Owning a Tourism Business is awesome

30 May 2010

Facebook Wizard Will Magically Make Your Money Disappear

A new software package, promising to enable you to reach hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook, will take your money in exchange for software which will spam the hell out of Facebook. While we haven’t purchased the application, it’s clearly against Facebook’s terms and is probably not the best way to build a “viral marketing” campaign. The application could also be the source of much of the Facebook Page spamming that users have been reporting to us in recent days.

Some of the key features of Facebook Wizard is the following:
  • Automatically add friends at random
  • Spam Facebook Pages by automatically liking and commenting on updates
  • Avoid being blocked by Facebook’s captcha via a “decaptcha” feature
  • Proxy support to hide detection from Facebook’s automated spam detectors

So buy this program and get ready to go viral! Not! My guess is that Facebook will have this shut down in a matter of days. While the application could possibly work, this is definitely not the way to go about building a marketing campaign. If you want to try out blasting your friends (and their friends) with a bunch of spam messages, go download the Facebook Wizard for a mere $95. It’s a great way to quickly throw some money out the window!

Facebook Wizard Will Magically Make Your Money Disappear:

14 May 2010

87% of Hotels, Inns and B&B’s say “NO” to TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is a few months into their “pay to display” contact information with enhanced business listings and the tactic (at least early in it’s implimentation) has to be recognized as a failure.

For those in the industry who can’t afford to pay for displaying contact information (the service starts at $600/yr for properties with less than 10 rooms) the news that most have opted to not sign up is good.

Just 13% of accommodation businesses have listed with TripAdvisor
, despite numerous invitations by email from the company to sign up.

With so much business being derived from TripAdvisor, TripAdvisor must have thought the enhanced listings would have been an easy sell to hoteliers when we first heard about the service this past November.

Offered to early subscribers at 50% off and still being flogged to hoteliers at 30% off, it is hard to believe that those who (like me) scoffed at the idea of paying to display contact information, will pony up even more cash for the opportunity. After all, other tourism businesses like restaurants get a free ridewhat’s with hotels having to pay? It is hard to believe that as TripAdvisor moves to a pay full price model for the service that more hotels will be inclined to get on board.

As for the early adopters who got the steep discount on signing up, do you feel you are getting value from your enhanced business listing?

Full article here: