Session: Effectively Use Social Media Tools to Boost Customer Engagement & Loyalty

Date: Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Time: 4.15 – 5.30 pm

Location:
Eye For Travel Social Media Strategies
Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf Hotel
555 North Point Street
San Francisco, CA 94133

Topics Covered:

• One-on-one push management of customers is a thing of the past. Social CRM is here and now but what does it mean to your business?
• How can social media be used as a customer retention tool?
• How can you use social media tools to foster positive relationships with your most valued customers and add meaningful benefits to their travel experiences, both online and offline?
• Can you measure the time and cost savings in other departments by providing real time info to your customers via twitter and social networks?
• Evaluate the way social software is altering the CRM landscape
• Customer profiling data – what information can be gathered via social media communications to target your customers more effectively?

Speakers:

• Anil Aggarwal, Chariman & CEO, Milestone Internet Marketing Inc.
• Linda Palermo, Chief Revenue Officer, Joie de Vivre
• Will Aldrich, VP of Product, TripIt

Registration:

• Standard Pass: $1595
• Milestone Guest Pass: $895

To register and get discounted pass pricing, email: sales@milestoneinternet.com

This session of SMX West featured easy, actionable tips on how to optimize your video for YouTube. Many of the YouTube tips also translate to other video search engines as well. The moderator was Chris Sherman, and speakers were Jay Akkad of YouTube, Matt Ballek of Resolution Media, Curtis R Curtis of Universal Business Listings, and Jeff Martin of TouchStorm.

First to present was Jay Akkad. Some of his key tips:

1. Focus on the Content. If the content of your video is compelling, that’s the first step to success on YouTube. He shared some good examples: the Evian roller babies, “Numa Numa Guy”, e-Trade baby, and the Meet the Parents video from Toyota. The common thread is that all of these videos are funny and humor does really well on YouTube.

2. Invest in the basics:
• Your thumbnail should be attractive & compelling. It shouldn’t be the company logo.
• Title & description are important. Make sure they are keyword-rich.
• Tags make or break your search ranking. Add lots of them and don’t be afraid to have too many.
• Allow embedding across the web.
• Secret behind getting views – The "related video box". Understand where your traffic is coming from via YouTube insights. Learn what videos are related to yours & use this information to optimize your video with similar keywords.

Next up was Matt Ballek of Resolution Media who focused on using Youtube optimization for business. Some of his main points:

1. Why bother optimizing your video? There are 20 hrs of video uploaded every minute. If you don’t optimize your video it will get lost.

2. Videos are 50 times more likely than web pages to get to Google’s 1st page of results.

3. Content – create content that has a long shelf live, is needed over & over again and has replay value.
• Keyword research – use youtube keyword suggestions. People search for different things when they are looking for videos. Example:


Search for WNBA in Google


Search for WNBA in YouTube


• Organize your content – create multiple videos around 1 theme – organize with optimized playlists.

4. Meta data – Make sure you have keywords in title, tags , descriptions, and captions.

5. Promotion:
• Promote your video on other social media channels
• Try YouTube promoted videos, which allows you to create a “call to action overlay” with a link to your website or landing page.
• Linkbuilding – link to your video from other websites & blogs.

6. Community & Interaction
• Your YouTube channel is your home page. Choose a featured video, or default to show a playlist. Customize the look & feel of the channel.
• Personality – make sure there is someone to write & respond to comments and moderate. Interact with people and defuse negative comments.
• More ratings & comments will help your video’s rankings, so encourage them.

Curtis R Curtis, of UBL.org was up next with some more great tips and statistics

• 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations. Recommendations are trusted more than advertising.
• A good example of the use of video on YouTube is Zappos.
• Shorter is better – videos don’t need to be long.
• Keep the videos casual so you can publish on a regular basis.
• Create a YouTube badge to display your videos on your website.
• 45% of videos are found by searching on video search engines, not on Google.

The final presenter was Jeff Martin of TouchStorm, with tactics for maximizing your views & interaction with your videos on YouTube.

How to use your YouTube channel?

1. Treat it like a Landing page – guide your user to do what you want them to do. Direct their attention & actions by using playlists to direct attention to certain videos.

2. Bulletins – write bulletins to communicate with friends & subscribers.

3. Playlists appear in YouTube search results, so optimize your playlist just like a video. Put keywords in the playlist title, description & tags and use some of the same keywords as your videos.

4. Video Engagement – ratings, comments, embedded views, and video responses all help with rankings. Some ways for encouraging engagement are:
   • Participate in your comments
   • Remind viewers to subscribe to videos
   • Thank viewers in advance for rating / reviewing / commenting on video
   • Give away prizes

In conclusion, making use of all of the optimization opportunities in YouTube are essential, but no amount of optimization will work unless you have compelling content to begin with. Also, video optimization isn’t a one-time thing. Companies should consistently create new videos & upload them to YouTube, and then look at their video analytics to find out how & why people are viewing their videos.

————————————————————————–
Contributed by: Michelle Pate, Milestone Internet Marketing

A study by eMarketer showed that 39% of marketing professionals considered social media marketing to be very effective in influencing brand reputation while 53% considered it somewhat effective. The other top effects include increased brand awareness, improved search engine rankings and increased website traffic.

For the hospitality industry, we have found that aggressive management and involvement in the top social media sites can deliver significant results. With the inclusion of social media in the universal search results, the opportunities to saturate the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are plentiful. We have seen significant improvements in search engine visibility for those hotels that incorporate social media into their marketing plans, and actively manage the channels in which they participate.

———————————————-

Contributed by: Kimberly Ercius, Director of Business Development

Moderator:
Vanessa Fox

Speakers:
Tony Adam, SEO Manager, Yahoo
David Wallace, CEO, SearchRank
Bill Hartzer, Search Engine Optimization Manager, Vizion Interactive
Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

Here are some of their key points:

Lee Odden
Lee Odden spoke about the importance of being involved in social media & how it interacts with search results.

A few examples of why social media is important:

• Market penetration- there are over 300 million Facebook users
• Social media ROI examples:
  • Transunion saved $2.5 million in 5 months by capitalizing on social media.
  • Toprank.com averages 15-20 media & blog citations per month, which is equal to a $10k PR firm retainer.
  • Umi Sushi restaurant in San Francisco gets 5 customers / day from social media (specifically from Yelp.com).

60% of marketers plan to take money away from traditional marketing & spending it on interactive marketing.

It’s important to optimize social media for search –  the role of SEO in social media is to directly influence the discovery of social communities or content via search. If social content is optimized, social profiles appear in search results.

For example: if you google “Lee Odden” the SERP is dominated by his social profiles:

Bill Hartzer
Bill started off by talking about the differences between old SEO tactics versus new strategies that incorporate social media. The new SEO strategy focuses on the old staples like creating site content, on-page optimization, along with new strategies like putting articles and more on your own websites as link bait. Social media will help get your website noticed and get attention for your content and link bait. Success in social media = getting noticed.

• Keys to a successful social media campaign:
  • Participate regularly
  • Vote & comment often & genuinely on social bookmarking sites and Facebook.
  • Add friends often
  • Check out niches & submit to appropriate niche sites
  • Social media will help get good, relevant contextual links
• Market Share of links
  • It’s key to have more links than others – you get noticed by people and crawlers. Word will spread through people linking back to you & retweeting.
  • How to get market share of links? – keep an eye out for newsworthy content, and post content quickly. You can update/ edit later.
• RSS feed promotion
  • Promote sites, articles, blog posts of those who link to you. A link to you is more powerful if the page also links to other links.

Tony Adam
Tony asks the question: is there an intersection between social media and search or is social media replacing search?

• The goal of social media is to be visible & stand out from the crowd.
  • How? Create content that people will want to share. Content needs to be relevant, timely, and newsworthy. If people like your content enough they will share it.
• Where is the conversion opportunity?
  • For local promotion – use sites like yelp.
  • Social media is not a replacement for search – social media is not a conversion based business. Social traffic doesn’t typically convert, but it does get you engagement. Social media creates online visibility.

David Wallace
David also asks the questions: How do social media & search intersect and does social media prevent the need for search? The answer is no. Organic and paid search are most important for driving traffic.

• Social media does play an important role in search, and it also is very important for reputation management and in dominating the search engine results pages (SERPs) for the brand name.
• There are a vast number of people using social media – you can’t ignore these huge audiences & should tap into them.
• 99% of surveyed online retailers have facebook fan pages or plan to get them.  13% plan on it, 86% already have them.
• Many companies are reluctant to embrace social media:
  • Is there really a valid excuse not to blog? You can cover news in your industry, or write commentary on news & hot topics.
  • Gossip – often companies are afraid of what people might say. Well, they are already talking about you, so join the conversation.
  • Oversight – we don’t want to manage social media. Get over it. It’s something that just needs to be done.
• How are companies using social media?
  • Link building, customer service, promotions, contests, announcements, building networks, connecting on a more personal level.
• Use search to stand out, use social media to build brand loyalty.

During the Q& A portion of the session, the speakers brought up a few key points:

• Any local business can benefit from social media.
• If you dominate the SERPs with social media profiles, if someone writes a negative blog post about you, their post is less likely to come up in the SERPs.
• Think of social media as long term linkbuilding.
• Use URL shorteners to track links, so you can record the number of click-throughs.

One key point really stood out at the end of this session. Yes, it is important to monitor your brand’s reputation online and become active in the online community, but Social Media can also have a very important role to play when it comes to SEO. From dominating the SERPs to adding backlinks and relevancy, companies who don’t leverage Social Media will be missing out on a huge opportunity and will be leaving themselves vulnerable to their competitors who do.

Benu Aggarwal of Milestone Internet Marketing interviewed Rajesh Srivastava, GPM (principal group programming manager) of Bing Webmaster – Search Ecosystem. Rajesh shares his insights on why Bing is emerging as the most exciting and unique “decision” search engine for travel and small businesses.

The following are several bullet points on why Bing is a cutting-edge decision engine:

• Most comprehensive coverage on the Internet – user friendly for decision queries, long phrase searches
• Bing offers the most relevant content for what you want to do and is organized in a simpler way that makes sense to the users.
• Travel – Bing gives traveler reviews, booking information, and details about a specific hotel. Bing is a decision engine, not just a search engine, because it helps travelers stay informed and further ahead in the decision process.

What can small businesses do to rank high organically in universal search on Bing?

1. Look at the traffic that is coming to your site and make sure you are converting.
2. Search on Bing for the Bing Local Listing Center and take control of your listing -make sure the content is fresh, accurate, and your profile is updated with phone numbers and URLs. Deliver a complete user experience!
3. Take advantage of Social Media – Blogs, Twitter, YouTube Videos, etc. – as these impact your linking strategy.
4. Design your website and content for the user experience and target your market audience – mobile users, social media fans, etc. If you offer a better experience, it will help with visibility in the search engines.
5. Measure Return on Investment for organic search on Bing – initiate the user to your website and then measure the entry points (organic, social media, or paid search) and conversion rates. Make browsers into users of your service!
6. Register in the Bing Webmaster Center – enter your website, site map, and email address. Bing Webmaster works as a liaison between search engines and the content owners/publishers, and offers unique features like outbound links, back links, and SEO toolkits (real-time reports) which are not available in other Webmaster centers.
7. Engage the Bing Webmaster – If there’s a feature you want, ask for it! Give them feedback on what they can improve and be transparent. They love to hear from you.

————————————————————————–

Contributed by: Benu Aggarwal, Milestone Internet Marketing

1. Google Social Search

In late October, Google announced the release of a new product called Google Social Search. Google Social Search attempts to aggregate all of the information about your network that it can, and then uses that information to give you a personalized search experience.
To make use of Google Social Search, users need to have a Google Profile and be logged into it when they are performing a search in Google.

Google uses your lists of connections from the following sources to determine who is in your social network:

• FriendFeed
• Feeds you are Following in Google Reader
• Gmail contacts
• Youtube
• Sites you have listed in your Google Profile
• Twitter

It also goes one step further and indexes not only your direct connections, but also your friend’s connections.
Right now, Google Social Search is in Beta testing. To try it out, log in to your Google account and create a Google Profile. You’ll need to incorporate links to all of your social networks into your Google profile. Then, go to Google Labs and click on the “Join this Experiment” button for the Social Search Project.

Once set up on Google Social Search, when you do a Google Search, you will see a new section labeled “Results From People In Your Social Circle” at the bottom of the page. Clicking the header link will take you to a search page with results only from Social Search.
Although Google Social Search is currently experimental, if it goes mainstream it could have a profound effect on the way people find your business online. For example, the more people who subscribe to your blog using Google Reader, the more users will potentially come across your articles when searching in Google.

2. Bing + Twitter

Microsoft is also making leaps into the social search arena with their announcement that they will be integrating Twitter and Facebook search results within Bing. The Twitter integration is already live and can be accessed at: Bing.com/Twitter.
The Bing integration with Twitter not only allows you to conduct Twitter searches within Bing, it also updates in real-time and lets you search tweets by date and time posted, and by relevancy. Microsoft determines relevancy by looking at information such as the number of retweets, captions, the quality of tweets, and keywords.

3. Yahoo + Delicious

Yahoo has also made some efforts to integrate social search, but they are doing it through their Site Explorer tools. When you log-on to your Yahoo Site Explorer account, you will see a new section for Delicious that displays the number of delicious bookmarks for your domain name. It will also show Top Delicious Tags, showing which tags have been applied to the URL and how many people have tagged it.

Clearly, the major search engines are embracing Social Media as an essential part of search. They have recognized that often the search results that come from a person’s social network are much more relevant to a user than purely organic or paid search results. Although we are at the beginning of the Social Search movement, it’s very important for companies to be aware of how social media can potentially impact their bottom line. Essentially, the larger the organization’s online social network, the more likely the company will show up in social search results. While very few people are currently using Google Social Search, businesses and brands should start building their online communities with the social search trend in mind.

————————————————————————–
Contributed by: Michelle Pate, Milestone Internet Marketing

Flickr improved its search results and is now showing detail information on photos and videos, and is providing advanced search option.

Delicious New Features:

1. Now Delicious allows you to search by filtering tags and timeline (daily, monthly, half yearly, yearly).

This feature is useful to select search queries, tags verified by timeline and filters by tags.

2. Fresh Bookmarks

Delicious launches new feature that shows “Fresh Bookmark” tab on the home page as shown below. It is displays recently saved Delicious bookmarks from popular discussion on Twitter and Delicious.

Here you will get all latest trends of Twitter and Delicious.

3. Email and Tweet Bookmarks

Now Delicious allows you to send an email or tweet the bookmarks directly using this tool. Here are the steps to follow.

1. Go to: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615
2. Install the tool.
3. It will add a Tag icon on your browser. Upon clicking it, you will be able to tweet or email that bookmark from Delicious account.

Note: In “Send” section you can add any email address, Delicious user name, and Twitter account login information.

Flickr New Features:

1. Flickr improved its search results and is now showing detail information on photos and videos, and is providing advanced search option. Here are the steps to follow.

1. Login into Flick account.
2. Click on search
3. Enter your search query. Also, you can choose any of the options like “Everyone’s Uploaded,” Your photostream,” “From your contacts,” “The common” etc.
4. You will get multiple photos results as shown below.

   

5. Hover over the photo for which you want to see detailed information Click on “I” icon. You will get detail information for that result.

   

6. Flickr provides links to the groups, tag clusters, and places relevant to the search result as shown below.

   

2. Flickr allows advance search option for photos and videos search. It is useful to sort by content type, safe search option, date. Also you have option for search text like “Full text,” or “Tag only,” or “None of the word.”

Note: Here you will be able to get result since 1st january, 2009.

Here are the steps for setting up an account and entering website and keyword phrases on KPMRS:

1. Go to: http://www.kpmrs.com/index.php
2. Sign up for the account
3. Sign on acccount.
4. Click on “Add a website” combo.
5. Select the country (US or UK).
6. Add the website (e.g. aquaresorts.com)
7. Add the keywords to evaluate and compare the ranking on different search engines.

Here are some of the features:

1. Keyword ranking:
   Here you can get keyword phrase ranking on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
   
2. Alexa Ranking:
   Here you will get Alexa ranking of the website with date range.
   
3. Trackback links:
   Here you will get site trackback links of Yahoo and Alexa.
   
4. Social Activity:
   Here you will get site popularity on socialbookmarking sites. For e.g. Twitter, Facebook, reddit etc.
   
5. Website Discovery:
   Here you can connect your Google Analytics account by clicking on “Connect” button, and then click on “Grant Access button” to connect google analytics account.
   
6. E – Mail Settings:This feature allows setting up e-mail alert as per report requirements.
   

Here are the some social media backlinks checker tools:

1. Quark Base: http://www.quarkbase.com

It shows the detail information on Top countries, Alexa Traffic ranking with date range, pageviews, competing traffic, similar and relative sites, tags, social popularity,own sites  popular pages on social media sites etc.

2. Website Grader: http://www.websitegrader.com

Tool provides comparative reports for two sites. You can analyze your site with your competitor’s site.

Also, gives report on On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Blogsphere etc.

3. Back Tweets: http://backtweets.com

Tool searches all backlinks from Twitter to your site.

4. Pageboss: http://en.pageboss.com

Tool showing website analysis on IP address, sitemap.xml, robots.txt. Also it displays baclinks of Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Alexa rank, Friendfeed, Stubleuponm DMOZ etc.

Google Backlinks Information:

Yahoo, Twitter and Alexa Backlinks:

DMOZ, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon Backlinks:

Note: To show detail information on backlinks, click on “Details.”

5. Urlmetrix:  http://www.urlmetrix.com/

Tool allows you to show ranking, web popularity etc. E.g. Pagerank, Backlinks of Google, Alexa, Yahoo. Also, shows backlinks for the social media sites (Twitter, Reddit, Technorati etc.)

Mobile Websites
The use of mobile phones to access the internet continues to increase.  More consumers and business travelers are going online on their iPhones and Smart Phones to access the internet.  US Mobile penetration is expected to be 94% or 291M users by 2010 (source: eMarketer, May 2009).  67% of travelers and 77% of frequent business travelers with Web-enabled mobile devices have already used their devices to find local services (e.g. lodging) and attractions (PhoCusWright).  Mobile Search is expected to grow at a CAGR of 58.6% between 2008 and 2013 (source:  eMarketer, Sep 2009).
Milestone’s mobile websites are optimized for fast download time, ease of navigation, and offer key content for easy browsing on a mobile phone screen.  The websites have easy, single-click access to directions, reservation contact number, and dining information.  Consumers are automatically directed to the mobile website when the hotel website is accessed from a mobile phone.

Graviti Lite^TM – Social Media Starter Plan
Graviti Lite^TM is a lighter version of Milestone’s social media optimization services.  It is targeted to hotels that want to engage in social media but are not certain whether it’s the right strategy for their hotel, are concerned about the time commitment, or cannot allocate significant budget to Social Media Optimization effort.  The Starter Plan key features include:
•    Enhanced set-up on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr including cross-linking between channels
•    Guidance on socializing and promoting hotels on these channels
•    Social Media Dashboard for easy access to the channels
•    Low budget entry point

eBuzz Connect^TM – Reputation Management and Social Media Tracking
Milestone continues to add more features and capabilities to eBuzz Connect^TM – Social Media Tracking and Management tool that was launched at Hitec 2009.  The tool allows hotels, brands, and restaurants to monitor and manage their online reputation from an integrated single interface. The tool tracks hotel’s presence in different social media channels such as photo-sharing sites, online video sharing sites, blogs, and user generated content sites such as Trip Advisor and Yelp.  In addition to Social Media Channels, eBuzz Connect^TM also monitors Online Travel Agency channels such as Expedia, Travelocity, and Hotels.com.

The product continues to gain momentum and market traction with several customers signed up for the program.  Some of the unique features available in the latest release of the software include ability to track specific keywords, most-mentioned positive and negative keywords in the reviews, hotel’s top reviewers, hotel’s most popular blog channels, and ability to prioritize comments and reviews based on the significance of the channel.  Hotels can segment the reviews by department which makes responding to reviews easier.  The tool gives actionable reports that hotels can use to enhance their marketing efforts and drive additional revenue.

To learn more about using Web2.0 strategies for hotels, or to learn more about Milestone’s Web2.0 and Social Media services, please visit  www.milestoneinternet.com or email  sales@milestoneinternet.com or call (888) 350-8396.