How we can all help promote Sutton thanks to the web
If you have a business, you may have attended a seminar or read a book about the importance of both keeping your clients happy and dealing with complaints if your client is not happy. I have often heard that “One happy customer tells two or three, but an unhappy one tells ten or more.” This is scary enough for business owners, but the internet has probably multiplied that figure by 10 or 100 times! Nowadays people don’t just use the internet to find your business; they also write their own reviews of their experiences with it and read those of others, especially when it comes to travel.
I am leaving shortly to travel to Mexico, and though I have bought a guidebook, even the most recent publication may be up to two years out of date. So I am also doing lots of research on websites like tripadvisor.com and the Thorntree forum in lonelyplanet.com, where people ask for advice about travel plans or share their own experiences, whether good or bad. In this way I have found links to accommodations which are not in the guidebook, and I have also crossed off places because of a negative appraisal by a recent visitor, despite sounding good in the guidebook. These internet resources are both an opportunity and a danger for tourist businesses – the effects of a bad review of your establishment can stay with you for a long, long time, whilst good reviews really build traffic.
In the same way that people may find a B&B through the user-driven sites I have mentioned above (which are different from sites like BBCanada or that of the village or Mont Sutton), so people can also find out about Sutton in general. You may have heard of Wikipedia, the web encyclopaedia that is open to anyone to add to or edit and is now often the first or second search result for many topics. Now there is also wikitravel.org, which operates along the same lines. I have written an entry for Sutton and encourage all of you to add to it and also to look for other sites, especially in French, where you might do the same. In this way the efforts of a few can be multiplied out into the wide world, and we can all play our part in building a successful future for our village and ourselves.
Lynda Graham