The PhoCusWright Bloggers Summit Thursday March 11th #pcitb

The PhoCusWright bloggers summit was Thursday the 11th at ITB in Berlin. The day started with a "town hall" meeting led my Philip Wolf, president of PhoCusWright, where everyone could participate in discussions about the coming trends in the social media environment. Quick surveys revealed that just about everyone reads Kevin May's blog Tnooz and not a single person in the room admitted to using Google Wave or Google Buzz.

Two workshops were after lunch, the first one titled "Using Social Media to Boost the Bottom Line". Kevin May was the moderator and panelists where Guido the happyhotelier, Yen Lee from Uptake, Detlef Meyer from Heritage Consult and Jonah Sigel from blog.planeteye.com.

Guido said that he never watches the metrics from social media. He just isn't the metric guy. For him it isn't about getting more guests, it's about getting better guests. The hotel rooms sell themselves if people like him, plus, he gets guests to his hotel who agree on what a hotel should offer. The relationship he has with some of his guests is so strong that some of them even have keys to the hotel. Now that's customer relationship management at the top level.

Yen Lee of UpTake said they used the blog for two main purposes. One is to improve the content which is good for both users and search engines, and the second is to aquire more customers. "We spend a lot of money on social media even though we can't proof the ROI. It just feels like the right thing to do." sain Yen. While search is still crucial for the traffic and conversion, social media has now become the primary channel for traffic for UpTake. The other panelists agreed to that but Sigal reminded people that though social media had become the primary channel, they still had number 2, 3 and 4 which should not be neglected.

Kevin posted a few twtpolls during the panel discussions which was a smart thing to do, though I found the options incomplete and limiting.

The topic of the second workshop was "Brand Management, Fighting Fires and Finding Fans through social media". On the panel were Sam Daams from Travellerspoint, Robert K Cole from rockcheetah.com , Claude Benard from hotelitour.com and Uwe Frers from escapio.

Kevin May posted a poll for the audience during the panel, asking what were the most successful social media channels for improving brand recognition.

The crowd voted for blogs, but Uwe Frers argued that commenting on blogs was much more powerful than blogging  yourself. Robert K Cole said it was like an ecosystem, the blog is good for creating content but you need to feed it to your twitter and Facebook channels and engage your customers.

Many still fear social media because of the negative effect it can have on your reputation. It's important to have a social media disaster plan. Fast response to crisis is crucial.

It's a principal policy never to edit or delete a negative review, said Sam Daams of Travellerspoint. Just react. "I don't think bad recommendations decline conversion rate" Uwe Frerer added. "The question is just which hotel gets the revenue"

The panelists in both the workshops seemed to agree on most things, which maybe made the discussion less interesting that they otherwise would be. You need oposite poles or some wild card into the panel to fire up some lively debates. People could at least see what direction to take in their social media efforts.

Hjörtur