Social Media for Hotels - Taming the Beast

If anything strikes fear in the hearts of hoteliers these days, it’s social media. Seemingly overnight, we’re expected to tune in to dozens of websites each day to make sure no one has badmouthed us or posted an embarrassing video. If they have, we’re obliged to respond in a courteous, guest-is-always-right manner, knowing that everyone is listening—travelers, clients, media and the competition. No pressure there.

We’re also expected to generate original content. Not the easy pleasantries we’re used to exchanging with guests, like “Good morning!”, “Superior or deluxe?” and “How would you like to pay for that bathrobe in your suitcase?”, but clever, meaningful things in text, image and video format. And regardless of how desperate we may be to fill our rooms, we’re forbidden from being salesy or overtly promotional. That will cost us friends and followers.

Social media is like a difficult guest who demands so much attention we’re not convinced she’s worth the effort. She’s in our lobby now, demanding to speak to the manager, because she didn’t get her wakeup call—and missed her daughter’s wedding. Like any great leader, our first impulse is to run and hide. But that will only make things worse. So we gently take her aside, listen, learn, and use every tool at our disposal to turn her around. In essence, we tame the social media beast.

Social media has wrestled control over what is being said about hotels out of the hands of hoteliers and placed it into the hands of our guests—and then handed them a megaphone. This is fantastic when guests are singing our praises, but vexing if they’re crying for blood. Fortunately, new tools are now available to help us harness the powers of social media. One such tool is Revinate, a hotel-specific solution that so impressed me I'm now collaborating with its experienced team.

For the hotel industry, social media is an all-encompassing term that includes traveler review sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, online travel agencies like Expedia and Travelocity, social networking sites, blogs, and content-sharing platforms like YouTube and Flickr. Hoteliers can debate the power of platforms like Twitter and Facebook to drive room sales, but the influence of traveler review sites, where a “Book now!” button is never far away, is undeniable.

A major point of resistance to developing a comprehensive social media program is the time commitment involved. As a former general manager and director of sales and marketing, I recognize the hunted look in the eyes of my colleagues. During these challenging economic times, who has time to actively seek feedback when there’s a line of neglected guests outside our door? And yet we’re all too aware of the risks of turning our backs on the conversation.

Part of the solution is to reduce our dependency on traditional marketing activities that have diminished in effectiveness, things like print ads and brochures, direct mail, print publicity, voice reservations and three-martini lunches. Our resources need to shift to where the action is; increasingly, travel research, decisions and bookings are taking place online.

At the same time, we can adopt time-saving applications that do the work for us. Tools that scour the web for text, photo and video mentions of our hotel and our competitors and deliver a daily summary to our desktop. For the cost of a room night per month, we can monitor performance in real time, share and respond to feedback, and drill down in areas where improvement is needed. A simple, intuitive interface is essential, of course, since hoteliers reserve all our patience for our guests.

By bringing guest feedback into the open, social media empowers travelers to compare not only rates but multitudes of opinions in a variety of categories, from service and rooms to value and overall satisfaction. By collecting, qualifying and organizing this feedback, tools like Revinate enable two game-changing new standards of performance measurement in the hotel industry: market share of guest satisfaction and market share of voice.

Whether we’re a hotel owner, general manager or department head, we can no longer avoid that guest roaring for our attention in the lobby. By reallocating resources and utilizing newly-available tools, we can convert the social media beast into a powerful ally for managing our hotel’s reputation and strengthening our business.

About Revinate. The ultimate social media solution for hotels, Revinate harnesses online reviews and social media as the ultimate measures of guest satisfaction and drivers of demand. By tracking key metrics, providing real-time alerts and intuitively guiding hoteliers to action, Revinate helps hospitality companies profit from social media. For more information visit www.Revinate.com

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What's the secret to achieving top ranking on TripAdvisor?

Many hotels aspire to achieve top ranking in TripAdvisor’s popularity index, but HKHotels in New York dominates the charts, with all four of its properties in the top five rankings. Did they pay someone off at TripAdvisor? Write bogus reviews or complex algorithms?

Turns out the secret is good old-fashioned hospitality. I thought hoteliers could learn a thing or two from the company, which owns and operates Hotel Giraffe, Casablanca Hotel, Hotel Elysée and the Library Hotel, so I contacted Adele Gutman, VP of Sales & Marketing. Here’s a condensed version of my interview.

Tell us how HKHotels achieved top five placement for all four of your hotels.
Several years ago, one of our hotels was in the top ten on TripAdvisor and another at #56, and it made us wonder, why the disparity? We started to pay a lot of attention to reviews comments. It became clear that reviews were our greatest opportunity for word of mouth advertising. We set a goal to have all of our hotels in the top 10%.

It was clear that satisfying our guests’ expectations wasn’t enough. To inspire the enthusiasm to post a review, we needed everyone to be thrilled. We had hired the nicest, happiest people we could find, so it was up to us to lead, train and empower them. Each hotel discusses reviews at morning meetings and posts comments on the board. Every employee, from housekeeper to doorman to general manager, takes pride in positive comments, so it created a self-perpetuating culture of going above the norm. We reached our initial goal of top 10% in 2004 and then made top ten in 2006.

How are your hotels different from other New York offerings?
If you ask our guests, they will probably point first to the friendly staff who will do anything to please them. Then to our clubroom concept, with complimentary refreshments, a European-style breakfast buffet and an evening wine and cheese reception. They might also mention free Wi-Fi, bottled water, cappuccino machine, and the comfortable, pleasing environment.

Behind this is the owner’s commitment to spending resources on enhancing the guest experience instead of on high administrative and marketing costs. We trust that if we do all we can to delight our guests, they will support our marketing and sales efforts by spreading the word and returning. With the help of social media, they tell the world exactly what to expect. That’s great, because each of our hotels has its own personality and flavor. And that leads to better and more frequent reviews.

Which social media platforms do you use?
Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, TripAdvisor and any other review sites that allow us to enhance our listing or communicate with potential customers. We tried a blog for a while but it was too time-consuming. I would rather get stronger with Facebook, Twitter and travel review sites. We have small hotels and a lean team. We do not have the resources for a dedicated social media person; we each try to take a few minutes out of our day to see what people are saying and how we can participate in the conversation.

What steps do you follow when you get a negative review?
It’s hard to hear bad comments, but we learn from our guests and grow better each day. Every negative comment is reviewed by senior management. We find out as much as we can about what happened and we determine the actions needed to improve, in all four hotels if necessary. Sometimes we contact the traveler privately. We reply publicly if comments are so strong it would look strange and uncaring if we didn’t. Or it may be a topic we want to address with the TripAdvisor community to ensure it won’t be a problem for them. Some comments are so “interesting” it’s best to say nothing at all; we trust savvy travelers will take them with a grain of salt.

What do you do to encourage guests to write reviews?
The secret is to make guests feel they have found something so special they want to share it with the world. There is no shortcut or marketing ploy. It’s about hard work and genuine hospitality. After our guests check out, we send an email to thank them and invite them to write about us on TripAdvisor, along with a link. That’s it.

What advice would you pass along to hotels who aspire to similar accomplishments?
Give up the notion that there is a shortcut. Just be the best hotel you can be every single day. Treat every guest as though they were the most important travel writer in the world, because indeed they may very well be.

Note: TripAdvisor rankings can vary from week to week. Visit HKHotels at http://www.hkhotels.com/.

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Who is the Voice of Social Media in Your Hotel?

When asked about social media strategy, I often hear hotel executives say they are “carefully monitoring” or “moving at a measured pace”. “Our strategy is pretty much to listen and monitor,” said another one.

That’s not strategy. That’s hoping social media will go away. It won’t.

On the other side of the spectrum are hotels that have leapt into social networking on all fours. They’re issuing Twitter updates every thirteen seconds and recruiting Facebook fans by the busload. But their messages carry the meaning and life expectancy of an air bubble, and their “fans” are not brand advocates but deal-seekers who signed up hoping for something for free.

Social networking is not a contest to recruit the most followers. It is not a race to send out the most messages. It is less about talking than about listening. It’s about engaging consumers in meaningful dialogue and recruiting brand advocates who will do the talking for you. These simple truths apply to every social media platform, from Twitter to Facebook to blogs to user review sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp and Expedia.

By now, most hotels have allocated funds for social networking. How best to spend this money? Given that participation in most platforms is free, the greatest expense is the time required to develop and maintain an effective program.

The first step is to establish your hotel’s social media strategy. For most hotels, it should be simple: to utilize online networking tools to build a positive reputation and generate revenue. You need to determine the resources to dedicate, the distribution of responsibilities, the timeline, the tools to employ, and the standards regarding vocabulary, tone, imagery and responsiveness.

The next step is execution. Who will manage day-to-day activities? Your hotel’s internet marketing company/search engine optimizer may seem like a natural fit given its expertise, but if it’s located off-property, especially in a different city, it’s a drawback.

Effective social networking requires the hotel to have an authentic, compelling voice that evokes its personality and brand. To engage in meaningful, real-time dialogue, the owner of this voice must have a finger on the pulse of the hotel’s operations. Moreover, a system that requires hotel staff to feed information to an offsite company that in turn re-crafts and distributes it is inherently inefficient.

The same goes for the hotel’s ad agency, PR company, social media strategist and corporate office. These entities have a role in strategy and implementation and should have an ongoing involvement, but the ultimate goal should be to bring social networking activities in-house.

It’s a big job. A comprehensive social media program involves monitoring and conversing with entire online communities on a variety of platforms, disseminating and responding to feedback and using it to enhance the guest experience, blogging, and sourcing and distributing text, photo, video and mobile content. This role requires outstanding communication skills, technical proficiency, resourcefulness, strategic thinking, some serious multitasking, and a solid understanding of marketing and guest service.

Can your hotel justify a dedicated social media position? Consider how dramatically consumer decision-making has changed. Increasingly, travelers—independent and group, corporate and leisure—are consulting the opinions of others through social media platforms. Many are bypassing reservations and sales departments to book online. Have the resources of your hotel adequately shifted to reflect this new reality? It may be time to retire a reservations or sales position and replace it with a social media manager.

Yes, “moving at a measured pace” is prudent, but social media is moving at a breakneck speed and too much dawdling will leave your hotel in the dust. It’s time to take advantage of the enormous potential of social media. Your hotel’s online reputation is at stake.

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