Category: Marketing

How could SOPA affect the Independent Hotelier?

Sopa Infographic
SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act. Currently US Congress and Senate are considering this act together with the The Protect IP Act with hearings and all for enactment.

I’m an independent Hotelier based in Europe. So I only have a slight understanding of all of their implications and ramifications, but I understand Internet giants like Google and Facebook are (among others) heavily lobbying against these two bills. Why would that be? When enacted copyright holders can via very simple measures (a writ to a hosting company) have bad websites cut off from the Internet. Furthermore financial institutions like banks and credit card companies could by the same sort of simple measure to be forced to cut off the bad guys from their income.

Now Google is noteworthy for scraping copyrighted material like photos from everybody’s website and regurgitating same for the “better of search results”. FaceBook does it in a slightly different way: It lets its members publish copyrighted material.

Can I now simply force Google to delete any photo material of my hotel I have the copyright to? Can I force their ISP to cut them off? Can I force their banks to cut their financial resources?

Take this one step further: Online Travel Agents do sometimes scrape copyrighted material. Tripadvisor may do it. Groupon like sites may do it.

Can I as an independent Hotelier force all these power houses from the Internet?

I know, I’m just dreaming of a more organic Internet that is not dominated by search giants or OTA’s, but sometimes it is nice to dream off.

My 2 cents. And your’s?

WTM, Travel Bloggers and their Avatars (2) – James Craven

I met James Craven (@CravenTravels) for the first time at TBCamp2011. A very nice guy with whom I tweet already some time and whom I very much liked to meet IRL (In Real Life) while the time was too short to talk shop a bit more.

Does he look like his Avatar? Just Look at this Twilk Wall (and click on the image if it is too small for your old eyes):

Craven on Twilk Small

You probably see what I mean.

  1. James is a very nice bloke, but I like to meet him, not the two kids he is on the photo with.
  2. Also nice is that the avatar shows James is conscious of poppy day…however on the wall the poppy is almost as big as his head.
  3. It seems to me the photo used for his avatar is not very recent.
  4. If you study the Twilk wall, you also see that if you want to use a portrait, make it discernible on such wall, much more a close up.
  5. Now especially James: He is a sales person and should know the first impression can kill any deal….I ask you…

My 2 cents

Update:

As a sequel to TBCamp 11 Darren wondered whether Social Media are killing discussions on blogs. Sure they do, but you can cut and paste the answers in the post….

Last edited by GJE on November 14, 2011 at 11:57 pm

WTM, Travel Bloggers and their Avatars (1) – Debbie Hindle

I saw Debbie (see BGB and @BGBcomms ) in action at WTM and took a shot behind about 200 people in a full social media session from which I cut out this portrait.

Debbie works in Travel PR and is one of still few PR types who is actively engaging with travel bloggers and social media.

I’ve bugged many people online that they should use an avatar that you can recognize from afar and that enables you to identify the person in question if you see the avatar in a stream or on a wall and moreover that you will be able to recognize them when you meet them in real life. An avatar is a marketing tool for your own brand!

This is the portrait Debbie uses for her Twitter account:

A wonderful portrait and from this you would no doubt recognize her if you met her in real life. However avatars are very small and avatars are in people’s mind when they try to discern someone they know in a room full of people they do not know very well.

If you compare the portraits now cropped to avatar size, wouldn’t you agree with me that the color portrait is far better tham the black and white one? You may use this one if you wish, Debbie!

Update
About half a year after this post Debbie took my advice and changed the Black and White Avatar for a Colored one.

Last edited by GJE on July 22, 2012 at 4:32 pm

The 5 Key Tools for Effective Facebook Marketing

The 5 Key Tools for Effective Facebook Marketing

View more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing

I just came across this slideshow and wanted to pin it down for future reference and maybe you like the share.

Celebrity Hotelier and the Long Tail

Long Tail
I might misunderstand the term, but in marketing and distribution the term Long Tail is frequently used to give the small independent entrepreneur or the small independent blogger like me hope to be able to earn a piece of the huge internet cake.

Chris Anderson is usually attributed the term Long Tail.

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

But there is this very old post that stems from before Chris’ article.

Celebrity Hotelier
Almost two years ago I used the term “Celebrity Hotelier” in a post here to see if I could crank my visibility up. It was a success. Soon afterward I got confirmation from various sides that Google (Big Bro) picked me up as a Celebrity Hotelier. Big Bro even granted me frist page result for the search term Hotelier.

Even today it seems to work after several overhauls of Big Bro’s algorithm:
I’m still ranking as number 1 (and number 2) on page 1 for the term Celebrity Hotelier.

And position 4 or 5 on page 1 for the term Hotelier:
Hotelier ranking number 4 or 5 on the search result

Quite possible I’m not able to circumvent the local search result algorithm of Big Bro, and that the conclusion is different from different parts of the world, would love to receive some feedback here.

Can Long mean Long time ago as well?
I got an e-mail today:

hi there.

this will sound very odd…

I am an architecture student in London. Last year I did a student design project set in Naples, which included a fictional character under the title ‘hotelier’. I needed an face for the character, so i typed ‘hotelier’ into google and found your picture.

I then did a pen drawing of the photograph for coherence of presentation… which I thought I would pass on!

The very photo of the earlier post worked into a drawing. Thanks Mate!

I know I may have stretched the term Long Tail a bit, but I found it funny this all came back after such a long time, especially in internet metrics where all seems focussed on here and now only…and may help defend my position.

In addition I also note that a Stumble by my blogging friend Barbara Weibel (@holeinthedonut) of A Hole in the Donut bears some influence on Big Bro as well.