Rosemary Gallagher has written a good piece about Reputation Plus the real time customer service in today’s Scotland on Sunday.

Businesses will be able to monitor their reputation on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and react in “real time” using a service launched this month by Scottish company Reputation Plus.

Set up by Neil MacLean, a former journalist, and Claire Dean, a TV and radio reporter and presenter, Reputation Plus claims to offer the first “online, real time customer service for UK business”.

Although Scotland on Sunday particularly mentions our real time customer service in terms of providing reputation services for financial institutions, there is also a strong travel PR element to ReputationPlus as you would expect.

An increasing number of tour operators, hotels and specialist travel companies monitoring their brands online and actively participate in social networks.

Matt Parsons’ list of travel companies on Twitter documents this growth nicely.

However for some social media is “yet another thing” said with rolled eyes, another spinning plate which they do not have the time, experience, resources or corporate culture to deal with.

That is why we have launched Reputation Plus as a standalone service to monitor any mention of a travel brand on social networks, respond where appropriate to complaints or praise and to promote the travel company in a useful and appropriate way to anyone looking for its products or services on Twitter, blogs, YouTube, Facebook or whichever social space next holds consumers’ attention.

Shortly after Madeleine McCann went missing from the Mark Warner resort at Praia da Luz in Portugal, I took a look at the Mark Warner site to see how they were handling their side of the sad event from a travel PR perspective.

There was little more than a statement but it was sensitively done and prominently flagged on their home page. No rolling updates, but then that wasn’t their job. It was right and proper to support the campaign to find Madeleine but then get on with the business of looking after the rest of their guests.

Such was the worldwide interest in the case however, my post – and like many people, I mis-spelled her name here and there as Madeline McCann – appeared on the first page of Mark Warner’s search results and received a hefty number of comments (far more than I approved for publication).

Five months on, I decided to take another look at the Mark Warner site to see if they still publicly acknowledge their, albeit distant, connection in the public’s mind with poor lost Madeleine.

The answer is that, yes, they still have a Madeleine McCann link on their home page but it is nestled at the far end of the secondary navigation, at the bottom of the page beside Terms and Conditions and Accessibility.

When you click on this it takes you to a simple page with a photo of Madeleine McCann and the web addresses for www.bringmadeleinehome.com and www.findmadeleine.com All fine and good. I think that is just as much and as little as I would have advised them to do.

My only problem with this page is that it is contained in a frame which prominently displays the sales numbers for Mark Warner Sun and Mark Warner Ski. That could be seen as unnecessary and insensitive. I doubt if many people looking into that little girl’s eyes will be moved to pick up the phone to book a week’s skiing holiday in Kitzbuhel.

Who pulls out the Rants & Raves on the Trip Advisor front page and will they take a bung to add or remove your hotel? That was my first thought when I saw the new-look site. Maybe these highlighted quotes have been there all along but now the front page has been de-cluttered, there’s no missing them, with a big thumb up or thumb down and customer rating.

It is bad enough finding your hotel slagged off by a dissatisfied guest deep amongst the Brighton pages but to find your “severe case of bed bugs” occupying prime real estate on the home page where every casual surfer will hit it up is likely to cause apoplexy. Back to my question then: does anybody know who chooses the reviews to highlight and the address of a decent counselling service for distressed hoteliers?

Side thought: there’s something very Old Granny Antimacassar about that Trip Advisor colour scheme, all those shades of beige and green. It’s not to my personal taste but the advertisers must be delighted. See how well the Tui logo stands out against all that sleepy, soothing subtlety. Blah.

The business of running multiple blogs is like keeping plates spinning at the circus. So excuse me while I flap over here in my size 20 clown’s feet and get this particular platter back onto its pointy pedestal.

One blog I started recently has only a tangential connection with travel but I am still enjoying rolling up my sleeves and getting it spinning. Activate Events is an event management company in Tayport near Dundee. It operates in a crowded and highly competitive market with lots of well-established players.

In order to help them be more easily found and then build relationships with potential customers, we launched The Corporate Events blog this summer.

Clearly the domain name was chosen to give them a boost on Google and though it is early days, we are already seeing good results on long-tail searches, particularly for anything to do with environmentally friendly corporate events in Scotland.

However this is about more than search engine results. If we mange to convey something of the personality of the events team and the creative approach they bring to team building and event management – for example a recent It’s a Knockout corporate event they held in Scotland – this should engage the internet visitor more effectively than any of the static brochure-type sites of Activate’s competitors.

Luxury Link, a site sellingupscale travel deals, has a SEO problem called Darren Barefoot, a loyal and increasingly satisfied customer. Yes, I realise that doesn’t make sense but bear with me. Early in 2006, Darren wrote a blog post entitled Luxury Link Has a Bogus Auction System and much to Luxury Link’s discomfort, it is still sitting at number five or so in its Google results. Darren’s subsequent experiences – including a bargain trip to Venice – and LL’s explanations of its auction system have softened his views and now Luxury Link has written asking him to change the title of his – to them – offending post. Darren has declined but now wonders:

Should I modify the post title to reflect my current thinking, or should blog posts remain archival reflections of my thinking on a given day in my past?

What do you think? I am not one of those people who believe blog posts are written in stone and I do see the case for changing the title, provided Darren is convinced Luxury Link is a reputable business, a good source of genuine bargains and would recommend them to friends and strangers alike.
Although Darren has written about Luxury Link subsequently, he has failed to knock his original post of its Google pedestal which partly emphasises the magnetic quality of negative consumer generated content while also underlining the advantage of age in a blog post. The older the better.
Of course, by linking to it here, I have just reinforced its place in the SERPS, a thought which makes me laugh in a slightly evil way. On the other hand I have also given some SEO juice to his record-straightening post In praise of Luxury Link again, which balances the equation. Let’s see how it plays out.

Technorati Tags: publicrelations, travelpr

I used to have a quilt in the spare room and whenever a visitor toured the house I’d say, “See that quilt. It should have been $200 but I got it for twenty.” Somebody at Macy’s in New York priced it incorrectly in the Columbus Day sale and the cashier was prepared to give it to me at the printed price.
Good for Macy’s, but I have to say if the the response had been “Sorry sir, that’s a mistake, let me correct that,” I would have probably shrugged my shoulders and walked away. I doubt if I would have written to the papers, started a blog or taken Macy’s to court over something that was clearly human error. Any fool could see it’s worth more than $20.
$35 at least.
I am pretty sure I would have felt the same about the Travelocity Fiji debacle. When the online travel agent posted a $51 fare to Fiji – or more precisely a nil fare with $51 tax – the news bagatelled round FlyerTalk and people snapped it up as if they had just spotted a dropped $1000 bill.
If I had been one of their number and Travelocity had subsequently told me it was an honest mistake, again I would have accepted that and moved on.
However Travelocity decided to honour the price and BusinessWeek has an article about how they came to that decision. Better yet, they have a video interview of their CEO laying out the facts (she’s smiling, but you can tell she’s bitter). I recommend watching it.
An important point is that many of these customers did not actually want to fly to Fiji – just as I had never been in the market for an American quilt. They were just chancing their arms and rather than calling their bluff and wishing them a fun 10 hour flight or whatever, Travelocity responded by offering them vouchers for domestic flights instead.
This whole situation was further complicated by a recent in-house training programme concerning the OTA’s service guarantee which had only just stopped short of telling everybody in the company that if Travelocity accidentally posts a nil fare to the moon they should honour it. Travelocity, understandably decided it couldn’t say one thing and then act as if this was some sort of special case, existing outside the rule.
Was it worth taking the suggested $2m hit by meeting these costs? I can absolutely see the PR case. However I’d like more proof that – at the final weigh-in – it made good corporate sense. Did they do enough to get customers and the media on their side? And have they subsequently done enough to get maximum coverage for the Travelocity position? If I had spent $2m I would want Travelocity to be celebrated as the OTA which kept its word.

Technorati Tags: travelpr

Want to know what Google’s universal search results will look like in a few years time? Listen to Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, talking about an experiment the Google UI team performed some time back:

When you started seeing some diagrams, some video, some news, some charts, you might actually have a page that looks and feels more like an interactive encyclopedia.

I think the idea of your search results ultimately having the richness of an interactive encyclopaedia would be very appealing for many users (and a living nightmare for traditional SEO’s).

I won’t parrot the whole thing but I found Mayer’s interview with Gordon Hotchkiss really interesting and I’d recommend reading it. You won’t be surprised to know I was particularly interested in her take on the increasing integration of rich media. This particularly resonated:

The other thing we’re seeing is different mediums, audio, video. They used to not work. If you remember getting back a year ago, everytime you clicked on an audio file or a movie file, it would be, like, ‘thunk’? It needs a plug in, or “thunk”, it doesn’t work. Now we’re coming into some standardized formats and players that are either browser or technology independent enough, or are integrated enough that they are actually going to work.

I don’t think we’re quite there yet with standardisation and but we’re certainly moving away from the universal thunk.

That’s why travel companies should be rolling their sleeves up right now and gaining experience in creating rich content, not just to gain attention in the organic search results but also as part of their paid search marketing. Because, as Mayer predicts:

as the page becomes richer, the ads also need to become richer, just so that they look alive and match the page.

Technorati Tags: google, travelpr

I am always interested in how clients present information to the search engines. For example, the importance of that snippet of text which accompanies the title and link is often overlooked. A recent Microsoft study considered the effect different sized snippets had on the user and there’s a round-up on the SearchTank blog.

Perhaps more interesting than the findings on snippet size (conclusion: no huge difference) were more general points on user behaviour when faced with a page of ten results. For example:

On average, users highly agreed with the statement “I expect the information I’m looking for to be in the top five results”

I should think that’s particularly true of long tail searches. The more detailed your search, the more likely the answer is going to appear in the top five.