Search Skills, Don’t Leave Home without Them

Today, lots of people are winging their way to Washington D.C. for the 18th Annual Affordable Meetings National Convention in Washington D.C. So, who’s going? First, 1700 top meeting professionals. Second, a host of top-flight speakers, like Scott Friedman. And third, going along for a virtual ride, is our own eBook, “The Power of Information: Google News Alerts Make YOU the Expert.”

Click here to see a 2-minute video search tip for meeting professionals.

Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International conducts this convention, which brings exhibitors, sponsors and marketing experts together with meeting planners and other hospitality professionals from around the globe. The main sponsor for the convention is American Express – and they are joined by a formidable group of other heavy hitting sponsors.

So, How did our eBook make it into the Affordable Meetings Convention?

It’s all because of Scott Friedman’s news alerts. Now, Scott Friedman is a past president of the National Speakers Association and is a pretty savvy guy when it comes to technology. For instance, he’s already LinkedIn, MySpaced and FaceBooked – and he’s been using Skype for years now to support his addictive habit of speaking internationally.

But, Sheryl and I are taking credit for introducing Scott to the power of news alerts on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live.com and Ask.com.

Scott’s topic is “Making Your Meeting More Marketable & Memorable” and he told us that among a whole lot of other information he was going to include some stuff about the power news alerts – and make it specific to the hospitality industry.

He’s been using news alerts for some time now, and told us about a recent speech he made to a major corporation. By doing a news alert for the company name for just a few weeks before his speech, “I really felt that I was up-to-speed on their industry and latest events in their company.”

Scott told us he would like to offer our eBook, The Power of Information, as a thank-you to his audience. Now, have you ever tried to say “no” to Scott Friedman? Not going to happen. But, for some reason, he turned down our offer to lug along hundreds of copies of our book on the plane.

So, instead, if you attend the Affordable Meetings Convention just click here to download the eBook. We’ll keep the link to this $15 download absolutely free for the next three weeks.

Scott also asked us if we had any other search engine tricks up our sleeves. We asked Scott how many years he had for us to show him since we have hundreds, of course.

But, for now, here’s just a couple of them:

When You Really Need a Four-Letter Word

One of the ways you can target your Internet searches better is to ask your search engine (Yahoo, Ask, Google or Live) to look only in one web site. You do this by using a four-letter word – and that word is “site.”

It works this way. Do your search just the way you normally would, then add the word “site” and put in the web address of a site you already know and trust. Here are two different searches of the Meeting Professionals International web site – (do them exactly this way for practice):

• florida site:www.mpiweb.org

• “meeting rooms” site:www.mpiweb.org

(Caution: skip a space after your search term and be sure you don’t forget the (:) colon after the word “site”)

When you do a regular Google search for the word “florida,” you get something like 237 million results. When you search only the MPI site, you get only 612 results.

Searching this way changes not only targets your results, it changes the way you think about what you might be able to find. Some examples:

• computer site:hotelmotel.com

• hsmai site:traveldailynews.com

• hospitality site:lynn.edu

Sometimes We Just Don’t See
What’s Right in Front of Our Eyes

So, let’s go back to our search for “florida” at the MPI site. Even 612 results is a lot to look through. But, look to the right of the screen and you will see the “Advanced Search” link.

Like to know which of those 612 results are most recent? While you have that results window open, go to the “Advanced Search” tab and click on it (sorry, you can only do this particular trick in Google). Promise, it won’t hurt.

When that window opens, choose the “DATE – Return web pages first seen in the…” line and choose from choices like these in the drop-down box:

• • • past 24 hours
    • past month
    • past 6 months

When you chose “past 3 months” you get only 23 results – far fewer than even those 612 results and most of them likely to be very recent.

Watch the video we made about these skills by clicking in the first paragraph of this article – or, oh heck, Right Here is Fine, too!

Note: that using any of the major search engines to search for recent web page entries is an approximate game, at best. You will occasionally find that very old pages appear as “past 3 months.” This happens because web designers are always fiddling around on their web sites, so blame them, OK?!!

Note to Meeting Pros:

Catch Michael and Sheryl in person around the country this coming year and see what the buzz is all about:

• October 3, 2007 – Women’s Success Forum – Colorado Convention Center, Denver (90-minute workshop)
• October 13, 2007 – NSA New England Chapter Meeting – Boston (all-day workshop)
• Feb 14-17, 2008 – SpeakerPalooza! (NSA’s Winter Meeting) – San Francisco (two 3-hour workshops)
• May 15, 2008 – NSA Indiana/MPI Indiana combined meeting – Indianapolis (all-day workshop)