We’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about Pinterest lately, but surprisingly little of it comes from within the Innkeeping community. I say it is surprising, because Pinterest seems almost as if it was made for innkeepers – it is easy to use (we jumped in for our Freeport Maine B&B, and were happily pinning away in minutes), plentiful graphics grab the attention of the visitor, and it is so addictive that users stay connected for a long time.

According to comScore, Pinterest ranks just behind Google+ in number of visitors, and third (behind Facebook and Tumblr) in the amount of time a visitor spends on the site. This is very impressive for a site that is not yet open to the public (you can join using a Facebook login, or you can request an invitation on the Pinterest home page).

So what is Pinterest?

Pinterest describes itself as a virtual pinboard, but we think it is being far too modest. From where we sit, Pinterest is a fantastic tool for sharing interests, or ideas, with others. It seems to be a combination of bookmarking sites (like StumbleUpon, Digg, or Reddit) with photo sharing sites (like Flickr, Panoramio, or Photobucket), with the added ability to comment, share, etc., that you find on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

Why do people share?

The reasons for sharing seem as varied as the backgrounds of the people sharing. Some are sharing their own memories or activities, much like other sites. But since Pinterest allows (even encourages) sharing of sites you visit (they retain info attributing the original source), you can also share your interests, dreams, and ideas.

Why would an Innkeeper use Pinterest?

There are several reasons to use Pinterest. First, as Heather Allard notes, “If you had the opportunity to make your business part of someone’s vision board, would you do it?” Of course you would.

Second, you can use it to share not only information and photos about your B&B, but about the entire experience of a guest at your property (OK, maybe not the entire experience, but you get the idea). An excellent example is provided by Whole Foods. As noted in a recent ReviewPro article, Whole Foods isn’t just sharing the food, but the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. B&B’s can share the accommodations and the experience, as well.

Several other uses for innkeepers, as well as some basic ‘how to’ information about using Pinterest is shared by Heather Turner in her recent article on Pinterest.

Another benefit of using Pinterest is yet to be realized, but could be among the most valuable of all. According to SearchEngineLand, Pinterest’s traffic has grown 100% since August 2011, and now carries quite significant authority from the perspective of search engine SEO value. They note that every pin of your content is a link to your website. When a Pinterest user repins your content, you get more links. While the value is uncertain, social cues do impact rankings, so it is difficult to conceive of having more social links being a bad thing.

Ready to Pin?

As mentioned at the beginning, Pinterest is very easy to use. However, Heather Turner’s article has some quick steps to get started, and there is a very complete article from BlueGlass, called Everything You Need to Know About Pinterest.

Happy pinning!

Closing the circle in this series on the process guests use to book lodging properties is what WIHP Hotel Marketing calls the Second Moment of Truth – the arrival of the guest at your property. We have already discussed the four-step booking decision process, how the guest becomes aware of your property (the Discovery or Stimulus step), how guests make the decision to visit your website (the Zero Moment of Truth), and the process of deciding to book with your property (the First Moment of Truth). In this article we consider the guest at your property (and beyond).

Ready to share?

How do you get word of mouth recommendations that will bring more guests?

If review sites and social sharing are the sources of discovery, then we definitely want our guests to have a positive experience, and to share that experience. How do we go about doing that?

1. The Positive Experience

People usually have a good experience when it meets or exceeds their expectations. Conversely, when the experience falls short of their expectations, it isn’t usually a good experience.

How are expectations set for prospective guests? Proceeding through the booking process we’ve been discussing, some expectation is created by the initial recommendations or reviews. These are refined further by the visit to your website and booking process. The Second Moment of Truth is when the guest arrives at your property and learns whether or not those expectations will be met.

What can you do to set expectations?

You can not do much to affect the word of mouth recommendations, but you can affect online reviews. You can respond to the reviews to

• thank guests for positive comments,
• clarify any misunderstandings, or
• explain (and show sensitivity to) any problems.

Photos have the most impact, both because they tell the story most completely, and because they can be viewed quickly. On your website you can set expectations by making sure the photos accurately show what the guest should expect. Naturally we all want to show our property to best advantage, and to use the best photographs we can in order to do so. However, if your rooms are on the small side, and you use and extreme wide-angle lens to make them look a bit larger, you are setting the expectation that the guest will have a larger room than you are actually providing. This is a recipe for the guest to be disappointed.

Make sure the website information is current. If you no longer provide an amenity, make sure your website doesn’t say you have it. If you’re close to an area attraction, certainly say so. If you’re not too close, don’t pretend you are!

Make sure your service exceeds expectations, wherever possible. You already know how to do that! There is no substitute for a guest who checks out saying, “You’ve thought of everything!”

2. Getting the recommendation

Ask for it! If you send a follow-up email, be sure to include a gentle request for a review on TripAdvisor (or any other site you feel is appropriate). Don’t be rude, or hit the guest over the head with it. Please don’t try to make them feel guilty (“If you don’t review us, we’ll go out of business”), but do ask, and ask nicely.

Let people know about your presence on the networks they are on (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Goole+, or whatever). Ask them to follow you. Ask them to recommend you. That said, don’t forget to check the rules of the review sites you request guests to use – some discourage asking for reviews, and even penalize you for rewarding positive reviews.

Not only do their recommendations reach their friends (who may remember to check them again when they plan their next trip), but they also will appear in searches for a long time to come. One of the aspects of posting things on the web, for better or for worse, is that you have no control over how long they remain available on a site operated by someone other than you.

Going around again

The cycle has the excellent potential of repeating itself. Potential guests discover your property through reviews, social media and word of mouth. They investigate further with search engines, reviews and maps. Once they have the basics, they visit your website, where your excellent site quickly convinces them to book. Once at your property, the experience is so good that they can’t wait to share it with their friends, family, and other connections. Those people learn of your property, and the cycle begins again.

By having a good presence on social media (the platforms where your target demographic(s) are found, of course) and on review sites, encourages discovery of your property. Good search engine, local, maps and review presence encourages the investigating guest to dig deeper and visit your website. A site that shows the guest the three things they are looking for (value, location and comfort) encourages them to book. And a great experience (supported by a website that has accurately presented your property – especially in the areas of value, location and comfort), encourages the guest to share that experience with the next potential guest.

This is the fourth article in a series examining how B&B guests proceed through the decision process for booking a stay. Based largely on research from WIHP Hotel Marketing, the first article describes the four-step process for booking, the second describes how a guest discovers your property, and the third examines how to provide information to get the guest to your website. This article discusses how to get the conversion – to capture the booking – once the guest has come to your site.

What is the purpose of your website? Have you ever given that some thought? Is it to (a) show off your beautiful property, (b) get people to call you for more information, (c) get people to call to book, (d) get people to book online, or (e) other? For most lodging properties, we would venture to say that the primary purpose is to get people to book online, and, secondarily, to call to book. Is it doing those things well?

The Guest Arrives at Your Website

Our guest has decided where they want to go for their getaway, they have discovered your property (and, probably, up to 10 others), they have done some initial research and learned a little about your property, and have now arrived at your website. WIHP calls this the First Moment of Truth.

What happens in the next few seconds will determine whether you get the booking or not.

What is the Guest Looking For?

Again, WIHP’s research indicates that the prospective guest is looking for three things:

• Value
• Location
• Comfort

They also found two other things that are very important: Quality websites sell better, and better booking engine design results in more bookings.

How should your website be designed?

A search on “web design mistakes” will yield many articles on poor choices in website design. Some even contradict each other. As mentioned in our previous post, Acorn Internet Services has prepared a series of checklists, accompanying their Smarter Innkeeper Series, to assist with selecting a web design company and/or SEO firm. The first article in that series includes a checklist to ask your prospective web developer, and makes a good list of things you should be planning to address with your website.

There are lots of examples across the internet of websites that are attractive and effective. For some examples, view the portfolios of design firms in our industry, such as Acorn Internet Services, Whitestone Marketing, or Insideout Solutions. While you probably don’t want your site to look just like another site, you’ll notice some similar elements on each site designed by these professionals. Large, high quality photos of the property, the rooms (comfort) and of the food (and other amenities, if appropriate). Clear, straightforward, navigation. Clear statements of rates and what you are getting for them (value). Clear descriptions of location and nearby attractions or points of interest.

If your website looks less “polished” than the competition (who may not be your neighbor, but in another location, entirely), you are not encouraging your visitor to book. If you aren’t showing them the things they are looking for (value, location and comfort), you are making it harder for them to find the information they are seeking.

Finally, if your booking engine makes it difficult to see what they want, and to easily and conveniently proceed through the booking process, you are making it less likely that they will complete the booking process (you can validate this using Google Analytics and checking to see where the visitor leaves the booking system, but that is a topic for another post).

What should your website do?

The guest has chosen about 10 properties to consider, and will visit the websites of all of them. Each will have 3-7 seconds to answer their questions. The questions will primarily be (1) is this property a good value? (2) is this property well-located for my planned activities? and (3) is this going to provide a desirable level of comfort?

There may be other questions in the mind of an individual guest, but virtually all prospective guests will be asking these three questions. Consequently, your website must answer them, and answer them quickly.

1. Your design must look professional and current (the portfolios of the industry web design firms listed above will show you what is both professional and current).
2. Your site must load very quickly (this is a priority for Google, and the slower it loads, the less time a guest will wait to see if you answer their questions).
3. Your photos must be professional, beautiful, and must show the comfort and the value the guest will find at your property.
4. Your rates must be prominently displayed, so the guest can easily see the value you are providing.
5. Your location – especially your proximity to the most commonly visited attractions and points of interest – must be easy to find.

If your site answers these questions for the guest, and does it quickly, and if your booking engine makes the booking process clean, simple and easy (including on mobile devices!), you will be capturing the booking you are seeking.

Our first post in this series provided an overview of how guests find and book a lodging property, based on research from WIHP, a hotel marketing agency. The four step process assumes the future guest has selected a destination area and then proceeds through the steps of (1) discovery of a particular property, (2) seeking information about the property to see if it is a good prospect (the zero moment of truth), (3) the guest on your website (the first moment of truth), and (4) the guest at your property (the second moment of truth). Our second post discussed the process by which a guest “discovers” (or learns of) your property as a possible place to stay.

Our topic today, then, is the “Zero Moment of Truth,” or the time when the guest has decided on a location to visit, has learned of your property as a possible place to stay, but has not yet seen your website, and wants to find out more about your property.

Another 7.3% seek information from a review site (such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.). After that the numbers fall off radically for travel guides (3%) and social media sites (0.8%). Just a side note – if you’re counting on your social media sites (Facebook, Google Plus, etc.) to provide the information, at the current time you’re reaching less than 1% of those who want to find you.

We would ordinarily expect Google to be the most commonly used search engine, so we won’t be surprised to find that it is. Although many articles remind us not to forget Yahoo, Bing, and others, and other articles talk about Google losing market share at the expense of Bing, in particular, these statistics don’t match up with the results of WIHP’s research. They found that 89.8% of searches leading to a property’s website came from Google, while Yahoo and Bing brought 4% and 3.6%, respectively.

Before booking, the average guest will have viewed 10 different hotel websites over 6 days, and will have visited the one they ultimately choose at least 3-4 times. This is where your competition truly exists. Your goal, at this point, is to be one of the sites (perhaps the top site) the guest will consider, and to get them to visit your website.

We talked about how to help yourself be found on TripAdvisor in our previous post, and much the same advice would apply to other review sites (though no others provide the exposure in the lodging market that TripAdvisor does). Consequently, our focus here should be on search engines – particularly Google – and map sites.

How do guests find information through search engines?

Try it yourself. What search terms would a guest, knowing the location and the name of your inn, use to search? If you’re having trouble, pick a place you’d like to travel, find the name of a property there, and try to find out more about the property using your favorite search engine. Then use those search terms for your own property and location.

What do you see in the results? In the case of our Freeport Maine bed and breakfast (while signed in to Google, which may affect the results), I see our website, then our TripAdvisor reviews, then a couple of B&B directories, a news article we are mentioned in, etc. Verify these results while logged out of Google. They may also differ by your location, so you may want to have someone repeat the search using a different location.

One thing you’ll see in all (or nearly all) the search results is a description of the page the result will link to. Although Google, at least, reserves the right to re-write the description, you can “help” by putting a well-written description META tag in the head section of a page. If your description provides an accurate summary of the content of the page, it may well be the description that is used in the search results.

Bear in mind that just because your own website is the first result in the search results, that does not necessarily mean your guests will click on it first! They may choose one of the B&B directories, TripAdvisor, or something else. Our goal is to provide information for our future guests in all of these sources, so they’ll find it regardless of where they look.

Getting found on search engines (search engine optimization or SEO) is a topic that would make an extensive series in its own right. Fundamentally it breaks down into on-page SEO (signals on the page that help the search engine determine how to index the content), and ongoing SEO efforts (such as building incoming links to your website, dealing with local listings, maps, etc.). We are planning to break out this topic, and part of the next post in this series (on the First Moment of Truth) relating to your website, itself, into a short series of its own. Consequently we’ll just hit some of the high points here. Bear in mind that our brief discussion of SEO is not meant to say it is not important. Just the contrary. It is so important that it deserves a more complete treatment than we can include in this post.

In an excellent series entitled “The Smarter Innkeeper”, Acorn Internet Services has devoted two of the three topics to on-page SEO and ongoing SEO (the third point is on the web design itself, which we cover in our next post). In each post is a checklist of tasks you can perform (or have done for you) to make your website more easily found by the search engines and to make it more likely to be indexed for the relevant search terms. The checklists are written as something you might ask your web designer or SEO firm, to be sure they don’t miss anything, but they will do very nicely as a list of the tasks you should plan to perform, as well.

Both of the two SEO checklists make reference to creating and maintaining local listings. In addition to any local listings sites, such as Chambers of Commerce, innkeeping associations, area marketing groups, etc., the search engines have their own local listings pages. Properly setting up and maintaining these pages will help you be found – especially on the mapping websites.

What about maps?

If you have followed the steps on the SEO checklists, and your local setup is correct, you do want to be sure your location is correctly specified on mapping sites. Most will allow you to claim your listing (you did that long ago, didn’t you?), then to edit the location if it is not correct. Again, most will allow you to specify business name, phone, website URL, etc., as well as other details, much as the local sites will. Keep in mind that the search engines have a specific format for business names, addresses and telephone numbers, so you want to follow those formats and keep the information the same from place to place. If the information is not identical (for example, saying “B&B” in one location and “Bed and Breakfast” in another), you run the risk that a search engine (which is only a computer, after all) will think they are two different businesses.

When your guest searches on a map, it is likely that they want to know how close (meaning how convenient) you are to a particular location. To help them out, tell them how close you are to various attractions. There is no substitute for making it easy for the guest to find the information they are seeking!

If we’ve done all these things, we’ve made it easy for the prospective guest to learn more about our property before they come to our website. In fact, if we’ve done our job well, we have whetted their appetite to see our website! We’ll talk about what happens on the website in our next post.

A few of you may have noticed that we seem to have taken a bit of a hiatus over the past several weeks. In fact, our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast had a very busy summer, and there wasn’t much time for About the Inn writing. Now that our busy summer and fall foliage seasons are behind us, it appears things will be back on a more even keel, and we hope to be able to publish more regularly.

How do you attract B&B guests? In the past several years, most smaller lodging properties have become aware of the importance of attracting guests through an online presence (oddly, though, some still seem to question the need – or maybe they question the long-term viability – of an internet presence). Gone, or nearly gone, are the days of buying print or television ads in huge volume, in hopes that a few visitors will be enticed to become guests.

For the smaller properties, in particular, this is a good thing, as few can afford the high prices charged for print advertising, let alone the several additional orders of magnitude for television campaigns – all for ads for which there is little hope of tracking their success, and for which industry analysts say the return on investment (ROI) is very small indeed.

So, then, all a small business needs to do is find a way to slap up a small website, and all the marketing is done, right? Unfortunately, many small properties seem to have adopted exactly that strategy, and are beginning to pay the price in reduced occupancy.

Print media (with the exception, to some degree, of direct mail), and for that matter television, tries to sell by sending an uninvited message to a large, but generally arbitrary, audience. The primary reason online marketing is more effective, is because the prospective guest is looking for you. They are, by definition, part of your target market. They are seeking exactly what you are offering: some type of lodging for a temporary purpose.

How do you reach the prospective guest?

It seems like an over simplification, but in order to get the prospective guest, seeking lodging like yours, to connect with your property and make a booking, you need to be found where they are looking. Which means that you need to know where they are looking, and be found there.

Where are they looking?

We usually begin by assuming that the guest has decided to come to your area, and needs to find lodging. This is because there are many, many different ways the prospective guest may decide to come to a region. However, you can play a role in this, by getting information about the area in front of the guest – either by more traditional means such as print or television, or by having that type of information on your web site.

Once the decision is made to come to an area, the question of lodging must arise.

According to WIHP, a hotel marketing firm, there are four distinct steps in the process of deciding on a lodging property: discovery or stimulus (where the guest learns of a hotel and gets interested), zero moment of truth (the guest begins to research the hotel), first moment of truth (guest finds the hotel website and begins to determine if this is what they want), and second moment of truth (guest arrives at the property and is either happy or disappointed). There is little doubt that these steps apply more or less exactly for smaller properties, as well.

Let’s look a bit more closely at these four steps:

1. Discovery or Stimulus

How does the prospective guest find out about a lodging property they may want to consider? WIHP’s data indicates that the most likely source of information is friends or family, followed by online travel agents (known as OTAs, including Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Booking.com, and the like), then TripAdvisor, and then, to a much lesser degree, other sources like Facebook, Travel Agents, Magazines, etc.

Because we’re interested in the smaller lodging properties, we would suggest that bed and breakfast directories could be included with the OTAs, at least for the guest who is interested in considering bed and breakfast lodging.

2. Zero Moment of Truth

How does the guest research the lodging property he/she is interested in? The data from WIHP indicates that nearly 73% will use search engines to find the hotel. Did you pick up on that? Most of our search engine optimization is around industry-specific keywords, but most of our prospective guests are searching by the name of the hotel!

Of the remaining 27% or so, guests will search map pages (9.6%), review sites (7.3%), travel guides (3.0%) and social media sites (0.8%) to find the lodging property.

3. First Moment of Truth

Once the guest arrives on the property’s website, you have between 3 and 7 seconds to help them decide to stay at the property. The average visitor will have looked at 10 other property websites, read reviews, checked rates, and verified the location on a map.

WIHP says the guest wants to know:

• will this save me money?
• will this save me time?
• will this make my life better?

For the property, this translates to:

• Is this the best value I can get?
• Is this located near the points I am interested in?
• Is the comfort going to live up to my standards?

How your website stacks up in answering these questions for the guest determines whether or not they will book.

4. Second Moment of Truth

When the guest arrives they will either be pleased with their selection of your property, or they will be disappointed. In either case, the results are likely to be posted on social media and review sites, and shared with friends and family. In exceptional cases, they may even appear in blog posts.

When you consider the likelihood of these results, whether positive or negative, being shared with friends and family, as well as the review sites and social media connections, you can see that these results will also become part of the Discovery or Stimulus phase of someone else’s search for lodging property. That makes it imperative that the experience be a positive one.

WIHP has provided a video infographic to illustrate these points clearly and concisely. The YouTube version is below.

In upcoming articles we’ll be looking at the ways we can reach the prospective guest in each of the decision-making phases of the booking process.

Yesterday Google announced that the +1 button is now available for any website to use (just like a Facebook ‘Like’ button, or similar buttons). It raises two questions:

1. Should you be using it?
2. How do you use it?

Both questions are easily answered – though most articles on the topic have not really dealt with them as much as emphasizing the “buzz” (no pun intended) or the absence of a “need” for another “Like” button.

Should you use it?

The short answer is “YES!” Yes, it is yet another social media thing. Yes it is similar to others. But get real. As Lisa Barone has pointed out, the practical effect of the Plus One program is to put everyone in the position of using the button, or being left out. The consequence of being left out is not known yet, but it seems likely that it will have an impact on search placement in some way.

How do you use it?

To use it you will have to create a Google profile if you don’t already have one. If you have a login for GMail, iGoogle, or any other Google service, you probably already have a Google profile.

The instructions to use the button are simply cut-and-paste, if you have access to your website.

1. Copy the first line of code (below) and paste it either inside the <head> tags of your page or near the bottom of your page, before the <body> tag closing. Here is the code:
   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
2. Copy the second line of code (below) and paste it in the page where you would like the button to appear:
   <g:plusone></g:plusone>

There are various options for the size and layout of the button, the link it should “like”, and whether or not to display the count of “plusones”. Knock yourself out.

Will your failed effort to repair your online reputation sink your business?

Stories about bad (and occasionally good) reputation management efforts have become all too common. Still, businesses often don’t get it. You can run, but you can’t hide! You can’t avoid the impact to your reputation by staying away from social media – you just don’t know what’s being said about you (whether positive or negative). We all make mistakes, so the best thing to do is plan how to deal with them. Three recent situations illustrate all three types of reputation problems, and make good lessons on how to (or how not to) deal with them.

The lessons from these stories apply to businesses in any industry, whether large multinationals or small, local businesses.

The Bad

This is kind of a double lesson.

Part 1: First, 7-Eleven posted a joke on their Facebook page that was mildly unkind to mental health. Not a very politically correct thing to do. Especially since this didn’t just show up for a few people, but to the over 700,000 people who “Like” their page. They deleted the post, but that didn’t stop people from talking about it on their Facebook page. No doubt the post was largely unnoticed due to the attention of the news media being captured by the disclosure of the killing of Osama bin Laden. If it had attracted a lot of attention, it could have been a PR nightmare.

Part 2: Next Peter Shankman posted about the 7-Eleven post, commenting about its being in poor taste and pointing out that 7-Eleven may have dodged a bullet because “Monday happened to be a very active news day”. Shankman was criticized by some of his readers as being too “politically correct”, and so posted a follow-up the next day, explaining what he meant, and giving suggestions for the use of humor in your posts. Shankman’s follow-up explanation clearly helped him avoid further criticism.

Even if you found the 7-Eleven post funny, it doesn’t mean that your audience will agree. Even if you disapprove of the post, it doesn’t mean that your audience will agree. Peter Shankman’s advice is good advice – if you have to ask yourself if something would be appropriate, it probably isn’t.

Lessons:

• Be careful (of course!) not to make mistakes, but realize you can’t always anticipate how something will come across
• Know your audience! You are not just chatting with friends, but posting where hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of your customers may see it!
• Realize that your sense of humor may be different than someone else’s, so give yourself a reality check! If you have to ask if something is appropriate, it probably isn’t.
• Ask yourself how this will make your brand look
• Deal with any negative fallout appropriately, and move on

The Ugly

A friend who has many talents, chef, blogger, graphic designer, consultant, to name a few, Heather Turner, recently blogged about her experience with a local fish market. Heather was gracious enough not to mention their name. The post is lengthy, but well worth reading. For the short version, here is my summary:

Heather bought unusually large lobsters for a special occasion, but when she cracked them open, the amount of meat was not just surprisingly small (as a chef, Heather understands, as we do in Maine, that what is inside the lobster is often less than you would guess from the size of the lobster), but very, very, inappropriately small. Heather didn’t expect compensation, but thought the market would want to know about this, so she attempted to contact the fish market, initially without success. She then posted a quick comment on their Facebook wall. The market responded, denying any knowledge of her earlier attempts and asking her to submit information via their web form, which she did.

Heather received an email reply, in essence saying she should understand that there is less meat than shell to a lobster (well, duh!) and they wouldn’t give her a refund (which she had not requested). Heather replied via email and received a call from the family who owned the business, saying they would replace the lobsters for her, and the staff would be notified.

When another special occasion arrived, Heather went to the market to get the replacement lobsters, and was treated rudely and refused the lobsters. She posted a comment on their Facebook page, which they deleted. When she posted another, she was banned from their page.

Wow! Where to begin? This episode is like a crash course in how not to handle customer relationships!

Lessons:

• Even before there was an internet, there was a concept of customer relationships – remember? The customer is always right (OK, they’re not always right, but if you start with that principle, you’re likely to have more customers!).
• Putting your head in the sand doesn’t make the world disappear! It just makes you think it did.
• Just because you deleted the Facebook post, or even banned the user from your page, doesn’t end it! Customers have blogs. Customers have Twitter accounts. Customers have Foursquare accounts. Customers have… You can’t ban them all!
• A company can do a lot more to protect its reputation by responding openly and honestly to criticism (especially criticism that is justified) than by pretending the problem doesn’t exist. People understand that you’re not perfect, but they also see how you deal with problems and make buying decisions based on your handling of them.
• As Heather points out at the start of her blog post, This is a perfect example of an excellent post that came out recently: A Better Business Doctrine – Part 1: A**holes are bad for business which should be required reading for businesses.

The Good

Many posts have been written (as a search for online reputation management will disclose) about disasters, and suggesting ways to deal with them. The best advice usually includes

1. Admit your mistakes
2. Promise to be better
3. If appropriate, offer some type of compensation or incentive to return.

Sometimes, however, the customer is wrong. Then the advice is a little bit different.

Michael Gray recently posted a story about a restaurant that received a scathingly critical review, which went too far. Not only did the author (apparently) omit facts that would give a very different view of the circumstances, but decided that a personal attack on the hostess (who was actually the owner) was also called for.

As Gray observes – the restaurant could have ignored the review, but that would have been a mistake, as it would be out there for future customers to see. While many would take the personal criticism with a grain of salt, the apparently objective statements about the service, attitude, etc., would likely have cost the restaurant business. This owner did exactly the right thing.

• She responded and pointed out that she was the hostess and the owner
• She mentioned the important facts the reviewer had omitted, such as his own late arrival for his reservation, how small the restaurant was, how the seating policy had been explained to the person booking the reservation and acknowledged by them.
• She said she was “sorry [he] felt the need to personally attack [her]” and suggested it was best for everyone that the reviewer had sworn never to return.

Lessons:

• Monitor your reputation – you can’t avoid bad reviews (and you won’t know about the good ones) if you’re not in the game
• Respond to negative reviews – if there is no response the next reader will assume either it is true, or you don’t care; neither is good for you
• Know when to fold ‘em – Don’t use the response to argue with a customer. If they are right, say so. If not, nicely take the high road and point out things they haven’t mentioned that show things in a better light. In any case, don’t prolong the painful discussion.
• Even one small, unhappy, voice can cause a huge reputation problem, especially if that one small voice posts on a blog, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, LinkedIn, Yelp, or any one (or perhaps several) of the multitude of online sites that allow conversations, comments or reviews. If others pick up the complaint, it will be your worst nightmare.
• If you’re not sure, then the customer is right

The Maine Innkeepers Association Educational Seminar for April, 2011, was held on April, 28, 2011, and the subject was Social Media – Beyond the Basics. We gave a brief presentation on Facebook: Beyond the Basics, emphasizing engagement and mentioning, to a lesser extent, optimization and measurement. Here is the video (transcript below):

Transcript:

Hello, this is Scott from AboutTheInn.com. This is a short presentation from on using Facebook, that’s beyond the basics from an event on Social Media put on by the Maine Innkeepers Association that was held on April 27, 2011.

So as we move beyond the basics of Facebook, we’ll be focusing on three areas. The areas will be engagement, to some extent optimization and measurement of the progress, but primarily we’ll be focusing on engagement. We’ll do mostly Facebook, a little bit on Twitter, and to some extent these things all apply to LinkedIn. They also apply to other things where you may find your customers, but most of the principles are uniform – there are some differences and we’ll talk about those as we go along.

So first of all we need to consider just what the goal is. Often times we get absorbed in Facebook or Twitter, or whatever your platform of choice may be, and we think about how we’re going to do it, and how we’re going to find time to do it all, and we really don’t think about what we’re really trying to accomplish. So much as I hate the terminology ‘heads in beds’, that is the bottom line, because when we sell rooms, for lodging properties, that’s how we pay the bills, no matter how we want to characterize it. So we need to consider whether or not we have a plan, and the plan should include engaging guests and then some measurable objectives, as well.

So as we consider those things, the first thing to consider is “Where are our guests?” We know that by sheer numbers, they’re on Facebook, they’re on Twitter, they may be following our Blog, they may be on LinkedIn, they may be on a number of others, including FourSquare, Orcut, Gowalla, or any of a number of others. Certainly you need to focus on any networks where the majority of your guests can be found, and if there are other networks where you think there are a significant number of potential guests, then certainly you need to be present there, as well.

So remember that what we’re really trying to do is to create relationships. You’re trying to use social media to make friends for your lodging property. We’re not talking about just selling, or the hard sell, but we’re looking at creating relationships in the places where the guests are.

The first step, from a Facebook point of view, is to create engagement through your custom welcome page. You can create a custom welcome page – one that is very attractive – usually modeled on your web site, and with attractive graphics and text that draws the user in, and also, as in the example here, you can offer specials and extras for those who ‘Like’ you – things that are not available to everyone. This builds a relationship and makes the user feel that they have an opportunity for something special.

Next add photos and videos – things that tell a story. We had an interesting thing happen at a recent innkeeping show, where one of the keynote speakers mentioned that he was going to use one of our posts as an illustration of telling a story. In this case it was in less than 140 characters. We were in the habit of tweeting our breakfast menu. People liked it, and when we stopped doing it, they got in touch and asked, “What’s for breakfast?” One day we had a young couple get engaged at the inn, so at breakfast we tweeted that the “Cute young couple got engaged last night” and what they were having for breakfast. Story told. People were engaged with it, and passed that tweet around more widely than would have otherwise happened.

Another way to do it is to ask questions. Now, in Twitter you can ask questions and sometimes you get no response other than the echo of your own voice. In Facebook you can ask questions, in the conventional sense, but you also have the ability to use a Facebook Question, which allows you to create a multiple choice question, and you can limit the responses to those you define, or you can allow others to suggest new answers. We’ve done a number of things with this. Sometimes we’re earnestly trying to get feedback from our guests, which is certainly a good thing. For example, we asked them if they preferred sweet dishes for breakfast or savory dishes, and we got some interesting information from that. We also asked them what kind of sweet dishes they like: pancakes or waffles or more involved things, or just what they like. We allowed them to add their own choices and we saw answers that included things we hadn’t even considered. You learn a lot of interesting things by asking questions.

Another thing you can do to create some interaction is to feed your blog to your page, because a lot of your Facebook followers are not necessarily following your blog – unless you feed it to the Facebook page, and Facebook, as a page, is like a big, hungry animal, just waiting to be served. So post your blog to your Facebook group so they can all keep up with your news. And, to encourage interaction, even in your blog you may choose to ask questions or try to get feedback directly, there.

You can also offer specials just to Facebook followers, as was alluded to when we discussed the custom welcome page. You can also sell gift certificates directly from your Facebook page, there is an application that will allow you to do that, or you can create an application, depending on your booking engine, to allow bookings directly from your Facebook page.

From the point of view of optimization, you definitely want to optimize your Facebook page, both your profile information and the business description information available to you. Facebook is its own search engine, so you want to use terminology that your guest or potential guests will be using as they try to find lodging in your area. So just as you would do this on a web page, you not only want to create your vanity URL, but you also want to think of profile attributes as something people might search on.

You’ll also want to be create when you select the name of your page. Think about branded names, like the name of your property, but also non-branded or descriptive names. For a hardware related page, called “Black & Decker”, and that would be interesting if you’re into tools, but a site called “Women with Tools” might get more attention.

Similarly, Siteman Cancer Center started with only a couple of hundred fans, and is now up to a couple of thousand, but compare that to the page “Cancer Sucks”, with 48,000 fans and lots of engagement. Both are basically information and support pages, but there is a big difference. That isn’t a recommendation that you copy this approach, but that you consider the concept of an edgy name that people can identify with. Something to think about.

Be non-commercial in your commercial approach. What I mean is, don’t just try to sell things. It’s been said many times, and I certainly wholeheartedly agree, that, in many ways, social media is like a cocktail party, or a conversation among friends. You carry on a conversation, you don’t just try to sell stuff. You know perfectly well that if you go to a party and you meet, to pick on an industry, an insurance salesman, and his entire conversation at the party is to try to get you to make an appointment or to buy insurance, you aren’t going to enjoy his company unless you desperately need insurance. But if that same salesman makes witty, interesting conversation, perhaps even giving you some helpful information, you may end up making that appointment. That’s the point of view that most people expect in the social media world, so it becomes an important thing.

So think of things to talk about that appeal to large segments of people. In our industry you might say, I need a vacation – well, who doesn’t? Or maybe it’s coffee… Whatever, but keep it on topic. Remember, our focus is heads in beds, but by building relationships. Now there’s nothing wrong with the occasional personal reflection, story or comment, if you’ve established your credibility by being a helpful, knowledgeable, source. People find that interesting and genuine. The problem comes when you show that you aren’t able to separate your personal “persona” from your business accounts. People don’t want to follow you.

Measure your results. In the Facebook world this isn’t just a “check your Google Analytics” comment. In Facebook there is a thing called Facebook Insights. To get to it, go to “Edit Page” and in the left column, click on Insights. There you’ll see Users and a summary and graph and Interactions and another summary and graph. Both also provide more details, and you can view the latest day, week, month, etc. This gives you a good idea of how much you are engaging people, and which posts were the most effective to encourage interaction.

Thanks for listening. I hope you find this useful, and that you’ll continue encouraging engagement among your social networks.

Many B&B’s, small lodging properties, and other small businesses have taken advantage of Facebook to reach their clientele, and have made themselves look very professional doing so, with custom pages on their Facebook page. Most of these custom pages were built using Facebook’s FBML app, which was quite feasible for developers, but somewhat intimidating for the non-technical person.

In early February Facebook announced that they would be eliminating the FBML apps on March 11, 2011 (though existing apps will not be removed, thank goodness!), and future apps would have to be IFrame apps (which Facebook had previously not permitted — the more things change…).

While creating an IFrame app sounds very technical, and could easily intimidate, if you can build a simple web page, you can build a Facebook IFrame app.

An IFrame is simply a window inside a web page, and another web page is displayed in that window. In the case of a Facebook IFrame, your web page, on the same server as your website, is displayed inside the window on your Facebook page. One thing to remember, however, is that Facebook will limit the width of your IFrame, so keep it to 520 pixels in width (and keep an eye on things, as you may need to make it a little smaller to avoid the right edge being clipped off).

If you prefer a step-by-step written tutorial, there is an excellent one from HyperArts. They also provide a skeleton web page you can cut-and-paste to begin creating the page you will use for your IFrame app on your Facebook page.

Yet another Facebook change!

After the “accidental” slip of Facebook pages a few weeks ago cause so much uproar (navigation moved to small text on the left side of pages, no more ability to designate the landing tab, etc.), we suspected that a major change to the appearance of pages was about to appear. Last night it did.

Page admins will have received an email telling them about the wonderful new “features” and encouraging the admin to switch to the new layout now. The email also says that (like it or not) all pages will be forcibly switched on March 10.

If you want to see your page – you may find something else has changed – if you were accustomed to navigating from your personal page to the business page by clicking the Account dropdown, then Manage Pages – that’s gone. Search around your profile to find the links to your pages – they’re gone, too. Hope you remember the URL for your page.

Looking at the page, there is a banner at the top offering you a Preview of the new page, an “Upgrade” to the new layout, and an Upgrade to Multiple Pages. If you select Preview, you get a walk-through of the five changes Facebook lets you know about. We found another important thing that doesn’t change, as well. Here they are:

Custom landing tabs

Perhaps most important for businesses, is the one thing that doesn’t change – if you click Edit Page, then go to Manage Permissions, you’ll find that you can still specify the default landing tab. That was the issue that caused the greatest outcry when the change temporarily appeared early. This is good news!

Featured Photos

Your latest photos are automatically placed at the top of the page (you can hide some if you don’t want them to be featured). This is similar to the personal page changes made not long ago. It provides an attractive “top” to the Wall. While it would be nice to have more control – say, with a photo album called “Featured Photos” so you could decide what appears and what doesn’t – it is attractive.

Tiny, almost hidden navigation

Facebook says the new navigation (in tiny text on the left side, below the profile photos) is “where people expect it” — really? This was the second-most offensive (judging by the outcry) change made earilier. People have grown used to the tabs at the top, and making tiny text under the photo the primary navigation is not “where people expect it”  – no matter what Facebook says.

New Wall Filters

Modified Wall filters – instead of the “Just [business]“, “[business] and others”, and “just others” filters, they now have only two – posts by your page, and posts by everyone. Less confusing? Probably. More useful? Dubious.

Use Your Page as Your Page

Clearly Facebook must have struggled to come up with a way to describe what they were doing – and failed miserably! It appears that this change means that  you’ll get notifications of posts on your business page, you can like other pages (as a business), and make comments on your page just like a personal page.

Email Notifications

Yes, I know this is mentioned above. Don’t blame us – Facebook mentions it again in their Preview. This new feature allows you to set defaults for email notifications for you and for your page.

Should you change?

Should you? It’s entirely up to you. The change is a bit of a tradeoff, but in any event, it will be foist upon you next month. Change early, change later? Not much choice from Facebook.