recently read a fascinating article about how The New York Observer is incentivising its journos with bonuses for well read articles and the amount of Twitter followers (see it here) and felt compelled to write something on the matter.
Personally… it’s a fantastic idea, especially with all the tracking tools available today… why haven’t others thought about this?
Obviously a paper or magazine survives through its readership. The more readers the more sales and ad revenues – it’s a simple model… so incentivising its core knowledge sharers in this way makes absolute sense. Bonuses will help journos think outside of the box to get more followers (for the publication), embrace the trends around social media and online publishing fully and ultimately make for a more exciting reader experience. The only problem is (and has always been) – how do publishers make their money online in the future. Obviously The Times (UK) is launching their ‘paid for’ online subscription but from a personal perspective I really don’t hold out much hope for this model when you can get the same information elsewhere for free.
Ad revenues online will almost certainly increase along with the introduction of affiliate marketing techniques (which we are starting to see emerge), but I’m hearing that many publishers are petrified and rightly so. Perhaps the way forward therefore is to diversify away from publishing or perhaps develop a more exciting, value adding means of sharing their content… but that’s the million dollar question right!
Here’s how The New York Observer are measuring journos bonuses on:
• Pageviews
• Number of posts
• New Twitter followers
• Number of comments
• External pickups
The scheme is being trialed for three months with the first place receiving $500. The second place will receive $300. There is a $2500 cap per employee in total awards. This means that one employee can sweep each month; but also there is a caveat that the same employee cannot win in consecutive months. Finally, web only employees are not included!
I’ve got a feeling that Ney York’s SEO trainers are going to be having a bumper year if this takes off.
Check out our beginners guide to social media marketing for Hoteliers and once you’ve got to grips with the basics see if you can start putting some of the following ideas into play:
1 – Set up a Foursquare account. Not come across FourSquare yet? Well, it’s yet another social network… but before you jump this paragraph know that this tool is incredibly powerful for attracting visitors and subtly marketing your hotel. In summary, FourSquare is a location based network and allows you to add attractions to your local area providing valuable visitor information to potential guests who will appreciate the advice. It’s FREE and takes minutes to set up, just take your time to get the information around what attractions you suggest exactly right.
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The world’s gone social media crazy tweeting this, facebooking that and blogging whatever and whenever we can! But look a little deeper in to this albeit fickle (on the outside) communication revolution and you’ll find an incredibly exciting marketing opportunity for hoteliers.
Whilst some of us may already have a twitter account or perhaps even a Facebook page, the fact remains that these marketing mediums are relatively untouched in the industry simply because we either don’t have a dickie what to do with it all, or possibly because there simply isn’t enough time in the day to run a hotel and put time into something with no any proven rewards.
Well, the good news is that after reading this article you’ll hopefully have a better understanding of what social media is all about, and more to the point, how a hotelier should be making the most of it in order to fill more beds.
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A detailed look at the alarming trend in bloggers charging PRs for exposure.
We recently undertook an online PR campaign for a prominent fashion brand, the task to seed a movie teaser around a new collection being launched. The movie was good, inspiring and on the whole, better than the vast majority you typically find in YouTube’s vaults!
Over the past 3 years we’ve been responsible for successfully promoting over 30 viral movies and have been noticing an increasingly alarming trend when it comes to around 50% of bloggers reaction to seeding…!
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If your company has decided to make the move into the world of social media marketing then you’re in the minority and likely to out-compete your competitors who haven’t.
If you are in this minority then hopefully you’ve researched or better still, implemented a corporate blog either as a sub domain, on a separate domain or within your own spoofy content management system.
Here are 3 easy to follow essential tips for promoting your corporate blog:
Make your articles work harder
Twitterfeed - Start by adding your blogs RSS feed to Twitterfeed. This will allow you to automatically ‘tweet’ your blog article titles to your twitter and Facebook followers. There’s no cost to this and you’ll find you collect loads more ‘followers’ who are looking for content around what you are publishing.
Pro-active promotion – Set yourself a target of promoting at least one article every week or fortnight to other relevant blogs and websites in your space. Identify 20 or so relevant sites and simply email them with a brief synopsis and link, telling them why you feel it’s relevant and worth featuring on their site.
Keyword optimised titles – If you want to get found on the search engines then you need to integrate keywords and phrases into your titles and within your main article body copy. A great free tool to use to identify suitable phrases is Google’s keyword tool.
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