Guillaume T
Founder & Editor of Hotel-Blogs.com / Business Development Hospitality - Amadeus UK & Ireland
If you were about to invest into web 2.0 functionalities for your company website, which of these will you integrate first ? 1/ Blog 2/ RSS 3/ User Generated Content 4/ Community 5/ Wiki Thanks for your help. Guillaume
Good Answers (8)
Guillaume,
Each of these technologies has their place in your customer communications and interactions.
A company blog is a great way to involve consumers in your product, but it does require a significant amount of maintenance. You must deliver regular, pertinent content in order to keep an audience of readers engaged.
RSS is a fantastic complement to your e-mail marketing strategy and tends to reach the same audience. It requires a similar amount of maintenance and content development.
User Generated Content can be captured on your own website and each of your partners' web sites via blog responses, e-mail and RSS responses, hotel reviews and a Knowledge Wiki. Many well known sites like TripAdvisor and TravelPost provide consumer directed services to increase user generated content surrounding a hotel.
The real power of Web 2.0 for the hotelier is leveraging content created within any one of these customer interaction vehicles into the other vehicles. For instance, create a topic and post it as a blog, then send it out via e-mail and RSS, and allow your customers or partners to respond to it. This builds the sense of community around your products and services and helps your customers know that you want their feedback and will do whatever you can to address their needs. Your aggregate learning can then be posted to a Knowledge Wiki for the benefit of all other customers and partners.
Community = Content + Interactions. Web 2.0 offers us new technologies to interact with our customers. Success will be created by finding people inside and outside your company that understand both how to create content around your hotel and how to use Web 2.0 technologies.
Best regards,
Tim Henthorn
TIG Global
Links:
It depends on what your most important business problem was.
If it was customer support then I would consider a Wiki, I have put in a link below to one done by T-Mobile for the Sidekick and one done for HTC Windows-based smartphones for you to have a look at.
If you are looking for increasing consumer engagement, then UGC may be a good idea, don't build anything from scratch thing about low investment items like a pool on flickr.
I would probably look to engage with existing communities rather than create a new one, because of the time commitment involved.
RSS and blogging are very useful for helping raise the companies profile and help with your search rankings. RSS only has value if content is changing on the site. Blogging only has value if you have something to say on a regular basis and can say it in a genuine interesting voice. Also responding to comments can take as much if not more time than writing the blog itself.
Links:
Bonjour Guillaume,
I would say that it really depends on:
1/ Your main strategic and tactical objectives: higher SEO rankings, improved interactivity / exchanges with your readers, increased credibility, developed readerships and repeats visitors… Each of these tools have different benefits.
2/ The time that will be allocated to maintain this new tool: each of this tools requires a different time investment. There is nothing worse than a blog with two articles that has not been updated for the last 5 months
3/ The chance of success of the concept: how unique is the concept, how original / viral is the idea? The proposition has to be attractive for user to be willing to participate.
To decide, I would:
a/ Define the main objectives.
b/ Short list the 2-3 tools that answer these objectives best.
c/ Choose 1 or more of those tools depending on the time and resources available to maintain them and their chance of success.
By the way, thanks for your blog, I really enjoy reading it.
Damien
I started with a blog that I did not yet integrate in my website. First I wanted to see whether I could come up with enough content to maintain a Blog. Three years down the line I believe I can. Am even a bit addicted. What amazes me is that a Blog that you post regularly on attracts much more traffic than a stationary site.
My next step will be to revamp my website.
I would love to integrate some relevant information about my city and things to do by a simple tool.
Although more and more people are using the web, we nerds easily forget that there are many people out there who refuse to do anything with the web.
Many guests still come to us via word of mouth.
TereLyn H
Web Content Developer and Technical Writer at eCommerce Industries, Inc.
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Of your list: Wiki, RSS, and Community.
We already use Wiki internally for knowledge management among technical support teams.
Second, we're considering implementing some RSS features for a Web portal, where customers can subscribe to new information on products or procedures of interest. That is, once we can ensure customers can have one login to access all features included in our upcoming redesign.
Third, we'll implement some community features to provide a forum where customers can ask questions amongst themselves. The big obstacle is ensuring a core of expert customers to serve as moderators for different products and categories.
From a hotelier's perspective....
1. UGC, a quick and simple way to join and share conversations
2. Community, promote (link) to the communities of people who are already talking about you
3. RSS, provided there's enough interesting content that changes frequently
4. Blog, again, needs to be interesting (food and renovations are great subjects)
5. Wiki, perhaps a great way to pool the UGC
There are lots of empty communities and unread blogs. And the well-worn phrase still rings true: "Content is King"...I think the key thing here is to ensure you understand where you are in terms of a dialogue with your audience/customers and how much traction you have with them. You can separate Web users into a number of groups, polarised by creators and spectators at either end of the spectrum (a Forrester model). Somewhere between 0.1% and 8% of people are actually creators, so in order to get some critical mass and engage an audience it's a good idea to offer some utility or content before asking people to add their own UGC / community / collaborative stuff. Ideally start with stuff which enables you to generate interesting (and dynamic if you want search results) content in a "publish" model and then move into "respond" phase and then into full dialogue.
So, RSS feeds are simple and cheap, but make sure you have something interesting to subscribe to, then bring in a Blog where you start writing (or you ask partners to contribute) and ask people potentially to respond. Once you've built some traction and a critical mass of interested people you could encourage that 0.1% to 8% of your audience to start responding...opening the door for more interesting UGC / collaborative / community-based content.
Josiah C
Experienced Web Designer/Developer, President & Owner of Web Development Firm; COLEwebdev
1. Blog comes first, it allows you to communicate with your visitors and starts to build a relationship.
2. RSS comes with the blog, but if you have other content that could be broadcasted in an RSS feed see #5.
3. User Generated Content would be the second priority which would help establish your community. You'd be covering two aspects in one as the community would generate your content and thrive assuming you supported it well.
4. A Wiki could be one aspect of user generated content, but if your use is to run internally as a sort of Knowledge Base or FAQ make this your second to last priority as you'll need a community to make the information useful.
5. RSS is mentioned above with the blog, if your intendt is to take existing content and create new RSS feeds beyond the blog do this last.
More Answers (10)
Robert F
Podcaster at podcastGenealogy.com
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My first thought as a general concept would have been Wiki ... this provides for a fast and efficient growth of content (both internal and external) ...
Harinder S
Founder at Funkeet.com
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It all depends on the business focus of your organisation. If you run a hotel-blog website, then I personally feel you should go for Blogs first and follow it up with RSS.
All of the above :)
I would invest in a good system to maneg the information, as all of the technologies you mentioned can be powered by the same source of information. I would investigate good CMSs with great XML I/O capabilities, and make sure you can get your info out of in a good clean way.
Then , you can work on adding different means to view this information, blog, rss, KB, forums... No matter what the new trend is, it will be able to read and spit XML. Look at Microsoft, they just redesign their file format around XML...
GEORSS
...with its content based on the collective click behavior of the users on the site and the web in general. (the content could be produced by users, editors of company website, other websites and web services. It might even include enclosures i.e pod- or vod- cast).
From a functionality perspective I would do RSS first, as implementing Blogs, Wikis, etc. may require followup monitoring and/or security resources, depending upon the company's policies. RSS can be quickly added and maintained.
Hi Guillaume
Good to hear from you mate.
I'm guessing I'd probably go with User Generated Content, then Community, then RSS followed by Wiki and Blog.
I hope this helps.
Good luck with it mate.
Mirek P
e-Strategist, e-Consultant; owner @ OPEN4net [LION: mpolyniakATgmail.com] pharma focus!
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IMHO blog first - fantastic way to get links to your site - increase your PR
You can visit my blog MIRPO ON THE GLOBAL VILLAGE http://mirpo.livejournal.com/
and type in 'mirek mirpo polyniak' in Google.com
FYI - the blog hasn't been launched with viral marketing yet
Hello Guillaume,
Fist step could be a monitoring of your web site in the Web 2.0 and Travel 2.0 space ! and engage the conversation with some leading Travel 2.0 web site...
Then, use RSS ans tool like http://www.pheedo.com/ to promote your business.
Blog and Wiki are great tool, but as you know, is time consumming ;-)
Hope that help
Dear Guillaume,
a word about user generated content used on hotel booking websites: Customer reviews are a perfect means to add real value to your content. I believe that official hotel classifications (star ratings) will sooner or later be ruled out by customer reviews. The downside is that the website owner is not exempt from the liability caused by e.g. insulting or racial customer comments. Costs resulting from reviewing the reviews should therefore be taken into consideration when a company plans to publish user generated content.
Links:
5. Wiki ! or 4. Community...
Best regards,
Marco
