As the new publisher of SpaClique.com I hope to discuss a wide range of topics. Nice thing about not having a boss is that I can let my Adult Attention Disorder take me where it wants to go. I tend not to take life to seriously and tend to write with and edgy and I hope humors style.
In my experience, the spa community is populated with an eclectic and incredibly interesting group of people. I have also found that our community has certain population that occasionally takes itself a bit too seriously. With that in mind, I apologizing up front if I offend a sensibility or gore an Ox of yours along the way.
Brian Cunningham
Owner\Publisher
Would you like a incredibly effective free marketing opportunity? Well here it is!
We have flown SpaClique off the proverbial new business run way and are now in full climb out to what we expect to be a fairly lofty cruising altitude. As with any new business there has been some bumpy air and a few surprises.
One small surprise has been the limited number of new Spa Bloggers we have. I know it's not because the Blog has gone unnoticed, as you can see by looking at the hit counter under each of the posts entered so far, most have been read hundreds of times. That probably explains why those who have contributed to SpaClique's blog, return to post again.
So just in case you didn't recognize the opportunity, let me point out again that contributing your thoughts in this area makes for some great, free advertising. Now before you go digging for you old press releases and look for the the copy and paste buttons in our text editor, know that we won't publish that kind of thing in the Spa Blog front page or in the news letter. Shameless PR post won't get read much anyway.
Good bloggers know that their content needs to be original, informative and entertaining in order to attract readers. It should also be first person conversational, letting your personality show is good thing as is your sense of humor.
We use a World Press syle format which is very easy to use and should be familiar to some of you. Getting started with your own Spa Blog is as simple as 1 - 2 - 3!
After Logging in go to follow the "My Blog" menu item on this page or the one on your "My Spa Space" page.
Enter a description of your Blog under the preferances tab.
Start writing. As you write, notice that you can insert images and You Tube clips.
Questions about blogging? Post a comment below or ask them here.
Last week our lead story was "NotchUp: Either the Best Idea Since LinkedIn, or the Worst Idea Since Flooz" I personally have never heard of Flooz but then I guess that's the point. The basic premis of NotchUp is first that it is a double blind "introduction service for employers and job canidates. The main attration is that NotchUp gives individuals who are not activly in the market for a careeer change to be found anyway. The unique hook for them is getting employers to pay highly qualified professionals for the privedge of being interviewed.
This is going to be something of a personal ventso please forgive me now.
Our front-page story this week is titled: TheSpaProject.Com Launches the Ultimate Social Networking Site for Spa Enthusiasts New And Innovative Website Offers Spa Guide, Shared Experiences, Trip Planning Tools & Rating Reward Program
New and Innovative? Ah.....excuse me!
Ok,step back 18 months, I'm asked to technology consult for SpaConx.com.The project had very little money (back to that in a minute) so Ibecame a minority partner. Right from the beginning I'm in disagreementwith my new senior partner, starting with the name "SpaConX" Talk about a thud, the only thing you could hear after we put that oneout was the crickets.
The real debate about was with the core concept itself: Can you make money as another Spa Directory with social networking as a the "wrapper"?
Social Networking and web 2.0 viral marketing has been very hot but is it really that hot?
In case you haven't already figure it out, SpaClique is a small family
operation. There are definite pros and cons, with one of the downsides
being that we don't always have the time to do a proper job of finding
and squashing site bugs. It's not so much the squashing part that's
hard as most issues get fixed in very short order.
Just knowing that there is a problem is most of the battle for us. For
example, we just fixed a bug where some members using MS Internet
Explorer® experienced a page crash when they attempted to edit their
member home page. This one took a little to figure out because the
problem was intermittent and involved a unique set of parameters. We
test with Windows® but most of the heavy lifting gets done on MACs
around here.
Many of you have inquired as to why SpaClique.com went very quite at the end of last year. In the first two weeks of this past December: 1. My partner in SpaClique "left to pursue other opportunities" 2. I made the decision to began the process of completely rebuilding our web site 3. My daughter Caity under went her second kidney transplant following a failed first attempt in August.
Working through 1. and 2. alone would not have disrupted day to day operations. There were a number of very serious complications to Caity's second transplant (third if you count the heart she received as a baby) leaving me with absolutely no band width to manage my new responsibilities as full owner and publisher of SpaClique.com for nearly three months. Early on in the ordeal, we decided to just "rest " the old web site to better focus available time on getting SpaClique.com v2.0 right for a relaunch.
Several weeks back we received the most polite missive from one of the
big spa media companies. They asked if we would kindly cease using the
term "Spa Enthusiast". They asserted that via copy right law, their
company had ownership of that particular phrase. I am not going mention
the companies name for a few good reasons:
If I have been slow to return your calls over the past three weeks please forgive me. On the 23rd of August, my daughter, Caity received one of my kidneys. Unfortunately, there were some complications and after three surgeries in three days the surgeons had removed it. I am sharing this as background to our decision to donate 10% of SpaClique.com's future revenue to two charitable organizations that helped Caity in a big way over the past year. They would be the Make-a-Wish foundation and the Georgia Transplant Foundation.
Original SpaSoft team returns to the Spa Technology market place with Priverus Software
The three guys who founded SpaSoft back in the early 90's, Joel Frieman, Tony Gouveia and Kostas Sourgoutsidis are at it again. This time with Priverus Software. I had a preview of their intentions at this past ISPA when I was preparing a spa technology round up artical for Hospitality-Upgrade. They were showing power point slides in a Venetian suite. To be honest, I was a bit surprised with the traffic to their suite considering they had be out of the space for six years.
{mos_fb_discuss:18}This is a piece I did for originaly for The Winter issue of Hospitality Upgrade but thought SpaClique members might find it useful.
For those of you that are not familiar with the ISPA conference, it is the large annual gathering put on the International Spa Association. This year’s conference was held in Las Vegas at The Venetian. Since I didn’t see many…ok, no familiar faces from HITEC, I thought you might be interested in hearing what your operations people were hearing from exhibiting technology vendors.
10. Bigger expense accounts. That $2,500 dinner with 8 bottles of wine may, after all, lead to a $100,000 sale. Yah sure.
9. Staying with a different hotel brand on every
business trip. There’s nothing like arriving late at night into the
same city for the fifth time–and still have no clue where the hotel is,
what the bed will feel like or what brand shampoo is in the shower.
Spa Blogs 
Would you like a incredibly effective free marketing opportunity? Well here it is!
Last week our lead story was "NotchUp: Either the Best Idea Since LinkedIn, or the Worst Idea Since Flooz" I personally have never heard of Flooz but then I guess that's the point. The basic premis of NotchUp is first that it is a double blind "introduction service for employers and job canidates. The main attration is that NotchUp gives individuals who are not activly in the market for a careeer change to be found anyway. The unique hook for them is getting employers to pay highly qualified professionals for the privedge of being interviewed. 
Talk about a thud, the only thing you could hear after we put that oneout was the crickets.
Many of you have inquired as to why SpaClique.com went very quite at the end of last year. In the first two weeks of this past December: 1. My partner in SpaClique "left to pursue other opportunities" 2. I made the decision to began the process of completely rebuilding our web site 3. My daughter Caity under went her second kidney transplant following a 
Several weeks back we received the most polite missive from one of the
big spa media companies. They asked if we would kindly cease using the
term "Spa Enthusiast". They asserted that via copy right law, their
company had ownership of that particular phrase. I am not going mention
the companies name for a few good reasons:
