Here is Part II of my exploration of the world of Twitter. I have been tweeting now for about two weeks, and have about 120 people actually following what I am saying on this incredible social media. It amazes me how fast this has grown for me from a peek at a new marketing channel to a full blown way to spread the word about what we do at Quantum Hospitality. More important, I have found so many really interesting people in the Twitterverse to follow. They are writing short notes (140 characters only) about anything and everything of interest to them. Here are my continuing observations about this exploding device.

In last weeks blog article, I described in general how Twitter works, but the simplicity of sending out very short messages belies the fact that a tremendous amount of information is being spiraled around the Internet in this fashion. By using one of many free services to shorten URLs, Tweeters are including references to blog articles and other websites within their Tweets. Once received, each person, if the information is deemed worthy, can then “Retweet” this information to his or her list of followers with a comment. It is this Retweet phenomenon which is the essence of viral marketing. It keeps the message circulating, growing and growing the number of people who ultimately see it. Just think of the possibilities. Imagine your Special Package description gets Tweeted to your friends (presumably your guests) who then spread the word to all their friends, who then send it to all of their friends, and so on. . . . This is the essence of the concept of Repeats and Referral, the two most important kinds of guests and prospective guests a Bed and Breakfast can have. In essence, the marketing potential of Twitter is endless.

Now, does it work? First, there is an etiquette happening as well. If all that you talk about on Twitter is your business, your Twitter followers (i.e. your “friends”) will likely stop listening to what you say. This is a social media after all! They want to know you as a person as well as a business. Here is where all your Innkeeper hospitality comes into play. You can spend a good deal of time on Twitter talking about what is going on at the Inn. It can be as simple as a description of that fabulous breakfast that you just fed to your guests, a description of one of your best guest rooms, or a short note about what is happening in your neck of the woods this weekend. Pictures work great on Twitter, with a Flicr account and a shortened URL, you can include great photos in your Tweets. Again the marketing potential is limitless. The key is to convey the wonderful ambiance of your Inn in 140 characters. That is the Zen of it all.

So the overall answer to the question “does it work?” is a resounding yes! What amazes me is that there are so many bed and breakfasts out there, but only a relative few have caught on to Twitter. This is a missed opportunity. Right now, it appears that the overwhelming number of people on the Twitter channel are people who are into social media as a business. The bloggers and web developers are all there. Also, you will find every form of self help and technical gurus there, as well as some really smart people who just want to learn about the anything and everything of it all. These people are basically your guests or prospective guests.

So what is the first step after signing up for Twitter? You need to get a following that wants to hear your messages. What better way than to put out the word to your guest list that you are now on Twitter. Put the Twitter link on your website, and send an email notice to your guest list with your Twitter ID. Ask them to follow you. Make sure you have the link in all your marketing pieces and newsletters. Set a goal to get a good number of your guest list into following you on Twitter.

Once you have guests following you on Twitter, you can then have a look at who they are following and who is following them. You can elect to follow anyone who is interesting to you (i.e. a potential guest). If you follow someone, they get an email from Twitter advising them that you are now following them. Usually, they will look you up on Twitter, and if it interests them, they can elect to follow you back. This is the social networking feature of Twitter, and it allows you to expand your friends and make new ones. Many, many Tweople have thousands and thousands of followers on Twitter. It is word of mouth at its highest level.

So my advice is “what are you waiting for?” Get going and Twitter on. . . .

This is my first week as part of the Tweople in the Twitterverse. I am trying to discover if Twitter, the new explosion in the Social Media World, is worthy of the time. Is it something that can help Innkeepers connect to their guests and build loyal travelers? My initial conclusion is a resounding Tweet YES!

First, let’s define the process. Twitter is a free Social Media website that asks the simple question “what are you doing?” You have 140 characters to describe anything that you want. Sort of a brief haiku of what is going on in your head. A posting is called a “tweet,” and it goes out to all of the people who have signed up to follow your postings (they are called “followers”). You, in turn, receive tweets from all of the persons that you are following (i.e. your friends), hence the social nature of this new media. That is pretty simple in concept. What it is in reality is like a nuclear bomb on the web. Millions of people are all atwitter about themselves. Here is my own experience over the last week or so.

After I set up the account a few months ago, I shot off a couple of tweets about things that were bothering me, like the new LL Bean credit card. I stopped after a bit, because I wasn’t sure whether anyone was listening to my rants. I just did not get what this was all about. Well in fact, there were at least 8 people in the Twitterverse that must have felt the same way about LL Bean, because they signed up to follow the stuff that I was putting out. I didn’t do anything else, but they seemed to hang in there with me.

Last week, after the mighty Wall Street Journal said that Twitter was hot stuff, I decided to explore this further. What I found just staggered me! First, there are an absolutely amazing number of very interesting people who are talking to the world on Twitter. By doing a search of interests or subjects or anything else you can think of, you start to see the profiles (picture, website, and short bio) of vast numbers of people. By clicking a button, you add them to your “following” list, and, low and behold, some of them look at your profile and decide that you might be worthy of following. Basic networking is then happening, and the more you follow, the more that follow you in return. Then comes a daily stream of tweets about anything and everything, but you can look at what comes in and cull the interesting from those that you really don’t want to read. There is an etiquette to Twitter as well, and clearly if you tweet too much during the day without a whole lot of content and interesting stuff, then your followers are going to turn you off (remove you from their following list). Sort of like immediate feedback about your worthiness. The most “interesting people” are tweeting about things that they have found on the web, and include a URL in their tweet. Other software companies have even set up websites to compress the URL’s into tiny links so that they fit into the rest of the 140 characters that you have to tweet with. So, what is happening is that Twitter becomes an amazing information sharing tool that starts from a very simple premise, but unleashes the power of the Internet to get worthy information to you.

Yesterday, I added a tool called Twhirl that sits on my desktop and monitors the tweets that come in from those who I am following. It has all of the functionality of the Twitter website, and even some great tools like compressing URLs and filtering tweets. It signals each tweet as it arrives. There are numerous tools for Twitter, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of the amazing world of add-ons to make the process better. While the search feature in Twitter is good, there are third market search engines that are incredible in their ability to dig out of the Twitterverse those people who might be relevant to you and your business.

Now let’s talk about electronic marketing for Innkeepers. What most of these interesting people are doing on Twitter is promoting themselves or their products or their blogs or their websites. By creating a group of people who follow them, they are engaging their customers and those people who might be interested in their products or services. So they are setting up a network of people to talk with who might be their customers in the future. Now the tough part. Since this is a social media, the pitch may not be as direct as “I would like you to buy my product.” This is about people, and remember the premise is “what are you doing?” Perhaps you are writing a blog article about a great event to take place near your Inn. You could then tweet what you are doing along with a link to that blog posting. Or you could simply tweet about what his going on at the Inn or anything that makes you more human and likable to your guests and potential future guests. The subjects are unlimited. There are a huge contingent of people on Twitter interested in travel. That is because they first are interesting, very savvy, and literate people. These interesting people like to travel. How do I know this? It is simply because you selected them yourself to follow, and, by their selection, your followers are interested in some of the same things you are. It is elementary, but very, very powerful.

So, that’s all for this post. I will continue to update this subject as I get further into the Twitterverse. If you want to follow my tweets, check out InnConsultant on Twitter.

Thanksgiving is perhaps the best Holiday at a Country Inn.  It is the one time that the Innkeepers get to really share their Holiday time with the guests and neighbors and to show their thanks for both a bountiful season and the joys of Innkeeping.  I know that we looked forward to this Holiday every year at our Inn.

It is a great time to share an amazing, traditional Thanksgiving meal with the community.  Often we welcomed both lodging and dinner guests to the Inn whose families were far away.   This gave us all a chance to celebrate a great Holiday as a kind of substitute family.  The spirit of Thanksgiving permeated the air as the fantastic smells from the kitchen provided a welcoming touch to the Fall decorations at the Inn.  A moment to stop to give thanks for all that has been given to us, and then a traditional meal served family style with seconds passed until no one could ever want more.  Good cheer, great food, good music, and the laughter around the dining room was reward enough for this very special day.   For those guests staying over at the Inn, we always brought out the leftovers that night for home-style sandwiches and pie.  This was always a very special treat for our guests. 

In this year of changing times, we give thanks to what we have, and renew our energies for the work to come. 

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

The most recent news from the Hospitality Industry is not good for Innkeepers.  Hotel REIT giant, LaSalle Properties announced it was cutting 20% from its hotel staffing (mostly run by large hotel management companies) and has rescinded its 2008 guidance to the stock market.  LaSalle reported that its Revpar (revenue per available room) decreased by 11.4 % in October; a huge drop!  While the Innkeeping Business does not use Revpar as a measurement, it is fundamentally the same as saying that average daily rate and occupancy combined dropped by that amount.  LaSalle is an important bell- weather for Inns because it is comprised of mostly luxury and higher-priced hotel properties.  For the full story, please see:   LaSalle Orders 20% Cut in Hotel Staffing – WSJ.com.

We hear anecdotally that many Inns and Bed and Breakfasts across the Country have had good years in 2008, at least until the end of October.  Now is not the time for Innkeepers to rest on their laurels.  A sea change is coming, in the form of a recession, the likes of which we have not seen in our lifetimes.  This is also not the time to just burrow in fear of what is to come.  As we have said many times before, when there is a downturn, those Inns at the top of their game can improve market share as against the competition.  A bigger piece of a smaller pie may save the day after all.

So this is the time to be countercyclical and increase your spending on marketing, especially electronic marketing through your website, blog, and by email.  Create attractive packages rather than discount, and spend all of that extra time you have due to declining occupancies to come up with creative and imaginative ways to get your repeat and referral guests to the Inn.  Most of all, just lowering the price will not work, and may make things worse in the long run (see previous article on Discounting).

Most of all, have heart.  The biggest reason that they come back to the Inn is because your have created a refuge and a respite from all of the problems the guests face at home and in the real world.  Remember that this is exactly what the guests need in these troubled times, and they will pay you for this experience.

At a recent meeting of Innkeepers, we had a discussion of Blogs, and, particularly, why would an Innkeeper spend the time to create and keep up a good blog? The answer is kind of simple. Do you want to have a successful website or do you want to continue to struggle for visibility on the search engines?

One key to success with Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines is to continually have fresh content on your Inn’s website. Having a Blog on your website allows you to constantly change the content, and particularly the links to and from the site, with new and relevant material. Remember, that for Google and the other search engines, the more relevant the material is to your website, the better. Thus, writing about all of the things to do and see in your Inn’s area, about the great restaurants, about the special events happening around you, all contribute to higher visibility in the eyes of the search engines. They also contribute directly to heads in beds!

At the PAII Conference this March, we heard many really great presentations on Web 2.0 and, particularly, Consumer Generated Media like TripAdvisor. You can play games with TripAdvisor to try to bury bad reviews or create your own reviews, but this will eventually come back to haunt you. Most Inns urge their guests to write their own reviews on TripAdvisor. Better than this is to open a dialogue with your guests via your own Blog. You can clearly respond to TripAdvisor via a Managers Comment, but why not explain yourself in detail on your own Blog. Ask for and respond to your guests’ concerns directly. It is much more powerful for your own website to be the place that guest concerns and critiques can be dealt with openly and without defensiveness on your part.

Finally, remember that hospitality and service is still the basic component of our Bed and Breakfast Industry. Having a Blog creates a new, electronic media to provide this hospitality and service to your guests and prospective guests. What better place than your Blog to show the world what a terrific concierge you are? You know your area better than anyone, and need to be its best ambassador. Don’t wait for the guest to arrive to provide this service. Make it an active part of your web marketing by putting it all on the Blog. Your Inn’s success will depend on it.

We are pleased to again be speaking at the PAII Conference this year. In one of our presentations Howard Levitan of Quantum Hospitality Group will be discussing how to best market your Inn with food. We hope you will be able to attend the conference, however, if you cannot attend we wanted to be sure to share our slide show presentation with you. We hope to see you at the Conference!

Marketing Your Bed and Breakfast With Food

We are seeing it everywhere, and know it’s time to take it to the inn. Going green…is it for you and your inn? The first thing that we think of is asking the guests not to have us change their towels. In reality it goes much further than this. We are talking about organic food, specialty products for the inn, marketing to guests that want to be green, enjoying nature, recycling, light bulbs, and much more. We started our investigation and were surprised by the facts.

The hospitality industry spends around $3.7 billion each year on energy, much of it going to waste, as stated by the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA). According to data from GreenTreks Network, Inc., a distributor of environmental education, compact fluorescent bulbs use 75 percent less energy and last 10 times longer then incandescent bulbs. Not replacing towels and linens each day saves 13.5 gallons of water daily. These facts in themselves are amazing!

We welcome your comments to share with other innkeepers!

We recently attended the 2007 PAII Conference in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. If you are an Innkeeper or want to become an Innkeeper someday, you should make a point to attend these Conferences. The PAII Conferences and trade shows are not only a great opportunity to network, but they are also a source of inspiration. New products, distributors, and ideas abound. We hope to see you at the next Conference!

If you were not able to attend the most recent PAII Conference, we wanted to share our slideshow presentations with you:

Food and Alcohol Safety Issues for Innkeepers

Exit Strategies for Inns with Restaurants

Creative Electronic Marketing

Recently we attended a national conference and happened to gather a sizable number of business cards from innkeepers requesting additional information from us. We are always happy to respond and answer questions and to forward additional information. We came back from the conference and started to work on fulfilling the requests. We sat down, separated the requests into piles for similar requests, and then came to a screeching halt! Much to our surprise over 50% of the business cards contained no e-mail addresses! The innkeepers were diligent about furnishing their website addresses, but no e-mail addresses. So off we went to track down the website address and dig through the websites to find their e-mail addresses. Even then, some of the websites didn’t actually list their e-mail address.

So our question today is: do people know how important it is to put an e-mail address on their business cards? By the look of this independent survey, I would say no. In the world of ever changing technology, an e-mail address is as important as a telephone number. So, if you don’t have an e-mail address on your business card, fix it! A guest may just want to drop you an e-mail to say that they had a lovely time at your innor they may have left something that they would like to have forwarded to them. Other situations could include wanting to purchase gift certificates, asking to send a brochure to a friend, asking to share a special recipe, and more! Guests aren’t the only receiver of your business cards. This could include business acquaintances (like us), vendors, local trade people, and more. It is much easier for people to keep a business card versus a brochure.

In closing, we encourage everyone to step back and evaluate your business cards…e-mail addresses are important!

All Innkeepers are concerned with improving the bottom line. No matter how much control over expenses you apply, how can you best increase room sales? Most Innkeepers know that the Internet has a bias in favor of destination locations. These are the historical travel sites in each state that are must sees for travelers. So how do Innkeepers grow their businesses if they are not in one of those “destination” locations that are being Googled more often than other searches? Or, even if the Inn is located in a destination, how can you make your Inn stand out from the pack?

The challenge is called “differentiation.” How can you make your Inn appear different (read that “better”) than the rest? The answer is the same, whether or not you are in a destination location. Niche marketing (called “Segmentation”) is all about making your Inn standout from the rest. The foundation of niche marketing is the development of packages which combine the experience of staying at your Inn and eating your great meals (whether bed and breakfast or full service) with one or more special experiences in your area. Here we are segmenting the market into small niches. We are trying to attract all forms of interests. The packages are easy to put together and can be unlimited in scope. Whatever adventure-type activities you have in your area like whale watching, kayaking, hiking, biking, antiquing, golfing, fishing, or whatever can be combined into a great package along with a stay at the Inn and one or more meals. The key is developing unusual packages that differentiate your Inn and convince your prospective guests that you are special.

This Niche Marketing concept was first developed by Disney to increase sales at their theme parks. It has been adopted by the Cruise lines which now make more money per traveler on experiences off ship than they do on the cruises. Finally, the big resorts have taken this up under the concept of “Cruise Ships on Land.” If you want to really improve the bottom line consider this one of the best ways to stand out from the rest of the Inns in your area.

Article written by Howard Levitan, Oates & Bredfeldt, LLC