Hraba Hospitality Consulting

I know I know…I am totally having fun with the 2.0 thing.  Don’t worry it is not the title, I promise.  But I do think it will exist!  I am not sure what you are going with for the title of this position, those of you actually *doing* this.  So far, in the capacities I have interacted with guests I am not too far from an “online concierge” for specific properties.  That being said, I was trying to identify what makes a good “online guy”.  What are your thoughts?

So far, after brief pontification… this is what I have:

1_ Fierce, undying, dyed in wool love for and belief in the hotel, product, brand, business, etc.

I think this is vital.  I don’t think you can sit and be part of a conversation that irks you, or that your heart is not in.  I think you might try… it could be like a relationship you want to work but you just know that can’t.  I am not sure about you, but there definitely has to be some redemption and true love for the properties I represent.  With a couple in specific, there is drive it in to the ground go to the mat love. You might be able to lose yourself in the fun that is social media, but then you may get to far from your job and positioning and maintaining your hotel’s needs (or product etc).  Too many people “play” social media.  You need someone trying to win for your hotel.. earnestly and deeply.

2_ Ability to conjure and work with words eloquently, concisely, and with precision

Concise?  Me?  Uh oh.  Managing positive and negative reviews is a daunting task.  One single property I work for (w/ outlets) has over 145 reviews in the first 9 months of operations on YELP ALONE.  This is not only overwhelming (given their 5 review response limit per day) this is incredibly frightening.  You can’t really carbon copy reviews… you have to respond individually.  They are so nuanced, and so individual… reviewers may react poorly to a “stock response”, versus not having written them at all.  Some yelpers have even ganged up on businesses that didn’t appropriately respond to their needs.  Whatever the case, when you are replying to reviews they are very nuanced, personal conversations that need to be real.  Social Media isn’t only about transparency, it’s about being honest, and providing a human face for your brand.  Someone replying with cut and paste isn’t going to, ahem, cut it.

3_ Someone able to stay focused in a relatively unstructured environment (wild west of job
responsibilities and duties)

This job is new.  It is also fairly vaguely scripted.  Often times by the time you are deep into an idea or “campaign” you realize it isn’t as relevant as you hoped and you take a different direction.  It is a long term process keeping many, many different balls in the air.  It is incredibly important to create some level of structure or you will be wayward in this e-stream of riptide currents taking you to worthless, time consuming websites, or off topic fluff and minutia that hasn’t an impact or relevancy to your task at hand.  Organization is paramount, and difficult to do with such a new world of floating job tasks and fluid long term projects.  If you can’t keep good notes, your dates in order, and target tasks by hierarchical importance, it is going to be a disaster.  Remember, your employer may trust you deeply but you have to have *something* to show them your activities.  You may have freedom, but you have to relate your importance and justify the labour expense.

4_ Ability to multitask at a dysfunctionally and depressingly high level

You need to start 15 projects, answer 40 questions, be on 2 different phones in 3 different time zones before 8am.  Maybe that’s just me… but you do need to have a terse organizational mind coupled with an ability to stay mentally organized as 75% of the stuff you are directed to do gets put on hold to do other stuff.  I feel like I am constantly coming back to projects I have been working on *forever*.  I have a “create new projects” social media side, a “maintain” social media side, “innovate” social media side, and a “catch up, catch up now!!!” side.  Between that and nap time is brainstorming time.  I need a couple house wipeboards to cover all of it.  In fact, I need to rework that because there are a lot more things to multitask.  Like there should be a Q&A hour from confused people constantly asking a statement, “I don’t get twitter?”, with a rising intonation.

You need to be on the ball, and you can’t forget what’s in the air.  When the ball drops in the conversation in social media, there is something worse than becoming irrelevant and going unnoticed… it is the negative effect it can have on your brand.  When people want to talk and you aren’t answering your door, they can think it pretty rude.

So once you start, it might be wise to notice that you can’t stop.  I mean.. you can.  Of course you can.  But there are always consequences.

So that is why I think this is going to build and grow, and eventually end up property level for most majour chains or properties.  Just my two cents.  But if it is true….

Add your own thoughts!.  I wouldn’t mind to know what you think?  We are going to have to give HR a job description at some point, aren’t we?  =)

My blog posts run aggressively long at times.  So… I gave the instructions and “how-to” in the last post, but all you skeptics might want a “WHY” section to refer to…. and we shall call this the “meat” of the discussion.  As I have made it late to lunch due to this post, it will not only entice me to end it, but will provide the bulk of the point of this discussion.

The reason this is important for business:

The more places we are active online, and the more places we exist online, helps us significantly. The more places we are talked about or our media is represented, the more relevant our brand and hotel is online, and the higher we will be ranked in search engines.

Search engines are changing and will be looking for content (media, graphics, organic conversation) and normal “keyword indexing” will be at the back of the bus. So as these changes start happening, we need to increase our online footprint as much as possible to grab as much “land” online before our competitors do. It is like the Oklahoma Sooners…those first to arrive ended up with the most land. Land in this case is content… personal photos on personal accounts (FB, flickr, shutterfly, etc) that casually mention work, or personal twitter accounts that engage people in conversation about your brand, or professional accounts for work. If guests, meeting planners, restaurant clients all post photos on their personal Flickr accounts, or youtube videos of their stays, or review (good or bad) on sites…. it benefits us greatly. The more content we have online, the more relevant we become. I know it seems like a lot of content, often empty or meaningless, but the more content the wider our footprint will be.

So get to it! =) Don’t hesitate to shout or scream or bemusedly confusedly ask questions. I am happy to talk about it, and today something clicked in on how important it is for EVERYONE to be talking about the brand or hotel, not just the social media guy. One smart person is good to get the ball rolling, but it takes the help of a whole network to get it up that hill.

Go.. learn… experiment.. have fun.  The online world has forever impacted our business, and it promises to get even weirder.  When these search engines start engaging content and media more than before…. successfull SEO will be a minour part of the overall picture.  So go create an account or two!

Some relevant articles to this discussion?

Brands in searching saving the internet from being the “cesspool” it is:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/10/08/this-cesspool-we-call-the-internet

This is a link to my blog, but it has some great “future of SEO” articles:
http://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2009/01/23/keywords-will-step-to-the-back-of-the-search-engine-line-or-how-consumers-will-find-hotels-in-the-future/

Seriously…. panic!  Panic now!

Okay calm down and chill out.  It really doesn’t help.  Actually my mantra is quite lazily swiped from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:  “DON’T PANIC”.  I can’t tell you how often that phrase helped during bomb threats, broken water mains, or total service meltdowns in opening periods…..

*But* I have your attention.  It’s devious to be sure, but you’re here and you might like this.

As you are calming down, I will help raise your eyebrow a bit, and possibly the bar.  This isn’t the limbo… so we will hopefully bring it up so that everyone can pass through! No, it is not the kind of bar you wished it to be.  You will need to find that later in the day.

We hotel social media people are all over it!  The internet that is.  We are in a lot of places online.  Frankly we are everywhere and it wears us out.  Following yellow page sites like citysearch and yellobot, following customer generated reviews on multiple hotel outlet pages with sites like TripAdvisor, Zagat, or Yelp.  We have multiple Twitter accounts, facebook pages, blogs, myspace, and more.  We have RSS feeds creating feedback loops of brand info!

Simply…. we are doing our job for the company, as rapidly as that is being defined.

But more and more I notice something.  Most corporate offices are totally clueless.  They are years away from this.  Many are catching on, starting to get it, almost there.  Even the corporate offices with visionary ownership – far ahead of the game – fall a bit short in that they understand that social media is important, vital, and very much the “here and now” of grassroots word of mouth, but aren’t completely utilizing the tools yet.  At times it feel as if there is a self satisfaction in having that “one online guy” managing things, so they can tell their other industry pals, “We’re on it.  We are relevant, fresh, and in the know!”

Sipping of Arnold Palmer’s then reverbrates in the lounge air with a smug sense of management being hip (Actually, that is usually me with the Arnold Palmer). I am fairly lucky this isn’t my case and it is hyperbole to be sure, but you catch my drift.  The point is that it’s so new a “tool” (for lack of a better term) there is a strong likelihood there will be communication problems at the beginning, the learning curve will be great, and making people aware of it will be very difficult.

If you believe in the brand you work for, it is your cross to bear.

The difficulty is bridging that gap, and helping people grasp it’s importance.  What is happening with social media, search indexing, and brand positioning is going to alter *everything* in the next couple years for the internet.  Quick article *here* However it so new I am not sure people are fully grasping this “thing”, beyond the hip and organized ones that are currently shuffling their social media guy into a room and praying that that person does a good job (so they no longer have to worry about the “annoying reviewers”)….

It isn’t the “be all and end all”, it isn’t a religion… but it is vitally important, much bigger than one person, and hopefully this ramble will help you will see why.

Ownership, management, and most employees are lost on it, understandably so.  Social Media is an overwhelming place of daunting content and endless snide reviews….  but we “SMO” were put here to build a base for the brand’s social media presence, and that is much more than just hiring someone to do the job and ignoring them.  It is allowing the SMO to interact with employees and help reinforce what social media is and does.  This is a position that will not only be a property level position at some point, but it will be a respected manager training and helping other staff to get on board and help the hotel.  Ehhh… possibly (Feynman said fence sitting is an art)

Most hotels with social media campaigns do not alert guests to it, often forgetting to mention it if it comes up. Often it is because employees don’t know about it, or sometimes because it just aggravates them.  You have all heard of it, probably been inundated by it and confused by it, which is often times why people just ignore it. But it is vital we talk about the lack of connection between the campaign and employees on property level, and why there needs to be more interaction than “yeah we have a guy doing it”.

How do you start this interaction?  My advice is to find any and every employee property level that “gets” social media, is into it, and might have fun with it.  In fact, many of your SMO’s already see some employees online while performing their job tasks… you know those employees online a bit more often than they might need to be?  That is where you start…. it’s that simple!

People are concerned about their employees talking about them online, but that concern should be obsolete!  You shouldn’t worry about it… THEY ALREADY ARE TALKING ABOUT YOU!  You couldn’t stop them if you wanted to, so it is wise to reinforce that your brand is online, they are representing it… and anything they can do to help will be appreciated!

Then start talking to those who might be interested in increasing sales leads, contacts, and bookings.. no doubt there is a savvy sales agent already hammering away on facebook all day.  Why not extend that into a professional sales page that they link a twitter account to?  Then you have networking for the sales agent, and brand presence for the hotel!  The more of these sort of interactions, the better!

Your tech guy might already be there, but if I know hotel A/V and IT people… they are way too busy to actually *do* social media.  But remind them they could use it to keep informed about current trends and products they can geek out to, as well as ask questions to quickly resolve conundrums.  Maintenance could use it in the same way as well.  When all your people have accounts up and running, think how convenient it would be for a guest to twitter engineering about a burnt out lightbulb, or a Wireless point that is down?

Starting to wrap up this ramble!

SO – the social media guy can handle a property level account for twitter, a facebook page, a blog, and more… constantly cross posting and getting the word out, but it takes more than that to increase your online footprint.  You want sales people talking sales, and tech people talking tech… you want all the employees connecting with other hotels and hospitality employees, as well as to other guests and clients. You want people commenting on blogs about the hotel where applicable, and talking about it on their own.  You want people posting their pics and videos.  You want your brand to be bolstered by thousands… not just one social media guru locked in a windowless room in a cage.

BUT WHY?  WHY ON EARTH IS THIS ACTUALLY A USEFUL BUSINESS TOOL?

Well … this post was so bloody long we will save the meat for the next post.  It will make sense.  I promise!

How Yelp works… a totally delusional, mindless, idiotic ramble that I choose to pull from the threads *there* to this site *here* for multiple reasons.  If you need to know the reasons, just make up your own… they will suffice.  =)

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Chicago does not click on sponsored biz results… at least… active yelpers that talk.
(http://www.yelp.com/topic/chicago-do-you-click-onto-yelp-s-sponsored-ads)

and albeit not directly about yelp, it has the same model… which ABSOLUTELY no one understands how to convert the traffic into money.

Kelleher from Wired.. his thoughts earlier this year:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_socialnetworks

A CNN / Fortune article about Facebook’s Number 2 being “the one” who can make it profitable:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/11/technology/facebook_sandberg.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008041213

while facebook has money problems:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/31/facebooks-growing-problem/

“facebook headed for financial ruin?
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/10/facebook-headed-for-financial-ruin.html

a good dollars and sense vs pageviews cut up of the issue:

http://okdork.com/2008/04/02/the-money-problem-with-facebook-myspace-hi5-apps/

And I think the AOL Yahoo thing brought out some interesting comments… especially from Randy Falco
http://gigaom.com/2008/04/10/aols-falco-gets-something-right/

“But despite drawing large, engaged audiences, other social networks have not been able to make the experiences relevant to users and marketers alike.”

And that last link says it very succinctly….

“That right there is the reason I’m hostile to most social networking and social networking-related startups that plan to rely on advertising: They’re depending on marketers to foot the bill while at the same tailoring their content to users that are generally hostile to or uninterested in marketing.”

How Yelp works some more……. a totally delusional, mindless, idiotic ramble that I choose to pull from the threads *there* to this site *here* for multiple reasons.  If you need to know the reasons, just make up your own… they will suffice.  =)  I just go back to it a lot and my searching here is better than the search function there.

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They make the rounds to venture capitalists (like some people that love yelp and actively participate) and get equity through that. They look for David Cowan and Tim Draper types to flush the yelp account with money…. and yelp uses it as operating funds. Earlier in Feb they got another $15 Million of VC funding from DAG, totaling something like $30Million in four rounds of VC exploration. Revenue is widely state to be less than $10 Million.

the ad model does not bode well for 2.0, as Facebook was massively overvalued and is having money problems
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/31/facebooks-growing-problem/

and Stopplemen has suggested that “But revenue from these sources isn’t enough to make Yelp profitable, Mr. Stoppelman said.” (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/why-yelp-works/)

If Yelp isn’t able to secure VC funding through 2010, the economy is such that it simply will not be there later. Depending on how much money yelp is burning through, I really can understand why their sales people are aggressive….

Unlike linkedin I don’t think this VC funding is going in the bank:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/22/BUAI141O97.DTL

But the problem here is that the ad and business model does not offer enough cash to prop up the coffers enough for it to be profitable. And… yelp is *not* profitable.

YET. maybe. hmmm….Period.

I think the linked comment in this article from 2006 says it best:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/04/yelp-secures-10-million-more-for-local-reviews/#comment-243531

the end is that there are people out there with a SHIT TON of money looking to fund some ingenious ideas. Those people are not idiots…. and they watch Yelp very, very closely. I am sure it will be fine, but this quote from Jeremy, and actions I have seen in the last couple months, suggest the leadership is not as strong as it should be.
http://venturebeat.com/2006/10/02/silicon-valley-the-industry-of-cool/

“When asked where they want to be in five years, Stoppelman responds: “Sitting on top of a pile of money … [in unison with Simmons] … surrounded by women! Yeah! [high five]“