Louis Halpern's View on Internet & Hotel Marketing

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Sometimes it’s excellent to be reminded about what you already know.

Pearlfinders interviewed 100 senior decision makers from 100 leading UK companies:

• 55% said that budgets were down from last year. Cost cutting was the most common reason cited.
• 33% said that their budgets have stayed the same, with most stating their aim was to cement their position in their market
• 12% said that they have increased their budgets

One, unnamed, marketing director reported ‘We take the view that it’s better to spend more in times of crisis, so that we stand out from the crowd’.

Nothing surprising there…

The role of agency PR in winning business provided some incite.  Last year the respondents said PR was very important in agency selection. This year 70% said that this was irrelevant when it came to decision making.

Social media has become very much mainstream in the past 5 years but is the cause of the diminishing power of PR.  The rational was the bombardment with messages from blogs, dm, cold calling and press coverage means that brand differentiation was diminishing.

Agencies are great at giving advice on how to keep brand messages succinct and make all channels consistent but often fail with their own work – to many creative geniuses I suspect.

Talking about social media, like all good clients with a newish trend on their radar, 89% of respondents claimed social media is important for their brand but only 29% are actually doing anything about it.   Perhaps they should start with managing their personal reputation on line and then go onto use the lessons for their brand.

Some of you make know that I’ve been writing a book with Roy Murphy about Personal Reputation Management.

It’s nearly there.

It’s being self published so we’ve sent a draft to the printer to define the format of the book.   The three formats are coming back soon then it will be time to commit the first few thousand copies.

Here’s a quick peak at the cover of the book.

We’re going to make it available in multiple formats.  Obviously the printed book, but also various ebook formats.

15% of final job applicants don’t actually get an offer due to their online postings, according to LinkedIn’s General Council, Erika Rottenberg.

 She revealed this information at a lunch time talk at Santa Clara University on the 29^th January 2009.  At the same time she gave some great examples of good and bad personal reputation [brand] management.

 The good. Henk van Ess, the “Accidental Entrepreneur,” who is now a successful web retailer after discovering a better iPhone battery from China.  He used LinkedIn for his marketing.

 The bad. Joshua Lipton (AP story). Josh was waiting sentencing in a drunk driving incident in which he caused serious harm to his victim. Whilst waiting he went to a Halloween party in a “jailbird” costume wearing jailhouse attire, and photos from the party were posted to his Facebook page. The prosecutor submitted the photos to the judge and he went to jail for longer.

 As you all know I’ve been writing a book on his subject and thanks Erika for these facts and Rich West for spotting them for me.

 << And in case you have Google Alerts on your name Erika or somebody forwards this link to you …  Please have a look at our new Halpern Personal reputation management service. To validate that were GC at LinkedIn I found that it was really difficult to find on you Google which I think it a bit more used than LinkedIn.  As a subject expert we’ll give you a discount ;¬) >>

London 9:38 29^th Jan 2009 Transcript

- talking about the Semantic Internet.

Louis: It was originally a concept thought of by Tim Berners-Lee. Do you know who Tim Berners-Lee is?

Tommy: No.

Louis: Tim Berners-Lee was the founding father of the internet. He is also the head of W3C. He kind of is credited with inventing it [the internet].

Tommy: Okay.

Louis: In 1999 he said, “I have a dream for the Web in which computers become capable of analyzing all the data on the web, the content, the links and the transactions between people and computers. A Semantic Web, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge. But when it does, the day to day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The intelligent agents people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

People have done have started to roll out the 1^st generation applications that will make up the Semantic Internet — have you seen it on iTunes, have you downloaded Genius?

Tommy: I love that on my iTunes

Louis: What Genius does is it uses a database to cross-reference your musical taste for the track you are listening to and creates a playlist. It matches your data with other data from everyone else and bingo, it suggests a track you might like listening to. Well that is just the Semantic Internet in one dimension.

The better example of a Semantic Internet would be: say, you know someone in a hospital and what you do is you look up their condition – kidney infection. And you go, oh my God that is really awful. You found out they were in the hospital because you got an email that you have looked at, in your Google inbox or your online inbox. The contextual information around it says “homeopathic cure for kidney infection”. You want to find out if it’s worked for other people. You get directed to a couple of glowing reviews. That is pretty good you think. I would like to buy that ‘cure’ for this person. You click on it, bang! My browser directs me straight to the store to buy it and the Semantic Internet is that clever because it has associated hospital with that day delivery service. Information pops up and says, “Would you like to use the delivery service?”

That is the example of how the Semantic Internet may change commerce and trade and the way we work. I think that’s the way Tim Berners-Lee originally envisaged it. The computers are connected together and by pulling all that information together logically. It is not filtering or a popularity test in the way that Google and other search engines do now.

Instead it is join up the data, it is helping to suggest the next thing we might think of. And that is kind of the vision I have for the internet. When the other concepts we talk about a lot like the Ubiquitous internet become a reality society will change, productivity will accelerate and humans should make another great leap forward.

Or maybe the machines will out think us – but that’s for another day

[Tommy works with me at HC]