[Matt Landau]

NOTE: This MMM was inspired by Mark's recent post: Mining Reviews for Marketing Gems

IDEA: As independent vacation rental professionals, our instinct is arguably our greatest advantage over bigger hospitality organizations: it keeps us agile, different, and focused (by following our intuition). Because our instinct is mostly internal, any tools that can help us channel, systematize, or articulate should used regularly.

ACTION: Wordclouds are visualizations of sentiment. They are the ideal tool to get you thinking creatively or objectively about any chunk of text. In the Inner Circle, a favorite way to use word clouds is with guest reviews:

1. Visit a free tool like https://www.wordclouds.com/
2. Paste in the URL of your guest reviews
3. Observe whether the words that are most frequently used are the ones you aim for
4. Idea from @Matt Elder -- Consider segmenting your guest reviews word clouds by types of guests (families vs. couples vs. solo), individual properties (to identify strengths and weaknesses), or by time frame (year by year)
5. Consider writing a blog post featuring your wordcloud -- weaving your guest into the growth process

FEEL FREE TO POST YOUR WORDCLOUDS BELOW..

BONUS (swiped from Todd's thread on How to make your housekeeper cry): If you find any housekeeping-related words (ex. Clean, spotless, luxury, fresh) give your cleaning staff $ bonuses with the actual bills paper clipped to the reviews.

 

[Mark]

Matt Landau - thanks again for the wordclouds idea. Attaching one for my property here...

I agree with @Matt Elder's idea regarding segmenting reviews and wordclouds. Use of my property is pretty evenly split between families vs. couples even though it's a much larger property than 2 people need. In my mind, I can somewhat predict how the segmented wordclouds will look but will be good to see them and channel into parallel marketing approaches.

 

[JStevens]

Fun and easy.........

 

[MattP]

Fun idea, Matt! I like too the idea of the $$ for review words to the cleaning staff, well done Todd.

Here's my cloud..

 

[Catherine]

Hi, I was wondering what " cache my reviews" means? I suppose those of us still on travel sites ( what is "OTA"?) without a dedicated review page can just do he old fashioned copy/paste. Fun idea. I actually have to create a web page now using WordPress ( it's new to me) so I can migrate my site from GoDaddy to another Host down the road.

 

[Matt Landau]

Hi, I was wondering what " cache my reviews" means? I suppose those of us still on travel sites ( what is "OTA"?) without a dedicated review page can just do he old fashioned copy/paste. Fun idea. I actually have to create a web page now using WordPress ( it's new to me) so I can migrate my site from GoDaddy to another Host down the road.

Hi Catherine, when I say “cache” I am referring to store away — this could be copy/paste, it could mean exporting a file from your platform of choice. So long as the content is on your own turf you have successfully stored it away for future use.

 

[Catherine]

Hi Catherine, when I say “cache” I am referring to store away — this could be copy/paste, it could mean exporting a file from your platform of choice. So long as the content is on your own turf you have successfully stored it away for future use.

Thank you, Matt! I was expecting some major software process or app...lol!