Survey on Hotel Reputation Management

I would like to share with you this Survey about Hotel Reputation Management for an study I would like to publish at Turismo 2.0

All participants of this survey are given the oportunity to receive the results when we close it.

I understand it will be good a material to analyze and determine the point of view of the industry about customer reviews.

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Mistery is over, the Blogger Hotel unveiled its identity

My name is Eurostars and my surname Madrid and Tower. I mean, my full name is Eurostars Madrid Tower ( “Hotel” for friends)

With these words written by the hotel yesterday the Blogger Hotel unveiled its identity. The Blog of a Hotel, has over 4.000 registered users and more that 500 comments per day, posted by its visitors.

The hotel is located on a privileged site on the main Castellana avenue, inside the Cuatro Torres (Four Towers) Business Area, one of the major areas of economic development in Madrid. This same business park will eventually house the future City of Madrid International Convention Centre.

Podcast on Online Reputation Management

Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim who just released a book with Dr. Judy Strauss titled Radically Transparent has been interviewed by Paul Dunay.

Company reputation is available to everyone. It is radically transparent.

Enjoy it.

Some concerns about Blogging and the Conversation

Javier Garcia, started a Meme that consists in having Spanish travel bloggers posting about the reasons why TripAdvisor should join the Conversation and discuss the issues that worry Spanish hoteliers.

I have clear position about this as the hoteliers have already some resources to block third parties use of their brands.

The fact is that TripAdvisor is a company with a business model based on reviews (and advertising, of course). It does not mean it is an Enterprise 2.0 so I see no reason why TripAdvisor must participate in Blog comments or a conversation if they don’t want to.

There are few 2.0 Enterprises, realistically speaking, very few in the tourism sector, may be none. A real 2.0 Company would be a company that promotes and incentivizes R & D through employee participation and collaboration, internally and externally by creating a community with its customers. It would be a company that joins the conversation with its customers with the aim of seeking continuous improvement and customer satisfaction.

We should get back to the real world and not demand anyone else to join our conversation just because we are blogging about it. If we have something to ask, we should honestly knock TripAdvisor’s door and say…

Hello, I would like to ask you a few questions.

That is what I have done.

Tripadvisor & its use of the Hotel’s Brand

There have been some discussions among the Spanish hoteliers since Fitur 2008 regarding the use of the Hotel’s Brand by Tripadvisor with lucrative purposes.

It seems hoteliers, basically independent hotels, are worried about the use of their brand being made by third parties when adding no value to it. In fact they understand that OTA’s add value by enhancing distribution, but review sites like TripAdvisor where anyone can post a review (positive or negative) with no need to demonstrate that ever stayed at that particular hotel, has no added value, despite the importance of transparency for its founder.

I understand that Hotel Chains have the capability to promote themselves on Tripadvisor and generate relevant traffic to their Corporate Websites,but independent hotels are not given a chance to purchase sponsored Links at Tripadvisor.

Are the hotels loosing the control of their brand? In my opinion, major OTA’s bid on hotel brands at their search engine marketing campaigns, and dedicate resources on SEO for brand based keywords. OTA’s have the capability to bid on PPC campaigns at sites like Tripadvisor as well as metasearch engines. Independent hotels have no chance to generate traffic from this sources unless it is intermediated.

Of course a hotel can protect its brand from being used by third parties, but it will definitely impact revenues from OTA’s who, most likely, will penalty that hotel to non-priviledged positions.

I haven’t heard a discussion like this on the english travel blogosphere, and hope somebody will discuss about it.

Meneame.net a not so social content website

I have been informed today that Wikio has indexed my articles in spanish for its Spanish version. The email was direct, and had a personal touch that we all forget when sending business emails. After that email, I haver been thinking about the effects of social content sites, and its capabilities for promoting Blogs, or User Generated Content.

It’s no secret that Web 2.0 power is mouth to mouth and the place to start with this process are Social Content sites for its consideration by Social Networks, like Digg.

Since I started blogging I have been submitting content to Social Sites. Since I started blogging in Spanish, decided to go straight to the point by submitting my content, as well as letting others to do it, at Meneame.net, with no doubt the Spanish leading social content website in terms of Traffinc, Users, and News.

Now I can say that the quality of any of this sites, depends directly of the quality of the users that are part of such communities. Users who vote, comment, and promote articles.

Meneame.net is such a popular website that any article promoted to frontpage receives tons of traffic to the original Blog, source of the content. My question is why do you need that traffic for? do I really need garbage traffic?

Social sites where freaks are who decide if an article has to be promoted or not, having no idea about the subject of the article, nor having the knowledge and the intelligence to judge my articles, I don’t think are interesting to me anymore.

There have been many good articles, not just mine, that have been considered by those idiots as ‘Spam’ or ‘Not interesting’. Come on… Not interesting for a freak like you, but there must be someone in the Travel Industry that cares about my content !

These are the so called “Karma Whores” by friky.com in a great article (sorry in Spanish) that discloses the strategy to promote content in Meneame.net, which is called MEO, Meneame Engine Optimization.

Now all readers understand what I mean, I don’t want Meneame.net users in my Blog. It might be too much for them, but I can understand they are too busy giving Negative Votes, and classifying good articles as Spam. Now they are offended because I posted about it in my spanish Blog and submited it. You can see what happened. It’s funny but sad.

Thank Gog there are other good Social content sites like Fresqui and Digg that are increasing in popularity as well. Other minor Social websites in Spanish I use are Negociame and NoticiasRSS.

Wikio, very popular in the UK and France just started in Spain, and I’m sure it will also be popular here, with no need to have those idiots on board.

Another site I use for marketing articles is Puromarketing with a very nice design that makes the reading experience a pleasure and well targeted traffic to you Blog.

What’s left? Yes, A Travel Specific Social Content website. That is the reason why sometime ago I launched TiB or TravelinBlogs.com that uses the same software as meneame.net does. Funny right ? Well TiB is going pretty well with about 70 articles submited a day. I will write about it in a near future.

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