Hraba Hospitality Consulting

My friend Marc inspired me to post the links and lessons so we can learn from the @ryanaironline spoof.  My blog article is a few posts down, but here is the fun stuff with the Telegraph, Times Online, etc.  I am including Marc’s comments too.  It was really fun, and I think I feel mighty comfortable sharing this on a professional level.  No it won’t be on my resume, but I will have a private smirk about it in the future.  Remember… creative pranks aren’t just fun… it’s healthy!   What started as an innocent, scotch fueled dabbled into creative pranksterism…. turned into a valuable lesson about brand mitigation, awareness, and accountability and verification needs in social media!

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I’ve got to say.  I have always wondered just exactly who it was that had the spare time to play these social media tricks.  It’s not surprise that it is Hraba.

But this experiment and the impact it had on the larger community is truly amazing. I’m not sure you can put it on your resume. But it clearly is something not nothing

Marc

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Articles… I think this is most of them:

Remember that ryan air thing? I had them so confused they claimed it was there twitter account.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/news/article5851864.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=1491494

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/4943871/Ryanair-caught-up-in-fake-Twitter-account-controversy.html

http://www.travolution.co.uk/blog/2009/03/official–-ryanair-joins-twitt.php

http://www.daxthink.com/2009/03/ryanaironline-abusing-other-airlines.html

http://journeysthroughtravel.com/2009/03/05/a-warm-welcome-for-ryanaironline/

http://gettincarriedaway.com/?p=189

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/thingsinthesky/

http://www.techcentral.ie/article.aspx?id=13161

http://www.joeblogs.net/?p=269

http://twitter.com/Gadling/statuses/1283209392

The below text is from Flickr to a user.

Hello,

Flickr account “framesdirect” was deleted by Flickr staff for violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.

www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

# Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes.

Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account.

-Terrence

My question… how are these hotels and brands getting away with using flickr for business purposes, or better question:

How long before Flickr further cracks down on businesses and starts deleting accounts?

Anyone that understands this complexity with flickr, please let me know.  I don’t get how this is being utilized as it violates the TOS?  Is it ok, or does Flickr just not care until they choose too?  I think there is a transparency and consistency issue here for Flickr?  Thoughts?

I cannot believe how alone I feel in my concern over the future of social media.  No one, it seems, wants to talk about it.  Beatrice Tarka with Mobissimo teetered precariously close to an incredible conversation, offering a seemingly benign nugget of info (at least how it was received):  You may have to start preparing to pay for your brand presence on twitter.  They desperately need to monetize, and this is the quickest, ways to do so,  if not a dauntingly difficult task to achieve.

I am massively skeptical though.  Much of this is simply about marketing, not so much utilizing the tools or talking about social media so much as a how-to primer for positioning your brand on Facebook and Twitter.

Personally, I am incredibly worried about this… putting so many fragile eggs in such a fragile basket.  You have Facebook which still hasn’t demonstrated to me anything more than a static page where people “fan” it as a novelty.  I am challenging any of you readers… if any of you have seen any real relevance or interactivity of users on FB, please let me know.  On one single of my many high end hotel brand pages, I have seen one user post one picture, and a couple mentions about how they love the hotel…. but nothing relevant or impacting that could mean “business”.  Twitter, as mentioned, has no monetization and I really think that puts a dent in the “cause celebre”.  What happens when brands flood twitter as will start happening?  How will you stay relevant?  How will you interact as twitter actually builds their business model?  How will brands protect themselves about spoofing, like my @ryanaironline hijinks?

Not only are hotels thinking very short sighted, they seem to be ignoring important issues in regards to how to *use* social media.

The fantastic Richard Bonds from the PA Tourism spoke of Flickr, and it gives rise to the question of FLICKR’s terms of service expressively forbidding commercial uses.  That being said, he did adequately justify his usage, in that it isn’t the presence of a brand so much as a social conversation of a place.  It isn’t room shots with rates… and he is right on about that.

But what of these companies.. airlines or hotels… ignorantly moving into Flickr and posting stuff expressively in violation of the TOS?  It just seems there is this panicked disconnect between people who know how to use social media, and marketers who want to exploit it.

Is it that the majority of travel companies are more interested in the dollar signs of social media and ROI conversations rather than the actual conversation?  It seems a lot of brands are aggressively moving forward with social media without having a clue what they are doing, or having any real plan.

Of course, this is where Forrester’s P.O.S.T. principles come into play, but it is more of a self-congratulatory “we are using a cool sounding tool” than people actually using P.O.S.T.’s methodology.

What’s more, the conference presenters so aggressively focused on ROI (and I am aware that was the structure for the panel presentation), it seemingly dismissed the social conversation of social media COMLPETELY.  Not only does that strike me as disingenious, it seems like they are missing a lot of the point if it is only measured in cold ROI.  I think there is a chance to miss a lot, frankly.  I understand you need to measure ROI, but you negate the power of and functionality of social media by being so myopic.

This is my round one report.

A hashtag may be all you need nowadays.  I must admit, for being a social media conference, I am not talking to people.  Of course…. it might just be my nature, and I might not need social media at all to do that.  =)

Onward we go!