Harry Gold has a great interview about a little discussed topic: social media for B2B.

HG: We all know that social media marketing is good for B2C (define), but are there any sites that are good for B2B?

BG: LinkedIn would be an obvious choice, but there are also industry-specific networking sites like ITtoolbox (where you can tap into a huge professional IT community), the Minyanville Exchange (a financial social networking site), Designer Pages (for architecture and design), and lots of others. However, keep in mind that “traditional” social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, even Twitter have B2B profiles and profiles where people often list their professions. So you can do certain kinds of B2B targeting by profession.

HG: Tell me about some of the B2B opportunities that you find interesting.

BG: You have to remember that I am a media planner and I look at online campaigns holistically, meaning I don’t just think of a social media campaign as establishing a mere presence in the social networks, but I always tie in banner ads, blog outreach, e-mail blasts, newsletter sponsorships, etc., into the media mix.

With that, I think LinkedIn offers a pretty basic but comprehensive opportunity: your company puts up a profile and connects with LinkedIn members, then you promote and supplement your profile with targeted display ads, dedicated e-mails, and sponsorships of the “Answers” category. For instance, if you are a B2B technology company, you might want to sponsor the IT category. This way you reach people who are actively seeking information about your product/industry, and you get to engage with them in a community setting.

ITtoolbox also offers great ad opportunities for enterprise IT companies. You can set up a vendor profile; have a variety of ad units, text links, dedicated e-mails, and newsletter sponsorships; and even help with lead generation through Webcast promotions and white paper programs.

And let’s not forget YouTube. Some B2B companies might dismiss YouTube as simply a youth-oriented, amateur-video site, but it is far from that. YouTube has turned into such a powerful and relevant social media tool that anyone can leverage its reach and viral effectiveness. There are thousands of education, science and technology, news, and how-to videos about and produced by various B2B brands and companies. For example, a quick search for “software as a service” on YouTube generated 1,220 videos. One video has been viewed more than 38,000 times!

A lot of sites would also be willing to work with you to set up custom content. You just need a strategic plan that details what direction you want to take, what results you are expecting and your KPIs [key performance indicators], and what you plan to do after you’ve launched your campaign. Also, a lot of these social networking sites offer fantastic targeting opportunities, so make sure your campaign will reach the right people.

HG: How much does this cost?

BG: It is usually free to set up a profile, but some sites have minimum buys for the supplementing display ads if you want the whole package or if you want a custom-branded channel (ranges from $25,000 to $250,000). It is best to support your profile page with display ads that will drive targeted users directly into your profile page. Also, it takes time and effort to create, maintain, and update these communities, and that should equate to monetary costs as well.

HG: How about blogs?

BG: There is a huge opportunity in blogs, for both bloggers and marketers. There are some very good networks, like Federated Media, where you can advertise on influential blogs, which you can cherry-pick from specific categories.

The full post can be read here

Time spent on social network sites has now surpassed time spent emailing in the UK, according to Facebook’s UK director Blake Chandlee.

Chandlee told delegates at the Eye For Travel Travel Distribution Summit this week that the average user of social networking sites spends 302 minutes a month on sites such as Facebook, TripAdvisor and Bebo where they spent only 179 minutes emailing.

He said: “If you are only planning on using traditional media to market your product you are only going to be successful some of the time. You need to think how you can add value to the customer experience using these sites.

“Some 52% of all 25 to 34-year-olds in the UK are on Facebook now and in the last 30 days in the UK, 28m events (people making arrangements to meet up) have been created on Facebook.

“There are 10.5 million people in the UK with a profile on Facebook and 100,000 of them have a travel profile. They can be targeted and a whole new level of marketing opens up.”

But Lastminute.com’s CEO Ian McCaig warned that caution should be taken before companies jump into the social networking environment in an attempt to market their product.

He explained: “There must be a level of sophistication and consideration because interruptive marketing in this environment does not work and alienates the customer as well as potentially damaging your brand.

“You need to check that your marketing is not popping up in an environment where a transaction is not taking place and people are just talking to each other. Intruding on social networking with your brand in an irrelevant situation is not welcomed.”

According to supplier YouTravel.com, Popular package holiday destinations have seen the highest growth in accommodation-only sales in the past year.
While Sharm El Shiekh maintained its position as the company’s top destination for the second year, Costa del Sol, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura all saw significant growth.

The company, which has seen its portfolio of contracted hotels grow by 1,000 to 3,500 since its launch in October 2006, believes the popularity of mainstream sun destinations means that dynamic packaging, while making a slower start than some had expected, was a trend that is here to stay.

Sales and marketing director Paul Riches said: “To see the growth that’s coming through from the staple package holiday destinations is indicative that there has been a shift in the way that holidays are being bought and sold in the UK.

“Dynamic packaging is not a blip, it’s a real trend and is here to stay.”

He revealed that the company, which directly contracts all the properties it features, was to expand the number of properties it offers on an exclusive basis, up from a level of 25%.

“We are undergoing a major product review at the moment and we will be taking off some properties as well as adding new ones,” said Riches.

“We’ve been doing this over the past 18 months but now want to have a total overhaul of the products we offer to our trade partners.”

He revealed that more than three quarters of the company’s business is now generated online.  

“Agents are moving away from traditional advertising on TV and then booking through a call centre; these days it has moved to a web and call centre presence,” he said.

Riches added: “We are going to be looking at securing global distribution deals in the coming months and really focussing on maintaining our current sales and margin levels.”

Turnover is forecast to almost double to 170 million euros this year, with international sales to make up a quarter of business by the end of the company’s second year.

A potential client approached us today for a large link building campaign and wanted to know what every client does:

1. How many links will $x a month get me?
2. How do you build one way links without buying them?

We work with a lot of really smart business people who like many really smart people figure if they don’t know how to do something then it isn’t possible. Or worse yet are hearing from the seo snake oil sales people that they can get 25,000 links for $29! Their traffic is down, their indexed pages are plummeting but still they want reassurances of how many links will they recieve for $x a month.

Unless you are buying links or submitting sites to a lot of not so high quality directories there isn’t a way for a white hat seo link builder to say we can get you x number of links for $x a month. When working in a similar industry we can provide a guesstimate based on past performance but there are so many variables that go into building relevant, quality links that often the most valuable links are the hardest to obtain but one quality link is worth so much more than 25,000 junk links….which if someone is getting you hundreds or thousands of links for just a few bucks you can be sure those links are junk.

As far as buying links, we stopped buying links for clients as part of an seo strategy back in 2007 with the smackdown on paid links and selling page rank. In case you missed it Google actively starting seeking reports of buying/selling link activity.

From Google’s Matt Cutts (head of Google’s spam team):

Update, May 12th, 2007: I finally got some time to circle back around to this subject. I wanted to add an example or two of the sorts of reports that we’d be interested in getting, and try to answer a few questions about paid links. Let’s start with some questions.

Q: Can you give me some more background on how Google views paid links?
A: Absolutely. Start with this post from 2005. It’s a pretty good review of our policies at the time (e.g. link sellers can lose trust, such as their ability to flow PageRank/anchortext. Also, we’re open to semi-automatic approaches to ignore paid links, which could include the best of algorithmic and manual approaches.). You can also read about panels at search conferences where we did a site review and how much paid links stood out in a site review. I even mentioned earlier this year that paid articles/reviews/posts should be done in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. Here’s a post from January, for example, where I said:

Yet another “pay-for-blogging” (PFB) business launched, this time by Text Link Brokers. It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is one way, but there are numerous other ways to do paid links that won’t affect search engines, e.g. doing an internal redirect through a url that is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt.

So this post shouldn’t be a surprise; it’s inline with our previous discussion of paid links. Some people wanted a way to report potential paid links and that was the main reason for this post.

Q: Now when you say “paid links,” what exactly do you mean by that? Do you view all paid links as potential violations of Google’s quality guidelines?
A: Good question. As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings. I’m not worried about links that are paid but don’t affect search engines. So when I say “paid links” it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”

you can read the rest of this post here

There are many, many ways to build one way links, we don’t usually disclose our methods until we sign a contract as part of what our clients pay for is our ability to come up with creative ideas and solutions not because we are necessarily brilliant but because we’ve spent years online in the search marketing space and through a lot of hard work have come up with creative, legitimate solutions that keep us one step ahead of our competitors and at the top of the SERPs.

‘Today in the Sky’ is a new flight flight community launched by USATODAY.com. This site is loaded with great content written by long time veteran USATODAY.com aviation blogger Ben Mutzabaugh. You can find up-to-date aviation news, surveillance, and “Flightdex” a which tracks the latest buzz about airlines.

‘Today in the Sky’  can be used to search for airfare, frequent flier promotions, mileage calculator, and flight tracking tools as well. Other travelers and frequent fliers members can communicate with each other to discuss trips, aviation news and more.

This is a great tool for those traveling weekly , monthly, and even yearly to catch up on all the aviation industry buzz. (which seems to be quite active right now)

‘Today in the Sky’ can be found at http://flights.usatoday.com.

John Battelle’s blog post - Twitter. Oh God. echoes sentiments by a lot of folks in the C Suite. It’s true that a lot of the tweets are nonsense, what I’m eating, what I’m watching on TV, etc that might be interesting to your friends but are less welcome to others.

However the power of Twitter and social media in general shouldn’t be discounted. Take this story for one example:

Twitter Post Rescues Jailed Journalist in Egypt

James Karl Buck was bailed out of jail by a ‘tweet’ post on Twitter, a social networking site. The message “arr ested” was seen by Buck’s friends and bloggers in Egypt and the United States via the Internet.

Buck, a journalism graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, was in Egypt for a school research project, ironically focused on bloggers and journalists who use tools like Twitter to keep in step with news, when Egyptian authorities arrested him. The authorities claimed that Buck may have been inciting a riot; although, Buck was merely photographing a labor rally near a textile mill in Mahalla, Egypt.

Buck reached Twitter through his cell phone, allowing him to make the post without being detected by authorities. Twitter allows its users to post 140 character or less messages, providing a place on the Web for people to be constantly updated in brief, to- the-point blogposts.

Thanks to the ‘tweet’ relaying his arrest, Buck was able to reach his friends via the Web, who contacted the U.S. Embassy and UC Berkeley, eventually sending a lawyer to bail him out of jail.

Buck says keeping in contact with the rest of the world via the Web and his Twitter posts kept him sane, curbed the fear that he would, “fall into a black whole” and potentially saved his life. Buck said that he “came to realize how important a tool like Twitter is.”

We all have overcrowded lives however Twitter is a pretty amazing resource. Choose who you follow carefully, weed out those who don’t tweet items of interest and watch your followers grow based on what you post.

With the smack down heard round the seo world for selling links which resulted in a loss of page rank for some websites including high authority sites such as Forbes.com new pressure has been put on webmasters to find relevant quality inbound links. Anyone who was buying links is probably thinking twice about continuing to do so. 

One of my favorite tactics for getting targeted traffic and to improve my sites positions within the search engines has been with quality niche directories. Niche travel directories are an excellent source of targeted traffic for travel websites. 

Niche directories often allow links to pages deep within your website. It’s important when submitting to these directories to match the best page from your site with the topic of the directory. Most niche directories are reviewed by volunteer editors who are passionate about their subject so only submit to relevant categories with a good title and description. Make sure to vary your titles and descriptions from directory to directory. Spend a little time on the directory to see what types of submissions have been accepted in the past however try to make your travel websites entry unique and original to make it stand out from the crowd. 

Quality travel directories can help a website become relevant for that topic and are great for becoming part of a closely related hub. If your travel site is about a destination in Florida and you submit your site to one of the Florida travel directories by being accepted into a Florida travel directory your website has received a vote of confidence and becomes more relevant for Florida travel.  Niche directories generate targeted traffic. Someone visiting a niche travel directory about Cape Cod is more likely to visit your Cape Cod travel website than someone visiting a general directory. Many niche directories rank fairly well for destination specific keyword phrases and may get a steady stream of search engine traffic. Here is my shortlist of travel directories however not all of them will be relevant for your travel site. It’s important to remember when submitting to these niche directories to be respectful, read the guidelines and follow them closely. 

If you’re looking for help building links for a travel site, you may be interested in our link building services.

MyGreatWorld is a free, alternative photo community that organizes photos by where they were taken, essentially creating a photographic map of the world, country-by-country, city-by-city. Residents and travelers alike upload their best pictures of a location to the site, and along with identifying each photo with a place on the map, you can add a date and classify pictures into categories, like art, nature, gastronomy, hotels etc. Optional written comments and descriptions can accompany each photo creating human generated content , and will be indexed for keyword searches. Visitors browse the site by map location, recently added photos, or top-rated photos, and can search by any combination of parameters including keyword, date, category, and location. There is also in internal private instant messaging system that will allow private members to communicate with each other.

This site in my opinion is far from perfect. There are way to many pages to filter through to get to where you need to go, it has a horrible home page, and it’s picture inventory is limited because they are still in infant stages.

This is a very interesting concept that I believe could become the “go to” place to access images of people at the same vacation destination that you and your family is planning. Another huge piece to this is the fact that not only can you look at images but you can read about what people say. This site can be extremely viral. Go help them out and upload your images of your vacation. The more content they have the faster it will grow.

Online travel marketing is getting more complex and more competitive with new business models and websites popping up daily all competing for a slice of the billions in online travel sales.

The HeBS Team put together a benchmark survey with some interesting results.

The full spectrum of hospitality and travel verticals participated, including boutique hotels, upscale hotels, budget, mid-scale and luxury franchised properties, major brands, real estate groups, resorts, hotel management companies, casinos, and more.

The survey results clearly show hoteliers understand the hotel Internet marketing strategy and respectively, should take a holistic view of the hotel online environment and adopt a comprehensive, long-term strategic approach to grow the online channel. No longer viewed as a source for only incremental sales, the website is a major revenue driver and requires an online marketing budget to support the activity. 

Today’s hotel marketing budget tends to include specific line items addressing direct web marketing. These are treated as “fundamental” and include website re-designs, organic search optimizations, search marketing, email marketing, strategic linking, online advertising and public relations, and new media formats such as Web 2.0 which includes  social media, CGM, and blogs.

Here are some main findings from the survey:

• For the first year ever, the industry reported that online business is coming from their own website more than third parties or corporate brand sites (see Table A below).
• Franchise/major brand hoteliers overwhelmingly find there to be major restrictions in online marketing conduct due to brand standards and regulations.
• Similar to last year, the highest percentage of survey respondents (72% this year, 80.7% last year) use search engine optimization and organic search in their search marketing campaigns. This was followed by paid search (50%, 62.7% last year), then local search (38.8%, 37.3% last year). This year we introduced mobile search into the survey, which 6.78% of respondents said they use in their search marketing campaigns.
• When asked what Internet marketing objectives they did not achieve in 2007 and would like to focus on in 2008, the highest percentage of hoteliers (44.23%) said website optimization, followed by search optimization – organic search (39.54%).
• The more hoteliers learn about online direct distribution and Internet marketing, the more they realize their property website does not conform to industry’s best practices. 54.62% of respondents said that no, their property website does not conform.
• This year, almost half of hoteliers surveyed are planning a blog on the hotel’s website. Other Web 2.0 formats planned for ’08 include photo sharing, surveys and comment cards on the website, and creating profiles on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.
• More than 96% of hoteliers are planning to increase their Internet budget this year.  68.1% of these hoteliers are shifting funds from offline marketing budgets to accomplish this increase.
• 49.15% of survey respondents believed that Internet marketing produces better results than traditional marketing alone. Another 44.07% believe that both Internet marketing and traditional marketing work equally well. The remaining 6.78% are of the opinion that traditional marketing produces the best ROIs.
• The most important factor hoteliers considered when planning their 2008 budget was last year’s budget. The second most important factor was industry averages.

Percentage of Business from the Internet
In 2007 over 35 % of hotel bookings were generated via the Internet. Approximately 62% of those (21.7% from total bookings) were done via hotel branded websites (i.e. Direct Online Channel). For the first time in 2007 the major hotel brand website bookings surpassed the brand GDS bookings (33.7% vs. 33.5%) (eTRACK).

What is the situation in the industry as a whole? As mentioned earlier, for the first time the Benchmark Survey respondents stated that in 2007, the direct website bookings exceeded the indirect (third-party online intermediary) bookings 23.5% vs. 20.4%. This result is on par with the industry and underlines the importance of the direct channel in the overall Internet strategy. 

Most Popular Internet Marketing Formats

Internet Marketing ROIs
In 2008, what are the Internet marketing formats hoteliers believe generate the highest ROIs? In the past, paid search and SEO were usually named the top drivers for increased revenues online. The 2007 and 2008 benchmark surveys show that hoteliers have matured and now understand that long-term, strategic objectives and formats such as website re-designs and optimizations, email marketing and strategic linking produce higher ROIs than “quick fix” solutions alone, such as PPC.

 
What Web 2.0 Initiatives are Hoteliers Considering?

Conclusion 

The Internet has become the largest and most important marketing and distribution channel in hospitality. As hoteliers learn more and more about Internet marketing, they are realizing that there are many missed opportunities and that the Direct Online Channel website is their most cost-effective revenue generating channel. The fundamentals of an Internet marketing strategy - a hotel website that follows best practices, search engine marketing – both paid and organic and email marketing, continue to receive the highest budget allocations. In 2008 several marketing formats are expected to receive increases: email marketing, website optimizations, paid search, local search, meta search. Web 2.0 and Social Media initiatives have become a hot topic in the industry and hoteliers are eager to explore these new media formats.

Another interesting result of the survey is that for the first time, the industry reported that online business is coming from their own website more than third parties. This shows that hoteliers are embracing direct online distribution. We expect this to become the norm over the years as hoteliers continue to increase their knowledge of Internet marketing and the benefits of making their customers their own from the first point of contact.

As you prepare for a record breaking year in website revenues, seek advice from an experienced and ROI-centric Internet marketing hospitality consultancy to help you adopt industry’s best practices, implement latest trends, and utilize the Direct Online Channel to its fullest potential.

Survey prepared by the HeBS team which for this project consisted of Max Starkov, Jason Price, Mariana Mechoso and Evan Rosenblum.