Facebook lost 5-6 Million members in the US in May 2011, mention of $100 Billion IPO comes same day.

Facebook Today

Facebook – what was a fun little site, the entire business world has turned into the Holy Grail. This is troubling, because it’s not the site that is amazing, but the new social comm technology that connects people.  I crunch some numbers here, and it’s obvious people aren’t interacting with brands on Facebook. Why are we losing sight of this? It’s just a platform, and membership does not attest to equity.  Equity is where the internet is happening, and the internet is not happening on Facebook.

Facebook might have a $100 Billion IPO, for Q1 2012.  Why would they let this ridiculous evaluation slip the same day it is announced that they also lost 6 Million people in May, via WebProNews.  Gizmodo says 5 Million. A Facebook insider says “nearly 6 million”.

It seems interesting, especially because one would hope that a whopping $100 billion would drown out the measly figure of 5-6 million members.  It’s notoriously difficult to cancel an account, so what’s going on?  Was the drop a culling of the notorious spam that poisons social media?  Is it businesses finally deleting their profile they built before the advent of pages? I know of a couple that have done so in the recent weeks. It’s a bigger, more frightening, trend than this.

The Social Media World watches as Groupon readies an insane IPO

I know LinkedIn. LinkedIn was a friend of mine. You are no LinkedIn.

I want to have a quick aside, and remind you that we all know Groupon is insolvent.  In fact, it’s safe to suggest that Facebook is aware that the social media darling is in crisis, having the market panic about feasibility as they approach an IPO.  An important IPO – one that tests the waters in a much deeper way than LinkedIn, a relatively conservative and successful no brainer in this 2.0 world.  It is also fair to acknowledge that whatever consumers do not know about Groupon, as Wall Street eyes Groupon’s likely failure as a business, other businesses are beginning to have a deep awareness of its flaws, which I documented here (with endless citation and evidence), but Techcrunch excellently explains it here.  Businesses wariness to sign up, coupled with Groupon’s balance sheet, makes that look like another disaster, and this is only valued at $20 Billion, one-fifth of the murmured Facebook IPO.  Do you think Facebook is watching Groupon’s “road-to-IPO” closely?

Facebook is failing, but it depends on how you want to define that.  At User Interface? At listening to consumers? At facilitating connection, communication, discussion? Helping create a consumer environment for our businesses?  This is something that is going to be defined by every individual angle – social media, individual people, business… but it’s safe to say they are failing everyone.

The Filter Bubble Problem

Mark's savvy with the Press knows no bounds.

Facebook has made made it so you can hide everything you dislike about the site.  You can hide people or pages, you can hide causes, games, specific api’s that post, specific phones, and more. These are the filters that Eli Pariser speaks about – the filter bubbles driving us apart, creating a homogenic environment, and limiting true connection and democratic discourse – and the resulting ethical issues involved.  These filters are meant to be a response to Facebook users’ dissatisfaction of the interface and lack of proper privacy controls. Users tire of mindless advertising and spam; being inundated with extraneous applications or attempts at monetizing the user base are finally wearing thin.  These filters are simply a way for you to shut down the site little by little, bit by bit. By developing these tools, Facebook has expressively admitted that the whole network is spam. I spoke about these hidden streams, overposting, and attention curation as equity, and you know that I do not consider Facebook a network in the traditional sense of the word.  If I don’t know who has hidden my business, then I don’t know who my network is, and therefore it is essentially defunct.

Could you imagine the statistics on overall users or pages hidden?  Have you ever hidden anything on Facebook?  I think it is completely unstable as a network, and assume Facebook will at some point have to unhide everything to fix some of the problems of “community”. I had hoped I wouldn’t have to post about Facebook again, but it isn’t just about narcissism and the challenge of pages.

Monetization

Facebook doesn't seem to work with dollar signs

Facebook is constantly altering their UI & architecture, so as to generate constant cash flow. These attempts at creation of revenue wholly disregard the individual users’ privacy & bungles the process constantly.  Beyond Zuckerberg’s slip ups, and horrid PR, Facebook adds confusing, unstable layers to a flawed structure/network that is based off of variably meaningful geo-connections. Social connections should *obviously* include *immediate* social circles, but the strongest online connections are based off interest, and do not necessarily involve family or educational institution, the latter which connects similar classmates across broad social, economic, and political backgrounds. Until Facebook figures this out, their dominance is tenuous. You cannot create a solid network based off of loose interests. Topics/Subject matter drive content creation, and content creation drives social networks.

Facebook’s slapdash and immature attempts at monetizing a site with enormous architectural flaws have made it a broken network, and now they are bleeding users…. there are so many meaningful, topical driven sites, that people simply don’t need it anymore. With the rise of topical boards, Facebook is moot.  You can still check in on your grandkids, or your college ex-boyfriend’s family on Facebook, but most people seem to feel more comfortable generating content in like minded communities, which also includes Tumblr and Twitter.  Tumblr has stolen an entire generation of younger kids, Twitter has mid 30′s parents and professionals who don’t have the time for the vacuousness of Facebook, or the time to figure it out.  This is where Facebook’s content is being generated – elsewhere.  Everyone still has a Facebook account, but you may be interested to know where the internet is really happening.

Where The Internet Happens

No, not those kind of boards.

The internet happens in the open.  It happens in an unregulated environment that business has little interaction with.  Foodies have Chowhound or Eater to talk recipes, cuisine, and what’s hot.  Sports fans have their dream team forums or ESPN boards & an entire industry of social sites.  Movie fans engage in sites like IMDB, Netflix, and Rotten Tomatoes, all rabid posters writing shining reviews or debating camera angles.  Entertainment blogs have members on sites like TMZ or Gawker, where posters gab ad naseuom about the plastic world of their interest.  These people *might* share on Facebook, but often the people that you know in the real world aren’t interested in the same hobbies or activities.  Techies on Techcrunch or Engadget have devoted commenters espousing their applicable fanboydom.  Relevant social sites like Mashable or open forums like Yelp Talk cover a bevvy of topics and retain interest from users.  Traditional national and local newspapers cover the entire gamut of local events and allow a wide spectrum of commentators with insane devotion (sometimes literally).  This doesn’t cover the existence of any millions of hobby or enthusiast boards for everything from offroading (based off the specific make and model of your truck) to knitting clubs or book clubs on small blogs or local sites to large sites like Amazon or Ebay.  Even boards like 4chan create content and relevance that makes other sites pale in comparison.  All this is an indication that social media has blossomed in a way that makes Facebook completely irrelevant.  The walled garden, with too many privacy holes in the fence, leaves a lot to be desired, and users are finally leaving Facebook for greener, rolling pastures.  It’s an apt analogy.

For example, my business is travel and hospitality. My entire industry is suffering devastating groupthink – and every conference or social media mention is about Facebook, driving revenue, ROI. I wanted to mention them, but don’t want to damage the conference economy built around Facebook.  I will just say that I know there are those of you out there nodding your head (ed note: thank you for the emails).  Do you want to know how I can be so brazen about this, and why your company’s efforts on Facebook are misguided?  It’s painful to admit, but the real internet and real consumer isn’t on Facebook, and never planned to be.  As soon as they are on Facebook, they are a sister or a grandmother or a college chum.  But when those same people leave the site – they are consumers on flyertalk, tripadvisor, yelp, and any other consumer site referencing the interest they have at that moment.  Someone can be on Facebook loading vacation pics one moment, and that can have zero relevance to the fact they are a consumer searching reviews for a hotel on Tripadvisor, a moment later.  The two are not related.  ”Consumers” do not exist on Facebook, because when people are on Facebook, they shed the role of consumer (or at least they think they do, which is all it takes).  A friend told me to be patient, but he was speaking to me about being patient in the business realm, that the facebook user will eventually be “born” a consumer.  Well, I am not so sure the users have that sort of patience, and looking at their fickle migration patterns of the past, coupled with their distrust of Facebook management, I don’t think my patience will have anything to do with it.

Our Groupthink and What Your Business Needs to Ask

It's not pretty when it happens, and sometimes we can't see it.

The groupthink throughout industry is to talk about how to leverage Facebook, and not whether it’s truly worth the effort or has intrinsic value. Everyone is so self interested that they won’t admit that it’s not the wonder it appears to be. The general rule is that you have to be where people commune, but it doesn’t mean it has to be anything more than a landing page.  I went so far as to ask fans of some of our hotels what they thought of brands on Facebook. Informal test of 4 hotels was unanimous – everyone overposts, and it is tantamount to spam. The more you post, the more people hide you. Great… you got 5 comments!!! Then it’s likely, as 90% of people are lurkers, that even more hid you. You are losing attention every day with your Facebook pages.

Outside the US, along with Twitter, Facebook has been the only available tool with the reach to successfully organize people, and the result has been powerful and moving and undeniable.

But, inside the US, it has been co-opted by brands and marketing agents who attempt to exploit it and utilize it for business. This is all at the behest of Facebook, who is trying to monetize the hell out of the user base and define and reinforce the concept of “user equity”.  Of course, businesses haven’t taken the time to realize there is almost no ROI, and when there is – it’s rare and far between. Why did they lose 6 million people in May? Is that real people, or is Facebook flushing out the coffers of spammers that are littering every corner of that network? Outside of this loss of users, how many existing accounts of the 700 Million members are spammers or multiple accounts? Dead accounts? How do they measure usage?

Define a successful campaign on Facebook? Define a successful business situation in regards to Facebook? Is it about money? brand building? interactivity? I have heard minor successes on Facebook, but no consistent, overwhelming victories as you may have heard from sites like Twitter.  You know what would happen if any single hotel took their page off Facebook? Absolutely nothing.  Facebook is a pass through. They interact with your brand on other sites like user generated review and rating sites, or topical boards where they can get advice from like minded people with expertise enough to answer tough questions.  Uncle Harry or your high school prom date isn’t likely to be able to do that for you.  People “like” and move on in Facebook, it’s a throwaway, passive activity; otherwise people don’t “like” anything because they don’t see the point, or don’t trust the process, even if they actually like something.  It’s obvious there’s a flaw in this system as a trustworthy & equitable model for making business decisions.  Facebook’s compulsion to legitimize the ad model structure of their social business has marginalized the ability for people to meaningfully connect. This erodes trust, and now people are finding other places to commune meaningfully online.  People are still using Facebook in a personal manner, so they wear brands like fashion, for status. They aren’t interacting with the brand so much as showing it off as they might Gucci sunglasses or a Prada purse.  There isn’t the compulsion or awareness by normal Facebook users to create commerce, or interact with businesses as they would on a review site, or topical network.  The closed network based off random, extinct, geographical connections (school, etc) stifles ability to congregate and commune around brands or specific concepts. The groups and pages don’t work properly, because they were an afterthought to the original intent of Facebook.

Is what your organization puts into Facebook worth what is coming out of it?

The End of Facebook

Heaven's to Murgatroyd, Facebook may exit stage left, even.

So far it’s been difficult to cultivate a social network into a successful long term business.  You can’t build a social network, just ask Google. A small network goes viral, then that network spends years garnering users and destroying the site in the race to monetize it, until users move somewhere else. Facebook went viral overnight, but this doesn’t mean it’s a successful platform for business.  Until they can offer a meaningful way to show real return or effeciveness, we are wasting labor and marketing dollars on a black hole.  The reason they aren’t sharing any of their data regarding site usage is because they know it would hobble their $100 Billion IPO.  The data and trends obvious in their private data, coupled with the social world’s IPO craze, it’s seems obvious they know the time is now, while they are jumping the shark.  Their talk of IPO is nothing more than a cynical money grab.  As Groupon will start the beginning of the 2.0 bubble, Facebook is desperate to cash in before it’s too late.

The sad part is that all these social media conferences and advertising or PR firms, coupled with the rest of big business, have so mindlessly invested endless money and time into developing their presence, they won’t be able to see the forest for the trees….. there is an entire economy that exists around Facebook, and people will have too much self interest to admit it’s time is passing.  They will hold on dearly, for fear of having to make new presentation slides, or build yet another business profile on yet another network.  Consultants will be frightened of being exposed for how much money they charge for administering Facebook.  Operators won’t want to change a thing because they finally got the facebook action committee meeting in place, or the hierarchy of responsibility for posting and replies.

Many people are vested very deeply in Facebook’s success, and I fear that our inherent self interest will allow this IPO to happen without a hitch…. a massively inflated and dangerous number representing an inflated faux economy that could collapse harder than a previous bubble we all should know and remember.  In fact, it’s going to happen.  Groupon is the start of it.  All that conversation about Groupon’s insolvancy and filed IPO papers – Facebook knows this.  The collapse will bring greater scrutiny, deeper questions, and demand for much more reporting and numbers in regards to the site.  As for now, Facebook stats are piece-meal, unsubstantiated guesswork, and Facebook is very secretive with all their usage stats.  Once real data gets out, do you suppose that it will bolster the evaluation, or bring it back down to earth?

I think the answer is all too obvious.  So Facebook is getting ready to cash in because they know they have peaked, and the other side of the mountain is a long way down.  It’s a precarious time for our economy as well as my personal hospitality and travel world.  Will we keep our heads down and keep espousing the genius of Facebook with empty stats and minor successes, or will we be big enough to move on, and realize that another time is passing?  I doubt we will be big enough.  But I hope this helps to create more of a dialogue that gets us there… ultimately one that protects the future of our economy.

Edit 16th June 2011:

A friend sent this article, “Older users likely to connect with businesses“. It is unfortunate that we are defining “connection” or interaction as something as passive as pressing a button. Users are tired of privacy issues, sure… but they are also tired of 90% of businesses doing Facebook wrong – not allowing user comments to appear on the wall, nor interacting and commenting on their posts.  It’s an RSS feed, and that’s spam, and it’s being hidden, and you have lost their attention.  When businesses realize the problems with Facebook, the lack of results, and the fact we burned most of bridges in trying to connect with users, ad sales will plummet, and the bottom will fall out.  We are still in front of the Groupon IPO, and lessons can be learnt from the Pandora debacle from today. Show’s over, says VentureBeat, as Pandora skids hard.  Stay vigil and stay aware, fight against groupthink, and engage your company with open-minded discussion regarding your next move.

UPDATE 30 Sept 2011:

Ed Note:  Google Plus’ Open social graph will quickly make Facebook’s walled garden irrelevent.  I quote  Terrence Lui:

“Those of you reading this right now should realize something. You have a fantastic lead. Everybody who depends on Google to run their business, and there are a lot of them, and is ignoring Google+ right now is a fool. You are in on the ground floor of something that will fundamentally change what is now the foundation of the internet.

So take advantage of it while you can. Stake out your place on the high ground. At some point very soon, the crowd will wake up to the fact that Google is serious about all of this and the flood will come.”

But I think the most compelling and damning evidence is this:  Twitter has seen more growth in the last 9 months than the past 5 years. It is vital to be aware of this fact.  Since May, Facebook user base growth in the U.S. has completely stalled, while these other networks are growing faster than ever.  I am basically done protecting my industry from the mindless groupthink.  Let’s let those who are listening gain the high ground.  Let’s let the vacuous & self interested, fall by the wayside.  Good luck out there guys.

First Step: Shout Out About It (even if others don't care)

People keep pontificating on the “check-in”, and what it means for most people, whether it will be relevent enough to stick around, or if it will fall into shadow like so many past “darlings of the moment”.  Well… I commented first *HERE*, and saw that consumers might think they are *not* a winning proposition here, and even Read Write Web claimed the death of the Check-In in 2011, and it was supposed to be a simple sentence.  In fact, I started by saying, “Here, I will make this simple…”, which is not only a bit grandiose, but sort of pompous as well.  I will try to relate my opinion with logic, instead of emotion… but it is still just an opinion.  I am just sharing a few thoughts on LBS (Location Based Services).  I would love to know what you think?

Check-ins aren’t going away, for the time being, because they are part of vanity and branded narcissism. People brag, everyone else ignores accept for supplicants and giddy fanboys. Check Ins are part of the “ME” culture… the issue is whether or not they will ever be really important. Aggregate check-in data for business *IS* interesting, but carving the path to relevance may include suffering the thorns of droll personal information that acts as spam, or the hot air of arrogance that chokes our lungs. I see the network, overall, quieting down on Facebook because the content generators form powerful cliques who don’t notice everyone else hiding them or just not paying attention because looking at their wall is a rollcall of constant chattering. To most people *I* know on Facebook, Check-In’s are spam. So are events. So are causes. So are messages. It’s all spam, and people are really getting tired of it, so they’re checking their pages less, posting pics less.  In fact, Facebook has made so many personalization features to combat the fact that Facebook, in itself, is spam, that these features are beginning to erode the entire concept of community (as you know from my post about Eli’s Ted Talk here, and this PDF 2010 talk)  As to the FB Check-IN:

We all come with baggage, so do the young Geo Location Based Apps

Facebook people didn’t opt in to the “check in” feature so much as have it forced on them, while giddy users of foursquare opt-in, and are voracious users of the real world board game… because they chose to be part of it. For Facebook users, it’s just more of the painful grind of the “me”.  Another thing to deal with – ignore, respond to, or hide. Is it possible that people are tired of the “me me me” stage of 2.0, and a more social semantic web will wipe out the relevance of the combined GPS individual user info that we are talking about? When people get over the individual importance of their check-ins, the real importance of the process will be noted: it’s not about the people checking in, it’s the brands that have been checked in to. The marketing opportunity isn’t with the individuals themselves, and soon we will move past trying to find influencers vs simple nodes.  I like weak ties, personally.

Where people are isn’t as important as why they are there. The next stage is communing around the places, and understanding that the individual person is simply a node in a much vaster network (Know Your Role, Know Your Place). The individual check-ins are irrelevent. It’s the thing they’re checking into, or around, is what’s relevant, and that means the real world is marketing your business by default. It’s viral, and it’s not something you pro-actively manage other than to run a ethical, fantastic business.  You don’t market to these people checking in to your hotel or business…. they are already branded in some loose sense as they are there. If you are doing your job, they will love it…. and it’s the simple fact that aggregate social user info like reviews, coupled with aggregate (I love the word aggregate) location info – nothing to do with the individual – will simply build your brand.  Fire your marketing department.  I am joking.  Calm down. I saw the ops guys in the back clapping.

The Swarm is what matters to marketers, while individual users matter to operations.

In fact, unless someone is famous or popular in some sense, the individual will have zero relevance, at least on a social network that isn’t a location based augmented reality app.  Famous people will give more credibility to places, events, etc… but for most of us little people, the future of our phones is that they just start clicking away when we are moving around (the issue is whether you will be able to opt-in to that, or opt-out of that?), and that aggregate data will be anonymously extrapolated to tell a story.  I know the privacy nonsense comes up again… I am all for individual privacy.  I just think it’s a red herring.  Kids these days… have traded privacy for notoriety.  We have traded privacy for apps that make us superhuman, in some senses. Read all about my privacy thoughts here.  Is the idea of volunteering endorsement of a brand that far fetched?  We do it every time we check in on Facebook or Foursquare, Gowalla, or any of the others endless check-in options.

Make sure to tag your friend with you, while you check-in, and ignore them.

I just can’t imagine individual user activity to be that important, where most of the time people see it as spam on Facebook.  I will post an informal test soon.  So I could see where it lapses. But the technology of recording or registering with locations will amplify, and that location data will aggregate to create a narrative about real world businesses, online.

I think they aren’t going away, but it’s certainly going to evolve and become something totally different. Active single user activity will alter and it will be more passive and automated.

But I am rambling.

Once we stop being so full of ourselves, the check in will take on a new role. Until then, we wear them as literal badges, as bragging rights. I am *HERE*. Look at me.  Like an expensive pair of jeans or some silly handbag.  I love trying to be mayor of my favorite hiking trails, so there I am, in nature, searching for a signal so I can let people know, “Wish you were here”.

It’s gonna be around for quite a bit, methinks.  Maybe we’ll be lucky enough (dry sarcasm) to simply have our credit cards automatically check us in when we are at the airport, or out to dinner.  Maybe currency will be your star rating, or an onsite review is added value to your bill for the restaurant, so you can have a real dialog with management about your experience and help the brand improve, and help manage it.  It’s going to evolve… it’s just how much it will scare us, and how we will want to respond to that, and control it.

This is the most important thing regarding Facebook & other online communities that very few people are talking about.  I note here (June 2010) that hidden streams destroy any legitimacy to this network, & eventually Facebook will have to change their practices.

Now, Move On’s Eli Pariser has written a book called “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You” -

“The Internet software that we use is getting smarter, and more tailored to our needs, all the time. The risk, Eli Pariser reveals, is that we increasingly won’t see other perspectives. In The Filter Bubble, he shows us how the trend could reinforce partisan and narrow mindsets, and points the way to a greater online diversity of perspective.”

We need to reinforce the wobbly foundation before it comes crashing down.

Here is his TED TALK.

Here is his talk from PDF 2010, as well – “Eli Pariser, the president of MoveOn.org, answered the PdF 2010 question “Can the Internet Fix Politics” with a warning about how the hidden personalization features of search and newsfeeds were subtly destroying the notion of a common public space.”

Smart people are actually writing about what I wrote about.  Dangit, I *knew* it was important.

It’s never about *me* per se, but it certainly is my hope that my ideas and the exchange of information gets out into the public domain and is found, in some way, relevant and meaningful.  If it sparks discussion, that’s all I want.  In this case, Eli is way ahead of everyone else… and it’s just nice to know I am on the right path about these complex issues.  Or maybe it means I have way too much time to be esoteric and ponder.  Whatever the case, consider this my endorsement of his book.

If you would like to read more about Facebook and it’s growing pains, attention as equity, overposting (an obvious experiment I have been running on my accounts so as to not destroy the biz pages I admin. *hopefully that explains a *LOT* of how I use and interact on Facebook*), follow the next link. There is another article, among many more, on my professional blog (so lame to say that) regarding Narcissism and the challenge of Facebook.  In case you missed it above, here is the link regarding Hidden Streams, and how they completely erode the functionality & impact of Facebook’s network.

(Thanks to Kristine Johnson for sending me the PDF 2010 YT that introduced me to him)

Hello friends, travel and hospitality people.. I have abandoned you for too long!  Well, my mind has been racing, and I am trying to put all these pieces together… how will it all fit?  How will interaction by the brand influence, connect, or impact the future of the social graph legitimizing and strengthening search?  *That’s* not even the important question – The real question will be how will a search built off network science control and influence brands?  Will there, finally, be a thwarting of the spam through human powered relevance ranking?  Will poor management styles, lack of interaction, or opaque manipulation of the consumer made to be transparent in regards to the brand?  These are small beans compared to the impact of wikileaks on the future of human government.  If you want to catch up on the *REALLY* important stuff, listen to this NPR Fresh Air episode with Bill Keller, from the NY Times, on the impact of Assange and Wikileaks.  But back to our silly little vertical.

Google search is inundated by spam – even their CEO Eric Schmidt admitted that “The Internet is a Cesspool“, and at the time 2 1/2 years ago, he insisted it would be brands that sorted out those murky waters.  I think that’s part of it, such as a brand interacting with the social graph, while publishing meanginful content to an interested audience that actively supports or bolsters the brand’s online relevance and presence.  But where Schmidt agreed the future of meaningful editorialism or content was in question, I think it’s the tapping into of the social graph that will sort all this out.  People will always try to game search, but the amalgam of a human powered network will wield sorting relevance like a skilled warrior, making antiquated algorithms look clumsy and slow.

The spam problem for Google is multi-layered.  First is the obvious gaming with SEO keyword spoofing.  For those that get brand related Google Alerts, you will recognize these as those random blogs republishing old content, press releases, interviews, etc, often misquoting it or ramming it into other, unrelated nonsense.  It’s a scam where you automate the publishing of online content to try to game search engines to appear more relevant than they are.  They are called content farms. Here is a BRILLIANT article on the “pollution of google” and an impending tragedy in relation to this. Another aspect of this pollution are the legitimate sites that aren’t out and out farms, but still try to game search engines into becoming relevant.  So it’s not just the egregious ones that are obviously spam, but you have sites like Huffington Post doing anything to appear at the top of search results – like their infamous “What time does the Super Bowl start” post.  In fact, it was this post about “Classic books we’ve seen being read” that made me swear off of Huffington Post.  One or two are classics, maybe, but it’s just shameless gaming of SEO.  It’s sloppy, and it’s sort of pathetic.  What I loathe more than anything else are the content laden sites that immediately populate every search, but are insipid and cluttering up of *legitimate* search.  You will quickly understand what I am talking about when I mention all the arbitrary wiki’s with stub pages that lead to nowhere, or worse yet E-How and their littering of irrelevant search the net over.  Oh, How I HATE EHOW (search that line and you get ehow articles on how to accept hate)!

So basically, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc are starting to realize the algorithm is not bulletproof, and it won’t carry the internet into the more semantic stage that is coming up.  The entire landscape of the internet will change in the next couple years, and it will be this innocuous (which is up for argument) layering of the social graph into your experience.  The algorithm can’t work and you *MUST* use human power to create meaning and relevance online and with searches.  Otherwise the ad model will fall apart, and no one will trust the search engines, and we won’t be able to catalogue or find anything*.  So now the “social search” is on the horizon (or – here).  It means that the internet will be consistent and familiar.  An article from wired explains Google’s social search here, but the best bet is to watch this video from Matt Cutts, famed google search guru:

“Privacy”

Basically, advertising is always going to be around.  While people talk about privacy, I realize I rather have a relevant ad than one that has nothing to do with me.  This is a step towards that.

For example, Facebook is now “personalizing your experience” as you move from site to site, aka Facebook is trying to monetize their product by creating a more seamless social experience in regards to marketing. You can turn it off…. But honestly, there’s always going to be ads or irrelevant and non topical spam in your face. Wouldn’t you rather know what your friends reviewed on yelp rather than random strangers in random areas, or when you visit CNN or BBC you can see what a colleague read, instead of the scattershot “most popular” stories. Even better (for the consumer, not just the advertiser), an advertisement becomes relevant. Banner ads are targeted to your likely interests. Instead of seeing an irrelevant baby diaper ads (if you are young and single), maybe it shows you a link to a cool wine bar you might like.  Maybe it shows a concert a friend is going to.  It’s a much more intuitive way to facilitate the online experience, and where end users find inefficiency and frustration, it is this precise movement towards open browsing that has people screaming “Privacy”.  Frankly, I don’t think people even understand what privacy means.

This issue of Scientific American deals with some fairly amazing thoughts on modern privacy – whether social networks bring around the demise of privacy, among many other topics.  I always harken back to 1999, when Scott McNealy, from Sun Microsystems, said “Privacy is over. We haven’t had it for years. It’s a red herring”.  In my opinion, it’s completely misunderstood.  While most online people, especially the younger audience, are cultivating attention to the best of their ability, there’s an obvious exchange of privacy for constant information about our network.  It is something that seems to be developing naturally, and the benefits have been happily accepted, regardless of people’s concerns about privacy.

If you want privacy, stay off a computer, don’t get on a router, and don’t sign into any sites.  Even going online from an IP through a router will divulge information about you.  If you think privacy is the issue here, you shouldn’t turn anything on. Period. It’s the only way. Otherwise, might as well unfurl to the future. Now I am not saying that you should wantonly ignore your right to your own private lives, but be aware part of the internet improving is a slight exchange of your personal information.  All things being equal, I think it’s an exchange I am more than happy to make.  What’s more, the thing buffering my idealogy or indignity of civil rights is this one thing: by in large, 99.9% of us are beyond dull, irrelevent, and completely uninteresting.  Privacy is only a concern for those that need it.  the majority of us will never be relevant enough for privacy to be an issue.  We need to have some perspective and stop thinking *anyone* in the world cares if you checked in on foursquare, or commented how nice your vacation is.  I happily inform you (happy in that it’s freeing) that you simply… are not.. that big of a deal.

This is simply how it’s going to work.  It won’t be big brother silently judging you, although countless eyes will be aware of you – friendly ones crinkling into a smile as they effortlessly share their lives with you.  Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t discuss and worry about privacy, but it’s a fact of life there will be a trade off – a tiny bit of inconsequential information about yourself for the ability to plug into “the matrix” and access the entirety of human information that has ever been documented, in a meaningful, relevant, and efficient manner.  Of course, we are sorry your ex saw a picture of you and your current beau on vacation.

Measuring Interaction

It’s great to be at this point.  It means the web will become more meaningful, but my issue is that there is still no way of really figuring out the impact.  It’s coming, and it will sort itself out.  But some of us ask questions, and keep busy with helping to understand the phenomenon.  For example, a property I am involved with had a few minor mentions on Facebook.  These are open profiles without privacy restrictions, so it is on public record and no issues of being prying or invasive.  I thought about it for a bit, and cannot see any issue with posting these link.  Look at these posts on Facebook, then consider the reactions, the conversation, about the brand, etc.

A jazz musician with 1300 friends mentions playing at the Allison.

Local Mom with a few friends passively mentions lunch at the Allison

Local Dad takes pics of dessert, and positive community reaction

The Future Starts Now (& has been happening for some time)

The “social search” side of this conversation is simply to lead us here… where I have my real questions, and where I would love your input.

I want to know what the value of those Facebook posts are, right there.  It’s obvious that social has massive equity, because they are beginning to dismantle the typical SEO methodologies like algorithms and static keywords in lieu of fresh content legitimized by the interaction of the social graph.  It’s pleasing to know we have taken the right direction with engaging the social network and building our brands while attempting to participate in and control our image and the conversation (in a modern sense, as best we can).  These 3 social Facebook interactions are undeniably more meaningful than a cold impression, but until there is some better method of tracking and measuring these comments, all we can do is be aware of them.  Twitter has a few tools, but nothing that leads the charge out of the impression model.  I am hoping we can eventually create something that would be able to track people as nodes or hubs or weak ties in geographic regions instead of simply looking at ip’s or url’s.  I am not looking to the old world marketing of finding an “influencer” so much as understanding the natural interactions as they ebb and flow in relation to your brand.  For more on Network Science, please read this informative and important article, “How Network Science Can Speed Up Your Success 10 to 20 times.”  It’s way ahead of it’s time, and it’s the next step in letting the argument of privacy jump the shark.

Our level of engagement is going to be more important in the future in a way that we can’t measure or perceive right now, and we are laying the groundwork to be heads and shoulders above other hotels in revelance and footprint.  Just as some hotels are *still* reeling from missing out on the SEO boom, some hotels & brands that think social is a joke will be in the same boat when the semantic web gains a stronger foothold.  It’s just – *how* will a brand’s engagement alter or impact a socially engaged search?

How Can You Learn More?

Next month, in San Francisco, there is a conference regarding Social Media Strategies for North America.  It is put on by Eye for Travel, one of the most respected Hospitality & Travel conference planner in the business.  It’s the 2nd & 3rd of March at Hotel Nikko.  There will be some of the best in the hospitality and travel business talking about these sort of issues and more.  It’s a chance to surround yourself with incredibly experienced and smart people about all these pressing issues.  I am really excited, and thought I would alert anyone about it who may come across this.  Sign ups are still going on *HERE*.

*One final thought if you actually have a little extra time.  This is a fascinating presentation (slow to start) on everything being cataloged as “miscellaneous”, because the established order of ordering is failing. It’s down here all the way at the bottom because it’s about an hour, and not completely relevant.  Fascinating, nonetheless.  It’s about relevance, which is obviously relevant in a discussion about relevance.  But who am I to assume it’s relevant to you?  Well, that was the social search graph is going to take care of.

As some of you were made aware in my interview of Shana from Tourism Queensland, I am chatting with some of the EyeForTravel speakers for the upcoming Travel Distribution Summit North America in Chicago this October 2010. The interviews are not only meant to be insight into the world of social media, mobile, and modern technology’s impact on the ever-changing landscape of the hospitality and travel business – but a dialog to help one another answer questions, as well as help get new ones asked.  These interviews aren’t necessarily light reading – these are the people at the top of our profession taking the rare chance to go in depth into some very heady and complex issues.

EyeForTravel has long been the go to source for travel news, events, and analysis, and are experts at bringing some of the most intelligent and thoughtful minds, as well as conversation, into the overall discussion of hospitality & travel. Hopefully, this conversation between Susan and I will add to that pool of information.  In fact, I don’t see how it cannot because if there is one true, legitimate and *bona-fide* professional who can use the word “guru” without sounding like a spammy internet marketer…. it’s going to be Susan Black.

Of course, many of you know Susan, of Black & Wright.  She is tireless, relevant, and, if you have been following the world of travel news and discussion, a name that is, and should be, hard to miss.  Her twitter account, @SusanTravels aggregates some of the best information in the industry, all the while working with clients on long and short term projects, planning and attending conferences, keeping up to date on current events, managing a hectic but rewarding professional and personal life…. as well as even taking time out for the likes of me.

That’s unbelievable, and it’s quite the honor to have her time and bend her ear. Our interview was incredibly casual, friendly, and meandering, while still focused on the issue at hand – What in the heck is going on with travel, tech, social media, and our industry! Susan had a lot to say… now it’s up to all of you to listen!  If you aren’t sure who she is, the picture, after the jump, should remind you!

Susan Travels

Robert Cole called you “The Ubiquitous Susan Black”, in that you are, literally, in as many places as your name is.  You are a rare gem in our world – in that you have a solid professional history in travel, so within social media, you aren’t just some newcomer with no perspective (all too common nowadays).  It’s refreshing to have learned, long time industry pros using social media instead of just another “guru” spouting noise. Tell us a little about your history in travel, prior to being engaged in this new world communication.

“I have been in the industry for a very long time – and I always hesitate when I give how long long because people immediately begin to think I am Methusleah.  But I have been in travel, starting in travel publishing, since back in the early 80s. So it’s been a really long time, almost 30 years; I didn’t spring from this ‘full blown and fully grown’.  I went through the more traditional travel route of working as a publisher for travel trade publications for many years, and getting to know the travel industry and their issues and their challenges, particularly with distribution, both on b2b [business to business] and b2c [business to consumer] side, from a number of different clients’ perspective.  First it was the corporate travel arena, I worked in news  magazine and corporate travel magazine.”

That is about when you entered into the online world?

“I switched over in the early 90′s to the leisure side, that was going through tremendous changes at that time, mainly the shift over from travel agents and more traditional types of distribution to the very, very early days of online. As a matter of fact, my first website was launched in 1994, which was called VacationPackager.com, right after the floppy discs and all that stuff. I was like, ‘WOW the internet, that’s kind of cool’.”

“Vacation packager took the database from the official tour directory that I was publishing, and took this relational database, and if you wanted to know about vacation packages like golf tours in Scotland or fishing tours in Costa Rica, it would tell you about the company, and give you all sorts of background info on the company – it was early, early search, pre-everything.  We sat on the homepage of  Travelocity – we actually preceded that site – but we sat on their homepage as a vacation package button for about 2 years, and did about 6 or 7 iterations of vacationpackager because we finished one we would say ‘No NO!.. what they really want to know is the itinerary.  No NO! They want they really want to know is comparisons, pricing, can you book it?’  We would do partnerships with a lot of tour operators and things, so it was quite a learning experience in a very short period of time.  From coming up with my first flying GIF thing ‘ooh look at that, the plane flies! How cool is that?’, to user, early days of usability and we started off as an advertising vehicle. There was no such thing as performance based, there was no such thing as search, there was no such thing as CPC, there was no such thing as anything.  I know I sound like the dark ages.”

Why did you get online so quickly, so early in the game?  Why were you so ahead of the curve?

“I loved it. I saw so much promise there. Remember, I worked for a relational database, a directory. You can’t get really sexy with a directory, but their really useful. And then to have all that information and sorted online, it was exciting. But yes… it was the day of the dialups, and it was the day of.. we had bandwidth issues.  I remember we had conversation about disabling the “back button” [We both laugh]

Sounds like you were a voracious “sponge”?

“I learned about it early on, and I learned it from someone who knew quite a bit in travel [professional friend of Susan's to remain anonymous].  I went to every single early show at the time; there weren’t many –  Jupiter had something, and Forrester had something. Whatever was around, I went to, I read *EVERYTHING*.  I kind of ran in circles like Rich Barton and Terry Jones, and all the early pioneers – it was a small circle…. A tiny little cirle.  We all kind of banded together – mainly the OTAs; the hotels weren’t really on board at this point.  PCTravel, BizTravel; just a lot of people that aren’t around anymore.  But it was a really interesting and exciting period.  Now, I was interested, not so much in the e-commerce point of view, but the power of an advertising point of view – that it was very targeted, that there was a lot of intent.  Again this was pre google, pre search, pre everything.”

“So that is kind of my background on all of this.  At the same time Eye For Travel started, back in 1999, I started my consulting practice, and started “E-Travel World” as part of a larger vision of intersecting industry and the internet, part of adtech, e-healthcare world, e-auto world, e-b2b – you kind of get the picture. That is when I first started with Forrester Research – first with Mari Moto, then with Henry Harteveldt and it’s when I first got to know the significant players and all the new applications in online travel in an intimate way because I needed to program them, and really needed to understand the differentiators and understand what they did.”

Hotels have always gotten beat up with tech. We are always 10 years behind: from updating property management or telecom systems (remember installing wifi, everyone?), to the early online days where most of us missed the boat with SEO; and now in our current state where we  struggle with branding and messaging in a climate that has the consumer model flipped.  Even some Travel Agent Publications are still trying to figure out how they missed that boat that sailed so long ago.  It seems more and more that knowing about the tech isn’t enough, and how to handle and integrate the tech is just as important as understanding the technology’s importance or existence.  Did you find that immersing yourself in this world of new contacts and applications, as well as being able to immediately practically apply them, sped up your understanding of their impact?

“Because I had a consulting practice at the same time, I was able to integrate and apply the new fangled applications to the needs of my clients.  It really was a terrific platform, and a way to learn about all these new things, crazy things like “search”.  I mean, as I said I read everything, went to a tremendous amount of conferences – I drank the Kool Aid. I mean – this will really date me – I remember when I saw the first business fax that came through. I was like “Oh my God it’s Star Trek, it’s Buck Rogers, it’s everything’.  So I always believed in what was next – that there will be a next, and that there were applications out there that would be exciting – even if it wasn’t adapted completely at the time, but that this is such a powerful tool – especially as bandwidth grew and it became easier.  At first, I saw that people were going on online chat rooms, and AOL chat. I was like ‘damn, everyone is going to these places’.  People were spending hours and hours abandoning TV and bars to sit online and participate in this interactive content.  That interactive content got me excited… I couldn’t believe I could chat with someone about a topic that was interesting to me with someone around the world.”

“Now, with the transition and movement to more transparent social media – I know now who these people are, I have met them person to person, face to face, or met them through someone trustworthy, it takes on a whole new dimension. I know who I am getting my information from, and I won’t end up quoting some oddball.”

And you don’t always need to know them, because some of these sites hold these transparent profiles that provide a little veracity and relevancy. Not as scary as the old anonymous days of the web…

“This comes with more of a linkedin, and more of a contextual conversation.  If within LinkedIn there is a conversation about distribution, or revenue management, that is relevent.  They may be people I don’t know, but when we belong to the same group and talk about contextually relevant information – I don’t necessarily need to know them, but if they belong to the same group or membership but we’re talking the same contextually relevant information.”

“With Twitter, again, the last word there is contextual and relevant. You look for the relevancy – I use it as an uber editing force.  Here’s a whole bunch of people who are interested in the same thing, in this case online travel, as I am, and they have the time to edit things so to say, ‘You may be interested in reading this, or you may want to see this you may have missed’,  and it may be someone you may not know personally, but it’s someone big in the industry.  So I find it as one big ole whopping editing opportunity for me, and that’s the value I see there.  And the value of conversation, but again I use it more in terms of ‘I would have missed that, thank you for bringing it to my attention.”

“Let’s say I have a subject like the recent acquisition of ITA by Google.   I can read what’s in the press, everyone can.  But there are some industry leaders who’s point of view I might specifically like.   I have a choice – I can call them up, that will take about 16 years if i could ever get them.  I could send an email; equally — they are busy, so am I.  I can maybe google them and maybe they have written something, or not.  And how many am I going to do for that.. 10, 20 30? Well that’s going to take all day, or year, or forever?  Or maybe I can join a conversation by putting in “ITA Software”, see what pundits have put something there, links to their blog and pick and choose what to look at, all in about 3 1/2 minutes.  I find it useful to get relevant, contextual information from sources I may or may not now that I do trust that have things to say that I may have missed.”

“Really, the strongest application to my world with Twitter is in relation to conferences.”

I have been blown away by twitter and conference usage.  You have people live reporting, you have other people commenting, contrarians yammering (like myself), even light hearted banter as people get slap happy near the end of the day.  It adds so many dimensions to conferences.

“It forges new relationships and contextual relationships.  How many times have you been at conferences and … sitting next to someone at lunch you *may* talk to someone, or sitting next to someone you *may* chat, or find the badge of a company you really want to engage with – but what are the chances that you could really form a deeper understanding of someone’s views?  Things you very probably would have missed from people you probably didn’t know you needed to know.  It helps connect people that I need to know.  This is how I morphed into it – it’s not linear. It’s a whole amalgam of different experiences of the travel industry, past present and future.”

How do you think the traditional travel background has faciliated your understanding of the online channel?

“What’s unique about where I am in the industry and with my development, is that – and there aren’t many of us, and I’m not bragging, but it’s just kind of an observation – there aren’t that many that came from a traditional travel background. There are almost no more suppliers, or in my case publishers, who dealt B2B in travel that knew *that* world pre-internet – pre-1995 – as intimately and played in that area *and* as actively as the “post beginning of internet” group. They *may* have just been in a different place early on – online advertising, etc. Not specifically tied to travel, just in a different place. There are few people who have come from traditional travel backgrounds who have immersed themselves as I have in this “online space”.  I am in this very bizarre position where I know people, and I maintain my contacts very actively with people from.. you know.. the 80′s, the 90′s; then I have this whole new group of folks I have known from the late 1990′s to today.  The first 15 and the last 15!”

It’s old world versus new world.  There is an obvious crisis of experience with modern travel professionals.  There are so many people saying they have experience in travel and the industry, marketing or hospitality, when they don’t really have a frame of reference to the industry, how it works, etc.  Sitting on twitter doesn’t necessarily make someone an expert.  So we need people like you to stand out. I hope I help.

I had the social media bug in me before the tools were around.  It was something called a rolodex.

Hey, I remember those.  I remember management hiring people they didn’t like just because of their Rolodex.  It’s still fairly powerful.

“Yeah I had a pretty powerful Rolodex – I even remember using the early Plaxo tech, and tools so you could scan business cards in, and leverage as much as you could off of those cards.  But yes, I have been a big, BIG believer of true, I will call it applied, networking. It isn’t enough to have a Rolodex, but it’s what you do with those connections – how you monetize it, how you use it, how do you partner with it, and understand and leverage those relationships.  It’s ‘who I know and what can those networks do.’”

Which is absolutely what the travel business *is*, or *should* be.  Those real world business connections are the strongest and most reliable, because you trust one another’s accountability and have experienced one another’s  professionalism, rather than something more passive like “liking” a tweeted story from Facebook.  I assume most of that rolodex was earned in tried and true professional relationships rather than the looser connections of social media?

“It’s a kind of an interesting background where I was a publisher primarily dealing with marketing distribution challenges from traditional travel companies.  It was mainly leisure, but again, before that, with hotels through meetings and corporate travel magazines, then through consulting and putting together conferences.  I was learning about a lot of new applications and applied intelligence – ‘how this works for everyone else’ – up to becoming a practitioner and seeing the fundamentals and day to day and how it really works and translates to the bottom line, and how people actually make money from it (or not) – back to running conferences and being a consultant.”

“That’s what I like to do; I like the diversity, I like to be out there, and cutting edge and seeing the next big thing.  You know, when you are in operations or operating within a company, it’s very hard, especially if you have 17 direct reports, everything falls on you, and life gets in the way.  I am in, out, back and forth – but have been consulting the last 6 years. Most clients are short term, but a few are long enough term where I am able to see something from beginning, middle, to the end.. and through execution.  So it’s been sort of a wild ride in this field – starting in the early days when you would place a print ad and hope for the best.”

I am an operator, and so I have always been skeptical of marketing.  It’s weird because of the way the social media sort of laid waste to the traditional marketing model. I get that “new world” model – and, of course, it’s not going to replace the old world of marketing – but I was always like “Impressions??!?! I know a guy who had a paper route – 200 houses or one dumpster.” [Ed note: joke attributed to Mitch Hedberg].  But now, the kind of data you get with analytics and the reports you can pry out, you can gauge your success in a much more concrete way.

“We have always talked about CRM, segmentation, performance – for years we have been talking about that.  It gets easier and easier with these new additions to the marketing arsenal.  I agree – it doesn’t replace things; it works better in an integrated way, in tandem *with*.  Social media doesn’t replace traditional online advertising, it works better *with*. If you are combining it with an email program, you will have better outcomes.  We have been talking integration since the 1980′s, as long as I have been in this.  Now we have the tools and we now really have the opportunity through our tracking and performance base to see how everything works together.  The intelligence and reporting is getting so much better and easier, we can really optimize different areas of our program based on what effects we see.  I think that’s the future.. it’s not social media over mobile over traditional over *this*, the answer is ‘YES’ – it’s everything.  But it is everything that is measurable and optimized working in tandem with one another.

“Seeing how these companies are segmented, the real challenge is to help them work with the tools so that it is optimized so everything becomes integrated. It isn’t marketing vs distribution vs operations; it really becomes part and parcel to each departments.  Those are, kind of, the issues today – sorting out the internal structure and breaking down the walls; it’s where the challenge and opportunity is today.”

“We’ve got all these tools, but who uses social – is it marketing, is it operations, is it customer service? Who is it?  And the answer should be ‘Yes’, but also ‘How?’, and ‘who’s in charge, and what happens’? And that’s just one teeny tiny aspect. And you can put that to *everything* – to email, to mobile, etc.  But figuring that out is the challenge, or ‘opportunity’.”

“When I first started putting conferences together, we always separated tracks by marketing and distribution.  I would argue, today, that it so archaic and irrelevant, it’s ridiculous… They are one in the same.  Marketing is distribution, distribution is marketing. Yes.  Is “search” distribution or marketing? YES! Of course it’s distribution.  Is “Google” media or commerce? YES! Is “Expedia” media, or commerce? Yes!  So all of these distinctions of what’s marketing, what’s advertising, and even branding has morphed with performance based distribution.  That also translates to offline distribution.  A lot of traditional distribution folks or marketers, it’s a very confusing or challenging world. The lines were very clear… ‘this is my world, this is your world.’  Now the lines are blurring, and it creates opportunity of course, as well as deep, deep challenges.  30 years in the same industry, it is remarkable to be active in the transformation of this arena.

Like these challenges with Social Media and Marketing.

“When travel companies are disappointed in social media, they have taken it on its own, and kind of left it in left field. They haven’t integrated it with everything else, and haven’t taken a look at their distribution and marketing goals, and are left trying to figure out how to measure it or understand the true value of these initiatives. The same thing happens with mobile.”

I see that with hotels – quite desperate to be part of the “shiny new toy” and use the hep buzz words. “Oh we need to get social media going – let’s do it!”, but overall, most really don’t get it.  It’s frustrating to the new entries into this new world.  You can get something up and running cheap and easy, but traditional marketers don’t understand it or can’t get parity between normal campaigns and the social realm.  It’s obviously effecting traditional campaigns, but it’s still a challenge to measure.  What should these old world marketing people be asking as they try to comprehend this very new world of social marketing?

“I think it’s based on marketers saying, “How does this fit in with my overall goals”. Here are my goals – it’s being clear with everything else they do with marketing and distribution.  ’Now that I have taken the time to say what our brand is, what our differentiator is, what our goals are, how I am measuring them, what I am doing – where does everything fit in with this ecosystem that I can measure and know what’s supporting it.’”

You wouldn’t randomly start to use Marketing or PR.

“No one would say, ‘I am not going to do PR because it doesn’t fit in,’, you ask ‘How do I do PR to support this?’.  You wouldn’t just do PR for the sake of it and see what happens.  Unfortunately, social and mobile and others are not yet reviewed this way, which is really unfortunate.  They are often measured at a totally inappropriate, and abstract, type of measurement.  You wouldn’t do that with anything else – why would you do it with social media?  You need it to be inline with goals.”

How do you think this will evolve? What is the future for us?

“I think the future is that we will finally learn to integrate all these things once we feel more comfortable with social, or mobile, or online marketing.  We will see new impacts and aspects with the Google / ITA merger, more new transitions and mergers, and new big players will enter the market like Facebook / Tripadvisor and Apple with Itravel.”

“Once we learn more about the power of that, I think the big opportunity will be integrating all of these lessons and tools, and creating them to be workable strategies that anyone – from the smallest hotel to global companies – will be able to utilize and leverage for their best use.  First we need to understand them, play with them, try them out, and have early successes and failures – then integrate them into what we understand in terms of both distribution and marketing.”

“In that, it doesn’t really matter what the next new big thing is, because we have a process in place to help it exist in the current ecosystem.  The greatest opportunities will be if marketers keep their minds open, and know that there will be blips on the way.  The whole integration helps with obtaining the goals.”

Since you mentioned them, who do you think will be the big players in the next five years.

“I think the big players are going to be different from the big players of “before”.  I don’t think it will be the traditional OTA’s, because they haven’t changed all that much.  Especially if you listen to Phocuswright and Forrester, it’s still ‘when you wanna go, where you wanna go’? –  It all looks the same.  I think it’s going to be, truly, a more intimate look at how people want to get their travel, and I think it’s going to be Google, Facebook, Apple that will now come onto the scene in a really focused way, with the resources and power behind them to find out a different way of distribution.”

Facebook partnering with Tripadvisor is interesting. Tripadvisor seems to be giving up on “native content” vs allowing Facebook users to contribute.  I think it hurt Yelp, and I have seen a huge jump in restaurant reviews on TA – but it’s all really fluid at this point.

“With the like button, with Tripadvisor, and different applications… they will find their way.  You can’t just dismiss the powerhouses of today just because they don’t have the right applications. That would be like dismissing Google in the past because the algorithm was a little off.  You have got to understand that these companies have the bandwidth, the smarts, and the money – and travel is one of the largest if not *THE* largest online opportunity, vertical, and once they have their sights set on it, they will figure it out.”

In working with EyeForTravel, you always seem so enthusiastic and geared up for the events.  Why does it energize you the way it does?

“I think these conferences take you out of your everyday thoughts, and opens up a window to what other companies are doing.  It allows you to see case studies, it allows you to see what’s real versus what’s vaporware, or what’s not. It really allows you to have a dialog.  What we are doing on the phone right now is a dialogue.  It enables marketers and distributors to see what is working now, and what will work 6 months down the line.  It separates the ‘hype’ from the ‘happening’, particularly the newer things like mobile, social media.”

“It saves a lot of time, energy, and effort if you are going down the wrong path, like not taking advantages of current opportunities or believing in hype that isn’t actually working.  Especially with the changing landscape and how quickly this stuff morphs, and the importance of the players today… it helps you see what you should be looking at, and what you should ignore.  I mean, two days at a conference to get all of that –  to save hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, of investment time, of executive time, to really have this immersion & dialogue – I cannot imagine how people could afford *not* to come.”

It’s funny… you can study it all you want, but unless you are completely immersed in a culture, you aren’t going to learn the language.

“There’s a reason people have these off sites – in a normal business day there are too many interruptions, there’s too much going on in the day to day.  You need this time to focus, you need it for your business, you need it for yourself – It’s necessary, it’s mandatory!”

Susan Black will be Chairing at the Eye For Travel North American Travel Distribution Summit in Chicago, the 13^th & 14^th of October, 2010.  You can look at the agenda here, and a list of all the speakers here.  It includes 4 separate focuses within one conference:  Online Sales & Distribution, Revenue Management, Mobile Travel & Tech, and Social Media Strategies. Register here, or contact rosie@eyefortravel.com for more information

Depending on how this one goes, I think this is my second to last or last post *ever* haranguing on, or thinking this deeply about, Facebook.  Blue in the Face makes one look crazy, especially if no one is listening… and beyond the simple fact that I may be wrong, and happily eat humble crow as I become more aware….. I do see some meaningful interaction on Facebook.  It takes some time, and for me it took *opening* my network.  This concept of a “closed” network seems bizarre to me, and it limited real, meaningful interaction, the likes of which I remember from IRC or topical boards.

You have seen me talk about this in regards to Hospitality Brand’s respective Facebook Pages, and the lack of real interaction… even when they are done well. When it comes down to it, there are some problems with the way Facebook Pages work.  This post is, to some degree, a slapdash missive of a rebuttal to this post about the Top Ten Facebook Brand Pages.  There are 100′s of those “top 10″ posts, but it’s a good post with some interesting thoughts… and they are the perfect pages to “pick apart”, so to speak.  I want to ask some questions (that I don’t have any answers to) that result from crunching interaction numbers, informally, as well as gauge what it means to have a “fan”.  Hopefully it sparks conversation?  I also want to delve into why there are real challenges for creating that meaningful interaction Facebook Pages.

Before we start looking at the nature of these brand page interactions, we need a little background on what Facebook is. First, Facebook’s narcissism problem is duly noted, and it means that Facebook users will wear a brand Page like a pair of Chanel glasses or Dolce purse.  In the Facebook universe, where interaction is “me” first, the network later, much (not all) of brand interaction is selfish, opportunistic, and all for show.  It isn’t at the brand’s convenience (nor should we expect consumers to act like that), so much as being an emblem for the consumer, and not something they expect to have a real relationship with.  In fact, I talk passionately about how bizarre “hiding streams” is within Facebook, and how that effects the way we post, the attention we lost, and the importance of curating it.  For example, the above “top brand pages”, while researching this article, had this post, right by the brand name:

I think it might suggest, based off the “Top Ten Brand Pages” article, that we need to look at how we interact with our communities.  It’s only one example, but at least they said something.  If stats are right, 70-90% of other people didn’t say a word and just hid their wall posts from view, forevermore. Another reason I won’t be posting much more about this Facebook nonsense: I sound like a broken record, stuck in a rare groove.  But as I have said before…. People are just understanding the crisis of perception in social media: it’s not about the “me”. It is about everyone else. In general, no one gives a hoot about your photos of dinner, your baby, your vacation (not to be dour; just grumpy hyperbole to pilot an idea into the harbor).  It makes people look arrogant and self absorbed – back to the narcissism study.  Of course, there are *many* *many* Facebook users that are *not* like that, and you are probably one of them.

Those who spend time on the meta level of social tech (IE not the ones who respond, when you are looking for a conversation, with “internetz iz serious bidness”) are definitely not the ones passively or flippantly interacting, nor the 70% who are simply “lurkers” or people that do not actually interact.  That data is from Forrester’s Groundswell, a book I suggest you pick up.  This recent article talks about 90% non participants who exist to consume information, and links to this article has data on the idea that 90% lurk. As I mentioned in a previous post, “lurkers – we know you are out there eating our posts” Social media works best when it is about EVERYONE else… real communication, real collaboration.  For example, you should be able to view this thread from my profile.  Instead of talking about me, I asked what they did. There wasn’t just *more* interaction, but it was personal, meaningful, and more robust than one off comments on viral videos like “lol” or “That’s great”.

The “Like” button is an activity and concept that I can wrap my head around, but it becomes incredibly frustrating when you realize Facebook’s attempt to hook itself into the framework of the internet leads to the single most passive social interaction that has ever existed, and that’s going to be an issue for brands and pages.  At least, it might make us take stock about what we really know about Page usage, and if it’s better to sit silently, curate attention, and post only when vital.  Allow people the pleasure of brand advocacy, and comment and follow up when necessary…. but it may be that our forced excitement and expectation in using these tools is putting off our consumers. If everyone focused on the network, instead of, naturally, being more self interested… think of the level of real interaction that would create between people, brands, and one another?

Herein lies an obvious problem, of whether it is my place to even suggest that people should change their underlying instincts or natural patterns in how they interact.  In fact, I could be trying to yoke a powerfully ingrained genetic compulsion.

One person is simply a node… and nothing else. If Oprah or Ashton dropped from Twitter, all that would happen is that the network map would fill itself. People do not matter… it’s the network that matters. It’s about the multiple nodes, weak ties, and flow of ideas and communication…. and one node could disappear without a blip. Cancel your facebook account and see how much it actually effects your network.  An important issue is that, if you start hiding streams in Facebook, in my opinion, it may make the network unstable, or at least, less meaningful.  Weak ties are less obvious to the network, and this PDF (following link autodownloads) of Granovetter’s “Strength of Weak Ties” article has some pretty amazing conjecture about them being markedly important in regards to Network Science. It’s a big problem even judging how many eyes on your page.

As soon as people realize this, we will start using social tools in a more intelligent and organized way.  To defer potential conceit on my part, I want to remind anyone reading this that you are likely ahead of the curve as well, and I am unabashed in suggesting that users need to mature somewhat before these tools can reach their potential.  The Read Write Web login debacle might be proffered forth, yet again, as evidence of Facebook, or Google, users’ relative dimness as to how to use the internet.  Of course, the point can be said is that it’s Google and/or Facebook’s fault because they need to be able to explain this stuff to users.

These social conversation tools are the single biggest shift in human communication in history, and people are taking photos of amuse bouche or retouching a vacation shot to make other people jealous…. the same other people who aren’t actually looking at another person’s page because they are quite busy acting like a star on their own page, hoping people notice *them*.  Facebook’s potential competitor from Google is tentatively named “ME” – well played Google. Is that deliberate, guys?

I wouldn’t spend my time on this, but I am somewhat irked that everyone has shrugged their shoulders and said, “I guess Facebook is as good as this will get,” and are, again, allowing FB to hook itself into the framework of the internet.  It’s a difficult proposition for me.  It’s quickly becoming bigger than a monopoly (a linked article that comments on the fact that the internet is *incredibly* well linked, interactive, and stable *outside* of Facebook).  If Facebook becomes the internet, some form of public utility that is not removable from the architecture of the internet, that is a big problem. It stifles creativity, and competition cannot exist in an uneven market like this.  Even with a smattering of bungled launches or app experiments that have gone viral (like Wave), Google needs to knock it out of the park with the competitor.  I am not so sure someone is in the position to really compete.

I have some ideas for Google Me… maybe it’s simply my own network I am talking about.  Could you imagine a social network based off of proximite geo-community, hyperlocality, and topical interests…. rather than some wholly arbitrary closed network that allows you to conntect to 20 year dead contacts that are as arbitrary as having a locker near them in grammar school?  If anyone wants to help build it, inquire within.  I sure as hell can imagine it. =) But the real point isn’t this complex new science of networking, nor is it the immediate issues with the existence of Facebook. It’s the existing interaction and community that is really happening around these brands.

Let’s look at Jones Sodas first, since we unfairly took a one in a million negative comment that I barely caught upon their profile.

So in this one snapshot (which is hardly enough to make this a proper study) – the first post has .0001003 / .01003%  likes, and .0000522 / .00522% comments.  What is a normal impression, or what is expected of 90% non contributors?  The second post has .0003772 / .03772% likes, and .0001164 / .01164% comments. I only include the percentages, because there is a HUGE difference between .037% interaction vs how people sometimes look at a number that small..contes. 3.72%.  It’s the former, and that’s tiny.

At the time of my post, Redbull has 7,957,179 fans. Pardon me for not having it in this picture.  That’s about the population of London or Chicago.  The two interactions showing have interaction rates (this is not even a standardized metric, by any means.. but it illustrates a strong point) as follows:  #1 = .0003777 / .03777% “likes” and .0000269 / .00269% commented.  #2 (sex sells) =  .0005072 ‘likes” and .0000387 / .00387% commented.

I was going to go through this for the entire list of 10, but you may understand my point (that I am, sloppily, beating into the ground).  I will do one more, as I already did Burt Bee’s interaction info on Twitter, as well.

At the time of posting 9,084,488 people “liked” the Oreo fanpage.  In the above, .0005586 / .05586% liked (a little more than one twentieth of one percent or 1/20%) and .0003344 / .03344% commented, the second posting was .0001671 / .01671% liked and .0000216 / .00216% commented.

I think you get the point…. even the most successful brand pages are creating interaction and real community involvement that is such a small percentage of their supposed community, we have to ask how this actually works?

I understand it’s a distribution channel, and you need to be available to guests and consumers that wish to interact with you on their own terms in their own comfort zones…. but numbers this small are almost impossible to fathom.  The way people are prostelytized by brands, I, personally, would imagine interaction levels much higher… at least into whole percentage points.  Is this Facebook’s fault?  Is this something greater involving the crisis of perception in social media?

More questions: Is having a contest that garners fans on your page a good measure of a potential consumer?  Are you attracting consumers that like contests, or consumers focused on the quality of your brand?  Is gaining a fan more important than interaction and community?  When you discount on a Facebook page, are you giving back money to a branded consumer that was already prepared to pay full price? These numbers are similar across the board, and I see endless smaller brand or hotel pages that don’t have a powerhouse of a community to energize.  Should we spend our time on this?  Should we spend our time on this …. *yet*?

Henry Harteveldt’s sage wisdom was so simple and zen:  ”Give it time.”

The Twilight Fan Page on Facebook has over 12 million fans… that’s the population of Calcutta or Los Angeles.  But, interaction levels are about the same, as they are for all major brands.  Crunch the numbers yourself, it’s fairly easy.

I am not claiming this to be a bona fide metric, but it begs some very important conversation.  Is this simply a wiki page for your brand advocate’s to show off their incessant narcissism – more about how you make them look & feel, rather than wanting a connection to a community?  If that’s the case, how much energy and time (and labor dollars) does a hotel invest on this brand advocacy versus legitimate conversation?

My main question is this: (as I sit and panic, and quandry, and furrow my brow):

Are numbers this small to be expected?

In the world of hard to track impressions and marketing measurements that dp provided a modicum of data and guidance (however skeptical I always am) – some people have said, “so what, who cares, it’s to be expected”.  But numbers *THAT* small?  Is that part of the Pareto Efficiency, or does the principle come into play (if you believe in that)? I am not saying you shouldn’t be on Facebook with a page, but what are we trying to do? This isn’t meant to be about misery or confusion, but I would quite like to see a conversation struck up about this.

What do you think?  I would love to know!

ED Note: A couple new articles in the past few days.

70% of FB users that have “liked” your page do *not* consider that permission to market to them.  Hey… I am on your side. That’s just idiotic.

And there are other “virtual crumedgeons” out there… fairly intelligent ones. In that link, the Economist reviews Jarod Lanier’s new book “You are not a Gadget”.

It’s nice to know that the 100% solar, 100% off grid Wilbur Hot Springs has seen this market opening up for some time… the unplugging escapists.  They highlight a number of fascinating New York Times articles here, and make a case for backing off a bit. Your brain on computers, indeed. See you at Wilbur.  (Full disclosure – I put that piece together for them).

Ed Note (7th Sept 2010):

Chris Brogan’s “The Coming Social Crash” article is interesting… about the impending mass step back from all these overwhelming tools.

But I stumbled on this today, and thought it was far too relevant to not attach.  I love the analogy of the story of social networking… but “Have we lost the plot in social networking?”  Some of the questions raised in that article are profound.  Can you really be #1 simply because you *are* #1?  How long is that model going to work for them?

I don’t always have stuff hit me, but it hit me today.

So I hadn’t figured out why Tripadvisor’s Restaurant Reviews had recently, so vigorously, taken off.  For those of us in hospitality who are aware of our brands online, it was hard to miss.  It is vital to stay on top of all conversation, reviews, and mentions, and whether through Google Alerts, or a random internet search… you noticed restaurants began to get reviews on Tripadvisor. It’s not really a surprise, and it is a completely natural direction for a travel site like TA.  But, where there wasn’t even an option to review or add restaurants until a couple months ago, the frequency of seeing reviews pop up is gaining momentum. MASSIVE momentum… and it seemed like it had to be larger than the Tripadvisor user base. I really noticed when some of our restaurants were ending up with as many, if not more, reviews than Yelp. I hadn’t been able to figure it out, but when I just added one of our newly opened restaurants to the Tripadvisor database, it used *FACEBOOK CONNECT* to populate the information about the restaurant, meaning the database lives both in Tripadvisor, where people can review it natively from that site, as well as inside Facebook as an application called “Tripadvisor Local Picks”.

Uh oh Yelp.

Yelpers can be attention seekers, but the platform of Facebook is the mecca of ME ME ME. If there is one thing a Facebooker is going to enjoy doing, it’s share their opinion – *ESPECIALLY* to their real live network of people who may be affected (or forewarned) by a review. It is obviously a natural part of networking, community, and connecting.  Oh.. it also vests itself in ego, and the desire to establish equity in social status. Go figure… but it never hurt, that while recommending a nice romantic restaurant to a friend, an ex fling sees your exciting life.  I am certainly not claiming this to be me, but the fact that studies have been done on detecting narcissism through facebook profiles, it’s certainly something that exists.  Here is another article that goes a bit deeper into social media and ego.

This means that, alongside the Tripadvisor user base populating restaurant reviews, we now have unwitting Facebook users contributing content to that database. You have a 400 million person population casually being redirected to Tripadvisor to help add content.  But this content generation is happening *from within Facebook*. This app makes it so that FB users are not leaving the site.  This reinforces the travel industry understanding that we can no longer create community when competing with communities like Facebook.  If Tripadvisor is learning this, and allowing off-site content generation, what do you think of your small community?  You need to congregate where people already exist, and reach out to them where they are online, not where you wish them to be (cue $100,000 website laden with bulky flash and slow load times).

In the meantime, you may have noticed Facebook searches being populated with hotel listings, and other brand names in wider internet searches. If a 400 million user population gets used to searching brand names and businesses for reviews, and information… that is the beginning of some powerful commerce. What’s more, Yelp could quickly become irrelevant under the crushing weight of Facebook’s population eager to add content for Tripadvisor, whether they know what they are doing or not.  It has been suggested that Facebook users don’t always know what they are doing (warning: hilarity ensues. Yes I know I have posted that a couple times.  It is too funny).

The way these two are dancing, I could see a marriage in the future. I think they want to date for a bit, but they might become a bit more popular than some of the other options out there. I am not saying Facebook could acquire Tripadvisor, but I am wondering what Google is going to do now that Yelp is off the table, or if that is something that might be revisited? Facebook and Tripadvisor paired could become a brutal force against Google’s plans, not to mention OTA’s like Expedia.  As for Yelp… they might not even see it coming.  Opentable reviews have already legitimized the review process in a way that Yelp has not been capable of.  Reviewing for friends, family, and network in a Facebook model creates more legitimacy still.

As always, I might be missing something. I know FB Connect works with Yelp in some ways, but I don’t think you can generate content from within a Facebook app?  There is so much to consider, I might be off.  But it’s always fun to watch this stuff develop. As always I promise to keep you posted. =)

There is a big discussion going on about the equity of attention in social media, and that curating attention is more important than posting information.  Curation is a fine line, and studies have shown that curation works better through less posting of more pertinent info, than more posting of one-off links, stories, etc.  Social Media is becoming quite good at capturing attention (think contests, PR stunts, promos, or other gimmicks), but maintenance of these relationships is becoming more important, difficult, and confounding.  If you look at Groupon, Homerun, and other coupon services (like San Francisco’s SF Gate deals that just started) – it isn’t hard to build a network so much as keeping that network interacting, which is the real challenge.  These coupon services are ideal examples: People will sign up for a specific offer (relevant to their interests), then react like the rest of the email offers (which they opted-in to) are part of their “daily spam regimen” (delete, delete, delete).

It is important to step out of your world as the business using social media to reach guests, and think how users of social media would like to be reached.

So… Facebook Pages, over-posting, and hiding streams.

We need to address this issue about how people use Facebook, versus how businesses wish people would use Facebook.  There is a fast growing problem that fledgling social media enthusiasts & page administrators are not aware of; although, they are encountering it daily in their happy-go-lucky power posting of relevant information for their hotels.

There are less eyes on your Facebook page than you realize, and you are losing more all the time.

It is a universal gripe…. even though no one truly enjoys Facebook, we need to be there as a business simply because that’s where potential guests are located, and that’s where we can perk up our ears to listen for mentions about our brand, and grow when we encounter advice or commentary.  Firm ROI is secondary to our experimental presences on Facebook profiles and pages.  Some are, in fact, successful in driving incremental revenue to outlets, some achieve positive brand building, some act as help-all concierges, some operate as ombudsmen, and still others have zero idea what they are doing or why they are there.  But businesses know they need to be available to their potential clients, even without a mitigated plan.  I think this is where a slight disconnect occurs for the business (and I have a whole post about this coming up):  People think it is about the business using social media (YAY! We’re HERE!), but it’s more about the availability of the business for the consumer.  More precisely, it’s about being available, but not being intrusive.  The way some people post on their Facebook Hotel Page, it’s tantamount to pounding on your guest’s door all hours of the day with little bits of information.  It’s overwhelming, and it is off-putting.

There is one simple fact, and it’s that the way you want consumers to use Facebook is *not* the way that Facebook users are using it. Yet.

We all know that Facebook is buggy, and for some businesses and neophytes, figuring out all of the settings and controls must be like wading through syrup.  For business’ savvy enough to realize you need to reach your audience where that audience chooses to congregate (chat rooms, groups, Twitter, etc), it isn’t made any easier by Facebook, and their lack of interactivity or ability to create real commerce with people.  Connections happen, and they are wonderful to see develop, but people are still reticent to have any real interaction with “business-as-commerce” versus “business-as-brand”, which is obvious in Facebook’s positioning with the ease of “liking”.   The throwaway simplicity of “liking” a brand at this point is meant to identify user profiles for targeted ad marketing, and not to promote any real deep interaction with the brand page itself.  Meaning, people are quite ready to “wear” a Facebook page brand as they would Gucci sunglasses or Prada bag, but they are not ready to transact with the brands themselves.  A lot of feedback from Facebook users is that business page posts still have the “feel” of being “spammy”.  With that in mind, we are already fighting an uphill battle in seeking out ways to connect with Facebook users that are fans of our specific brands.  This becomes precarious, however, because many businesses over-post pics and info in an eager and noble attempt to share their services/products.  This can actually drive people away.

Of course, the logical way a social network would remedy this is to have the brand advocate user “unfriend” or “defan” a page.  That way, a business page could use data exhaust and user actions to help learn in real time about what they do well, or what they might be doing wrong.  This works quite well on Twitter, and their are even Apps built on the API that allow users to find out precisely what they did that lost, or gained, followers.

But leave it to Facebook, a company obviously more concerned with user-experience less than the monetary value of those previous “likes”, to create the ability to “hide streams”.  It isn’t Facebook’s concern that a page isn’t curating attention, so much that the user enjoys a brand.  To Facebook, liking the brand is more important than telling the brand they are interacting poorly.  Once a Facebook user has chosen to “LIKE” a page, they will do almost anything to maintain that superficial connection for ad-model demographic targeting reasons.

Leave it to Facebook’s closed, corrupted environment to allow disingenuous networks; instead of Facebook creating meaningful networks of truly interactive partners, they have allowed users to hide streams, so you can be part of a network without really interacting with it. For those that are completely unaware, the option exists within Facebook to “hide” a stream, be it a page, an app, or person.  This is wonderful if you are sick of Foursquare check ins or Mafia Wars updates from friends, but it violates a vital aspect of social media’s earnest and transparent attempt at communication, and interactivity.  When a “stream” becomes overactive (constant updates, possibly via RSS or blog feed), or hyperactive (admin posting multiple links rapid fire, attempting to batch process relevant content for the hotel)…. users are hiding your stream.

This is a problem – not just for businesses, but for Facebook, as well.  Facebook is creating vast, HUGE false networks, or at least connections without interaction.  I don’t mean to be glib – but doesn’t it strike you as worrisome that a vast community of people isn’t really that much of a community at all?  I know it’s a vague concept, but how much trust will you stake in a network based off of false pretenses? The network that is supposed to connect everyone in the world is doing more to create a completely “tromp l’oeil” experience in regards to social media – it looks more like a network than it really is.  In the simplest terms, this is going to come back to bite Facebook big time, and they will have to make some decisions about hidden streams in the future.

The entire aspect of being able to be friends with people, or like a page, with the ability to “hide” their stream is disastrous on the effect of real networking, communication, and building potential commerce from within Facebook.  When your stream is hidden, you have no idea that it has happened.  When a Facebook user hides your posts, they still  “like” your brand, and are associated with it….. *WITHOUT EVER SEEING YOUR CONTENT*.  You disappear from their eyes, and you now have “phantom fans” who don’t interact with you.  Of course, Facebook made “liking” something inordinately easy to do, a couple months ago.  But in accomplishing their social graph concept, it further dismantles meaningful communication and interaction in lieu of passive, meaningless brand identity meant for ad-marketing, with zero regard to relevant idea exchange.

So, when users “hide” the stream, they still look like fans, but they don’t receive your posts anymore. Facebook, or the fan, doesn’t alert you, nor are you informed in any way.  The business, as a result,  has no idea they have been “hidden”, while the Page’s fan count will remain constant.  It’s been happening for a lot of business pages, and it’s becoming a problem for people that don’t understand the interaction people expect from a business, versus the interaction a business wants (wishes) to have with their clients.  If a business can’t learn from their mistakes, how will this experience improve for the people involved? If a user can haphazardly “like” at the same time as “hiding” those people or pages, is that really a relevant connection?

Your hotel may have 1000 fans, but what if 100 have hidden you? There has been so little conversation en masse about this “hiding” phenomenon, that I can’t accurately gauge what percentage of “like”-fans end up hiding pages, but in every day conversation about Facebook, in an extensive group of acquaintances, it seems to be a very common, and very popular, activity.  That’s scary.  If it’s a commonly known function in Facebook, you could have 30-70% of your audience not listening anymore.  That’s really scary.

Frankly I find it markedly cynical, and disingenuous.  If I had any clout, I would ask Facebook to stop it right now, and not because I don’t like being able to hide things in my own stream.  I love not seeing any of those apps populating wall, but it does make my decisions to “follow” and “like” pages less meaningful, and less legitimate.  If I couldn’t hide a feed, would I really fan a page, if I knew I were meant to legitimately interact and communicate with that brand?  Would the brands be intelligent enough to know how to court users, or captivate them enough so as not to drive them away?

I have had some success with how I manage interaction on Facebook… I post a link occasionally, but save most of the meat for a blog post which includes events, commentary, relevant google alert posts, comments, info – and then let that blog post feed into Facebook.  It is a whole bunch of posts / links in one single post.  That way people can access and interact with it if they want, at their leisure.  Instead of the links coming across their wall as one post at a time, they all sit in one place for the guest’s convenience.  One post with 20 links seems to be received much more favorably than 20 links posted once at a time.  Remember, this isn’t about you or your business force marketing or pushing your brand onto Facebook users; this is a place for you to be available to potential guests. Don’t get carried away.

If you overpost, you risk becoming irrelevant without having any knowledge or metric from Facebook to see how you are doing, or what you can do to curate the attention necessary to strike a balance.  Attention, in this new “economy”, is equity.  And curating the attention is now your sole job.  That’s interesting – because in our rush to curate attention, a lot of us forgot to ask how, precisely, to do that.  In an eager rush to share exciting news about your hotel, you may be losing eyes without having any say in the matter.  The only real option is to patiently fence sit, and be a skeptic.

My thought is to be patient, and ride out this precarious situation.  For the time being, Facebook users are hesitant to interact with businesses; when it becomes more acceptable, *then* get more interactive with your fans regarding products, selling, etc.  For now, we want to curate, and maintain, this attention.  The best way to do it is by being calculating, and to some extent… quiet.  At least make sure your formula = less posts + better content.

I, unfortunately, don’t have any answers.  It’s simply something that has been on my mind, and it’s not a conversation people are having on the implementation level of social media.  There are the tech bloggers yammering about equity, curation, & attention, but businesses have a way to go before they understand this aspect of Facebook.

This may change…. FB may cement itself and people will eventually get used to it as a vast & interactive portal, or it could fall apart under poor management and lack of acumen in development of the business pages side of the site.  Most Facebook users are still stuck in the concept of a private dialogue between close friends, where Twitter has evolved into a more interactive real world community.  It is sorely obvious that Pages…. are…. yet…. another…. slapped together…. on top of old architecture…. idea…. which Facebook threw together because they were worried about losing brands to Twitter’s opt-in propensity for real commerce.  Pages weren’t thought out in any real detail, and as these problems begin to mount, FB will need to make some serious choices about how to fix their site.

Until then….

This specific issue is why I organize most of our relevant links into a blog that lists all the information, pics, stories, etc.  Other than that, I reply to people’s comments and responses on the page. I post natively whenever possible, for reasons which I will address in a subsequent blog post.

In the end, this is less about Facebook, and more about you and your business page.  We are a captive audience to Facebook’s shortcomings, and it is a necessary evil for the time being.  In thinking about how you use Facebook Pages for business, you may want to consider the above; especially if you are one of the Pages that continues with a rapid-fire, staccato-like posting of brand mentions, deals, articles, press releases, etc….

It’s time to rethink your eagerness versus effectiveness on Facebook Pages.  Of course, as I write this… all I can do is wonder about Facebook’s effectiveness, overall.

Google PLACES (or where did my Local Business Center shove off to?)

One of my favorite developments in the last few weeks, aside from Google’s experimentation with populating rates of hotels into it’s maps, is Google “Places”.  The blogosphere is abuzz with gentle, quiet speculation on what in the heck is going on here.  It’s obvious repositioning to compete with the likes of Yelp and Foursquare.  But Google is rolling some of the features attached to the new name a bit slow, and we will see how it reshapes our mobile experience.  I, for one, really trust Google’s methodical approach to entering this space… and when they unroll their entire suite, I think it will challenge Yelp to Expedia and other OTA’s.  If you can advert with Places in your market… let me know how it goes!

As Google positions, Tripadvisor works to get ads going in the first place

Tripadvisor toils in it’s monetization attempts… First hotels, now tourist boards.  You know how I feel about paying for your hotel to be listed with information on TA… DO IT!  Think about what percentage of your traffic comes from OTA’s, then start figuring out depending on your market and rank on TA how much of that traffic jumps to Expedia or others straight from Tripadvisor.  That 25% markup those OTA’s are stealing from you will come back, and likely quickly pay for the Tripadvisor listing fee.  It’s a smart move, and a cheap experiment.

Something else that might be a costly experiment in regards to Tripadvisor is losing you reservations to Expedia, and hurting your SEO.  Tripadvisor badges or widgets that aren’t actively blocking search engines are likely bad for business.  I posted (the below) article about how it hurts your hotel site’s SEO, but bolsters Tripadvisor’s.  What I didn’t realize was this – if people link from your website and booking engine to Tripadvisor via that widget – and like what they see on Tripadvisor – they are usually sent to EXPEDIA to book their room.  You just linked your guest to a page that will make you pay a 25% commission.  I don’t have all the answers, but in the comments section of *THIS ARTICLE*, the gent describes a fancy way to blind the widget.  I have also seen hotel sites that simply copy and paste the review from Tripadvisor or Yelp into different parts of their website – thus stuffing a page full of relevant keywords that can also help the guest decide to book… while continually mingling with your booking engine the whole time, never chancing lost control of your inventory.

MORE SOCIAL TOOLS, INFO, & Tech Talk

Unique and fairly intelligent ways to leverage twitter… a non hotel article to get you thinking about what twitter is, and how you can leverage it to benefit your property.

A brief link, but a good question – who do you use for hotel videos? Hired actors? Regular line staff? It’s important to consider how you want to represent your hotel, and how people will receive the information.  Honestly, I think the manipulated, high gloss marketing message is in shambles, and when it looks too slick, people will immediately not trust it or find it disingenuous.   Whatever the case, this is all about having a plan and understanding as you tackle new media…. if you don’t these things come out of left field and surprise you.

Design Hotels launches a Facebook Booking Engine…. (call it an F.B.E. for short!).  This will, once and for all, solve the problem of wondering whether people are on Facebook to proselytize and chatter about brands as a showy display of feathers (I LIKE THIS BRAND! It means I am AWESOME!), or is it a place to commune, share, and ultimately – BOOK?  Just checking it out, it seems fairly confusing.  I enter my dates, and then I mysteriously land on an unassociated page without it transmitting the choices I made.  Seems like FB booking has a way to go.

I for one am a) sick of hearing about the IPAD, b) sick about the marketing reinventing history as if Apple invented the tablet, and c) sick of hearing about all the giddy fanboys trying to adopt slick but inherently flawed tech as nothing more than a marketing gimmick.  HOWEVER…. this article, IPAD: Hotel Hype, or Help?,  says it is making Intercontinental’s concierge more personable & functional (not to mention cool like they are from Star Trek), and it isn’t just hype.  I know the tablet will be the future or consumers and content ingestors…. but I just think we are a bit of a way off from it being functional for content generators.  This is simply a machine to advertise to consumers, no more, no less.  Playing a game or reading the paper is incidental.

HOTEL TALK!

RevPar laws basically state – Trading Rate for Occupancy isn’t that smart of a move (Labor, among other operating costs, rise significantly, and the added dollars don’t always even out on the bottom line).  So why is the “Name your own price” phenomena rearing it’s ugly head?  Phocuswright tries to explain here.

Not to mention… most of us still think it is perceived value that has a big part in selling hotels… and not handing back money to someone who would have paid the higher rate you just tanked, anyway.

Do you think modern marketing for hospitality is at a crossroads?  I do.  But then again, maybe I think the doormen are more about the hallmark of our industry – hospitable, friendly customer service – than marketing.  When marketers start calling normal operations “marketing”, you know they are scrambling to make sense of the confusing new world of social media.

TIG shares their wealth of knowledge with hoteliers, and more!

TIG releases more reports, further exemplifying why people want to work with Thayer.  Wow.  The reports are on Microsites, Mobile, & Apps, as well as a 2 part on Social Media & the DMO Marketer. Double Wow equals video leveraging of insider’s tips…. Quick, simple, instructional videos from TIG on internet marketing, hotel SEO, and more!  If you ever have the budget to work with these guys, there is only one answer about whether you should…. YES. You should.

MOBILE IS A POINT OF SALE, but remember it isn’t all or nothing!

This one is a slam dunk, because Mobile Marketing is Good News for Hotels! Beyond that article, what you really want are actual tips – not just on energizing your comprehension of mobile marketing – but getting into it and doing it right.  Some have deemed it the “new point of sale” – and Mashable helps you figure out how to work with it.  Mashable is sometimes a bit vacuous with mindless social media fandom…. but these *9 tips about location based marketing* are winners.  If you need some help finding the business page in Foursquare.. well.. it’s right here.  If you are trying to figure out more, and it’s over your head… you might want to consider EYE FOR TRAVEL’s conference on Mobile in Travel & Hospitality in London, early June. I linked the agenda back there, and if it doesn’t get you excited about the potential of mobile (or kinetic energy at this point), nothing will.  Social Mobile is the ROI everyone has been salivating for.  Pay attention to it.

But remember… as mobile burgeons, traditional channels still provide results.  Not only do those channels hold tight, so does email marketing (something Hotel Marketing Strategies has been a big supporter of)… as you can see with some surprising information he put together on a recent post.

COFFEE TALK, or *PHEW* I am sort of getting overwhelmed because I am a hotelier, not a tech guru or social geek!

I think it’s important to take all these rapid changes with gentle aplomb, some furrowed brows, but a lot of thoughtful shoulder shrugging too.  It’s important to be a fence sitter sometimes… accumulate as much data as possible before making any decision.  I am not saying delaying action, but I am suggesting to be thoughtful.  Don’t automatically become a convert to this new world, because no one really understands it yet.  *NO ONE*.  I think Dick Feynman (a hero of mine) could have said it best:

“in any organization there ought to be the possibility of discussion… fence sitting is an art, and it’s difficult, and it’s important to do, rather than to go headlong in one direction or the other. It’s just better to have action, isn’t it than to sit on the fence? Not if you’re not sure which way to go, it isn’t.”

Everyone expected the telegraph to kill newspapers (you need to be a paid Economist subscriber to read that fantastic article), the TV to kill the radio, social media to kill traditional methods of marketing… but we all know that “sky is falling” nonsense is just about capturing attention to headlines, and the future will be a mish mash of everything.  Don’t panic…. just try to comprehend.  And if you still need a basic review of how to engage in social media, here is a fairly competent and quick article about how to do it well.

BUT THAT’S JUST CONSERVATIVE HESITATION, because the future is now….

That warning being said, here’s something that I call jaw dropping, and possibly a slight peak at the future of a semantic web (as they keep saying.  It’s the new “mobile is here! 2006, Mobile is here 2007, mobile is here.. maybe 2008, mobile is coming… 2009, MOBILE IS TOTALLY FREAKING HERE 2010!) -

SPEED MATTERS…. This is where the start of today’s post gets somewhat scary.  Did you just finish a website re-design, or pump endless cash for years into internet marketing branding and design?  Well… those flash laden pages that are pretty when they finally do load are a drain on your Google ranking… and your SEO suffers the more bulky or content laden your sites are.  GOOGLE ANNOUNCES SPEED IS NOW TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT IN REGARDS TO INDEXING. In fact, Hotelmarketing.com has a good suggestion… if you use flash, you might want to take a peak at your own speed…. and see where you stand.

Which leads us to Adtech SF, and some interesting tweets that I am commenting on in regards to the concept of the dying brand website.

Apparently the brand website is dead (or committed to an iron lung), and you don’t need it anymore.

At a fairly important conference about the advertising & the internet, they basically said that a brand’s website is dead.  They are dealing with some fairly complex issues of sustainability for business in online competition, coupled with the need to have accessibility to how your brand exists online.  I am extrapolating off the conversation I heard, but it’s basically the following:

Basically, a website should be for a booking engine, and directions, but anything else might not work, especially as google is starting to improve rankings based off of load time and speed of website.  The idea is that the way the internet is headed into a more communal area where it is about niches of relevant interests, and it will be nearly impossible to leverage a small brand website versus all the community based chatter in regards to certain topics.  In addition to this, it isn’t in the best interest of ANY of these communities to lose the potential power of consumer dollars spent through their portal, so why should they happily direct people to you in the first place?  In this, your website is moot because everyone is forming their opinions in conversations with user generated pictures, stories, etc.  The way search is changing, even booking engines will exist within social platforms (IE Facebook), and people will slowly stop visiting your site, and ultimately, no one will be going to them all together.  Also… the SEO era is moving into a “semantic” era where search engines will be reading user generated photos and videos, whether they are tagged or not -

Meaning there is *your* contribution.. a couple expensive photos, an expensive site – but the internet community members with keywords and chatter alone will overwhelm any input you have.  You won’t be able to compete with the niche communities that are actively owning *your* brand, vs making your site relevant or even noticeable in return.  Therefore, your site will be less relevant, be pushed down overall, and even the anciengt codger who won’t give up the old fashioned way of booking through the hotel’s site – well – it’s going to be even harder to find.

Scary stuff.  And not that far off.  It’s fairly interesting too, but…..

Time for me to retire. haha.

No – seriously.  Anyone have an island they could lend?

If those well researched and thoughtful representations of how things will be changing isn’t far enough in the future, let’s move a decade down the road… to 2012 (haha).  These sanguine and cogent predictions aren’t the typical crazy, wide eyed guru’s ramblings.  These are smart… and likely.  Marketing Times has 11 Predictions for social media in 2012… and they might interest you.

It sure as hell interests me.