MOST SEARCHED

LAGLCC-IGLTA-GayTravelocity Reception @ Custom Hotel

We had a wonderful evening reception at the Custom Hotel in LA, hosted by an incredible staff. Over 75 people were in attendance for our first event bringing members together from LAGLCC (www.laglcc.org) and IGLTA (www.iglta.org) and sponsored by GayTravelocity.com

A few words about the Custom Hotel... it's a gorgeous boutique hotel located very near LAX. Every other Wednesday night is Crush, their local gay night they promote to the GLBT community living on the westside of LA.

Links to photos here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattskal/sets/72157617138719277/

Job Posting: Business Operations Manager for The Clubs

Help wanted. Seeking energetic, enthusiastic and goal-oriented candidate for the position of Business Operations Manager for the Dallas and Houston Clubs (www.theclubs.com).

Tasks

Oversee local management team in Dallas and Houston
Develop staffing programs to focus on and improve overall customer service
Ensure accounting processes established by company are implemented, verified and routinely audited
Oversee marketing initiatives from conception to implementation, based upon set marketing budgets
Interact with local organizations, contractors and local authorities

Background

10 years of hands-on management experience
Online marketing experience, including understanding of current social networking and Web 2.0 trends
Staff training experience desirable, with the ability to motivate, evaluate and direct employees
Accounting experience with Quickbooks
Previous management experience in hospitality industry a plus

Requirements

BS or greater, preferably in business, management and/or marketing disciplines
Travel between Dallas and Houston on a regular basis, with possible travel to other Midwest destinations in near future
Computer experience and knowledge, including Excel, Word and PowerPoint

Selected candidate will report to the Board of Directors. Salary is negotiable. For interview consideration, please submit resumes to dennis648@aol.com.

Should You Promote Your Company On Facebook and Risk Competitors Stealing your Customers?

This question has come up several times over the past month... one client in particular recently wrote: "Is it dumb for us to have a business/fan page (as opposed to profile), because competitors could start emailing all our peeps…friending them (and a lot of people accept everyone) and the start marketing to out entire mailing list?"

My response was as follows:

So you know my overall position on this… I think that the net, overall good that comes to your company by creating a Facebook business/fan page far outweighs the possibility that a competitor can poach your online network of friends (aka, your e-mail list).

First, Facebook discourages this. If someone started going through your friends and “friending” them all, Facebook would catch it at a certain point and warn the person not to do it or risk having their account closed. I know several people this has happened to, which then subsequently keeps them honest in the future. Being “honest” means that most business users of Facebook have come to realize that they need to earn friends, not just spam or steal them, and thus the greatest benefit to you as a company is that I believe what you have to offer in order to “earn” those friends and keep them staying in touch with and on top of your business offerings is considerably greater than that which your competitors can offer.

The video you’ve been placing online has been watched my almost everyone you and I know… your photos, uploaded to your business page and tagged, will go a long way in terms of spreading the word about your company far and wide to Facebook’s audience of over 200M users and growing. Posting links to your various new tours and travel packages is one way to promote yourself… posting your customers blog links, as well as providing them a page where they can post these themselves, will also help to create more buzz and bring more awareness to your company, your brand and your product offerings.

The bottom line is that your customers ARE already on Facebook… they are viewing other gay travel and tour operator offerings… they are engaging with each other and sharing information and stories about trips they’ve taken with you. Without a business presence on Facebook, these conversations and engagements are going on without you… you are NOT part of the conversation and you are missing out on shaping and influencing the direction those conversations and engagements go, which should be towards your business.

I hope this helps.

Matt

Tea Party!!!

Lisa Benson's politcal cartoon today found online at cartoonistgroup.com really cracked me up. It became the anthem for today's Tea Party celebration. I think the only thing I'd change is to make the guy on the bow Obama, the chief pirate.

themostsearched, like many others, was unable to attend a Tea Party today because we are working hard to earn enough money to support our families AND pay our taxes while still giving back to our communities.

themostsearched is outraged at the Democratic-controlled US Congress. They have frivolously spent TRILLIONS left and right. This out of control spending will result in future severe inflation and devaluation of the dollar. Worst yet, many of the politicians who got us into this mess such as Barney Frank through his promoting home loans to those who couldn't afford it shrug off responsibility and accountiblity for their actions. (hey hey ho ho Barney Frank has got to go!!!)

But Congress is not solely culpable. Now that themostsearched as let Obama have some time in office without criticism, it is time to speak loud and clear: Obama your signing these massive spending bills rates you (so far) as the worst president in modern history. But then again I wasn't surprised because you had no executive experience and your ideals come from a far left socialist agenda.

It is at this time that themostsearched gives our support to an alternative plan, a better way:

(1) For the first time in our life, themostsearched gives support to the Fair Tax (see http://www.fairtax.org/). The 16th amendment needs to be repealed and IRS abolished. There is no defense for the status quo when Treasury Secretary "Tax Cheat" Geithner can't even get it right. The Fair Tax will also enhance savings as taxes will be increased on consumption. There should be some control in the Fair Tax to prevent particularly those with higher incomes from spending a bulk of their incomes out of country to avoid tax but this is so much better than what we have. Also we will reap a huge effeciency as we rid ourselves of a parasitical tax collecting sector of our economy and federal bureaucracy.

(2) Establish US Congressional term limits. maybe 3 or 4 terms for senator, 5 or 6 for representatives. The Congress is so concerned about controlling business that they are becoming too powerful. This modest proposal would help provide a check on Congress.

(3) Establish a federal balanced budget. Exceptions would include war approved by Congress and a majority vote by the people (its our money; we should have a say if we're going to suddenly spend more for some reason).

Social Network Marketing Updates for 2009

The concepts of Touch Points and Connections become even more poignant in this new age of Twitter and the recent Facebook updates

There can be little doubt that social network marketing is becoming one of the fastest growing areas in the marketing world today. Every day, we are inundated with new terms and forced to continue to keep up with the latest in social networking technology, including these new Twitters everyone keeps talking about, and the more recent updates Facebook has launched in order to both stay on top of the growth curve and counter this Twitter phenomenon.

In addition, it is becoming more and more clear that the eyeballs and attention of online users worldwide are continuing to migrate and spend more time in social networking sites than ever before. Facebook was at 100,000,000 users as of July 2008, and they are now surpassing 200,000,000 today, doubling in the span of just months. To accommodate this growth, Facebook has made a variety of changes designed to try and anticipate how users can continually manage this greater and greater influx of information in a way that’s still both useful and relevant in their daily lives. Of course, this accommodation and change is met with greater resistance today as so many people are now personally vested in the functionality of Facebook and don’t want to see key features for staying in touch with friends and business associates become diminished.

That said, Facebook is still the dominant social network for businesses large and small to reach their consumers in ways never thought possible before. With the new Facebook redesign, a Facebook Business/Fan Page is fast becoming the way to go for companies wishing to have the most impact with online users today. The new design allows a business to more conveniently present itself similar to how an individual presents himself today, with photos, status updates and even blog feeds imported as Notes. All of these elements appear in a user’s News Feed, which means that the business has a better chance of staying front and center with their consumer base. The more popular the elements are (such as a great photo album tagged with multiple people), the more often that element appears in the news feed, as well as appearing on the right-hand column where Facebook now features what it deems the most popular content for a user to view for that day.

Of course, an update for 2009 in the world of social networking would not be complete were it not to discuss Twitter. This service, which has definitely taken a lead position in terms of what new social network topic people are talking about, allows all of us, individuals and businesses alike, to keep our friends and fans up to date as what we’re up to in business and in life. The technical term of a Twitter is a microblog, which is simply a small amount of information equal to that which fits into a typical cell phone text message.

One important aspect of Twitter is to have as many people following you as possible... the more that follow you, the more you’re spreading your message out there on the Internet. So if your company has just posted a new update in its blog, has issued a press release, has an event to announce or simply has something to say, putting it into a Twitter means that you have one new online location from which to get the word out. And people will hear you and respond almost immediately.

The second power of Twitter is in the non-immediate responses found when using the SEARCH function on Twitter, which was rather hidden by the folks at Twitter until only recently. You can do a search for key words relevant to your business, such as “gay travel” or “gay business” to find Twitter postings several weeks or months old that are relevant to you and your industry. Finding these postings allows you to see who is posting what, discovering more about them through their online Twitter bio and link to their website. It is fast becoming a great way to expand one’s business network to reach individuals not found through some of the more traditional social network sites we’ve been using over the past year including LinkedIn.com and Plaxo.com.

It is this concept of “followers” and “connections” that is fast becoming key in the social networking world. Without a good number of people relevant to your business staying connected with you and receiving those gentle social network updates you’re sending out by posting status updates, Twitters, photos and link postings online, you would run into the “tree falling in the woods” scenario where if no one was listening, one would question whether the tree actually fell! The key is to put in the time to develop relevant friends, followers and connections in these and other social networking sites... it is this network of connections that is fast becoming the key differentiator between a successful social networking campaign and one that is just mediocre. It’s clear that to maintain a consistent network, one must put in the time... thus, as more and more companies are wading into the social network marketing waters and finding initial success, the next logical steps are to increase the time spent (whether that’s hiring an individual to do the work or an outside agency) so that they can continue to maximize the opportunities that are just continuing to expand and grow in this new marketing space.

It is not just Facebook, MySpace and Twitter which have the opportunity to maintain a network of connections. The selection of which site you choose to upload your business photos and videos is very important as well. I tend to focus on Flickr.com for photos and YouTube.com for videos. Flickr.com not only allows for excellent integration of your business photos into a variety of sites online, but it also maintains a strong social network from which you can increase the likelihood that your photos are viewed online. By uploading your photos onto Flickr and tagging them with key words you want them to be found by, you’ve increased the likelihood of your business photos being put to work for your business. By putting your web link in with the photo’s description, someone who finds your photos can follow you all the way back to your website. Lastly, adding your photos to some relevant groups associated with your photos and your business (such as the gay travel group, which currently has over 700 members) will further expand your reach with your photos in ways not possible on other photo uploading sites.

The same applies to YouTube, where your videos can ultimately be set up to drive more and more traffic to your website with the use of tags (key words) when uploading your videos. These tags allow someone viewing one video to see “similar videos” of which yours would be included. Thus, if someone is watching a video about “gay Montreal” and your video is also about gay Montreal and tagged as such, your video will probably be one of their automatically selected “similar videos” as well, which online users click on quite frequently as they “channel surf” on YouTube. By maintaining a strong branding presence on YouTube with the use of these “channels”, your videos will then ultimately bring more eyeballs to your online products and services displayed on your website.

Gay and Lesbian Social Networking
Advertising - Marketing - Community

For the full-color PDF version of this story, go here:
http://www.PinkBananaMedia.com/pdf/PBM_Web20_Travel.pdf

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http://www.PinkBananaMedia.com/BusinessReport/

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NOTE: This article is part of the Gay Market Report 2009 and is FREE TO USE as long as byline above, credit, logo and link are included with story. Credit Pink Banana Media,

Gay Business Report - April 2009

In This Issue

Social Network Marketing Updates for 2009
The concepts of Touch Points and Connections becomes even more poignant in this new age of Twitter and the recent Facebook updates
There can be little doubt that social network marketing is becoming one of the fastest growing areas in the marketing world today. Every day, we are inundated with new terms and forced to continue to keep up with the latest in social networking technology, including these new Twitters everyone keeps talking about, and the more recent updates Facebook has launched in order to both stay on top of the growth curve and counter this Twitter phenomenon....

Social Network Marketing in Gay Travel
Content ideas for gay travel and destination marketing are quite varied, and can include:

Events: you could focus on upcoming GLBT events in your area, including Pride festivals, film festivals and more.
Club and Bar Reviews: you could run a series of blog postings highlighting GLBT clubs and bars in your area
Restaurant Reviews: you could run a series of blog postings highlighting GLBT and GLBT-friendly restaurants in your area
Hotel Reviews: you could run a series of blog postings highlighting GLBT-friendly hotels in your area
Destination Attractions and Highlights: you can feature art exhibitions, museum openings and wide variety of attractions and highlights in your area
Individual interviews: you could have featured interviews done as blog postings of key GLBT business leaders in your area

Beta: New Tool for Measuring Social Network Marketing ROI
As social network marketing continues to grow in the marketing mix of companies worldwide, the one area that it continually falls short is in measurement and resulting Return on Investment (ROI) for the companies making their initial investments in this space. As a result, our company has embarked on a new project to create one of the first ROI spreadsheets for social network marketing. It’s not easy, as the variables to measure are considerably different from the tried and true banner advertising and e-mail marketing used today....

Other Highlights

Promotion of an Event using Inbound Marketing
The Power of a Tiny Picture
Book Recommendation: World Wide Rave

Download PDF

March 2009 Gay Business Report

In This Issue
Webinar and Seminar Schedule Through 2009

Updated presentation adds more detail on “touch points” and the power of influential contacts in your network

Be sure to watch for our freshly updated seminar and webinar series for 2009, covering the world of Social Network and Web 2.0 marketing to the GLBT?community. With almost 50% new material, focusing on new topics such as Power Influencers and how to connect with them, as well as expanding on the best Touch Points your company can have when making outreach in this new frontiers, this seminar/webinar series will show you both how to do it all in-house, as well as help bring some new concepts to your overall online marketing mix....

Access Obama: Making contact with the White House is easier than it used to be
You work for an LGBT media outlet. You're on deadline and need a comment from the White House regarding any one of the Obama administration's civil-rights policies affecting lesbian and gay citizens. How do you go about getting your questions answered? How were gay media relations with the White House in previous administrations? And will they be different under President Obama....