Travel Brands Engagement in Various Social Media

On March, I did a research on travel brands in Asia concerning their behaviour in social media like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Myspace, and Youtube; and whether they have a blog site as well. So I started to look for hotels and then airlines. First it was fun reading their profiles, posts and updates. But when I found that the search result esp. in Facebook, showing hundreds of them, took me almost a lifetime to configure out which one is official or personal. Eventually I got the accurate numbers. The pain didn't stop here.

Decided to narrow down the search into 1 month backward, I collected each profiles activities in various social media. Unfortunately Facebook didn't have the functionality to show # of posts (unlike Twitter), so I did it manual - using my finger (felt stupid pointing at the monitor, counting while other hand scrolling the cursor up & down). Some were highly active in updating their accounts (such as Airasia), while some were not (such as Singapore Airlines).

I found that 90% of travel brands in Asia have Facebook page, followed by Twitter and Flickr, Youtube and LinkedIn. Hi5 is the least popular among them. It is amazing that most travel brands also have multiple profiles in Facebook. Usually each profile is to promote different product or country (such as Shangri-La and Mandarin Oriental Hotels).

For full analysis and lesson learned, you can download the Travel Brand Engagement Report here.

What is Google Wave?

Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.




Google Wave has a lot of innovative features, but here are just a few:

1. Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.
2. Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.
3. Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook (Facebook) application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.
4. Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.
5. Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.
6. Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.
7. Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.
8. Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

Learn more about:

• Terminology
• Wave Gadgets
• Wave Robots
• Wave Embeds

here > http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/

Social Media from the Island of the Gods

What do you envision when you think of Bali? Surf? Sun? Rice fields? Now you can add to that list Social Media Marketing. Bali firms water&stone and ClearWhiteSpace have joined forces to launch Bali’s first social media marketing service.

The rapid growth and rise in effectiveness of content channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg and the like creates exciting new opportunities for companies to reach out to their target markets. These new media present not only fresh channels to distribute information but more importantly they also provide a forum for engaging the world in a two-way dialogue.

Traditional marketing and PR don’t provide the immediacy, specific target marketing, or detailed reporting that is achieved by online channels. The nature of social media provides marketers and PR personnel with a much richer way to interact with people. Because the media is simultaneously one-to-one and one-to-many, companies can extend their reach while still maintaining a personal and persuasive voice.

For those new to the social media arena, tracking, responding and engaging users can be a daunting task that includes not only technical challenges, but also a new type of strategic execution. The combined services of ClearWhiteSpace and water&stone solve both of these problems with a turnkey social media marketing service. Ric Shreves of water&stone adds: "By combining cutting edge technology tools with a deep and experienced understanding of the marketing mix, we provide our clients with access to this new way of reaching out to the world. By putting it all together in a turnkey package, our clients will gain a competitive advantage over those slower to react and engage social media users."

Complimenting each other in their areas of expertise, water&stone brings their technical experience to the table and ClearWhiteSpace their client communication and PR skills. ClearWhiteSpace and water&stone work by first tailoring a social media strategy to a client’s needs and then by providing the execution skills to get the job done. They offer strategic planning, monitoring, engagement and escalation services, and also include the creation and maintenance of online profiles to raise brand awareness and product recognition. Jo McFarlane of CWS states: "Our traditional sales and marketing experience allows us to understand client strategy, to educate ourselves quickly about brands and to communicate on their behalf in a language that compliments the brand, the product and the specific channel audience."

Near real time monitoring and accurate tracking means that clients gain the ability to test their target market and evaluate results almost immediately. The team’s monitoring systems give tremendous reach and enable them to receive all online postings relevant to the client and track the dialogue that results. Postings are measured by both their influence and their sentiment, thereby enabling clients to identify and track the most influential voices and to follow trends in market sentiment. Jo adds, "With social media tracking you can find out who is talking about your brand and what they are saying. You can also identify areas of concern and spot issues before they evolve into problems. It’s the new PR and so much more.

The question isn’t can you afford to do it, but rather, can you afford to ignore it!"

Things to do when your website is reported as attacked site

Leaving your domain or website non manageable for quite a long time can cause a disaster, especially when page rank is already high. Frequent updates on content, probably change of design here and there, and monitor stats & traffic are necessary to keep the robot and traffics. Here's what happened when you abandon your website:











Next, steps you can (or must) do to escape this.

1. Sign it to your Google Webmaster Tools and see for details
2. Go to StopBadware.org's Security Tips for Websites and follow the instructions
3. Visit Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page
4. Contact your hosting provider and read forums for similar problem to other users
5. Check the web files for unknown files, codes, extension or applications
6. Put your site offline for temporary until you fix the problem

After you've done some or all actions required above, ask Google to re-review your website.

Technorati Claim Code

This is to confirm Technorati

Technorati Profile

Social Media Marketing

These couple of weeks I have been busied by what is so called SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING. My boss asked me to do some research on social media tools and services over the internet. Bumped into some good stuffs. We subscribe for the free trial of Scoutlabs and SM2. Hope next week we can come to a decision of one good social media reporting services for our clients.

Here's a glimpse for those who's not familiar with Social Media Marketing. It is is an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. The number-one advantage is generating exposure for the business, followed by increasing traffic and building new business partnerships.

Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. In the context of Internet marketing, social media refers to a collective group of web properties whose content is primarily published by users, not direct employees of the property (e.g. the vast majority of video on YouTube is published by non-YouTube employees). read more...

One on One with Ric Shreves of Water & Stone

Ric Shreves is an author and one of the founding partners of Water & Stone, a web development company that specializes in open source content management systems. Shreves has been building CMS websites for over 10 years for global brands such as BASF, Colgate-Palmolive, Tesco Lotus, FPDSavills and many others. He has also published several books on open source and open source content management systems. He is presently working on two titles for Wiley & Co., the Joomla! Bible and the Drupal Bible, which are scheduled for publication later this year. We asked him about using open source content management tools.

FCM: You've studied open source content management. In your view, what are the top enterprise class open source tools? read more..

WaterandStone

Water & Stone
Jl. Raya Semer 888, Kerobokan, Denpasar - Bali.

I recently work at water&stone. It is a boutique web development and online marketing agency. Our specialty is building web sites with open source content management systems, particularly Joomla, Drupal, Magento, and WordPress.

water&stone was founded in Bangkok, Thailand in 2003 by partners Ric Shreves and Nalisa Sitabut. The offices are now located in Bali, Indonesia where we employ a mix of designers, programmers and content management professionals.

While some of our clients are in South East Asia, we also work with many clients in the U.K., Europe, Australia, and North America. We service our overseas clients by taking advantage of some of the best strengths of the Internet: The ability to provide platforms for collaboration and the ability to unite geographically diverse audiences. We not only encourage clients to employ technology to help them solve their business problems, but we also do it ourselves.

We invite you to explore this site to learn more about water&stone. Use can view examples of our work by visiting the Portfolio section of the site. More information can be sent to you on request. To reach us, email to nalisa@waterandstone.com.

Busby Competition

I heard that there's another SEO competition by the end of the year. It was held by somekind of hosting provider if I'm not mistaken. It's called BUSBY SEO COMPETITION and open for all Indonesia citizen.

But I'm less interested since I don't have a friend to compete. My motive is not to win it over some strangers ( I might not win it at all), but friends give you more pleasure. We communicate. 2 friens of mine where we used to run an SEO competition are no longer available. One has leaving Bali, one is in Sanur busy with his work.

Last week I bumped into the SERP of this Busby competition when I searched for the keywords of my IndoSEO.com (Indonesia Search Engine Optimization dotcom). The participants were quite many. I didn't know who the winner is.

Bye 2008, Hello 2009

MERRY XMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR

In this upcoming year I will be officialy working as a Web Marketing for 2 years. Same old duties: checking web ranking and traffic at Search Engine, monitoring Google AdWord and analize Google Analytics and reporting to the bosses. Not much SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) work since the company owner is highlighting the marketing and online advertisement for the website.

In this upcoming year I will be already lived in Bali for 3 years. Island in Indonesia where I never think of staying and working before.

Last year I abandoned my IndoSEO project. This year I'm thinking to work on it again. I want to be an E-Commerce Manager after this. Haven't got the chance yet. Hopefully this year. Surely not in this company. I wish that everything is going better for everyone, well .. maybe just for some people, and thats including me.

Exotiq Villa Holidays LAUNCH

Being a website project manager for the first time giving me lots of new experience. How to become a leader, managing time-skill-resource and self learning. I never imagined how the journey would be, but i was ready. Took 3 months to re-designed the company website. Thousand additional functional, script and design changes, and seemed like a life-time web testing. Late hours, weekend overtime, pressure and stress.

Today, October 14, 2008 we all gathered in meeting room at 3rd floor to have the most anticipating moment of a project that spent thousand dollars in the creation process. 12 noon we counted down the time and BOOM! ....

Google Analytics How to: Step 1

Get to know how a website performs in search engine and understand visitor's behavior during visiting web pages. Google provides tools that generate reports on statistics and numbers on a website performance including e-commerce. They are Google AdWords and Analytics. In this topic, I will explain the Analytics first, since we don't need to spend any money to use this Google tool.

These are steps in using Google Analytics:

1. Do you have a website already? If not, make one. Or two.
2. Do you have a Google account? Get your G-Mail email address now.
3. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/. Login using your G-Mail account.
4. Click the "Add website profile" at bottom left of the page; follow this configuration:





5. Next is to insert the code into the page of your website. If you can't, consult your web programmer.
6. When it' successful, Google Analytics will be able to gather the data within 24 hours. If you want to see it, re-login to the URL above.