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Hotel/Resort Lake Placid, published a LONG comment to a great article about how businesses benefit from twitter.com, which I shall re-post in the near future. Take a look at how this resort takes advantage of social medias.

We are a Hotel and Resort in Lake Placid, NY that began a Twitter and Facebook Specific promotion on 4/22.

In brief – The Adirondack High Peaks is not only the name given to 46 mountain peaks over 4000ft in the 6 million acre Adirondack Park of New York but they are also the namesake of our hotel-the High Peaks Resort.

For 46 straight days we are offering a special rate for 46 minutes each day based off the elevation of one of the 46 High Peaks. For example a rate based off the 4867 foot elevation of Whiteface Mountain will be $48.67.

Each day between 9 and 5 we alert friends, fans and followers only through our Twitter Profile and Facebook Page to when the daily rate will be available. After the update is posted the “elevated” rate of the day becomes bookable for 46 minutes on our website.

In the first 26 days of the promotion we’ve gained 550 new Facebook fans, 350 new Twitter followers and have averaged just over 12 reservations and 25 room nights per day.

But more, we’ve experienced such positive feedback from guests grateful for a chance to have a getaway at a time when they thought they just couldn’t afford it.

The promotion has helped us educate others about the High Peaks region around Lake Placid, establish why we are named the High Peaks Resort, give folks a chance to getaway to Lake Placid and to stay at our resort, but most importantly it creating impressions and relationships with guests that will hopefully last a lifetime.

I can’t think of another platform other than Twitter and Facebook that this would have been as successful for us!

written byJD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile

Should news organizations be wary of social media? Or embrace it? I’ve been arguing the latter for years, and now there are beginning to be lots of examples of journalists using Twitter and other social media tools in smart ways to engage their local communities.

In this 9-minute interview I hurriedly conducted at South by Southwest Interactive in March 2009 minutes before catching a flight, two of the top social media strategists in the newspaper business shared their thoughts about the value Twitter brings to connecting news people with their communities. Daniel Honigman, social media and editorial engagement strategist for Tribune Interactive, and Robert Quigley, Internet editor of the Austin American Statesman, chatted a few minutes after their session, “Old Media Finds New Voice Through Twitter.”

Some top-level takeaways:

“You create customer loyalty” by being part of the online communities that users identify with, Honigman said. “Social media is a way to build your own brand and build your own audience.”

Honigman pointed to solid metrics to support the use of social media: more page views, more site visits, and a richer set of community resources, including an ample supply of beta testers, new sources of events and ideas for new products and projects.

The change comes harder in the broadcast news world, said Honigman, who works with the staffs at WGN in Chicago and KTLA in Los Angeles (and I found this particularly interesting). “It’s absolutely different for broadcasters. ?The golden rule of broadcasting is that you never mention the competition, and in the social space it’s real-time aggregation.” If you let the community help you aggregate the best-of-breed resources available — regardless of who created it — “you can spend your time doing other things.”

In Austin, ‘increased relevance’

Quigley, who runs the online department, says 40 journalists use Twitter in a newsroom of under 200 people. He described Twitter this way: “It’s a tool that lets you connect to your audience in a way that previously was very difficult or impossible. It gives you the ability to get to where they care about you, and you care about them. We all care about our community. Why not show that instead of being a walled-off ‘we’re giving you the news and we don’t care what you have to say’ kind of organization?”

Not all reporters take to Twitter. Some get it right away while others don’t or don’t want to. But staffers are using Twitter for news tips, sources and event announcements as well as using it to humanize themselves. The bottom line is: taking part increases your relevance in the mediasphere. “If we’re not where people are discussing the news, then we have a chance of becoming irrelevant.”

Quigley ended on a personal note: “Twitter is such a personal medium. People feel that they know you, that they’re friends with you, and that can be rewarding, when people say that they love what you do. You just don’t hear that when you work for the newspaper for the most part.”

Apologies for the subpar lighting: The interview was conducted on the fly at the last moment.

Watch or embed the video on Vimeo

Watch or download the video in H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia

Related:
NPR’s experiments with social media
Using Twitter at the Chicago Tribune
How to use social media in the newsroom
Using social media to build an audience

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.

I had a quick tweetversation with one of the most successful “twitters” (I later found out) @caseywright, and later discovered that he runs the Wright Brothers Communication and has some really great keynotes discuss how businesses and you should utilize social network like Twitter. The video below is one of those, very inspiring: you will for sure learn from wholefoods and zappos.

Social Networking Secrets Revealed from Wright Brothers Communications on Vimeo.

Let’s take a quick look at if @Jack (Jack Dorsey, the inventor, founder, current chairman of twitter.com) is the ultimate twitter pro according to the world of twitzlyzer. , and to see if twitalyzer holds up to the test.

Since Jack has 376,733 followers, earliest twitter-er, and tons of tweets, it took Twitalyzer close to 5 minutes to pull all the data together.
His Influence is established: 49.5%
His Signal is astonishingly high: 74%
His “Generosity” is very very low: 1.9%
His velocity is low: 14.4%
His clout is astonishingly high: 89.2%

From this data we can tell that Jack is one of the most influential people on twitter. What do we learn? You don’t have to tweet a whole lot, but you do have to be focused, informative and conversational/interactive if you want to be a twitter pro like @Jack.

I hope by now you get a chance to read Whit’s “twitter rant” and start wondering: am I for twitter, or am I against twitter?

Whit and lot of people think twitter.com is a fad because “no one is busy with tweeting, no one is paying attention to what others are tweeting about” and soon “it will end up like a big pile of crap no one can do anything about but forgetting”.

Read this: Twitter is supposed to be full of “crap”, the more crap there is on twitter, the more valuable twitter.com will become.

Imagine there is no twitter.com, people still chat/talk: popular people talk on the phone with friends/family all the time, lonely people talk in their head. All these talk are gone disappeared after “talk” is done.

Twitter.com lets people tweet in short message, which resembles the most basic human behavior: random chitchat, small talk, daydreaming. Although twitter.com insists it’s a great tool to connect with your friends in a more intimate/closer setting, it’s actually being adopted by millions people for other purposes: random chitchat, small talk, daydreaming, stay on top of News.

It’s not important for people to read all the tweets, the good ones will surface for different individuals and each person can have his/her own favorite few. 99% of tweets are supposed to be random crap that will instantly get lost. How often do people write down their phone conversation, their random chitchat, small talk, daydreaming: not often. But people still have to turn their thoughts/chitchat/small talk/day dreaming into action of pursuing something, buying something, doing something. Conventionally, marketers are able to identify people’s needs based on their experiences, seasonality, understanding of people, sometimes, guessing. With Internet/Google/Yahoo came the much better transparency from the historical data, which enables digital marketers to capitalize on. When Facebook came along, social media breaks down the inter-personal barrier, all of sudden everyone is connected with everyone. But Wait, Facebook does not provide better than what Google does: the historical data. Facebook only “invades” more on our privacy and force people into a more social animal than they are supposed to be. Readwriteweb calls “Facebook is a cult”, Facebook does not really provide anything more than smart sustainable marketers don’t already know. Yes, I have listed my favorite movies/hobbies on Facebook, but they don’t represent my real time needs, like AT ALL. Many marketers have been trying Facebook “contextual ads” for ages without success. I am one of them: running contextual ads for ages without seeing ROI. The “valuable information” on Facebook now became “crap”.

With Twitter.com, all of sudden, people start writing down their random chitchat, small talk, daydreaming. I tweet about the nice raincoats that bunch of random women wear at a street corner near my apartment while it was raining and I wanted to know where I can get that raincoat (for my gf). You maybe twittering about the shopping trip you must do afterwork. All in real time!

Yes, I admit all these tweets are trivial, worthless to our friends and no one wants to see. But that is besides the point. The smart sustainable marketers in the social media era that is beyond Google/Yahoo will need to mine the real time twitter.com. That is when crap becomes gold. That is why visionary people start treating twitter.com as a real time search engine. That is why Google is drooling over twitter.com.

That is exactly why Twitter will be the king of new social media marketing.