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 trails & picnic day trips in the area. If you have a nice restaurant, talk about all the local farms you buy from and the guests you have, instead of just putting a discount/special out there. If you have a spa, tell a story about one of the favourite therapists instead of just saying “1/2 off”. If you have meeting rooms to sell…. talk about one of the cool groups that came to the property and why they excited you. Involving more than just yourself will stimulate and open up conversation.  Could I go on?  Obviously… but I am assuming you are getting it.  Social Media is *NOT* a print ad.  It is a relationship, networking, and interaction.  One sided, spam-like deal tweets will only help you get recognized long enough for the people to ignore you.

3) Build a culture and humanity around your property… not just a shallow marketing effort. You need to humanize and personalize your activities online. If you are nothing more than an RSS feed for your hotel, people will walk away.  You need to show you are a real person… so wear your quirks and emotions on your sleeve.  If you are an emotionless robot, people won’t notice you… but if your energy, personality, and even idiosyncrasies, show through… it will truly create a more meaningful and real experience for other users. If you play at the deferential professional being obsequious with no character… that will only reflect on your hotel in a negative light. You need to intone and create a sense of “soft and comfy beds”, rather than sterile hallways littered with emotionless automatons.  Always be professional, but for criminy *BE REAL*!!!!

4) Then…                    after all this….                 you become the Concierge 2.0.  Help anyone and everyone REGARDLESS of whether they are utilizing or recognizing your brand. You cannot be so disingenuous that you will only engage people you think will bring you business. You have to cordially, professionally, and earnestly engage anyone and everyone. Not because you are trying to brand your hotel… but because you are a real service provider that is inherently interested in fulfilling guests, helping the community, and creating harmony in people’s lives.  This isn’t advice…. this is a way of life.

Hospitality is about service, consistency, and making people happy. Don’t make it more complex than that…. Follow that as an ultimate guideline in creating your business online, as well as in the real world. You are there to stay open, pay your employees, and hopefully walk out with a little profit (someday). But the only thing that will keep you there is the community, and the community is filled with living and breathing people that need to be respected and treated with integrity… online and off. If you treat social media as a marketing tool, you are not only going to miss the point, you may actually damage your brand.  But if you are real, engaging, enthusiastic, and humanize your property, you could become indispensable to the people and surroundings of your area.

I know I have been slow on blogs lately… I have a security related blog coming, as well as follow up to my LEED and eco-resort related blog post. In fact, I seem to always have one or two in the wings, but for some reason this caught me. I will repost some of my older blogs that discusses this online concierge method of utilizing social media: “Concierge 2.0”, “What do you say about managers not in the room”, and “Did we Just Create a New Position for Real??”

Cheers all!

Newsweek’s Budget Travel has a great article about TripAdvisor trying to deal with the long coming revelation that many of their users and reviews are not legitimate.  This is, frankly, a huge blow to the site, and should pose a happy problem in it’s early adolescence as they deal with all the changes that come along with growing into adulthood.  Frankly, I am thrilled that this may provoke User Generated Content sites to seek the same verification model other sites have.

At any rate, this is vital to all of us, and it recalls some of my previous post (which I seem to mention once or twice):

You know I am skeptical of social media, whether speaking of Facebook’s lack of meaningful interaction, or Flickr’s nebulous TOS.  In general, I have had major concerns since my yelp research project, and resulting thoughts on ethics in social media. I had even mentioned in January that Yelp should consider verification processes.

One scotch fueled evening my jocular side protruded a wee bit and I became a prankster. To be honest it wasn’t to learn the lesson I did, rather just good fun.  I speak of the Ryan Air Twitter spoof of mine, which got considerable attention in traditional media (namely because Ryan Air claimed @ryanaironline was their account).  It  helped me realize that there is a grave concern for brands and trademarks, and both the businesses & social media sites should have a vested interest in a verification process of brands.  There is a serious risk of hijacking and damaging people and businesses, with inauthentic people (or dim ones not realizing pranks and social media can go viral) damaging a brands reputation.

Social Media is young. FB beat out myspace because it is better at replicating and verifying the real world (although it can’t actually do anything more meaningful than provide a wonderful marketing data gathering opportunity for FB, coupled with a nice phonebook)… but it was verifying that the person was the *reality* based person, which quickly attracted people to it. If you aren’t relevant to any networks, or aren’t genuine… you quickly become invisible.

As user generated review sites follow a similar path, these things will stabilize. It is very young, and still in the myspace period of fake profiles and people… but as twitter adds verification services & FB starts considering verification due to trademark infringement issues with it’s new URL program: , it will be obvious for User Generated Content Sites to authenticate, across the board. I am not sure if open ID and attaching accounts to mobile phones is the simplest way, but if something doesn’t happen quick the sites will implode through sacrificing the only thing that makes their business model feasible.  I am sure Tripadvisor has seen the start of accounts closing due to the breach in ethics.

We will wait until services like Yelp and TripAdvisor grow into the awareness of what they have created.  People sardonically jest “the internet is serious business” when it comes to this sort of stuff.  But it is.  It isn’t just 2.0.  It’s a massively powerful tool that completely reorients the consumer model, putting control into the hands of the people, and out of marketing and PR companies, possibly for the first time in capitalism’s history. The message can no longer be managed, and PR doesn’t work the same way anymore. You are only as strong as the advocates and endorsers that believe in your brand. Ethics is paramount.

The only way for these sites to continue their validity is by echoing the sentiment of their own taglines: Tripadvisor’s “get the truth… and go”, or Yelp’s “real reviews, real people”.  If they commit to intelligently policing their own site by being completely transparent, authentic, accountable, and earnest, they should be able to emerge better than before.. They might need to take a huge dip in registered users, as well as delete a lot of existing content. This open and honest method of dealing with this situation will undoubtedly sacrifice trust in the short term, but it is the only way for a social media site to maintain the trust that they leverage for business.

It will hurt… but this is an opportunity for them to re-organize into a leaner and more valid site than ever before. Most people saw this coming. Let’s hope it isn’t something they try to spin away or ignore… instead of doing what is right and being honest, while doing everything they can to curb the problem.

I admit concern about the idea of having to hire non-revenue generating staff to handle the massive clean up project, and the fact the money simply might not be there to handle it.  However, it is obvious they are quickly responding, like April Robb from Tripadvisor commenting to Christopher Elliott. I do like the warnings they put on some hotels, but it could be markedly arbitrary?

We’ll have to see.

Not sure what age social media is at right now, but it is certainly hitting a painful growth spurt.