What holds you back from using social media (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, or others) to market your property? We’ve address some of the barriers in earlier posts (see, for example, What Good is Social Media?, or click the Social Media link in the tag cloud below right), but another barrier is time. One of the commonly asked questions is, “How much time do you spend on social media?” The answer is (and should be) different for different people.

Wouldn’t it be great if Google would tell you which changes will help with search results? Don’t you wish your site ranked better in the organic search engine results pages (SERPs)? Wouldn’t it be great if you could find out from Google (well, let’s not forget Bing, Yahoo! and the others, but after all, their share of the market is tiny compared to GOOG) whether or not certain changes will really make any difference?

A few months ago we wrote about the importance of tracking the sources of reservations, and mentioned that we would be testing the Intell-A-Keeper software available from Acorn Internet Services. While the high season bookings will get busier in the coming weeks, we thought it was time for an update on that process. The results are both interesting and enlightening We have been using Intell-A-Keeper (IAK) since January, and find that the results are both interesting and enlightening.

We’re used to seeing Google link (in the so-called organic search engine results pages – SERPs) to our home page, and sometimes to other popular pages on our lodging web site. But wouldn’t it be great if they linked directly to your availability or booking page? Well, now you can have them do just that (though not from the SERPs – for that the page is on its own for establishing popularity)!

Last week Google announced that its Local Business Center pages would be called Place Pages, and that they had added several new features to them. Now they have followed that up with an announcement that Place Pages now have a mobile version, at least on Android phones (such as the Google G1, Motorola Droid, and several others) and iPhones. Before this announcement, smartphones with good web browsing abilities could see much of the standard Place Pages, so in that sense this isn’t an earth-shaking announcement.

Today Google announced its new “Google Places” program– which is a new name, and several new aspects, for its Local Business Center. While many things will remain the same, there are some important new additions being rolled out gradually. These could have quite an impact on businesses – especially smaller lodging properties. A few weeks ago Google signaled the beginning of this change, by calling the Local Business Center listing a Place Page.

This post describes a Facebook app that uses FBML, which is no longer permitted for new apps on Facebook. The updated post, using static iframes, is located here (posting June 5, 2012). Some innkeepers frequently question the value of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, as being too time-consuming, all entertainment, annoying, or simply not producing any return on the time invested. We recently came across an idea from a large hotel chain that many bed and breakfasts can put to work immediately.

A few weeks ago, at the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) annual conference in Austin, Texas, we did a presentation called Managing Your Online Reputation. If the ideas expressed there (guests posting video, reviews, photos, etc., on Facebook and other social media sites before even leaving the property) are not enough to motivate you to take some steps toward monitoring what is being said online about your business, perhaps this latest scam will.

After attending the PAII conference in Austin, Texas in early March, we’ve been on a long road trip to see family and take care of some personal issues. In the course of those travels an interesting lesson arose for all of us. We were driving down the Interstate, with an approximate idea of our destination, and wanted to find a bed and breakfast for the night. However, our actual destination was a local attraction, with the area B&B’s scattered among a number of nearby small towns.

At this week’s 2010 PAII Innkeeping Conference, we presented a workshop on Reputation Management. The slides from that presentation are below. Some of the attendees at the session had specific questions, and the audio will reflect those questions and answers. The audio will be available for purchase from the PAII website. If you have questions, please feel free to contact us or leave a comment.