I stayed at the Hilton hotel in San Diego this weekend, and overall a great experience. However there was a 10 dollar charge for internet for 24 hours usage at the property, and since I wasn’t on business, I wouldn’t be able to expense it.     

Charging guests for internet access is like charging for water or the lights, and hotels that charge are missing a few business opportunities.   Like what? Here’s a few suggestions, and then I’ll open it up to commenters to share their ideas:

1. Providing free WiFi (like coffee shops have figured out) means I’m more likely to stay on property and spend more time and money on your hotel. It means I’m more likely to have business meetings in your restaurant or lounge and invite others to come and do business.  We have expense reports and are likely to buy food and drink.  We’ll access our web enabled devices at the pool, in the lounge, keeping our kids busy, and keeping us connected.
2. Savvy hotels will create or foster location based social networks, that will encourage guests to rate and rank which restaurants, attractions, and self-support each other.  As we rate and rank nearby attractions in the context of being a guest at your hotel, that centralizes our experiences with your brand –we’ll tell our network about the great we had our experience in and around as guests at your property.
3. Develop a virtual concierge that will be a helpful guide to your guests, consider using twitter like the four seasons does, they even do this for their Palo Alto hotel, near my house.  You can provide us a better experience if we’re connected to each other –and to you.
4. Maybe we’ll spend more times learning from your leadership teams, like Bill Marriot’s blog.  Hotels put a lot of marketing and service products in our hotel rooms like menus, spa treatments and concierge treatments, allow us to see these things online, not just in paper, giving us more opportunity to buy more.  

I’m not picking on Hilton alone,  as I’m told it varies on property per property basis, and there are many other hotels that charge for internet, but as a general rule of thumb, provide a better experience to guests so you can connect with other –and you.   When I travel on personal trips, I’m going to consider free internet access as a major factor to my decision on where to stay.

Update: Here’s a handy guide of which hotels charge who have internet access and how much they charge.  About 22 of the 44 hotel chains charge for internet, and some don’t even offer it (motel 6).  Many of you expressed agreement with my post (and a ton more in Twitter) so I hope this helps in your decision making.

I’m having good success working with StudioNashVegas, and based on your feedback from a while ago, we’ve slowly made the changes you’ve suggested. Being a community guy, I’m working with you all to decide on what’s best for the upcoming redesign –of course, I factor in the feedback, but I make the executive call, or we’ll be doing death by committee.

While I’m 90% confident the comp is where I want it to be as far as user interface and information architecture, part of my work as a social analyst is to experiment with the different tools out there, so I’m going to use CROWDspring to outsource creation of my header. The designers will keep the logo, and will be given the dimensions to use for the header, more news on that soon (Update: here’s the details). This is a controversial topic, as I’ve written about why it’s here to stay, and I’ll be in one of the main stages at SXSW to debate it.

I’d like to get your feedback on this second iteration of the comp, I take your feedback seriously. Even if you see someone who’s said something similar to you, please chime in the comments, as I put weight on frequency of mentions.

Remember, it’s not just me that has to use this site, it’s as much a community resource, so I do value your feedback.

Click to see larger version

Oh yeah, I’ll work with my buddy Brian Solis who will take a new profile pictures, just haven’t had the time. Update: If you’re interesting in designing my banner, see the rules here on CROWDspring.

Leave your feedback below, myself and Mitch from StudioNashVegas are listening.

I’m practicing what I preach to clients, and am adopting one of the five objectives we call “Embracing” which is when brands use social technologies to collaborate with their customers to create new products. In this case, the product is my blog, and the customers are you, my community.

I’m undergoing a blog redesign, and after deciding on designers (read the process) I’m working with Mitch from studionashvegas. We’ve done several comps on my redesigned logo, which is now finalized, but am looking for feedback from YOU, my readers on the blog redesign.

I study community, and this blog needs to serve your needs as well as mine. I know who my audience is from real research (see stats), it’s primarily interactive marketers at agencies, corporate, and consultants. Since I’ve outgrown this current design, see the overflowed right nav, it’s time to clean up the layout, make it easier to find information and highlight what I think is important.

Although we’ve taken a few comps to get to this point, here’s the latest version we’re willing to share. Since you’re going to be looking at this design as a community member, I want your feedback, and am watching for patterns in suggestions, or what you like.

We’re also having the same discussion on Friendfeed. Here’s to making a great blog to suit our needs as a community, love to hear your opinion, please leave a comment below.

Before I went on vacation, I asked you to provide me with raw, real feedback about this blog. 88 of you did, and I learned a lot, the highlights include:

High Level Summary
Overall, the readers of this blog are above satisfied with the blog, with the content and insights provided. Many readers are in the marketing services industry, at small companies and in the United States. There is room for improvement to add more case studies, and provide how to guides, and to improve grammar, and publish more succinctly.

Read the rest of the results (only for the data geeks) there are tons of graphs, data, and qualitative feedback.

You’ll learn:

How sophisticated readers are with social media
How they consume this blog
How often do they read
Does this blog help them with their job
How big their companies are
What titles they have
What industries they are from
Do I write too often?

I’m reading each response, and will use this to improve, be better, and continue to help build the community. Thank you again!

Update:

Jennifer Joseph of Forrester Research has posted her findings from all FOUR Forrester blogs, read her analysis, and see her slides.

I’m having lunch with the CEO of Compete Scott Ernst, after speaking at his client event, we’re kidding each other about who’s blog is better, in fact there’s been two rankings about it, Ad age and we’re at a photo finish over at technobabble, . Many of you may be familiar with compete.com, but they do more than that.

In his presentation I learned a lot more about what they do, but over lunch, I just told him that awareness is very low: “Until today, I had no idea these other services you provide”. He agreed, and I suggested we do a market test to ask people what they think

I know from my recent survey that most of my readers are the people he also wants to reach (see graph), so lemme ask you

Leave a comment below, what do you think Compete does?

Scott, who blogs on the Compete team blog, is interested to hear what you have to say, I hope he responds from his blog, and I’ll update this post.

Left: Results from a survey: “How do you consume the content on Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang?”

Well, that’s an understatement really. The readers of this blog are collectively smarter than any author, and I recognize that.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, I ask questions, as I want to know what people think. I read every single comment, and often respond to comments , questions and followups.

I recently ran a survey to find out how people are using my blog, and most are reading this blog via RSS in a feedreader, they’re not even visiting the site. While feedreaders are great for getting content when you want, where you want, and in the format you want, you’ll miss out on the wisdom being generated in the comments.

For example, last week’s post on Six Career tips generated dozens and dozens of juicy tips that can help you in your career, but if you’re reading that only in the feedreader, you’re really missing out.

So I encourage you to once in a while come back and visit to see what’s happening in the discussions, that’s where the real value is.

Update, a few hours later: A few people in the comments requested a summary. Ok here’s a comment summary: A few people requested a comment summary. This is the last time I’ll be doing a comment summary, ha!

Related: Shoemoney, a master at search marketing doesn’t take his commenters that seriously, I know many of those who have commented, I have a high degree of trust for my commenters.

I’ve been meeting a lot of folks that are readers of this Web Strategy blog here at SXSW. It’s overwhelmingly an amazing feeling to know that folks are improving their careers by learning, connecting with others, and finding links to other resources.

Beyond the initial buzz of meeting all of you, I ask nearly everyone “how could the blog improve?” I’ve received a range of responses, including the following:

“Be more transparent about your day job as an Analyst”

“Don’t be afraid to proudly wave your Forrester reports, you’ve worked hard on them”

“Make it easier for me to find information”

“You post too damn much, slow down”

Feel free to leave a suggestion below, style or content suggestions.

The most common comment by the way is “I don’t know how you do it (in regards to the time) and “Do you have a hobby or loved ones?” You’ll have to find me in person to hear my answer. I love meeting readers, please do come up and say hi, it’s really a pleasure for me to get to know you!