Air Bed & Breakfast Gets Social

Last fall, after planning a 3-week trip, I was attempting to sublease my prime location of a Brooklyn apartment on Craigslist. While attempting to dodge the typical sketchy Craigslist behavior, I got an email from someone promoting a site called Air Bed & Breakfast.

Air B&B is a listing site for people who have spare rooms or empty apartments they’re looking to rent out. It builds on the concept of Craigslist, but adds a humanized touch that created a pretty profound sense of relief in me. I’d personally rather rent to or from someone whose photo and stats I can see, however, I guess some people like to live on the edge.

Air B&B is one of those sites that had the foresight to build a social element right into their business concept. Creating a holistic social media approach is always going to produce better results than adding it after the fact. Lisa calls that concept of last-minute addition “social media as a condiment.”

In this blog post, I wanted to highlight some of their more interesting social components. While they have their own blog, Facebook group, and Twitter account for keeping up with the site, it’s the social tools they offer their users that are most interesting to me.

User-Generated Reviews

I think Air B&B is one of the best examples of a concept that is strongly supported by user-generated reviews. User-produced content is divided into two categories: reviews and recommendations. Recommendations are provided by your friends and people who know you well enough to say that you aren’t keeping fingernail clippings in jars on your pantry shelves. Reviews come from people who have actually booked and completed a stay in your space through Air B&B, which gives the reviews credibility. Also, each good review that you receive helps to boost your “rank” in search results, so there’s an incentive for having your former “guests” come back to the site and continue to engage.

AirBnB__GORGEOUS_in_New_York

Widgets

Air B&B offers two kinds of widgets:

Your Listing Widget – This is a widget that showcases
your listing at the top, along with other listings in
your area. I thought this was pretty brilliant, because
while your space would come first and obviously be the
first one people saw, they are also promoting other
listings on their site with your permission, increasing
the chances that someone is going to come back to their
site.

Local Listings Widget – This is a widget that showcases
listings in your area as an alternative to hotels. So,
let’s say that you are on a budget but need to attend
the law school graduation/laid-back wedding of a friend.
They can imbed this widget on their event page to give
people a reasonable (and unique!) alternative to the
Best Western.

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Not only do they give you the widgets, they also provide some very basic analytics. You can see the number of impressions, clicks, and click-through rate of your widget, which will help you improve promotion of your own listing.

Other cool things Air B&B is doing that are somewhat social: they have a tool that automatically formats and posts your listing to Craigslist. They also have a tool that sends you a text message when someone books your space or has a question about it, so you can always stay on top of your listing.

Aside from that, the site of the design is clean and user friendly, which makes me really happy. Sometimes when sites try and add new functionality, they just wind up janking up the aesthetic. With their utilitarian social elements and user-friendly set up, these guys seem to have it down. I’m looking forward to watching the evolution of this site.



Ignite Social Media