Hraba Hospitality Consulting

If anyone has an opinion on this I would love to hear it.  My previous entries on this involve Facebook pages, and their effectiveness for positioning your image and property.

I suggested they were nothing more than long term brand marketing, and didn’t really have an impact.  I surely won’t advertise on facebook again (I ran some tests awhile back.. see older blog posts), so pushing it out there by traditional methods is out of the question.

I really didn’t get why, though.  There is plenty of advertising and marketing going on within people’s profiles, based off them being endorsers and posting different things on their page.  But the pages seem to sort of just sit there, and gather dust.  They get some traffic, but nothing of merit.  It is obvious that I could be missing something, or that I am not applying the tool correctly.  I also thought I simply couldn’t invest the time to get it to take off.

But…. in the odd twitter jibber jabber, in a moment of clarity, I absent mindedly wrote out a simple, concise reason:

“FB’ers are passive endorsers, not active brand searchers.”

And there you have it.  They will play your scrabble game.  They will comment and agree on someone’s brand name clothes, beverage selection, or sunglasses in a picture.  They will share the musicians they think are cool with youtube clips. 

They passively endorse things.

But I don’t think they are actively searching for brands to actively endorse.  At least, if facebook is meant to become a wholly integrated world of marketing and social networking, it seems to have a long way to go before people are using it like the yellow pages.

Whatever the case, I am not sure that it *won’t* become that.  It just doesn’t seem to be there right now.  I also have one property that has a peculiar value offering in regards to facebook, so I am excited to see if this perfectly situated hotel will become relevant on FB.

Everything aside, I just had a thought and a rambled a bit.  I would love to know what you think about it too.

Do you think Facebook will ever be a place to build a strong brand presence?  Do you know of any companies that have a strong brand presence on FB besides Milton Bradley with Scrabble, youtube with videos, etc?

The old marketing model has been flipped upside down, and now people are trying to figure out how to reach consumers that *want* to be reached… branded consumers that want to identify with your brand, rather than ignore it dutifully with the endless visual and aural “spam” that litters every street we walk down, store we walk into, or sites that we surf. And it is in this that we find our best opportunity… consumers no longer want to be advertised to. However, they will endorse your brand in the interest of their personal identity… which is why Yelp has been such an incredible opportunity from a business end. Not only do I like to reach out and talk to the consumers, I like the challenge of rectifying bad situations! It is a personal mission for me to redefine “advertising and marketing” with being real and transparent to the guest. I want them to identify with my quirks, possible (yet unlikely) typos, and my individualistic approach at really responding to each consumer… knowing each consumer is much more amplified than a traditional non social site reviewer. Like it or not, the consumer is now easily tiered into multiple levels of VIPS, not unlike what hotels have done for years.

Initially, very few businesses took advantage of yelp. Then came the terror and panic…. Business owners realizing it was a force, almost a lobby, that they needed to address, which led to an amazing moment in yelp history of business owners lashing out and acting like defensive bullied playground kids. Then things starting calming down a bit. This is the point we rest at… a moment when more and more hotel (business) owners are becoming involved, not because they are worried about customer perception… but because they realize the tool this is, in a violently upset world of dying print media and traditional marketing tactics going awry. Finally, in a world where we are moving further apart and less connected to our clients…. We have a direct and professional way to approach them.

Yelp has gotten me to the point of actually knowing our clients. It has been enjoyable finding out about their families, preferences, suggestions, and complaints. Yelp has helped me to humanize my client base. And because of this…. The angriest yelpers became some of our most branded and loyal customers because we showed that we were engaged, earnest, and interested in improving our relationship, service, and brand.

So Jim wanted a simple testimonial, and I blather on. But the ROI is never easy, and we need a new way to measure things. However, I can speak plainly of unhappy guests that have returned on a comp night from the hotel, that happily spent incremental revenue (outlet revenue like spa or restaurant). I can also speak of positive reviewers that have been given discounted rates and have returned, already branded, to enjoy our hotel yet again, and we await yet another update. What some of you at yelp might not have realized is how much of this is branding… that you are reinforcing your brand as they write a review…. But if the identify with the review they are tapping out because they hold the company/hotel/etc in high esteem…. That review they type out is literally reinforcing the brand as they type it.

Yelp is much more important than a review site. It is on the threshold of being the epicenter of the “new” marketing model. It is no longer about shoving adverts down the throats of consumers who want nothing to do with you. It is time to recognize we can not only talk to branded consumers thirsty for information…. But we can find depth and meaning in the relationships between clients / guests and create a new approach to business that not only has demonstrable ROI, but is a more human, interested, and excited approach to knowing your client base.