Savvy Operator

The Engagement phase is the second phase of the four step L.E.A.D. social media strategy and is the first step in connecting and conversing with your potential customers, partners, and vendors. The Engagement phase is all about joining into an existing conversation rather than starting your own conversation. During this step you are beginning to [...]

No special tools are required for the engagement phase, however, I do recommend optional profiles for the purposes of properly branding your comments: Disqus.com – Disqus is a shared commenting system used by many blogs. It allows you to post your comments to Twitter and share them on Facebook from the same profile. This is [...]

In the previous article, titled “Listening for your brand on-line“, I mentioned a few monitoring tools that you can use to listen for mentions of your brand or keywords.  I will now go into a bit more detail about each of these tools. Google Alerts If you only use one monitoring tool, Google Alerts is [...]

The Listening phase is the first and, I would argue, the most important step in the L.E.A.D. ™ social media strategy. Like any conversation, listening affords the listener the luxury of understanding the nature of the conversation, the individuals involved, the subject matter, and the direction of the conversation. Listening also provides the listener with [...]

If you are like most business people online, you are probably bombarded with sales pitches by SEO and social media experts all claiming that they can get you tons of traffic in no time.  But like all things that are truly worthwhile, there are no quick fixes to being successful at either search engine optimization [...]

Coupons and promotions have been around for a long time and are commonly used to drive business by providing price incentives.  As a tour or activity operator, there are a lot of ways you can use a promotional coupon to drive new or repeat business to your website.  In the traditional model, a customer would [...]

Every in-destination tourism company (whether it is an attraction, tour operator, or activity provider) prints brochures and rack cards for distribution to tourists.  It doesn’t matter what market you are in, you will find these brochures in the lobbies of hotels, store fronts, and tourist offices.  Hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions) of dollars are [...]

PPC or pay per click can be a very effective way of driving traffic to your website especially if your website does not rank well on Google search results because of high competition for your keywords.  As part of any Google PPC campaign, you will have access to using Google analytics to track your campaign [...]

Your booking page, whether you create it yourself, or you use a software product has to be secure.  If you are currently requesting credit card information on a page that is NOT secure, you are probably in violation of your merchant agreement and could face severe penalties if you do not secure it.  Okay, now [...]

By now you have probably realized that there are a number of software products available in the market that are marketed as “tour operator software”.  But how do you determine what features are best for your organization? Needless to say there are a variety of systems available on the market.  There are two predominant groups; [...]