Dragonfly Media Curacao

Source: hotelmarketing.com

NEARLY every morning, over his second cup of coffee, Tom Brady, general manager at the Affinia Chicago, logs onto his computer and surfs over to TripAdvisor.com to see if there are any new postings about his hotel.

“It’s an obsession,” he said. If the review is positive he moves on. If it’s unfavorable — like the complaint posted in March from a guest who had received a $90 parking ticket because of a valet’s error — he’s on it immediately. In that case, he marched straight out to the valet to find out what had happened. After identifying the guest, he made sure that the company issued an apology and a reimbursement for the ticket.
“This is all over the world,” he said, describing his concern about any negative comment on TripAdvisor. “Everyone is looking at this. I’ve got to make sure it’s solved quickly, so God forbid someone else doesn’t have the same problem.” (more…)

Marie Howell of Bruce Clay Europe attended a session at the SES NY (Search Engine Strategies New York) about big companies and how they need to organise their SEO internally. Apparently the session was more about how you manage an SEO campaign than actually doing it.

The article is clear, concise and very interesting. You can find it at: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2007/04/organic_seo_wit.html.

In our work we have a lot of different kinds of relationships. No, we’re not promiscuous, we love our partners and would not dream of being unfaithful. I’m talking about relationships with our clients, the relationships with the visitors to our website and the relationships with our clients’ visitors. Every time we get a new client we need to build relationships with them and their visitors. That’s a whole lot of relationships, I can tell you that.

Luckily, the way of dealing with the clients, our visitors and their visitors can be very similar. In this post I want to look at what makes a good (on-line) relationship. (more…)

Source: www.hotelmarketing.com

Despite improved customer-satisfaction ratings at several e-commerce companies, online travel sites still suffer from security , performance and customer perception woes that cause potential travelers to put down their mouse and pick up the phone to book trips.

Forrester Research found that in the light of recent survey data those who book travel continue to resist the Web as their main resource for making reservations. The research firm polled about 5,330 North American consumers in the last quarter of 2006 to determine exactly what prevents them from putting their faith in online travel sites. To start, the top-three most common reasons for those who book travel not to stay online to make reservations include concern over credit-card security, Web-site performance issues and limits on the actions they could take online. (more…)

For the people who do not know Tripadvisor: Tripadvisor is one of the largest travel communities on the web. On their website travellers can write reviews of destinations and hospitality businesses (mainly hotels). A positive review on Tripadvisor is the ultimate testimonial.

Tripadvisor now also gives hotels the opportunity to post the Tripadvisor reviews on their own website. The technology involved is a tiny bit of HTML-code which hotels can easily implement in their website. Through this code the latest reviews (positive and negative) are shown on the hotel’s website.

“TripAdvisor is the largest source of travel information anywhere, and our new distribution initiative sets out to make it the largest source of travel information everywhere,” said Christine Petersen, senior vice president of marketing for TripAdvisor. “Consumers today value and seek out the opinions of people like themselves who have already lived the experience they’re considering.”

We wonder which hotel on Curacao will be the first one to show its self-confidence and put these reviews on their website…

Today I came across an interesting article in which the author sums up why SEO is not only important for “the big boys”, but also for smaller companies. And, even more importantly, how an SEO strategy can help your business. “Obtain Increased and Higher Quality Sales”, “Brand Recognition”, “Enhanced Credibility and Legitimacy” are just a few of the benefits the author discusses. You can find the article on www.10e20.com.

Source: HSMAI.org

NEEDHAM, Mass., TripAdvisor(R), the largest travel community in the world, now allows travelers to quickly and easily post their vacation videos. TripAdvisor also allows travel marketers to showcase their wares by uploading their videos. Thousands of TripAdvisor travelers already uploaded their videos and hundreds of thousands more viewed them, revealing a strong demand for ever more descriptive ways to tell a story or research a trip.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth a million. Video can convey so much emotion so quickly,” said Christine Petersen, senior vice president of marketing for TripAdvisor. “We’re thrilled to offer the elegance of the written word, the power of candid photos and now the punch of video, so that whatever the experience, our travelers and the hospitality industry alike can share their information most effectively.”
(more…)

The people that have to deal with the contents of a website invariably come across one of the most annoying dilemmas around.

On the one hand they need to write clear, concise and short texts because the people that visit the website in question want to know what’s going on in an instant. They don’t want to read pages and pages of text if they don’t have to. On the other hand; the search engines need text to be able to figure out what your website is about and the more text there is, the more they have to form their ‘opinion’ and the more words you might be found with. So, how do you deal with this.

The general way of dealing with this dilemma is to try to satisfy both parties and, even more importantly, not to ‘annoy’ either of the parties. Some content managers make very short pages with “read more” links and others create longer pages with a summary in the beginning and a longer explanation below. Both forms have something going for them, although we prefer the second way of handling content.

Besides this, it would be wise to consider the audience. If you cater your website to a specific group of people who are actually interested in what you have to say (as opposed to people you want to sell something to) you can make your texts longer because your audience will read what you write until the last syllable. If you want to sell something to a ‘casual’ passer-by on the other hand you need to grab his/her attention quickly and guide him/her in the right direction fast. So, for this group you need a short page or a catchy summary of what you want to say.

MSN adCenter has released a cool keyword forecasting tool.

Type in one or more keywords and you’ll get a breakdown as to the number of searches over the past year, and the forecasted number of searches for the next few months. It’s a great way to do more accurate projections on your traffic and sales volume for the near future.

As well, MSN will provide you with data about the demographics of the people who are searching for that particular keyword, namely age and gender.

No MSN adCenter account is required to use the tool.

Related Link: adlab.msn.com/ForecastV2/KeywordTrendsWeb.aspx

By Andy Beal
Source: Businessweek.com

If you’ve watched any professional motor sport, you’ve likely witnessed the following scenario. The early leader loses ground to other racers as his car’s tires begin wearing out or the engine starts smoking. A pit stop will initially cause the driver to fall even further behind. But ultimately the time taken under the care of mechanics helps the driver pull back into the lead. If the Web’s search engine industry is the race track, Yahoo has just taken a timely pit stop to try and win back ground lost against the new leader, Google.

On Feb. 5, Yahoo! (YHOO) started moving all of its paid search advertisers over to a new ranking model, informally known as “Panama.” The aim: Gain some much-needed momentum on Google’s more widely used AdWords platform.

It took Yahoo many months to create the new model, effectively rebuilding the system it acquired with the $1.6 billion purchase of Overture Services. Although Panama is just getting off the ground, there’s reason to believe this time in the pit has done Yahoo good (more…)