20 minutes in to our 15 minutes of fame
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2013-01-20 10:15:06 - Graham EllisWell - in the week of 7th January, we were on Channel 4 every day at 5 p.m. as we visited (as owners of Well House Manor) three other accommodations around the UK, met with their owners, and competed for the "Best Value B&B of the week" prize. Watched by (third party data) around 950,000 people. The busiest hour on our web site was a hundred times busier than the busiest hour in the previous month, and we were talked about on Twitter and Facebook without regard to our personal thoughs / opinions. That latter sounds worse than it is, for after starting with people not knowing us and criticizing looks and little things we were fully aware of and expecting anyway, we moved on to being seen in an almost universal positive light, especially when contrasted against some of the other players.
But now we're a week on. During last week, the shows were repeated on the "4/7" follow up channel - back to back on the Saturday, then the series came on twice a day during the week again. Following up from my blog / graphs [here], we've now complete another week and the web stats look like this:
Before the show (from 31.12.12) 252 visits in the week
(235 unique, 615 pageviews, 2.44 pages per visitor)
The week of the show (from 6.1.13) 3100 visits in the week
(2831 unique, 10250 pageviews, 3.31 pages per visitor)
Week just gone (from 13.1.13) 655 visits in the week
(542 unique, 1665 pageviews, 2.54 pages per visitor)
Graphically:
Looking at the week just gone:
and you can see the 4 p.m. repeat in the afternoons, with the show that featured Well House Manor on Wednesday spiking the most traffic, and the "reveal" show on the Friday bringing a lower but noticable spike.
As a comparison, here's the week's chart for our IT training site
Where you'll see a business to business site that's busiest during the week, and with substantial traffic all night too as the information we provide on technical subjects is valuable worldwide.
A further comparison, the same week for our First Great Western Passenger forum (by customers, for customers, NOT run or sponsored by the train company):
And there you'll see a daily pattern - little drop off at the weekend although Saturdays are always a little lower. But almost no-one there at 3 O'Clock in the morning, as it's a UK site.
So ... is the TV experience now something that's over and in the past?
No - for we have seen a second wave. People look at the show and look for the web site straight away. Then friends, family, past guests and potential guests take a further look. Many will get in touch via email / facebook, and many will post to forums and the like too if they're of that nature. Past guests who've had a negative experience with you (for whatever reason) will have been reminded, and will tend to come back even though it's months or longer after their experience, and post about their experience on Trip Advisor. This is one of the soft, negative underbelly effects of your "fame for 15 minutes".
Along that same line, if there's anyone in your past with old scores to settle, expect them to pop up. We're fortunate that we have many friends and far fewer skeletons than you might expect by our age, but we have had one pop up. I would hate to be in the shoes of the contestants who told me "a lot of people don't like us because we're successful", as I'm pretty sure that some of those people will have popped up - indeed, I have seen evidence of it on the web. And there may be those who have been there in the past, but in a very small way, wanting to jump in and take the credit. An email may give the clue; listening to others talk around the town and you hear a suggestion that your success is almost entirely due to a rather minor player from years ago!
Like all businesses, we get plenty of unsolicited phone calls looking to sell us products and services. And we've noticed that some of those are now referring to "Four in a Bed". Would we like to pay £99 to capitalise on the exposure / have our place advertised with a mention of the program in a place that many viewers see? "No Thank You" says I, and ask the caller if she had checked our number with TPS before she called.
Hesitantly, I have documented much of the curate's egg - rotten in places - as I've been asked about the follow up to the show by other contributors who's transmissions are still awaited. They're a minor part - a very minor part in our case - but they're something to be aware of.
The second wave of responses also brought the more thoughful questions - the people who run other establishments and wonder if they should apply for any future series of the program, for example. And the people who saw something at your place on the show, and would like it too. We've had questions about our orange juicer, about the monogrammed retaining bands around our face towels, and about the flowers made from old train tickets in our museum. They say that immitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and these requests make us feel very flattered.
In the lull after Christmas - first weeks back in the New Year, travel difficult through Ice and Snow, credit card bills from the Christmas to be paid, tax to be filed by 31st January - people aren't back into thinking about weekends away, summer holidays, and touring the countryside. So there's been no immediate rush of accommodation / leisure guest bookings. Perhaps people have bookmarked us and will come back to the show - we're certainly seeing a much less spikey traffic on the web site and it is up by a factor of 3 during the day, so that's something we'll see - too early to judge and worthy of follow up analysis at the end of February, and then again late in the spring.
But what's a quiet time of year in the lesiure market is the time of year that businesses are looking ahead for the next 12 months, and a number of very significant contacts from "way back" have been in touch. Enquiring about courses for which they'll be raising requests with their employers. And there have been people who have seen our technical data / presence on line in the past, require training, and now know so much more about our approach that they're going to book with us. Numbers are small, but this is our core business and the response that we've had in the area is (I'll admit) something I didn't forecast, and most welcome. As we start next week, I'm anticipating having to juggle some dates around in order to fit in all the course requirements we have before Easter (Footnote - if you're a potential delegate reading this, PLEASE get in touch as I think we're well enough resourced to do a superb job for everyone who wants a course!)
And so onwards. It's hard to come down of the excitement and buzz. It's hard not to keep looking at twitter / facebook / forums and realise with some disappointment that people have moved on to Satis House, the Yellow Submarine, Manor Lodge and Ashculme House (and next week it will be the Amber Guest Houes, G! Boutique, Taylor's Farm Retreat and the Knife and Cleaver. And it's hard not to go off into a rhapsody of telling everyone you meet about the show, at the trigger of no more than a casual comment from them. We have a good contact who tells us and everyone he meets about the day he met the Queen, and he shows them the video. We must avoid that - we're moving on providing excellent training [here] and an excellent hotel for leisure and business visitors to Wiltshire [here].