Will the last Seattle Internet company to add a structured social media program to its online offering or outreach, please turn off the lights? Wait, reverse that. Social engagement can be a very luminescent idea to build traffic, heigthen awareness, elevate search ranking and propel your marketing message and sales momentum!
Zillow has just announced the launch of Neighborhood Advice, a social home-shopping experience that helps buyers and renters learn about neighborhoods from their Facebook friends.
While shopping on Zillow, users are prompted to activate Facebook® Connect and then see locally where their Facebook friends live or “check-in” the most. As shoppers search for homes in a specific city or neighborhood, Neighborhood Advice will recommend Facebook friends connected to the area to contact for personal tips and advice.
For example, if a user is searching for homes in the Green Lake neighborhood of north central Seattle, Neighborhood Advice will identify friends who have shared that they live in Green Lake, or who frequently “check-in” to places in Green Lake. The home shopper can then send these friends a private direct message on Facebook to ask questions about the neighborhood.
“When people are looking to rent or buy a new home, they always ask friends, family and co-workers questions about different neighborhoods. Neighborhood Advice takes this further and deeper by allowing shoppers to quickly and easily tap into their broader online social network as they shop for homes on Zillow,” said Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow. “Integrating social media tools and friend networks into the core Zillow home-shopping experience is yet another way we are giving our users access to previously hard-to-find, yet sought-after, information.”
Expedia’s new “Last-Minute Deals” program is now crowdsourcing travel planning by letting customers share the best deals with one another.
Unlike other flash sales programs, which are trypically driven by suppliers and based on inventory, Expedia Last-Minute Deals showcase deals found by other customers. The key parameter is point of origin. To access Last-Minute Deals, travelers visit www.expedia.com/lastminute and either the site will auto-detect the customer’s location or people can enter their own home city. Last-Minute Deals then springs into action, surfacing the best deals found by other travelers to different destinations. With a quick click, travelers can make those deals their own.
“In a sense, the millions of people who come to Expedia® are now serving as your own personal travel agent, helping you find the best and most popular deals from your home city,” said Joe Megibow, vice president and general manager, Expedia.com. “So many customers travel with Expedia every month that it puts us in a great position to deliver this type of service to our customers. With Last-Minute Deals, you can get the best deals available by letting everyone else do your research for you.”
Expedia’s Last-Minute Deals program is the latest offering in the company’s robust portfolio of ways to find travel value on Expedia.com. In 2011, Expedia launched both the ASAP program – which, as the acronym suggests, delivers trips featuring A Sudden Amazing Price®, live and bookable for up to 12 hours – and the hugely successful Groupon Getaways with Expedia partnership, which couples the flash-sales expertise of Groupon with Expedia’s unparalleled global network of travel suppliers. Groupon Getaways with Expedia follows Groupon’s voucher model, where travelers book a hotel room or package at an exceptional rate, then travel when the time is right. Groupon Getaways with Expedia deals are also transferable, allowing consumers to give the gift of travel to a friend or loved one.
Urbanspoon, a leading mobile restaurant app and reservation management system, has announced its popular app can now be added to Facebook Timeline to enable people to share their dining experiences with their friends. The new Dineline feature allows people to track restaurants they visited as well as what meal they had at that eatery, upload photos and share memorable meals on their Facebook Timelines.
Even Microsoft’s Bing is changing its tune from the ‘Decision Engine’ that “Helps you Decide,” to the search engine for “#Doing!” The “ing” in doing is mean to echo the “ing” in “Bing…”The new tagline was unveiled during the NFC championship football game on Sunday.
The campaign, from Publicis Groupe’s Razorfish, will feature winter-sports athletes. The first spot uses Bing searches to tell the story of American snowboarder Kevin Pearce, whose tragic accident quashed his Olympic hopes. Ad Age reported in September that Bing was ready to kill the “Decision Engine” tagline created by former agency JWT and used since the relaunch of Microsoft search in 2009.
Microsoft has made fairly modest gains in its share of the U.S. search market. Google leads, with a 65.9% share in December, according to ComScore. Microsoft holds 15.1% vs. Yahoo’s 14.5%. [24×7]
