Social Media Marketing for Travel #2: Automation Tools and Risks

In our previous hub on the Future of Social Media for Hotel Marketing and Travel, we discussed the form and function of Social Media and how all media is morphing into a new digital internet-based landscape that is going to be defined by process as much as content.

Mike Koenigs, of MSMM and Traffic Geyser, has build a huge business using Social Sharing sites to market brands. He uses Video as the vehicle to deliver the message, posting brand videos to all major video sites, bookmarks and network sites, all with a single process. As video is now one of the most popular forms of sharing and finding information, it is an effective and very successful strategy. Mike uses highly regarded Social site to distribute the message via video.

Google attributes high value (PR Rank) to Social networking and bookmarking sites, which makes this Video Marketing strategy effective in several respects: If the sites get traffic that is great, but because they are high PR they get Goggles attention and help create the index. Automatic posing to hundreds of sites builds a social index of the brand, getting it into search engine databases and ranked on search results. Social Indexing, Social Proof, gaining an authority score and high Page Rank will increase your chances of getting into the first page of search results for your target search terms. All this is covered in the SocialIndexEngine.com pioneered by AXSES. Good SEO, Social indexing and conteant marketing is the path to viral powered branding.

Shaun Hurley of Content Buzz builds on this concept, adding his own network of participants who build Social Proof by “liking” and commenting on others in the network. Social Proof is the future form of SEO, where only links of value register and sites that are know and have followers will outrank competition. This is the focus of the new Google Plus 1 network.

Articles too have their Article spinners that post articles to hundreds of sites. Many of these were shut down with the last Goggle upgrade called Panda. With Panda, many sites disappear from search results overnight. Others, like e-zine articles and Hub Pages, lost market shares, made changes and are climbing back.

Affiliate Travel shopping sites that use content from GDS and OTAs, like Expedia, also lost listings and saw their visits decline massively. A small company that sold furniture and used the supplier's description and images had to rewrite content on thousands of pages.

A top-performing affiliate marketer, Jeff Johnson, had his YouTube account terminated for infringement of its guidelines. A single video published in 2008 was cited as the reason. In that video, he advises us to build many sites. If you have one site, it will only show up once in search results, so build many. Google does not like duplicated data and this may be what it termed inappropriate.

But as markets fragement into social groups, the message must be repurposed. We all have our own preference for information, media and message. Some care to know how a thing is made; others what it does, why they need it, how it works; and others what if. On top of that, we have our own role: the family man/woman, business person, parent, child, etc. More and more the message is refined to the precise combination of rules, expectations and needs which vary by time and occasion.

And then we are defined by what we do and wtht the our need for information is different. A manager of a small typically do not care for philosophy and want to know what this or that does for their business, how easy it is to setup and manage. An educator like Clay Shirley, is much more interested in the philosophy. There are thus many ways we need to priorities and customise the message for segments of users in every market.

Repurposing the message is not only valid; it is essential and the search engines have not yet figured this into the system, but they must. Marketers must be sensitive to creating original messages that don’t say the same thing in the same words ,even if delivered to entirely different platforms and media.

Bill Gates coined the phrase that Content is King. The new media is all about content. Content marketing is the new word for video, articles, podcast, RSS, website and SEO Marketing. Every business is now an information business enabling content sharing across the social network.

As hotel tourism marketers scramble to be seen and get their clients seen, many are finding it essential to use automation tools and inherent in that is some unknown and some risk. But automation is now an essential part of getting seen, tracking and publishing. This is a characteristic of the digital age and with it comes those who will abuse and those who will follow just to be heard.