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No question, tourism, hospitality and entertainment businesses are using social media to connect with
potential clients.   It is great to get the customer testimonials, upcoming events, and photo sharing of people having fun at your venues!

Using social media is also helps build internet
search campaigns and search engine optimization.

A recent survey shows how dramatic the improvement is.

Forty-four percent of respondents reported seeing noticeable boosts in search engine campaigns. Forty percent saw a lift in search engine referrals, 25 percent observed higher click-through rates on their paid search initiatives and 25 percent increased their conversion rates.

The majority of these companies leveraged social media to improve search engine optimization.

• - Two-thirds (66 percent) are using the platform to create in-bound links.
  


• - 64 percent are using extended profiles to reap more hits from search engines.
  


• - 62 percent are tuning in to social media conversations to plan keyword strategies.

The benefits of social media campaigns inspired many firms to hire more social media experts.

• - More than half (56 percent) of companies are devoting more budget to the platform,
  


• - 15 percent are hiring staff

A great extra benefit of adding adding YOUR OWN customer community / social media ON YOUR OWN website using the Synergy Connect web software platform is in the search engine optimization.

Significantly more updated content is appearing within your site, thanks to your customers or fans responding to your community, sharing information, sharing photos, etc.  Almost all of this content will include words (keywords) that correspond to the keywords you want your website to be found under.

As well, users viewing your content in your community can press the Facebook LIKE button and/or the Share button on all these community pages within your site, resulting in many more inbound links to your site.

Each of these increases your search engine optimization, and helps more new customers find you.

With hundreds of millions of consumers using social media and online shoppers conducting more than 16 million searches per month, the combined power of social and search channels enable brands to reach a large audience

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Interested in implementing this positive impact for your business?  Adding your own customer / fan community to your site using Synergy Connect is easy.  It can connect to almost any website.  Your community will be implemented with your business' brand.

Just contact us at Synergy today to get started. Ask about a free internet strategy session for Vancouver AM Tourism Association members.

Also, are you a BC company with 1 to 50 employees?  Ask us about the grant of up $5,000 Free to help you with this new innovation.  Limited time offer.  First come, first served.  Ask today!

The Vancouver AM Tourism Association provides great networking events for those in the tourism and hospitality indistry, as well as first hand information on major events, new projects and entertainment in the Vancouver area.

Whether it's developing business leads or staying current on tourism and hospitality issues, Vancouver AM members pride themselves on being in touch with what is happening in the tourism community and the city at large.

The Vancouver AM Tourism Association has been busy lining up high quality speakers throughout the year.   Here is a copy of the calendar of events for your reference.

An up to date list of coming events is on the Events menu above.

The PNE is excited to be hiring for the position of Manager, Group Sales.  Attached please find the job specifications.  All applicants must apply at www.pne.ca/jobs to be considered for this position.

Thank you,

Jennifer Campbell

The social software and collaboration space for businesses has been expanding rapidly over the past few years. Tap into the best practices for embracing success in social networking.



Analyst firm Gartner, Inc. has revealed its key predictions on the use of social software and collaboration in the enterprise. These predictions focus on offerings ranging from team collaboration to dynamic social networking applications that offer rich profiles and activity streams.

"The growing use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by business user has resulted in serious enterprise dialogue about procuring social software platforms for the business," said Mark R. Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner and co-chair of the Portals, Content and Collaboration (PCC) Summit. "Success in social software and collaboration will be characterized by a concerted and collaborative effort between IT and the business."

To help businesses easily meet this goal,Synergy Connect.com was designed to easily add a social software platform directly to any business' or organization's website.

Just as on this Vancouver AM website, you can engage your customers, members, prospects, and other influencers.

Gartner offers five key predictions where social software is headed over the next several years.

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.


Greater availability of social networking services both inside and outside the firewall, coupled with changing demographics and work styles will lead 20 percent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications. During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts. Social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities such as status updates and expertise location.

"The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities," said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner. "While e-mail is already almost fully penetrated in the corporate space, we expect to see steep growth rates for sales of premises- and cloud-based social networking services. "

Gartner recommends that organizations develop a long-term strategy for provisioning and consuming a rich set of collaboration and social software services, and develop policies governing the use of consumer services for business purposes. Companies should also solicit input from the business community on what collaboration tools would be most helpful.

By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging.

The huge popularity of the consumer-microblogging service Twitter, has led many organizations to look for an "enterprise Twitter". Enterprise users want to use microblogging for many of the same reasons that consumers do to share quick insights, to keep up with what colleagues are doing, to get quick answers to questions and so on. "However, it will be very difficult for microblogging as a stand-alone function to achieve widespread adoption within the enterprise. Twitter's scale is one of the reasons for its popularity," said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president for Gartner.

Through 2012, fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 percent of IT-driven initiatives.

Enterprises will need to develop entirely new skill sets around designing and delivering social media solutions. But long term, enterprises will realize that social media is not a "hit or miss" activity naturally prone to high failure rates, and that a calculated approach to social media solution delivery must be an IT competency. At that point, post 2012, the social software market growth will accelerate as will the overall impact of social media on business and society.

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Contact Synergy today for a complimentary strategy session to discuss your businesses' social media goals and how Synergy Connect can help you start achieving these today. Call us today at 604-681-0516 or info@synergycc.com.