The latest entry in social trip planning is Trippy, a site that revolves around planning a trip based on recommendations from your friends. The site differs from Gogobot and Gtrot in that it aims to build your entire itinerary from your Facebook friends.

When you create a trip on Trippy, you are told right away which of your Facebook friends “know” your destination, having lived, studied or visited there in the past. You can also specify whether your trip is strictly business, budget, romance or even adventure, and tell your friends what you want to experience during your trip. You can then add places, restaurants and hotels you are considering visiting, eating in and staying at. At the end of the process, Trippy provides you with a customized trip URL that you can share on Facebook or Twitter to get your input from your social circle. When your friends click on this link, they will be able to view your proposed itinerary and make comments. You can plan your trip by the day, and when you’re ready, check rates and book your hotel within Trippy’s platform.

Another great site for planning your trip is TravelMuse. The site acts like a scrapbook for your trip, as you can save any web page into a folder so that all of your ideas are in one central place. TravelMuse offers its own Bookmarker to make this process as easy as accessing your bookmarks through a browser. You can also view your saved items on a map, on a calendar, and look for other things to do when you have a few extra hours.

A unique feature of TravelMuse is the “Get Inspired” tab, which allows you to build a customized trip based on your interests and preferences. You can select when you wish to travel, what airport you are flying out of, your favorite activities, maximum flight time and budget per person. From these parameters, TravelMuse will build an entire trip for you within seconds. Talk about making travel easy!

What social travel sites will you use to plan your next trip?

The process takes the device into a chamber and they put a specialized nano coating in the form of a vapor on it. The vapors form a bond on a molecular level to protect the phone. The vapors are so small that they cannot be seen or detected which is ideal for a Smartphone. The cost is $59 and you have to send your phone to the company to be treated and they will ship your new waterproof phone back to you. Kind of makes you wonder what there actually putting on your phone since they do not recommend getting your phone wet to test it out. Liquipel does state that if your phone gets wet that your phone will be fully functional including ear jack and usb port.

The idea is great and they seem to have a process down but I guess only time will tell if this works as well as advertised. There are several videos that demo the process from placing the phone in a glass container and submerging the phone completely in water. One of the demos shows an android device being submerged in water without the battery case and came out working just like before. It was pretty amazing stuff and will be interesting to see if actual user feedback is as positive as the product demonstrations.

So what is the best response if there is a crisis at your property? What is the best action to take in order to disseminate the appropriate information, keep people happy and calm, and most of all continue to be respectful? It depends on the circumstances surrounding the crisis. Regardless, people will be flocking to your hotel’s Twitter account to receive information about what’s going on at your property (Beverly Hilton’s Twitter account has gained over 1,000 followers since Houston’s passing!). You don’t need to be a news source providing up to the minute news on anything other than what’s happening on your grounds. Twitter has really changed the way hotels broadcast to their guests and followers, and while it’s great to take advantage of this channel, it’s also important to be respectful and not overdo it.

In some cases, it might be appropriate for a Twitter account to “go silent” in honor of someone’s passing. In Beverly Hilton’s case, where the hotel basically invoked a “the show must go on” approach, the Pre-Grammy Gala began and there was no mention of Houston for quite a while as the hotel began tweeting about arriving celebrities. Twitter users were upset to find updates about celebs instead of information about and respect for Houston. A better idea might have been to incorporate both events together. For example, “George Clooney arrives, appearing somber, and pauses quietly at Houston’s memorial.” This shows respect for Houston’s death but also announces the news of Clooney’s arrival.

Another tactic might be responding to select tweets and retweeting your concerned fans as well, to let them know that you are listening to their thoughts and that you too are concerned about the current events at your hotel. There are many options of how to react in the social media world, but acting as if everything is fine and moving on without showing your fans you actively care about the situation is not the best way to go and can appear discourteous to some. It is a great way to upset your followers and leave people with nothing but a sour taste in their mouths.

Flip.to works by allowing guests to reach out to their friends in a way that feels natural while using social networks along with a hotel’s booking engine. When a guest books a room with a hotel using Flip.to, they can share their trip with their friends without even leaving the hotel website. When this guest’s friend clicks on the link, they will land on a personalized version of the hotel’s website that includes reviews from their friends about the hotel and local area. Hotels will have the ability to control all messages to guests, including advertising incentives for sharing trips. Flip.to will also email vouchers to guests who have reached their goal with a QR code that makes the redemption process simple. Hotels will also have access to their own analytics so they know who is talking about them and how much traffic they are receiving.

With Flip.to, hotels finally have an effective way to engage with their guests and measure their ROI. According to PRnewswire.com, nearly one in four guests has used Flip.to to share with all their connections their trip details and what hotel they are staying at. In addition, for every 100 posts shared through Flip.to, hotels have seen 300 to 1000 unique visitors coming to their site, with 10 to 20 booked rooms. That means an ROI of 5 to 10X.

More than 100 hotels are currently using Flip.to fuel new bookings including L’Auberge Carmel in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. They were also the first to integrate the marketing tool with hotel channel management system RezExchange so that their clients no longer have to re-code their backend software. This also means that guests of L’Auberge Carmel automatically have their perks credited without the use of vouchers.

Flip.to differs from social travel sites like Gogobot, Gtrot and Kukunu in that it empowers the hotel directly, and has built-in incentives for positive messages. The use of a personalized landing page through a guest’s link is also effective in selling a hotel with real words and faces of people they trust. Flip.to’s platform is also currently available for airlines and restaurants. With a platform that makes sharing and rewarding feel authentic and natural, Flip.to has great potential to revolutionize the way hotels use market online through social networks.

EdgeRank, Facebook’s news feed algorithm, takes many characteristics into consideration when it decides where content shows up in users’ news feeds. If a post has a high level of engagement or the user that shared the post has a close relationship with another user, the post is displayed more prominently on someone’s news feed. This is another factor accounting for the high engagement rate – because these posts were getting many Likes, comments, and shares, they were getting placed higher in users’ news feeds, which only encouraged more Likes, comments, and shares. There is something to be said about using the keywords “Super Bowl” though, since this event is inherently one of the biggest events in the US all year– such a giant increase in engagement might not be realistic for every post about a current event.

A great way to find current, up-to-date news that you can post about is to see what is trending on Twitter. Twitter constantly refreshes its left-hand “Trends” tab with real-time topics that are garnering the most buzz at that moment. An important caveat to remember when considering posting about a current event is that you don’t want to force your brand into irrelevant conversations. It might reflect poorly if you seem to be posting just for the sake of getting more engagement. Try to find a unique way of joining the conversation by making the post relevant to your brand and its message. Be weary too that you might get lumped in with other people or brands who have posted about a similar event, as Facebook frequently aggregates posts about the same topic and it is easy to get lost in the shuffle.

Business Calendar has some great options you will not find on the Google stock calendar. What I disliked the most about the new version of Google’s calendar is entering new agendas and how burdensome it was to set the date and time you want. The calendar would keep adding another day for the added event and I would constantly have to edit the duration. Business Calendar is great when it comes to that, you can easily add an event and it does not change the duration on you and makes it very simple to change. You can view your calendar in month, week and as an agenda or today view. Also if you long press an event you get shortcuts to edit, delete, copy or add a new event which come in really handy.

There are plenty of options and features for business users such as graphical and textual presentation, drag and drop functionality, options to link contacts to an event and a search function. There is also smooth scroll and zoomable multi day view, configurable font sizes for the app and the widgets and a context-sensitive help system to optimize your work. If you’re a business user you won’t be disappointed and for non business users do not worry it is not complicated but actually rather simple to create, edit and delete events. Another great part is it syncs up perfectly with your Google account and calendar widgets if you have those as well. So far I really like business calendar and it does what it supposed to do well. The paid version is a little pricey at $4.99 but it’s a small price to pay for a stable and useful Smartphone tool. If that is still too much try the free version and you still get all the same features except with ads. Either way you can’t go wrong.

Many businesses, public figures and celebrities have started using Google+ Hangouts to reach out to the public including the White House, David Beckham and The Muppets.  Most notably, President Obama used the social network’s video conferencing tool to create a virtual town hall meeting focusing on the economy. He took questions via Twitter and YouTube. Five Americans in citizens across the country also participated in the Google+ Hangout, and were able to ask follow-up questions in real time after the President spoke.

Further, NBC’s Darren Rovell will host a Google+ Hangout to discuss this year’s Super Bowl commercials on February 6. Users will be able to use a feature of Google + Hangout that allows users to share and watch YouTube videos simultaneously. Rovell explained the purpose of the hangout: “The day after the Super Bowl is when people head back to their office water coolers to discuss what they loved and what they didn’t. Our conversation is about taking all those water cooler conversations and bringing it to a national, digital stage.”

Both of these hangouts take advantage of the “Hangout on Air” feature that allows Hangout to act as a live broadcast to the public. Google+ Hangout combines some features from programs like Skype and GoToMeeting such as multi-people video conferencing, and screen-sharing for free. This is what makes Google+ Hangouts unique.

Google+ Hangouts can be useful for small and large businesses alike. Here are just a few ideas for using Google+ on a smaller scale:

• Customer Service:  Personalize your customer service by helping out your customers face-to-face! Private hangouts can be a great way to offer excellent support and you’ll be able to get visual cues and live feedback from your customers.
• Brainstorming: If your business operates remotely, Google+ Hangouts allows for weekly or monthly communication through virtual meetings. You know ideas flow freer in a group setting. You can also use Hangouts with Extras to watch inspiring YouTube videos to start or end sessions.
• Instructional Classes/Webinar: Chef Lee Allison uses Hangouts to teach cooking classes. You can teach skills from software to social media through video with interactive chat. Hangouts make question and answer sessions easy, personal and informative!

Can you think of other ways to use Google Hangouts to promote your business? Please feel free to share your ideas in the comments below!

Just a short while ago, the Internet was abuzz with discussions about SOPA and the drastic effect this bill could have. Not long after the bill was shelved, file-sharing site Megaupload was taken down. Next, Twitter announced that it would be censoring Tweets in specific countries. And most recently, Google has come out saying it too would be censoring its widely-used blogging platform, Blogger, on a country-by-country basis as well. While in the past, some Internet users could have gotten away without caring about or even being aware of such censorship, it is becoming more and more difficult for even the common day user to ignore the direction that the digital world is taking.

Twitter’s recent policy changes may be the most interesting. Late last week, the company posted on its blog saying that it would take a reactive approach to removing Tweets, meaning that it will censor content only after a request is made to have it taken down. The content will, however, still be “available to users in the rest of the world,” as the blog post reads. Doesn’t this almost guarantee an increase in site traffic for this flagged content? Who wouldn’t want to read or watch something that another country has deemed inappropriate? We as humans are inherently curious about this sort of thing!

Google’s popular blog-publishing service, Blogger, also announced recently that in the coming weeks it will begin rerouting Blogger’s blog pages to country-specific URLs. For example, if you are in France visiting a “blogspot.com” site, the servers will automatically detect your IP address and redirect you to “blogspot.fr”. Creating a localized domain will allow Google to be able to remove content in a specific country but still have it available for U.S. readers and potentially other countries’ as well.

While both Twitter and Google, as well as any other site that may follow, are simply doing their best to adhere to local laws, this is a clear step backwards in our current digital era. Despite this censorship being implemented mainly for non-U.S. countries, it does bring many questions to the table. Weren’t these social networks created so people can share their own opinions and express themselves freely? Where will these attacks on free speech end? And what can we do to make them stop?