider, first, whether there are any objectives that you are currently failing to achieve with your online marketing avenues. If so, see what you can do to overcome that deficiency. Next, see where your guests and potential guests congregate. These are places you must have a presence, even if it duplicates something else you are doing. Remember, you must go where your guests are – in an online world you can’t always expect them to find you!

Finally, if you see a genuine duplication, where the objective is the same, the ability to achieve it is the same, and there is no difference in the audience you can reach, consider whether you are expending unnecessary time or money to maintain that medium.

Validate Your Success

In order to be sure you are actually accomplishing your objectives, you must be able to quantify the results. A discussion of measuring the effectiveness of these avenues is beyond the scope of this post, but we will discuss it in more detail in a future post. For now, if you are using any form of statistics or tracking software, you must use it to validate that these efforts are performing adequately.

Have you ever considered creating audio podcasts (voice readings of your blog) for your blog? I have, but the time it would take to record and post them kept me from preparing them myself, and I wasn’t willing to incur the cost of a commercial podcasting service. Then I saw a post by one of my favorite SEO experts, Ann Smarty, on using the free service from Odiogo for podcasting. The voice is quite natural sounding, for the most part. Some of the inflections are not “human” sounding, but it really is quite respectable – especially since it is free.

Simple Steps to Podcasting

There are really only three steps to using Odiogo for podcasting.

1. Sign up for an account with Odiogo
2. Add the widget or plugin for your blog (if you use an unsupported blog platform – but lots are supported – you may have to paste the provided code into your template)
3. Enjoy listening via your web browser or portable device.

Ann Smarty’s post shows the screenshots of your subscription page (which includes advertising), or ours is here. You can see our subscription button in the right sidebar.

Adding Odiogo to WordPress Blogs

Once you have signed up for the Odiogo account, here are the simple steps to add the Odiogo “Play” button to your hosted WordPress account:

1. In the Plugins section of the Control Panel, click Add New
2. Search for Odiogo
3. Click to install the plugin
4. If you want to add a Subscribe button for the Odiogo podcasts, go to the Appearance menu and select Widgets, then drag the Odiogo Subscription button to the area where you want it to appear, change its name if you like, and save it.
5. View your blog and you should see the Play button beneath the title of your blog posts, and the Subscribe button in the area where you placed it.

Adding Odiogo to Blogger Blogs

Adding the Odiogo podcast buttons to a Blogger blog is even easier. You should be logged in to your Blogger account when you sign up for Odiogo.

1. During the sign up process, there will be a button to add the widget to your Blogger blog. Click it.
2. If you want to edit any of the fields, click and edit them.
3. Drag the Subscribe widget to a different location, if you like.
4. Click the button to add the widget.
5. View the blog to see the new Play button beneath the title, and (unless you made changes) the Subscribe button in the area you placed it.

Note that if you click the Play button, besides playing the podcast, you have the opportunity to download the post to an iPod, MP3 player, etc.

Very nice, Odiogo!