It is my strong belief that one of the greatest mistakes made in the travel industry, as it relates to social media, is that they bring an advertising mindset to the process.

When we begin the inquiry process for our various journeys, the first word out of the mouth of very intelligent people is:  “how many hits a month does your site get?”

This tells me that they are considering our work to be merely a one shot advertisement, and that they intend to judge us on the number of folks that we can drive to their site in the immediate future.

If I may be so bold, this type of thinking is missing the whole point of social media!

Here’s a case in point.

It was nearly a month ago that we posted the video recording the highlights of our visit to The Inn of The Five Graces, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Subsequent to our visit, the enlightened folks at The Inn of The Five Graces put our video in the press section of their website.  The yellow arrow to the right shows the prominent placement of our video on their site.

As I was studying the analytics of our website today, I noticed a few very, very important statistics:

• 25 people clicked from the Five Graces press section directly to our video to learn more about the Five Graces.  Why?  They were looking for third party endorsement.
• Interestingly, 24 of these 25 people were from Phoenix, Arizona.  An important target market for the Five Graces.
• Also, very interestingly, these 25 people spent an average of 19 minutes on our site, and viewed an average of 6.44 pages.

So what should we take away from this?

1. The articles that we produce in the Internet, unlike television or print, live forever! Granted, these are not monumental numbers.  But consider that a month down the road our combined efforts to create interest in the Five Graces still lives on.  Television, and print would be long since dead!
2. Our piece, on the Five Graces, contained text, photography, and video.  Only on the Internet can you pull that off.
3. The Five Graces, by putting our third party endorsement on their website, is helping to keep that particular moment in time alive.  Is it possible that a year from now, 50 people each week might view this article?  Not sure, but it is certainly possible.
4. Consider the incredible cost savings.  This type of exposure in television, or print media would cost a small fortune. Furthermore, if you don’t keep feeding the television, and/or print media monster, your investment is practically worthless.  Our piece, for the Five Graces, will live on forever.  Furthermore, if we notice that attention is waning, all we need do is to bring new attention to the article.  Internet articles are easily resurrected from near death.

As we disclosed in our article, The Inn of The Five Graces hosted us for one night in their hotel.  In return, they will experience many eyeballs over the coming years watching the video of our wonderful third party experience.

If you calculate the ROI of even one person making a stay at their Inn it looks pretty good.  I am, however, convinced that our joint social media efforts over the years will bring them many new raving fans of their property, and their subsequent ROI will be stratospheric.

Therein lies the power of social media for the travel industry!