Ms. Dietrich

Social Media & PR

Social Media: Get On the Boat Before You Miss It

By Gini Dietrich, Founder & CEO, Arment Dietrich Inc.

A year ago, hotels assumed social media was a fad. Today, they’re quickly trying to figure out how to use the new methods of communication to grow their guest base. Everyone is rushing to get on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Foursquare, but now that you’re there, what’s next?

Those of us who spend time daily in social media understand the value and power of it:

• A guest who is unhappy can be turned into a brand ambassador, just by listening to what they have to say, responding to them, and making changes.
  
• A new product or location can be launched by crowdsourcing ideas from your community in order to make them feel like they have ownership in your brand.
  
• Someone across the country or even overseas has access to your hotel, which is phenomenal for tourism traffic.

But none of these things happen if you build your social networks and expect people to come to you. Or if you use the social networks as just another way to sell your wares. This is not the “Field of Dreams.” Just because you build it does not mean they will come. You have to be proactive and you have to provide value that makes people want to join you, participate in conversation, and engage you one-on-one.

There are some hotel brands that are doing social media well. But, contrary to perception, most have been doing social media, in some form, for at least a year, if not longer. They are the early adopters and I’ve talked to a few of them to help you understand how to incorporate social media into your hotels.

The Affinia Hotels began with social media by participating online with TripAdvisor. They were one of the first brands to partner with the Web site in order to engage their guests.

“Guests are our best advocates,” says Brooke Jennings, director of PR and brand development. “We embrace them and it does so much more for us.”

The brand then began using YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. One of the goals of the hotel in Chicago is to gain more awareness. So they invite locals to have meetings in their space by using Twitter to not only attract attendees, but also to create live tweeting opportunities.

The hotel in New York City has had the most brand awareness derived directly from social media. They hold blogger events, and the first one was at the beginning of this year. They partnered with a tea company and Spa Week media and invited the top bloggers in and around the city to attend.

“It was so interesting because the bloggers in the room were glued to their phones during the entire event,” says Jennings. “The stories are online immediately. You don’t have to wait for lead times. You don’t even have to wait for them to get back to their offices!”

But the return on engagement, as John Wolf, the senior director of public relations at Marriott Hotels, calls it is not immediate.

“If your primary objective is to generate revenue, there are probably better ways to do that,” he says. “But if you are looking to engage, to create loyalty, or to change or enhance a perception, then you have return on engagement. We think this is almost better than a return on investment because you’ve created brand ambassadors.”

The Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Mich. found they had to test a few things and make changes based on the results (or sometimes the lack of results).

“We have a blog that our historian wrote last year,” says Ken Hayward, vice president of sales and marketing. “We found that frequency is almost as important as content if we wanted to engage our guests in both on- and off-seasons.”

This year the blog is built to be more content-rich; it includes information from golf, grounds, pool, flowers, housekeeping, food, beverage, and history.

“The blog has more life value than Twitter or Facebook,” says Hayward. “It builds a bond between property and guest and provides us just one more tool in our toolbox for marketing.”

The flip side of social media, and something someone invariably asks me about when I speak, is that guests now have the opportunity to say negative things about hotels and their experiences online, where it lives forever. The Affinia Hotels found someone was saying negative things about their linens online. They were already considering changing their linen program when it came to their attention and they responded immediately. “With negative postings, people just want to know you care,” says Jennings. “When we found the negative mentions about our linen program, we took the time to respond and listen. It’s customer service at its most simple.”

Social media, if you think about it from a customer service standpoint, makes you even more efficient and still gets you home in time to have dinner with your family. No longer do you have to collect the comment cards and sort through to decide which ones need response. No longer do you have to guess what your guests think or what they want to see more of during their stay.

Now you can collect daily information about what’s working and what’s not working. Now you can have an idea and immediately get feedback. Now you can test messages and content quickly, without having to spend a lot of money or wait months to get input. Now you can respond immediately if a guest is unhappy and develop a loyal brand ambassador out of them.

Jennings says, “Either you get on the boat or you don’t, but if you miss it, it’s bad.”

Gini Dietrich is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Arment Dietrich, Inc., a firm that uses non-traditional marketing. The author of Spin Sucks, Gini has delivered numerous keynotes, panel discussions, coaching sessions, and workshops across North America on the subject of digital marketing tools. One of the top rated communication professionals on the social networks, Gini was recently named the number one PR person, according to Klout and TechCrunch, on the channels, and number one on Twitter, according to TweetLevel. Ms. Dietrich can be contacted at 312-787-7249 or gini.dietrich@armentdietrich.com Extended Bio...

HotelExecutive.com retains the copyright to the articles published in the Hotel Business Review. Articles cannot be republished without prior written consent by HotelExecutive.com.