Earlier today at the New England Innkeeping Show Jay Karen, the CEO of the Professional Association of Innkeepers (PAII) sat down with Stephen Kaufer the CEO of TripAdvisor in front of a room full of innkeepers for what was at times a tumultuous discussion. As a matter of fact, at one point an innkeeper asked Mr. Kaufer “What is Trip Advisor doing for us?” to which Mr. Kaufer presented a new offering that was announced this morning – the option to add a direct link and contact information from the TripAdvisor website to your property.

Of course, this link will not be free, but rarely are quality inbound links – especially from someone with as large a following and userbase as TripAdvisor. The rates will apparently start at $300 per year (with perhaps discounts for PAII members) and will go up based on property size.

Personally I am quite excited by the news, as it will offer me the opportunity to truly track referrals from Trip Advisor to my Vermont inn, Forty Putney Road Bed and Breakfast in Brattleboro. As of now, I could only assume that some of the direct hits by name were spawned by folks who may have seen us on Trip Advisor. To me, this is easily worth the $300 to “try things out” for a year.

Watch the video and let me know what you think. The whole interview is quite good and will hopefully be available on the PAII website Innkeeping.org soon.

The TripAdvisor press release follows:

NEWTON, Mass., Nov. 17 /PRNewswire/ — TripAdvisor®, the world’s largest and most popular travel community, today announced that accommodations can enhance their TripAdvisor listing with their URL, telephone number and e-mail address, to appear on TripAdvisor sites beginning January 4, 2010. The new TripAdvisor Business Listings enables owners to provide direct contact information to their properties on all TripAdvisor sites around the world. The listings represent a new opportunity for property managers to directly connect to millions of researching travelers, converting potential customers to paying guests.

TripAdvisor Business Listings are sold on a flat-fee subscription basis, with a cost that varies according to an accommodation’s number of rooms. One-year subscriptions begin at $600 per year in the U.S., and those properties that purchase before January 31, 2010, will receive an introductory 50 percent discount on their subscription. Innkeepers, B&B owners and hoteliers can register now at www.tripadvisor.com/businesslistings.

“Many hotels, inns and B&Bs already recognize TripAdvisor as a major source of referrals and new business, but until now, there was no way for them to link from the TripAdvisor site to their own,” said Steve Kaufer, founder and CEO of TripAdvisor. “TripAdvisor Business Listings will allow property owners to connect to customers more efficiently and likewise for travelers ready to book.”

“We are looking forward to participating with the new TripAdvisor Business Listings. Our efforts are focused on growing revenue from all online channels, especially our web site,” said Daniel Donahue, general manager at the Lenox Hotel. “The Lenox Hotel is proud of the number one hotel ranking in Boston on TripAdvisor. We see this tool enhancing the user experience on TripAdvisor because it provides direct access to a hotel’s web page with one simple click.”

More than 75,000 hoteliers have registered on the TripAdvisor Owners’ Center www.tripadvisor.com/owners, since its launch in March 2009, to monitor their properties’ reputations, have a dialog with guests, and optimize their listings on TripAdvisor. Growing numbers of hotels also choose to advertise to TripAdvisor’s continually expanding audience — the TripAdvisor Media Group has expanded from three to 14 TripAdvisor branded sites around the world in four years, and added two more sites in China, including daodao.com, a leader in the Chinese online travel market.

“Without question, B&B owners know their guests are using the trusted and valuable information on TripAdvisor when deciding where to stay. Direct links to B&B web sites on TripAdvisor property pages will enhance the travel research process and will be a big service to the millions of travelers who do their due diligence on TripAdvisor,” said Jay Karen, CEO of the Professional Association of Innkeepers International.

“As TripAdvisor grows globally, this new feature shortens the distance between travelers and hoteliers,” said Nathan Clapton, vice president of partnerships for TripAdvisor. “The 50 percent introductory offer allows hoteliers to lock-in a great price for the entire year.”

In an effort to send emails to guests to invite them to write reviews, the long and ugly link from TripAdvisor needs to be included in the email. Occasionally the links are “broken” by the email client or even in the wrapping of the text on a page. Earlier this weekend, I got an email from another client asking about creating a nicer URL for their new facebook page. There is a simple answer to both of these issues.

Here is a quick and easy fix for this and other ugly URL issues.

Open up your htaccess file (or have your webmaster edit the file) and add a 301 redirect for the URL you would like to share.

The code is simple

redirect 301 /urlyouwant http://www.blahblah.com/reallyuglyurl

which would create a new “page” on your website at www.yoursite.com/urlyouwant

For example, instead of sharing this link:

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g57192-d82517-Reviews-Forty_Putney_Road_Bed_and_Breakfast-Brattleboro_Vermont.html

you would be able to share this:

http://www.fortyputneyroad.com/tripadvisor

using this code:

redirect 301 /tripadvisor http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g57192-d82517-Reviews-Forty_Putney_Road_Bed_and_Breakfast-Brattleboro_Vermont.html

You can use this same redirect code to point any url to any other url. Try it http://www.fortyputneyroad.com/tripadvisor here.

The first option is using what is called an “FM Transmitter”.  Many of you have seen this technology before, weather years ago with “Mr. Microphone” or more recently, with an iPod adapter you may use in your car.  This technology works by creating your own mini radio station.  Plug your music source into the device and it broadcasts that music on a selected radio channel.   The music is received on any standard FM receiver, from a stereo system, to an alarm clock.  Not many people realize that there are larger versions of this same technology available as well.   The biggest manufacturer of these products is Ramsey Electronics.  They have provided this tech to drive in movie theaters for years.  Look on eBay for a Ramsey FM transmitter.  Follow their directions and you can be spreading your music around the inn for less than $400.

The second and more “high tech” solution is to provide guests with actual music choices, from the web and your personal library.  There are a few companies offering this technology, but one of the first to the game was Sonos.  Take a look at the Sonos music system, which allows each room to stream web music and share a music library from a central computer. The system is completely wireless and works similarly to your wireless internet.

A new participant in the wireless music world is Yamaha.  They just released the new MusicCAST2 digital audio streamer.  While I haven’t had a chance to try it first hand, it looks quite promising for providing a high quality, personalized music system to your guests.  It supports up to 32 rooms of individually selected music.  Of course, these systems cost closer to $1,000 plus $300 – $500 per room, which may not be for everyone.  However it would certainly be a marketable amenity in a high end property or room.

We all know that music is a key part of providing a full guest experience.  These are some options for enhancing that experience without running any new wires.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and tips.  Stop by www.tenminuteswithtim.com and let me know how you are sharing music at your inn.

Unfortunately the plugin doesn’t work with the new Twitter API and it looks like the talented developer has taken a vacation.

Luckily I saw that a user had posted a fix to the thread on smashing mag and I made their suggested change to get things to work. However there is a pretty serious flaw to the suggested change, that is – the plugin will then simply look at the first part of the email (before the @ sign) and use the twitter account image it finds there, regardless of if the email entered is a twitter email or not.  So needless to say I had a lot of interesting photos appearing alongside comments in my blogs…

So for a quick fix, I changed the code to check for @twitter.com and changed the label of the field to indicate a way to use the twitter avatar. You can see it in action on my beer blog.   I am using WordPress 2.8.3 there and with this quick change the twittar plugin works well.

If you want to try this out the original plugin “Twittar” can be downloaded here. I am sure that there are many better ways to accomplish this, and I am looking forward to the promised Twittar2 coming soon. But for a quick fix – around line 150 find:

function showUser($id){
// Will arrange the url we need to open @ twitter to get the photo info
$request = 'http://twitter.com/users/show/show.xml?email='.urlencode($id).'';
// Will open another function that will do all the hard work
return process($request);
}


and replace it with:

function showUser($id){

$pos = stristr($id, ‘twitter’);

if ($pos === false) { return process(‘static.twitter.com’);
} else {
$id = explode(‘@’, $id);
$id = $id[0];
// Will arrange the url we need to open @ twitter to get the photo info
$request = ‘http://twitter.com/users/’.strval($id).’.xml’;
// Will open another function that will do all the hard work
return process($request);
}
}

After looking into the story, it turns out that by default, Facebook users have been automatically opted into a new Facebook program which allows placement of  your profiles  image in select advertisements.

According to the updated Facebook privacy statement:

Facebook occasionally pairs advertisements with relevant social actions from a user’s friends to create Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends.

So while I am not opposed to my photo showing up on a page that I am a fan of (for example, if you look at a brands fan page, you are shown “fans” who are your friends) I don’t think that I am looking forward to seeing my photo popping up on advertising.

Luckily it’s easy to opt out of this new program.   It’s today’s tip:

1. On the top right side of your facebook home page, click on Settings
2. Click on Privacy
3. Click on News Feed and Wall
4. Check the Facebook Ads heading
5. In Appearance in Facebook Ads – click No One

This was another in a series of odd choices for this popular social platform to make.   It seems difficult to even imagine the fair and practical purpose for this policy change.  Sure it will likely work well for advertisers, I am certain the click through rates will increase on ads with your friends photos in them, but at the same time – making this change without an obvious announcement to the Facebook community is a bad decision by any standard.

Regardless – unless you are interested in appearing in the next ad for a dating service or hair replacement company (more likely in my case!) then I would suggest you take the steps above and disable this function asap.

{{{membership|1.00}}}

This is protected content hopefully.

The call for innkeepers to just “Join the web 2.0 phenomenon” is a scary one.  Innkeepers should certainly be aware of the phenomenon, and participation in it can be an excellent marketing tool. Properly utilizing these interactive web services can be more effective than most online directory subscriptions and it will cost you nothing but some of your time. Of course, improperly jumping into interactive web content can be disastrous.

As far as our industry is concerned, this model of interaction works well for third party marketing sites (such as Trip Advisor) and for “top level” sites; such as Yelp, Yahoo and even PAII and other industry organizations.  This model does not work well for the direct to consumer site (such as your inns own website). While we certainly want to get feedback from our guests and visitors, our own website is still our most powerful marketing piece and we cannot allow that to convey any message other than the carefully crafted one that we have created.  Many businesses were quick to jump into adding “web 2.0” features to their sites, only to regret doing so later.  Rather than adding features to your site, take advantage of the many other sites that are already online offering the interactive functionality.

So how do you get involved in this frenzy in a careful and controlled manner?  Well here are 10 tips for getting your Inn out there into the “Web 2.0” world.

1. Stick to a plan.  You should already have a pretty solid branding in place for your inn.  You have a website, you have brochures and business cards.  Don’t stray too far from your already crafted brand.  If you don’t already have a strong branding, I would suggest not diving into this project until you have crafted one.  Don’t just dive into the world of blogs and forums because you read an article about it, or heard a speaker at a conference talk about it.  Know what your goal is in this project.  Make sure that your goal is something quantifiable.  Perhaps you want to see x number of reservations from the new traffic in x number of months.  Know how much time you want to invest in the process and be sure that you can afford to use that time to take on this project.  This isn’t set it and forget it marketing.  Don’t get started unless you are ready to commit the time needed to make it successful.  I spend about 4 hours a week participating in forums and on blogs for the purposes of increasing traffic to my website.  Putting in much less time than that would not likely result in much of a return.
2. Create a consistent online identity.  To make this marketing project successful, you will need to sign up for many different forum, blogs and social networks.  Pick a unique name that is available and likely to remain available on the next great new thing.  Don’t be concerned about making the name contain your town names or anything like that, just be  consistent.  There is no SEO aspect to your username.  Using a consistent username on every site creates a subtle “link” between these sites and yourself.  As users see you in several places, you begin to establish yourself as an expert (hopefully) and your online persona will gain credibility.  I have had many people mention that “they see me everywhere online”.  When in fact, they are just researching their trip to the area and see my username active on every site that is relative to our area.
3. Do a Google search for forums, groups, blogs, articles, etc… about your area.  Some of the large travel sites have very active user forums.  Take advantage of that.  Be a local expert.  Don’t just limit it to travel sites though, be creative.  If you happen to have a national park nearby, search for groups talking about the park.  If you are a great chef and love to talk about food, find a forum or group for chefs or foodies.  Love craft beers (like me) join a craft brewing forum.  There is no limit or boundary to where you can get involved.  Just be sure that it’s a topic that interests you and that could perhaps also interest potential customers.  Which leads us to…
4. Know your customer.  Don’t go trying to make this work in areas that are uncomfortable for you.  Do you really think that your customer is on MySpace?  Maybe they are, but if you aren’t comfortable there yourself, don’t even try.  Also, consider your Inn when deciding where to jump in using your Inn profile.  If your Inn does not accept pets, participation in a forum of pet lovers would seem off brand and would stand to confuse your message and your potential guests.  Sure you can still participate in those forums, but you should not be using your inn identity for them.  The most important part of making this successful is finding user forums, blogs and social network groups that you are comfortable chatting and participating in and that ideally you can present yourself in as an expert.
5. Complete your profiles.  Fully fill out any profile information at every network you join.  This is where the SEO part of this project starts to come into play.  Make sure that you include links to your website, a bio and photos if you can.  Include a bit about why you are an expert in the area of the forums topic.  Use a consistent email address , but not your inns main email address.  Create a unique one for this project. a good suggestion would be to use your name like Joe@yourinn.com.  A separate email address will make the results more traceable as well as make it easier to fight the inevitable spam that will come from a public address.    Just remember, the profile should be about YOU, not your inn.  You are working to establish yourself as an expert in this community.  That will inherently create interest in you, and therefore your inn.  This leads me to the most important tip I can give…
6. Do not advertise.  You are participating in a “Social Network”.  Just like in real life, nothing turns off your friends faster than trying to sell them something.  You are here to share your wealth of knowledge and to participate in conversations about a topic that is interesting to you and exciting to talk about.  Of course, you just happen to own a beautiful Inn in an interesting area.  Let this already interested audience come to you.  Believe me when I say that they will.  One of the forums I regularly post and participate in ranks 4^th on all of the referrers to my website and has resulted in at least a dozen bookings that we are aware of.  Don’t feel that you need to make an ad out of every post, it won’t work and will get you flagged as a spammer.  You should never even mention your inn unless it is in response to a direct post asking about it.  But…
7. Add a signature line to every post.  The signature line is the most important part of this process.  It is the way that you will subtly advertise your inn and add to your inbound links which will help with your websites search engine ranking.  Make sure that the anchor text (the actual linked text) is appropriate for both the community you are writing in (the forum, blog, etc.) as well as for the search engine optimization of your site.  For example, if you are participating in a forum about pets and happen to have a pet friendly inn, try using text like “Bill and Sue Smith.  Proud parents of Fluffy and Kitty at the Maple Tree Inn in Vermont”.  This is a subtle and effective way to promote your inn, but not sound like a salesperson.  You will be surprised how many folks will click on that link if your posts are interesting.  Providing interesting or intriguing content and discussion creates a desire for the other users to know more about you (or your pets, or your model train collection, or whatever…) and the signature line link is the way for them to do that.
8. Be an expert on your topic.  You are an innkeeper, which means that you are already an expert on many topics.  You are also “living the dream” of many of your readers.  Make the most of that.  I have been participating in about 6 forums regularly since I have become an innkeeper.  Every one of them has led to a discussion (brought up by other users) about the inn.  As I said earlier, let them come to you.  The fastest way to become an expert is to look for existing topics that you can jump in on and post your knowledge.  Answer others questions and share your opinions.  You can be slightly more adventurous in your posts on these sites as you again are making an effort NOT to sell anything.  If topics you are well versed in don’t yet exist, create them.  Be careful here though as nothing will set off a forum faster than posting a topic or comment that is already addressed in another thread.
9. Use good link content. Although many blogs and public forums block indexing of links in their comments, many others do not.  In the interest of building good links, be sure that if you chose to include a link in the body of your post or comments, your content is relevant to the page you are linking to on your site and that your anchor text is both relevant and useful.  Link to distinct landing pages of your site, not your sites main page. For example if you are posting a comment about restaurants in your town, and you happen to have a great list of restaurants, link to the actual restaurant page on your site not to your main page.  You can create essentially infinite pages on your website.  If a topic comes up that you think would make a good webpage, create it.  I have added a page of local shops, a page of bike paths and a page of places to rent kayaks and canoes as a direct result of the discussions I have had in forums.  These have become some of the more popular entrance pages of my site.
10. Type till your fingers are numb.  There are countless avenues for you to employ these tips.  The most important aspect is being consistently visible.  This takes time, patience and more time.  That is why I suggest that you only participate in the groups and forums that are of interest to you.  A “one off” posting in a forum will not be very effective in getting someone to visit your website, let alone your inn.  Post at least something weekly to every forum you participate in, more often is better.

Overall, never forget the point of what you are actually doing, advertising your Inn.  So start posting, be yourself, follow these 10 tips and get your Inns rooms ready for all of your new business.