Hraba Hospitality Consulting

Cheers and good day! Your friendly neighborhood Hotelier trying to stay on top of hotel news, and travel info, and hospitality & management philosophy… oh yeah… and technology or social media.  Okay okay… I am apparently trying to keep you updated on everything, and here is a little more from my corner of the internet…. endless relevant information filtered into a relatively decadent lunch sized chunk.  Enjoy!  Don’t hesitate (more…)

I actually got into a conversation on linked in today!  Go figure… I haven’t used it much as the “professional facebook”, but every once in awhile meaningful discussion about the industry pops up…. even then I typically don’t dive in.  But it is interesting…. so much conversation about the recession being over, and hoteliers, ownership, and properties are popping up their heads to see if they see their shadow.  As real winter looms, our proverbial “winter of discontent” wanes.  But instead of being rife with joy… let’s cast our doom & gloom nets out a bit.  If you look anywhere in media – fear and panic are often confused and countered by (more…)

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?