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Social Media Optimization and the Hospitality Industry

Read an interesting post by Cameron Olthuis on an introduction to a newly coined phrase..."Social Media Optimization". Basically an SEO-like approach to fast-burgeoning social media like blogs, vlogs, wikis, etc.
"Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a new term that was recently coined by Rohit Bhargava and has since been taking on life of its own. In his introduction to SMO, Rohit draws similar comparisons to SEO. SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren't the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. While it's not taking over SEO yet, it has the potential to someday soon."
It would be very interesting to see where this goes when it comes to business...particularly the hospitality industry. Social Media is all about people...and guess what...so is Hospitality! The Hospitality Industry has traditionally been a little slower than other, more tech-savvy sectors in adopting new technology and online marketing opportunities...but this has changed a lot over the past few years. Some hotel chains have taken superb, proactive approaches to online marketing, distribution and public relations, including the creation / adoption of SEM, SEO, RSS, Blogging, Social media advertising among other things.

The key challenge will be controlling the message that goes out of course...this is why most corporations are scared to get involved with the more radical elements of the internet revolution (social media definitely leads the way here) - will it all just lead to a "controlled chaos" approach eventually? After all, a compromise must be reached, somewhere, sometime. One things for sure, of course...social media and other revolutionary internet advances are here to stay...accept it!

Read the post mentioned here: Introduction to Social Media Optimization

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Posted 08/24/06 by JJ | Filed under: E Commerce and E Business

Comments

Great post!

There's so many possibilities in the hospitality industry for SMO. But you like you said, they are traditionally very slow to adopt the new opportunities.

Even controlling the message is getting easier now that we are getting all kinds of buzz tracking tools. It gives you the chance to respond and help shape the conversation.

Posted by Cameron Olthuis at 08/24/06 12:25:25

Thanks for your feedback and comments Cameron - buzz tracking sounds like a great idea...do you have experience with these sort of tools...and what works best, in your experience?

Posted by hotelguru at 08/24/06 12:29:47

Yeah, I've got quite a bit of experience with buzz tracking. There's quite a few big agencies that've created buzz tracking solutions for their clients, I have yet to find one I really like though and they are all pretty pricey.

Then of course you have all the blog search engines like Technorati, Google blog search, Rollyo, Sphere, etc etc. Those are fairly decent tools to use.

We (my company) have actually been developing a buzz tracking tool of our own and we're within days of opening a private beta test. If it sounds like something you like to try out send me an email, you just have to promise to give some feedback.

cameron (at) acsseo.com

BTW - I have been reading through your blog and I like what you're doing. Lots of good posts.

Posted by Cameron Olthuis at 08/24/06 12:44:10

Thanks again Cameron - great stuff - will be in touch shortly by email :)

Posted by hotelguru at 08/24/06 12:47:38

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