I recently had dinner and a chat about social media with my friend Sebi, social media guru. I told him I was working hard on growing SentoGuide and that just moving the site to WordPress doubled the traffic within a few days. Any promotional efforts on my part immediately sent daily visits through the roof. Sebi mentioned connecting the site to my Facebook profile would be the next step. The next day I went and did exactly that.

Most of the content of SentoGuide consists of posts with information on individual public baths in Japan, and with the total of baths being well over 6,000 that’s a lot of posts. I realised that pushing all that in front of the faces of my Facebook friends would probably help nobody, least of all the site, since my Facebook friends would probably see it as spam and switch off quickly.

I figured if my friends feel that way, perhaps my audience does too. Many people publish all they have to everywhere, Facebook, Twitter, etc., without regarding whether anybody actually wants to read it. It might yield some short-term results, but in the long-term this strategy is not a winner.

So when using social media to promote your site, blog or product, stop and think for a minute whether you would want to do to your friends what you are about to do to your audience. If they answer is yes, you probably have a well thought-out strategy, but if the answer is no, think about it carefully.

For example, don’t submit everything you stick on your blog to all social networks with any sort of automatic submitter, but take the time to handwrite your Twitter or Facebook pitch. I think that in the long run that will have the greatest benefits.

Here is the issue: people employed on a part-time, temporary basis are not as intertwined with company culture as permanent employees, and, as for every company and industry out there, that means less affinity with the product. This is often the result of the temporary relationship these people have with the product they are producing, and companies don’t see the need to invest in extensive training and product knowledge. This might seem like a fair approach when you produce a standardized, tangible product, and little affinity is needed for the temporary part-time employee to be able to do his or her job.

The service industry however is different. The product produced is the service in question. If you run a hotel, your product is a comfortable night sleep in the appropriate level of luxury and service. If you run a school, your product is high quality lessons students can learn from. A below-par service equals a faulty product. And below-par service is often the result of little or no product affinity. The question every service industry manager therefore should ask themselves is: How can I inspire my temporary part-time worker to deliver a high quality product?

The answer unfortunately is not straight forward, because firstly it depends on the personality of the temporary part-time worker. If your employee is intrinsicly motivated to do his or her job to the best of his or her ability, the manager is in luck. The only thing that needs to be done is to provide adequate support to the employee and give the employee the resources he or she needs and they will provide the joy with which they do their job.

It gets harder when you have to deal with people that are not intrinsically motivated to do the best job the can. Extrinsicly motivated people will demand some form of reward in return for their best effort. The first thing that comes to mind is money, generally a great motivator for people to do their job. In the service industry however we do not just want people to do their job, we want them to do their best job possible. This after all has a direct impact on the quality of our product. So besides offering the remuneration, we will need to find out what makes people tick. This is complicated by the boundary I set earlier: temporarily employed part-time staff.

One of the most important extrinsic motivators for this particular group of people employed in a service-providing job is to have the a minimum level of service that is acceptable to whoever consumes the service. This baseline should consist of a few non-negotiable standards. We need to be very clear about those standard and about the fact that they are non-negotiable. As I mentioned earlier, product affinity is about knowing what the product is based on, and training should therefore not be taken lightly. Training is also a good time to clearly lay out your non-negotiables. Lastly there should be reprocussions for failing to meet a non-negotiable standard.

With that basic framework in place even temporary part-time staff will be able to help your service business excell. Intrinsicly motivated workers will meet and exceed the standards you have set for them because they strive to do the best they can. Extrinsicly motivated employees will, if anything, be motivated by the fear of the concequences of not meeting the set standards. What your set of non-negotiable standards looks like depends on your business and you will have to determine those based on your own values.

As a direct result of this definition dilemma, I have for long been struggling with the question of when you have truely been somewhere. I first started thinking about that when I was about 8 years old. I lived in The Netherlands back then and was vacationing with my parents and little sister in the south-east of the country. Actually, our four-week vacation was split in two blocks of two weeks. The first two weeks we spent camping in the south-east, and the second half we spent about 200 kilometres to the north not far from the German border. To quickest route from the first location to the second partly ran through Germany. I had never been to Germany, and the German part of the route took less than 30 minutes. The only stop we made on the way was for a traffic light. I remember being excited about going to Germany the morning before the drive, and I remember a vague since of disappointment when we reached our destination. I couldn’t help but wonder whether I could call that 30 minutes spent driving through a foreign country a true visit to that country, and if I could now brag to my friends I had been to Germany. I decided back then that I wanted a foreign experience to be more meaningful before deserving to be named a foreign experience. That is when I started my, up until now developing definition of a foreign experience. Let of share with you how I reached my current answer to the question: When have you truely been somewhere?

After this initial doubtful foreign experience, I decided that you have only truely been somewhere when you have spent the night there. A pretty advanced thought for an eight-year-old. For a solid 10 year I managed to hold on to that personal definition, until… I went to Australia when I was 19. I spent a year in Australia, so it is not that difficult to accept that I have been there, but on the way to Australia I had an 11-hour stop-over in Hong Kong. I spent most of those 11 hours exploring the city, but I did not spend the night. My definition needed tweaking. I decided that to have truely been somewhere, you would at least have had to set foot outside the airport.

I stuck to that definition for a while, until I realised that during the initial experience that set off this whole thought process I had only spent time outside an airport, so again my definition did not cover as much as I wanted it to. I realised that there was another factor that set my Hong Kong experience apart from my Germany experience: I spent enough time in Hong Kong to want to take a shower to refresh myself.

That is how I reached the basis of my current definition. To truely have been somewhere I will need to have taken a shower there. A recent experience in Singapore airport prompted me to tweak that definition a little more. I had a few hours to kill in Singapore airport and decided to take a shower in the airport. I have however never set foot outside Singapore airport. So there you have it, a combination of definitions leading to my current definition of truely having been somewhere:

To be able to say you have truely been somewhere you will need to have taken a shower outside the airport in that country.

Dangerous or not, medical tourism has grown into a niche, with websites like medicaltourism.com offering more and more tour-like packages.

A quick look at Wikipedia reveals an increasing number of destinations. Countries like Israel and Poland attract medical tourists looking for a bargain without foregoing on quality, while countries like Thailand are popular for their high degree of specialisation.

Whether or not you agree with the ethical side of medical tourism, it is creating new markets and new opportunities for countries that have not traditionally been known as destinations to proliferate themselves.

In an already stagnating leisure market, allowing consumers the flexibility to change to a cheaper fare after booking and paying might be exactly what will push some people over the treshold of parting with disposable income. It might very well increase the number of seats or beds filled at any given moment in time, but it does give the operator (airline or hotel) a lower profit margin per guest. That begs the question what is more important, quality or quantity?

In my view, the answer is quantity. To get us out of the current economic mess, money will need to start changing hands again. In other words, the more consumers consume the quicker we will begin the recovery process. Very crudely that means we need is as many people as possible to spend as much as they can spare. Hence my answer to the earlier question being quantity.

Allowing travellers the flexibility of changing their booking to a cheaper rate after the booking process has been completed will, again, likely give more people that little push they need to spend on travel. Therefore reading that United Airlines has decided to fine people $150 for changing to a cheaper fare was a little bit disappointing. Clearly United Airlines is concerned with the short-term benefit to their bottom line, not in pulling its weight in getting out of the recession.

Over the past few weeks the dangers of protectionism to an economic recovery have been pointed out in several well-read publications. What we need to turn the downturn around is to work together on getting money flowing again, not protection of individual (or corporate, or national) interests. That too goes for United Airlines.