Ms. Lutz

Social Media & PR

Are Online Placements More Valuable Than Print?

By Didi Lutz, President, Didi Lutz PR

You remember those days. Your hotel made it on the front page of the daily newspaper, or scored an awesome feature in a prestigious glossy travel publication. You ordered tons of hard copies and sent them along with personalized notes to your repeat guests. You laminated copies of the article to place in fancy frames all around the hotel, and your office. You added copies to your press kit and send off to media to generate more interest. It worked like a charm for new marketing and sales opportunities.

Well, those golden days of print are gone. Yes, gone and disappeared for good. Go ahead and mourn it if you like.

We can finally say that the dust has begun to settle after social media took over the publishing industry and caused its major shakeout. The world of publishing has been reshaped and is now in the process of adjusting to the almighty digital space. Up until five years ago, print ruled the PR world. For hotels, PR meant bringing in reviewers, facilitating fam trips for media, organizing events, writing traditional press releases, announcements, giving tours, and talking to reporters who wrote the stories.

These days, everyone and anyone can be a writer and a reporter. With social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, and so on) enabling citizen journalism, PR folks had to slowly get accustomed to talking directly to the audience, bypassing the media. People who have access to a computer and internet can become the journalists. PR folks have had to learn to change their language and their toolbox since they no longer speak to journalists who write for traditional media outlets. It’s been a heck of a transition from print to online, to social media – and beyond.

But, like any crisis, this too has taught hotels how to value placements in today’s digital space, where terms such as “level of engagement,” “number of likes,” “followers,” “post quality,” matter more than the traditional measurement tools of the overplayed column inches and inclusion of photo in the print article.

Online has conquered print. Or, rather, it has made print immortal. With the dust settling in publishing, we understand that online reading versus print reading offer two very different experiences. It’s one thing to read news on a computer or mobile device. People get easily distracted when reading an article online, filled with links and information to side-track them. They aren’t necessarily focused on reading that one article, and more like to get distracted by curiously clicking on an embedded link that will take them to another page. Reading and searching online becomes a chain reaction. And that’s the idea. Sharing content over and over, while engaging with that content is what online media outlets offer. Social media come in to help promote and share that content. Think of online sharing as a digital word of mouth, where people write articles and talk to the world about their experience, positive or negative, and opening it to commentary to their network and beyond.

At the same time, print still lives on. Personally, I don’t think print will go away – at least not entirely. I do think that print media have a special role to play in the PR process, that is important for hotels to be aware of: print offers the opportunity of reading for pleasure sans distractions within content. In other words, if someone picks up to read a travel magazine, s/he will spend an average of half an hour reading that magazine and focusing on the specific articles – without the ability to click onto something else that looks interesting or bothering with search engines. That solitude of reading the Sunday paper with coffee and a muffin, or a favorite magazine at the airport or on the beach hasn’t changed. In fact, people (including myself) still crave that private time to read and really have the opportunity to absorb and digest an article.

However, we have no choice but to roll with the punches in terms of PR and marketing for hotels, and professionals have to decide what is the most strategic approach to reach out to guests. Below I have listed some reasons why online/digital and social media placements are more valuable now:

• Immediacy. From Tripadvisor reviews to blogs, tweets and posts on Facebook and checkins on Foursquare, there is just too much going on. Print requires long lead times, and a process that will usually outdate news by the time an article is published.
• Sharing content. We live in a world where content is shared continuously and on a global scale. An interesting article or video about your hotel, for better or worse, can easily be shared several times and very quickly. Comments pour in and suddenly you have an ongoing dialogue with free feedback from current or potential guests (Think about it: do you really need those outdated comment cards on top of beds anymore?)
• Flexibility. Online content, whether it’s a video or a story, is generally flexible. You can email it, you can copy paste it, you can print it out, save it, even ask to make changes to it if there’s a mistake! With print, corrections are a whole process and take a long time. Once something is printed, it’s a done deal.
• Digital immortality. Although newspapers and magazines live on in library archives, online placements are also digitally filed in search engines and on social media. Online stories are available sometimes for years and years and help your branding and online influence.
• SEO and SMO. Search engine optimization is very last decade, but it’s not dead. SEO is still important to maintain a healthy digital presence on the web. However, with the popularity of social media growing, SMO is a concept that hotels should know about. With many users receiving their news and updates from their social networks, it’s important to create an SMO strategy to amplify the PR process for your hotel.
• Viewership. It’s difficult to compare the number of impressions an article or social media post receives online with the traditional circulation numbers of print publications. It’s not a fair comparison, especially since we explored the different experiences the two media vehicles provide. However, we do business in the digital age where content matters and immediacy makes an impact.

These are some ideas of why I think online placements have grown not only in popularity, but also carry a strategic weight on any PR plan for a hotel. Efforts on print placements should be marginalized only because it’s not worth the effort to chase a glossy magazine for two years just to get a sidebar in a feature story. It’s just not worth it when you can have 200 stories online that are well positioned in the digital space. Of course, for any good PR plan to be executed, hoteliers must set the right goals for their property. Most importantly, they should hire the right people who understand the new dynamics of publishing and are willing to work through the digital/print gap. To top it off, maybe you can have a digital frame with your best online placements next to that traditional one.

Didi Lutz is an internationally acclaimed hospitality public relations professional specializing in boutique hotels, luxury travel, destination and tourism communications. Prior to starting her own business in February 2005, Ms. Lutz was the Director of Communications for the Hotel Commonwealth, a 150-room luxury property in Boston. Within the first year of the Hotel Commonwealth's opening, she established the media relationship that led to worldwide recognition for the property as one of Ten Best New Business Hotels by Forbes.com. Ms. Lutz can be contacted at 561-628-7422 or didi.lutz@gmail.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.