Our review of the current version of RezOvation GT was published January 24 (during the 2012 Innkeeping Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas). At the conference, RezOvation invited current users to see a preview of the upcoming release, and to provide feedback on some of the anticipated features. We attended that preview, spoke with some of the RezOvation staff, and have some notes to share here. At the outset, the staff stated that the goal with this release was to give it a feel that would be very familiar to existing RezOvation GT users, while making it much more intuitive and much easier to use.

Following our recent posts on Google Analytics, How to Evaluate Your Paid Listings in Five Minutes or Less, and How to Take Charge of Your Online Marketing Statistics, we presented two sessions on Google Analytics at the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) annual conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, in January, 2012. The slide deck below is from the first session, Google Analytics – Beyond the Basics. Our other presentation, Measuring the Success of Your Online Marketing, was posted yesterday.

As a follow-up to our recent posts on Evaluating Your Paid Listings and Taking Charge of Your Online Marketing, we presented two sessions on Google Analytics at the recent Innkeeping Conference for the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) at its annual conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. At the conference, time made it necessary to hurry through some of the slides, near the end of the presentations, in particular. As a result, we are posting the slide decks here, so you can revisit them and copy down any necessary information, links, etc.

This is a guest post by Sarah Dolk of Adobe Nido Bed & Breakfast in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I had some fun last night. I had read in a blog about how we can create a custom icon/button/logo for our business that Apple device users (iphone, ipad, and touch), can download to their desktop as an image bookmark, thus creating a simple link to our website for the device user.

Based on data from its sister company’s directory (Destination Nexus) Reservation Nexus bills itself as the most popular and most used all-in-one reservation system for US bed and breakfasts and inns. With all due respect, data from a sister company (only), and excluding data from much larger directories, makes that conclusion just a little suspicious. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that ResNexus is one of the top reservation systems, both in popularity and in features.

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!

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.

From conversations with innkeepers at some recent conferences, we know that innkeepers understand that web analytics are important, and they are searching for ways to use and understand them, but are not finding that to be an easy task. We were looking at tools that provided some additional capabilities for Google Analytics, and came across GA Evolution, and think it may help some innkeepers get useful results, without overwhelming amounts of raw data.

When you think about it, attempting to provide security in a medium (social media) where the objective is to share (at least to some degree) personal aspects of your life, doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that Mark Zukerberg of Facebook famously declared that privacy is dead. But is it? Should it be that way? Even with Facebook moving the goal posts every few weeks, and changing the way you control access to your data, and sometimes defaulting to very poor choices, you still have some opportunities to control what you share outside your circle of friends (real friends, I mean, not just Facebook “friends”).

First effort at liveblogging -coffee: check; power plug: check; table: sort of… This is the Thursday morning, March 11, “Challenge the Experts” session with PAII’s Executive Director Jay Karen, Eric Goldreyer (former owner of BedAndBreakfast.com), Carol Edmondson or Innkeeping Specialists, Tim Brady(introduced as internet guru) of 40 Putney Road B&B, and Ellen Grinsfelder of the Inn and Spa at Cedar Falls, moderated by Dave Hiler of Hiler Hospitality. First, we start with announcements and a story about a horse dying (it’s Texas).