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.

In our previous post we introduced the four step process (identified by WIHP a hotel marketing firm) of a guest finding, and staying at, a lodging property, then feeding the beginning of the cycle again by telling others. In this, and the next few posts, we will break down the components and see how you can more effectively help future guests find you.

As a refresher, the four steps are

1. Discovery or stimulus (where the guest learns of a hotel and gets interested)
2. Zero moment of truth (the guest begins to research the hotel)
3. First moment of truth (guest finds the hotel website and begins to determine if this is what they want), and
4. Second moment of truth (guest arrives at the property and is either happy or disappointed – which will sometimes result in that reaction being shared)

We’re going to focus on the first topic in this article: How does a prospective guest discover your lodging property?

The semi-automatic reaction in today’s world would be that, of course, a prospective guest learns about your property through a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, or others). That is not what the data indicates. The results of WIHP’s inquiries indicate that the guests are most likely to learn about a lodging property from friends or family, an online travel site, or TripAdvisor. Specifically, their statistics indicate that nearly one-third of people who learn about a property discover it from friends or family (32.7%), followed by roughly a quarter who discover it from Online Travel Agents (OTA’s – 27.9%) and TripAdvisor (23.1%). Other sources have far smaller influence (see the infographic on WIHP’s site).

If you think about how you would find lodging for your getaway, this makes a good deal of sense. Most of us, I suspect, would decide first on the destination (“I want to go to Maine” or “I want to go to France”), not on the lodging property. Only after the destination has been selected (at least tentatively selected), and we’ve checked to see that there are things we want to do or see there, do we move on to the details of making the travel arrangements.

This indicates that, whether based on recommendations of friends and family, or other sources, the destination is selected first, then the accommodations. Why is that important? It greatly affects two things: (1) they type of search people make to find your property (more on that topic in our next article), and (2) the specific information your website should contain (for example, if you have relevant information on activities in your area, your site may come up during the search for information about the area).

With this in mind, how can we increase the likelihood that prospective guests will find us? Let’s look at the three ways they tend to locate a property, and see where we can make it easier for them to find us.

1. Friends and Family

Family is, well, family. But the definition of who is a friend, and the way we make/find friends today, has changed significantly with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google+ and many other platforms. A few years ago friends were people we knew in our neighborhood, or met at work or within other social settings. Today we add to that our online friends, whether or not we have ever met in person or spoken by phone. Our network of friends is many times larger, and far more widespread, than ever before.

So the question becomes, how do those family and far-flung friends learn of our property, so they can recommend it to our prospective guests? Perhaps they have stayed at our property in the past, and have shared their impressions with friends and family. To the extent they haven’t stayed with us, in most cases they have heard about our property from someone who has stayed with us, or is otherwise interested in our property.

How can we improve our reach to these people? We can think of at least a couple of ways.

First, encourage every guest to share their story of how they enjoyed their stay (hopefully this will be positive comments). If they will share with their network of friends and family, offline or online, it has the potential for a huge reach, and will help to reach those prospective guests.

Second, encourage them to submit reviews on one or more review sites. Be a little careful, as some sites (Yelp comes to mind) forbid you to ask for reviews, while others, like TripAdvisor, encourage you to do so. In addition to these well-known review sites, most bed and breakfast directories allow reviews, and reviews can be placed directly on Google and on several of the OTA’s. Even a “Like” on Facebook or a “+1″ on Google will help pass on a favorable impression of your property (and may help with search presence).

2. OTAs and Directories

As mentioned in our earlier article, we think that, for the bed & breakfast or small lodging property, online directories should be included with OTAs as a source of discovery. How can you use these tools to help your prospective guests find you? In this case it should be somewhat evident, but here are our thoughts:

• Be sure you are listed on the directories which place well in search results for your area. Most directories show up well in most areas, but some are better than others in specific areas. Go to Google, Bing and Yahoo and search for lodging in your area. Try “bed and breakfast your area”, “your area bed and breakfast”, the same substituting “b&b” for bed and breakfast, do it with and without the “&”, and substitute “lodging” and “hotel”. See what directories appear on the first page of the results (even if it is their listing for a competitor). Be sure you’re on those directories.
• If you’re not already, consider getting on the OTA’s. Bookings through them come at a high price (commission), but the exposure you get may be worth it. You can negotiate a specific arrangement with a Global Distribution System (GDS) provider, or work through some booking system providers, like ResNexus or RezOvation. Tnooz publishes daily reports on which travel sites have the highest market share in different markets. Choose OTA’s with strong penetration in your target markets.

3. TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor has its own way of doing things, and many innkeepers are not happy working with them. Regardless of your views of their system, TripAdvisor is a fact of the innkeeping life today. The best thing to do is to try to work with their system, to help your prospective guests find your property.

First of all, be sure to set up your property information in the TripAdvisor Management Center. You don’t have to like the way it works (we aren’t particularly fond of it) to use it. Make sure your information is current and correct – especially your contact information. As an aside, be sure your business name, address and telephone number are set out exactly as they are in your Google Place Page.

By default, TripAdvisor includes basic information on your property, but no link to your website, and no phone number. To help prospective guests find you, our second suggestion is to consider getting a Business Listing (paid), which will result in TripAdvisor displaying your telephone number and a link to your website. This is especially valuable to the mobile user, who can just click the phone number to call you.

While innkeepers of smaller properties are sometimes reluctant to spend the money it would require for a TripAdvisor business listing, and for the commissions on OTA sites, or even for some of the directories, if the objective is to increase visibility and therefore help your prospective guests find you (and through that process increase your occupancy), these are the areas where the prospective guest is looking, so they are also the areas most likely to produce results.

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.

Let’s face it, Google is obsessed with speed. But don’t take my word for it, look here and here, too. So what can you do about it?

Last week we came across an article noting a security product that “accidentally” makes web sites load 60% faster. We almost passed it by, until we saw that it arose from Project Honey Pot – which we had seen previously. In brief, Project Honey Pot is a project that studies how spammers and hackers operate, and applies that knowledge to defend against them. It turns out that in the process of studying security it was necessary to figure out how to really speed up page load times, so the security monitoring wouldn’t slow down web sites they were monitoring. The result was CloudFlare.

Five Minutes to Faster Page Loading

CloudFlare is proud of their quick signup process. They show a video on the home page, and note that your signup will take less time than watching the video. The only thing you’ll need is a way to notify your web hosting company of a change of two entries (your Domain Name Servers or DNS). Most commercial web hosts have a web-based control panel you can use to make these changes, and CloudFlare has a help page to guide you for many popular web hosting companies. If you use a content management system or blog system (like Drupal or WordPress) there may also be a CloudFlare plugin to help with configuration.

Once you’ve created your CloudFlare account and notified your web host of DNS changes, it takes about 24 hours for the actual changes to take effect, then you’re off to higher speeds – and while you’re at it, much higher security, as well. There is a free plan, a Pro plan and an Enterprise plan, each with different speed and security features.

Give Me the Bottom Line!

We noticed faster load times in far less than the 24 hours stated. In fact, it is almost scary watching a page load. If you’re used to seeing elements appear one or two at a time, prepare to be surprised. When loading a page there was a brief hesitation (maybe 0.5 seconds, at most), then the entire page just appeared! There was no delay of “Waiting for example.com” or “Transferring data from example.com” – just a brief perception of a status-bar notification and the page was loaded.

CloudFlare provides a nice Dashboard with analytics showing the number of page views (be prepared for the number to be higher than shown in your analytics software, as CloudFlare is not measuring using JavaScript, so they are giving accurate numbers of even users without JavaScript enabled), and a breakdown of how many came from visitors, crawlers, and threats.

That’s right, they identify threats. Because of their security emphasis, CloudFlare has a database of known threats and can identify them on the fly, and prevent them from gaining access to your site. Their “Threats” tab on the Dashboard shows details of threats and their sources. Often they block a user who has been known to post spam on other sites. You can grant access to a user you feel is wrongly blocked.

Speed is the Bottom Line

In the week or so that we’ve been using CloudFlare, we’ve observed that the actual speed numbers seem to vary a little – both the numbers given as “Without CloudFlare” and “With CloudFlare”. That seems to correspond to Google’s SiteSpeed measurements, so we presume that the daily changes represent anything from internet traffic delays to hosting server delays – as they vary, page load speed will also vary.

One thing that hasn’t varied is that the page load speed with CloudFlare is much, much faster than without it. the site for our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast has averaged 70-80% faster with CloudFlare.

Oh, and we observed one more, unadvertised benefit: our traffic shown by Google Analytics began to increase noticeably once the page speed improved (though it wasn’t bad before!). We’ve seen better than a 50% increase in traffic to the site, with no change in bounce rate, since installing CloudFlare.

Let’s see, 70-80% faster page load speed, with greater security. Free. What would you do?

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.

The basics of creating and using QR codes

Sample QR code linking to our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast

One reason most articles don’t really explain how to make your own QR codes, and how to use them, is that it is a very easy process. There, no need to feel intimidated! Try it yourself if you have a smartphone or other mobile device with a camera. Just activate your Bar Code Reader app, and point your device at the QR code in this article, and see what happens (you may have to download a Barcode Reader app, if you don’t already have one).

OK, What are QR Codes, Again?

Others have described them in detail (see the two articles in the first paragraph, above), so we’ll simply say that QR codes are like a bar code. You can scan or read them with a mobile device’s camera, and they provide a link to something. You decide what the something is – that’s why most of the articles are called “15 way to use QR codes” or similar titles – the possibilities are nearly endless.

So, the way this works is that you put a QR code somewhere (on your business card, in a magazine ad, on a web site, T-shirt, billboard, anywhere in the physical world). The prospective user sees it, reads it via their mobile device, and their device opens the URL embedded in the QR code. They then experience whatever wonderful thing you have placed at that URL. Maybe it is a map, a video, a photo, a great review, or any of the other marketing ideas people have created. Or, create your own.

A Link between Virtual and Physical

Think of a QR code as a way to provide a connection to online information (the virtual) and the real world experience (the physical). If there is something you would like your guests (who are in the real world) to see, but they need to see it in the virtual world, the QR code is your pathway from the real to the virtual.

OK, a bit less esoteric. The QR code is an easy way to get people to find what you want them to see, using their mobile device.

Maybe you want to put a link to your website on your business card. Instead of just writing the URL on the card, you put a QR code (that links to the website, or to a video, or whatever) on the business card. Then the guest can scan the code and go directly to the website.

Getting Started

• First, the planning. Where would you like the guest to go? If you need ideas, read one of the first two articles for a number of suggestions. We’ll assume you have a YouTube video to which you’d like to direct a potential customer, by embedding a link on your business card.
• Copy the URL of the video (for YouTube, click the Share button beneath the video, then use the URL in the “Link to this video” box; don’t use the “Embed” link).
• Choose one of the free QR code creation sites (several are mentioned here, or just search for “QR code generator”) and go to their page for creating a QR code.
• If the QR code generator asks for the content-type of the link, select the correct content-type. For our example we’ll use URL, since we want to direct the user to the URL of our YouTube video.
• Select any other options available, such as the size of the QR code, and click on “Generate” or whatever your generator’s button says to create the code.
• You’ll now see a QR code, looking something like the illustration at the top of the this page (our example links to our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast, so it will be slightly different from a code linking elsewhere).
• The QR code you’ve created is simply an image. Download it or save it in whatever way you ordinarily steal save images. For some QR code generators, you may need to do a screen capture (use a screen capture program, or just use the Print Screen key, and paste the image into a graphic file – some cropping may be needed)
• Put the image wherever you want people to find it. In our example, we’ll add it to our business card when we send it out for printing

That’s all there is to it!

Now get out there and get QR happy!

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