Priceline Is At It Again on Twitter

Fresh after ramping up its Twitter followers by 400 percent in six days with a hotel-promotion that ended April 28, Priceline is at it again with a fresh $50 marketing play with the same bulking-up-on-Twitter goals.

TheNegotiator just tweeted: "Cinco De Mayo Promo! May 5th - 500 random followers will get a $50 HOTEL COUPON! More followers = better chances!!! - pls RT!"

Actually, Priceline's strategy is ratcheted up a bit with this second promotion because it is trying to strike up relationships with influential Twitterati.

The way the Cinco De Mayo promotion is structured is that a Priceline follower who might have 1,000 followers would get 1,000 chances to win one of the 500 hotel coupons. A Priceline follower with only 10 followers would only get 10 chances to get a coupon.

Playing these odds, the most influential among Priceline's followers would take home the bulk of the 500 coupons.

It's hard to believe that an influential Twitter participant would warm up to Priceline and become a substantially more loyal customer because of a $50 coupon, but this seems to be Priceline's thinking on the issue.

Then again, perhaps this Priceline promotion is only the beginning of its efforts on Twitter to build customer loyalty.

These Priceline promotions put a punctuation mark on the question of whether offering $50 per follower might be an expensive proposition.

Alas, it must be very cost-effective and, well, cheap.

Consider that:

1. To redeem the $50 hotel coupons, followers must book a minimum 3-night stay on a relatively pricey 3-star hotel or higher.

2. And, they must do so through Priceline.com's high-margin Name-Your-Own Price merchant-model-hotel business.

3. So, assuming that some of those people booking rooms using the coupon aren't regular Priceline customers, the online travel agency is chalking up incremental bookings.

4. And, as is par for the course with coupon promotions, a lot of people won't use them. And, that means Priceline enticed a bunch of people to follow TheNegotiator on Twitter without spending a penny.

5. Also, think of the buzz that this promotion is creating as followers re-tweet the tweet and good-for-nothing journalists like myself write about it.

And, apparently, I was the first muckraker to write about Priceline's marketing play when I broke the story in Travel Weekly.

Incidentally, Priceline, I'm told, has worked out the coupon delivery issues and now can DM (Direct Message) thousands of hotel coupons per day through Twitter.

As of this writing, @denschaal, has 426 Twitter followers.

So, the Priceline promotion makes me wish I had a few hotels to leverage.

A Twitter Summer Travel Stimulus Package

With apologies (not really) to Congress and President Obama, if you really want to read about an alluring stimulus package, you've come to the right place.

Actually, the idea is the brainchild of a friend and industry colleage, Susan Black, who figured out an easy, effective and cost-efficient way to stimulate summer travel.

Susan's simple solution: Since your travel company must get involved in social media and because some members of your team may be slow to grasp the etiquette and culture, then just go out and hire a summer intern or two who "gets it" and let them tweet-up a storm.

Susan advises that your company needs to find a summer intern who is passionate -- not only about Twitter or whatever medium you choose -- but about your company's sweet spot. In other words, if your company operates a ski resort, then find a college kid who knows the difference between a a mogul (the snow-related thing) and, well, a mogul (the person who calls the shots in the boardroom).

The intern's salary won't break the bank, and your company may find a Twitter-savvy future full-time employee who might one day become your company's mogul (the CEO variety). You never know.

Susan mentions that you should also hire a "strategic consultant" to give the intern direction and to figure out how the Twitter plan fits in with your company's broader goals. Susan just so happens to be one of those aforementioned strategic-consultant types. But, this is not an advertisement for her services. For that, she would have had to pay for an exhorbitant banner ad in a column alongside or below this post:) Hire whomever you want or don't hire anyone to get your social media act together.

But, I know one thing: Within certain limits, of course, you have to give this intern some free rein. You have to let your tweeter flex his or her stuff in the 140-character per-tweet world.

If you make our ski buff tweet all corporate-speak, you lose. If you are just going through the motions for the sake of being involved in social media, the effort will fall flat and the Twitter Summer Travel Stimulus Package will end up as stimulating as a complex derivative instrument.

Should Expedia Opt Out of Behavioral Ads Push?

Imagine if your reading habits at the library or bookstore were public record and advertisers used that information to hand you a cellphone application when you walked into Best Buy?
Switch to the online arena and that's basically what's happening with Expedia's new PassportAds program, which I described here.
Expedia and others inside and outside the travel industry are selling advertisers data from your Internet cookies, supposedly without any personally identifiable information, so marketers can more-effectively target you when you surf around to major travel and non-travel websites.
When did our online travel buying habits become commodities? Probably quite some time ago, but now major websites, seeking new revenue streams, are accelerating the sale of information about your browsing habits.
While Expedia's program is for ads to be posted on U.S. websites, international advertisers are getting involved in the program, and Expedia is mulling expanding PassportAds internationally.
I don't mean to pick on Expedia. Other major websites are getting into this arena, too. It is a major trend in the advertising industry.
The FTC proposed some guidelines on the behavioral-advertising issue. Among them, the FTC rightfully argues the cookie-sellers should prominently disclose these practices to consumers and not necessarily bury these disclosures within hard-to-fathom privacy policies.
Expedia's partner in the venture, BlueKai, gives consumers the option of managing which of their buying preferences gets shared with advertisers or opting out altogether.
I visited that page, and BlueKai knew, for instance, that I would be traveling in the next 7 to 14 days.
As Expedia and other travel companies engage in bolstering their media programs by selling cookie data, at the very least they should explain their behavioral-advertising business on prime real estate, their home pages, and give unwitting consumers the option of withdrawing from these advertising programs.