Hraba Hospitality Consulting

Wow Apple is off the rails, eh?

AT&T is tragic, at best.  Om, from GigaOm (he went early due to AT&T), talks about his big iphone break up from earlier this year.

Now Iphone’s massively inconsistent app store is getting (more…)

I had been chatting with the guys at Market Metrix a couple months ago about the necessity of using their solid metrics with social media.  Of course, I didn’t know they were already up to something….  I am very interested to see what has been developed, and feel this may turn into a very useful monitoring tool that will monitor trends, issues, etc… highlighting what you are doing right, what you are doing wrong, and gathering the (more…)

So…

This is a fairly funny, interesting article about the complexity of social ads, and how they can exploit any of your proprietary data for their own ends…. in that you agree it isn’t proprietary anymore by uploading it to the site.  IE:  Complain all you want, but if you are on a social media site, they own you.  Some try to be (more…)

Mr. Kirby from Hotels Magazine has written a great piece about @hiltonsuggests and their new model of using twitter. In light of that, the massive amount of new twitterers/followers since my posts about the development of an “e-concierge / Concierge 2.0″ role, as well as how to effectively establish and utilize your brand using the tool of social media… I thought I would expand a bit and touch on it again.

It is exciting to see brands establishing themselves as I had envisioned… not vapid spam marketing, but being leaders in helping guests. Hospitality is the name of the game, and the only way to build your brand isn’t to market it, so much as effectively position it, with deference to your guests and not your marketing department.

Kirby’s post talks about active searching for guests, instead of the passive approach; letting them come to you. Albeit a massive undertaking for a flag like Hilton, it will also be incredible effective.  I have been doing this for a couple years, and it really works. If you are a property with hot springs… search hot springs.  If you are a property in a wine growing region with fine dining… I think you get it. Fact is, this is INCREDIBLY time consuming, and I have backed off of it a little in need of positioning and building the social media presence for a number of clients… but there should be a point I am back to having the time to filter through aggressive wide netting of google alerts, backtype, twitter search, and other RSS’.  In fact, I think I totally melted down at one point through a blog post, as noted here.

In fact… the following will start to really help you position your property on something like twitter:

1) Firmly commit yourself to the geography and history – know your story, know where you came from, and know what your offerings are, what makes you special.. and share it!

2) Ingratiate yourself to the community – share city and county wide news, events, stories, photos, etc. Celebrate the Juniour Varsity going to state, or the new art gallery exhibit.  People don’t often care about a hotel.  They *do* care about what matters to *them*.  If you share and come together over similar interests, you will start to matter to the social web. Become a leader in information about your surroundings and tap into people’s interests. It isn’t all about *you*. It isn’t about wanting to sell your rooms, talk about your rentals, or pitch your restaurant. If you are myopic enough to think only of yourself, you won’t be as relevant as if you represent yourself as part of a community. Don’t just offer a room rate, talk about what makes a room special – from the historic quirks to green room design.  Instead of selling your bike rentals, talk about the incredible (more…)

There might be some rights issues here, as I am in the process of receiving permission for posting this 1 page article from the Law Group who published this. That being said, no offense… but we have all talked about intellectual privacy versus memetic operations of data, right? Meaning…. good ideas want to get out. They become memes… just like music, jokes, fashion trends…… a good idea is not own-able, and will travel of it’s own volition and propulsion (some lawyers will disagree). It is eerie, because memes really subject us to humility that can leave us ideologically foundering: Does the concept of individuality or originality exist when it is the *IDEA* that seems autonomous, simply using the human mind as a vehicle? Is our living, biologically charged body simply a tool for the truly alive *INFORMATION* to move about, and we are a finite, disposable entity? How long was (more…)

Spot on and completely hilarious, I am sure many of you have felt this frustration. Apparently, everything is negotiable nowadays, eh? This makes it nice and ridiculous, for easy lunch time digesting.