UniFocus Forms Partnership with Circos and gCommerce for Reputation Management

Partnership to Provide One Portal for Social Media Monitoring and Feedback

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. November 11, 2009

DALLAS, TX, November 10, 2009 — UniFocus, a global pioneer in the hospitality industry for performance, workforce management and closed-loop feedback solutions, has kicked off a strategic partnership with Circos Brand Karma and gCommerce Solutions to leverage the full potential of reputation management. The firms have joined forces to provide clients with real time access to an array of online commentary and analytics from one portal.

“Our strategic partnership with Circos and gCommerce is emblematic of a dramatically changed marketing environment wherein social media plays a larger role,” said Mark Heymann, President and CEO of UniFocus. “The viral nature of this medium allows guests to 'tell' exponentially more people about their experiences than ever before, making the old 20 person rule obsolete. It's always been vital to know what your customers have thought about their experience, but now it is more critical than ever to know what's being said about your property and how that impacts your online revenue channels.”

Social media is user-generated content built upon the interactive facilities of the web, and is increasingly influential in determining which destination a consumer, business traveler or meeting planner chooses. Circos Brand Karma extracts brand sentiments for analysis from online consumer-written reviews and comments; gCommerce assessments put everything into a broader marketing context to drive online revenue channels.

“We created Brand Karma so that hospitality organizations could take relevant social media content and turn it into meaningful information for the business,” said Mario Jobbe, Co-Founder of Circos. “Brand Karma utilizes complex algorithms to transform property-specific commentary on social sites into numeric data for subsequent competitive analysis. This information is then packaged into easily digestible reports for management.”

“Our hospitality clients are experiencing big gains as the result of optimizing revenue from online channels,” said Scott van Hartesvelt, gCommerce President. “We are essentially monetizing social media by providing the analysis and reporting to glean actionable information for our customers. That's our core business, and it's a win-win proposition since our services are paid for out of a percentage of their increased bookings.

“If an organization wants to improve their revenue performance, we start by doing a web site assessment,” continued Hartesvelt. “Then we go through the marketing process, from search engine optimization to a competitive overview, positioning, branding and developing an e-Marketing and channel distribution launch plan. And we fully engage our clients in the process, meeting with each one no less than once a week.”

“In the past, most hospitality organizations have gathered feedback from touch points that range from focus groups to guest cards to online surveys,” said Denise Cooper, Marketing Director for gCommerce. “Now in addition to these approaches you can have access to best-in-class 24x7 monitoring to more than 250 social media and travel sites to find out what specific conversations are going on out there about your property.”

Today's economic climate is forcing many hotels to drive revenue from multiple channels, creating a critical need for an online reputation management system that bubbles up all relevant online feedback and comments.

“The combination of our three companies brings an unparalleled breadth of experience to the hospitality sector, both with respect to technology and industry expertise,” added Heymann. “Our strategic initiative will advance the interests of clients and protect their bottom line as we take online reputation management to the next level by leveraging both survey and social media analytics to create better intelligence for revenue retention and enhancement.”