Wiki strategy: promoting your travel, tourism or accommodation website
A wiki is a website that allows users to collectively add and edit content. “Wiki wiki” means “quickly” in the Hawaiian language.
A public wiki can be visited and edited by anyone using a browser. This creates a powerful online collaboration environment that is self-managed by its users. Wikis are considered part of the social Internet and a category of Web 2.0. There are many wikis that provide opportunities for hotels, inns, resorts, and other tourism and hospitality businesses to post their own listings.
How big are the wikis? The most famous and frankly impressive wiki is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). According to Alexa, it is the ninth most popular website in the United States.
A private wiki can be password protected so that only users can view and edit the information. It is an excellent collaboration tool for your hotel team. We have tested over a dozen wikis for this purpose, and currently use several within our offices and manage hundreds of pages of collaboratively edited information.
From the perspective of a hotel and tourism marketing strategy, a Wiki offers you the opportunity to obtain copyrights on your own area and business. The results will send qualified traffic to your website, allow you to manage your hotel brand, and most likely will send you qualified traffic and online revenue. These are completely free marketing resources, but you should take the time to use them.
Before you start exploring and inputting your own copy, take 20-30 minutes and learn how to edit a page.
Etiquette: Many wikis allow you to make updates anonymously. Ideally, you should sign in and create an identity. Don’t be selfish or self-promoting – While you want your business added, it’s best to create appropriate supplemental information as part of adding your business (depends on the wiki what information it is. It’s okay to fix mistakes, it’s not okay remove competitors. When you add a new page, make sure you start with the right template. If you make mistakes, other people will correct them, and if you “spam” inappropriate content, other people will remove you.
Wikipedia is a powerful resource that many hospitality companies should add to. Also visit its sister site, Wikitravel (www.wikitravel.org) for a website that is definitely appropriate for any hotel, inn, resort, hospitality, or tourism website. It’s worth taking a few hours to create a page rich in information about your area, your niche, and/or your business.
Wikicompany is a business-focused resource that allows you to add your company for free in just a few moments. See the list I made for a hotel website marketing company.
There are a growing number of niche wikis, one example being SingleTrackwiki for mountain bikers. Keep an eye out for these and add them if applicable. They always appreciate quality content.
RoaringFork Wiki. is an example of a wiki about a geographic area, the Roaring Fork Valley. That’s the home of Blizzard Internet Marketing, and it’s a wiki produced and managed by Blizzard.
Many people want to create their own wikis on topics they are passionate about or in their field. Mediawiki is a professional level version for true geeks. Overall I would recommend trying simple online versions, try wetpaint, seedwiki, jotspot or stikipad, they are easy to set up and get going.
We recommend that you take a few hours and implement an online marketing strategy to promote your travel, tourism or hotel website on wikis.
Resources:
Qwika is a wiki search engine if you want to search over 1,000 wikis at once. Their results are dominated by wikipedia.
Check out the html to wiki tool if you plan to migrate web-based content to a wiki.
Mashable Blog on Stikipad
More about WikiCompany
New York Times on wikis in business
