HHotelConsult hoping to make sense of his brainpan’s thoughts, rambles, ambles, and more. Hotel Industry banter, social media thoughts, and general blather.
Josiah Mackenzie, hotel marketing pro, blew my mind once again with his exhaustive and insightful advice in using Flickr for Hotels. His social media plan and help is just…. wow. Thanks sir. Some of his thoughts will be in the social media bible, whenever someone has enough time to sit down and write one (even though it seems to change second to second). Whatever the case, his work always gets me thinking. This time it brought me back to the vague, somewhat uneasy marriage of business and flickr.
Something people don’t seem to want to talk about, or at least isn’t brought up too often in regards to Flickr, is their famously nebulous Flickr TOS & Yahoo Terms of Service. I have spoken to some industry professionals about it, and am confident these are quiet concerns people keep to themselves and the kitchen table at 3am. A few have approached it, as well as there being spirited conversations, involving multiple staff, on Flickr itself. Just like Yelp’s notoriously vague behind the scene manipulations, people have cried foul to the way Flickr chooses to manage/delete accounts, with seemingly random application of it’s TOS. What’s more, it seems people aren’t confident in how to use it. Even the staff have varying viewpoints and opinions on the matter. At least one majour hotel flag and brand that uses Flickr relentlessly (and incredibly effectively) says he goes to bed at night thinking he will wake up and the accounts will be deleted. Other groups, like craft makers, are completely lost as to what “commercial purposes” means, and are getting frustrated with errant deletion of their groups.
The reason this concerns me is because I see the most avid users of flickr talk about it being “spam central”, and people being incredibly aware that brands are *really* starting to penetrate that site. The above linked article is from a year ago, but the conversation is incredibly relevant. If you are still unsure, try searching “flickr” and “TOS” on Twitter Search; that is pretty overwhelming that there is a big question looming. As Flickr hears more from the community about brand spam, when will they take those famously vague words, “Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account.” into account? When might they start looking at a brand and suggesting it is creating less of a “story”, and creating more of what their users don’t want.
People do not want their photo sharing site to turn into a business marketplace. It is obvious by the discussions happening about “commerce and flickr”, and most apparent with commentary on flickr group discussions about Etsy, and people using Flickr to catalogue their offerings. That is an incredible no no, apparently. But that certainly draws our line a bit closer and more precarious, as we don’t *really* know what hotel’s photo sharing is about. Can anyone define that? We do know that “Flickereeno’s” (Flickr Staff) are incredibly helpful and accessible, compared with some other social sites. They responded inside some of the above linked threads, as well as directly to people’s earnest questions.
These are some important problems to resolve in regards to exactly what space a hotel operates in, on flickr. Their TOS expressively forbids businesses for using it, in any way, for commercial purposes. This includes etsy people using flickr to host a catalogue, or private, personal businesses owned by individuals who are using flickr in any way for their biz. This is complex, because they are obviously lenient, and cannot possibly have omnipresent control, but they have the right to clamp down any time they wish.
In a recent meeting, we met with Flickr’s GM on an unrelated note but asked him about brands and photos, *SPECIFICALLY* in regards to hotels. His paraphrased words are as follows:
“We typically are fine with a collection of images that tells a story”, but they are down on direct advertising.
I doubt they will forbid relevant or useful brands from existing, but there is a chance in the future that they will crackdown. Until the TOS are cleaned up to expressively permit a hotel from existing on Flickr, their right will be to delete your account without warning or justification. As of now, their TOS suggest that they *will* do this at some point in the future, in that a hotel is not a person using it for personal reasons.
I guess the point is that it is a relevant and important aspect of a hotel social media optimizer’s job. Use it effectively and it can be an incredible tool to help your hotel. If you aren’t sure how, you can find interesting articles like this about marketing and Flickr, or simply use Josiah’s incredible work. You will miss out if you aren’t part of this, and it can really help your overall social media program.
Below was sent to “elite” (read “drunken”) members of yelp. This is INCREDIBLY exciting. This will legitimize yelp, and I have to say this is the most important development in the last couple months in social media. This is huge, exciting, and I am very happy to explore this with my hotels. What a PHENOMENAL tool.
———–from yelp————
As a member of the Elite Squad, I wanted you to be among the first to know about a new feature that is rolling out in about a week or so. It’s called Business Owner Comments, and as the name suggests, it will allow a business owner to write a public Comment after any given review. Comments will be the latest addition to the free Business Owner’s Account that any business owner can sign up for, and that lets them add Photos, post Special Offers and create an ‘About This Business’ section (for more info, read up *here*). As a reviewer, you’ll be emailed each time you receive a new Comment, just like when you get a Compliment.
The goal is for all Comments to be pleasant and useful. For example, if you wrote a glowing 5-star review some months ago about your favorite pub, in which you mention drinking Harp because they didn’t carry Guinness… both you and other readers would probably be happy to see a new Comment saying, “Just got our Guinness tap last week. Hope to see you soon!” Here are a couple other example Comments.
Comments will NOT be a forum for a business owner to disparage a reviewer. As you’ve probably seen with Private Messages, most business owners are actually appreciative of honest and constructive opinions, and realize that being rude to customers is — both on and off Yelp — bad for business. But for those few ill-mannered folks out there, we have come up with some fairly strict Comment Guidelines — and our customer service team will remove violating posts.
I haven’t been able to really wrap my head around this until today, and would like ANY industry advice or thoughts.
I am a hotelier that is attempting to simplify our lives as SMO, CRM, etc.
With all these accounts and things to keep up with, I want the simplest method of updating and keeping my fans up to date with our news, events, offerings, and great pics, etc. I was boggled as to how to best manage this, considering we are constantly posting one article to multiple pages and sites.
So… for now… this is the best practice for syndicating and streamlining your SMO work.
1st – use yahoo pipes to grab any aggregate content you need… meaning flickr photos, etc. There are a lot of things to build and use here, and I am still learning, but it is simple to – at least – create automatic feeds for photo uploads and other information.
2nd – take all possible feeds and mayhem you have created with yahoo pipes and parse those feeds into twitterfeed, so that all content you are interested in (external corporate blog, tags of flickr pics, etc) is fed into your twitter account.
3rd – Siphon the single twitter RSS feed into your FB page by importing it through the “Notes” settings. Notes posted through the RSS are, SEEMINGLY, posted to the wall so that all our fans and followers are able to see them.
therefore… any tagged photos, blog posts, newsfeeds, press releases, etc can be fed from pipes into twitter, therefore creating one RSS feed that will distribute *all* aggregate data through the RSS for your twitter page. Taking that and embedding/importing it into your Facebook Page means that you only need to post on twitter, publish your blog articles, and make sure all these connection are up and working.
NOW.. correct me. Is this the simplest and most elegant way to manage content, push content, and create less work through simplicity? Let me know!
Flickr account “framesdirect” was deleted by Flickr staff for violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.
www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne
# Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes.
Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account.
-Terrence
My question… how are these hotels and brands getting away with using flickr for business purposes, or better question:
How long before Flickr further cracks down on businesses and starts deleting accounts?
Anyone that understands this complexity with flickr, please let me know. I don’t get how this is being utilized as it violates the TOS? Is it ok, or does Flickr just not care until they choose too? I think there is a transparency and consistency issue here for Flickr? Thoughts?
I cannot believe how alone I feel in my concern over the future of social media. No one, it seems, wants to talk about it. Beatrice Tarka with Mobissimo teetered precariously close to an incredible conversation, offering a seemingly benign nugget of info (at least how it was received): You may have to start preparing to pay for your brand presence on twitter. They desperately need to monetize, and this is the quickest, ways to do so, if not a dauntingly difficult task to achieve.
I am massively skeptical though. Much of this is simply about marketing, not so much utilizing the tools or talking about social media so much as a how-to primer for positioning your brand on Facebook and Twitter.
Personally, I am incredibly worried about this… putting so many fragile eggs in such a fragile basket. You have Facebook which still hasn’t demonstrated to me anything more than a static page where people “fan” it as a novelty. I am challenging any of you readers… if any of you have seen any real relevance or interactivity of users on FB, please let me know. On one single of my many high end hotel brand pages, I have seen one user post one picture, and a couple mentions about how they love the hotel…. but nothing relevant or impacting that could mean “business”. Twitter, as mentioned, has no monetization and I really think that puts a dent in the “cause celebre”. What happens when brands flood twitter as will start happening? How will you stay relevant? How will you interact as twitter actually builds their business model? How will brands protect themselves about spoofing, like my @ryanaironline hijinks?
Not only are hotels thinking very short sighted, they seem to be ignoring important issues in regards to how to *use* social media.
The fantastic Richard Bonds from the PA Tourism spoke of Flickr, and it gives rise to the question of FLICKR’s terms of service expressively forbidding commercial uses. That being said, he did adequately justify his usage, in that it isn’t the presence of a brand so much as a social conversation of a place. It isn’t room shots with rates… and he is right on about that.
But what of these companies.. airlines or hotels… ignorantly moving into Flickr and posting stuff expressively in violation of the TOS? It just seems there is this panicked disconnect between people who know how to use social media, and marketers who want to exploit it.
Is it that the majority of travel companies are more interested in the dollar signs of social media and ROI conversations rather than the actual conversation? It seems a lot of brands are aggressively moving forward with social media without having a clue what they are doing, or having any real plan.
Of course, this is where Forrester’s P.O.S.T. principles come into play, but it is more of a self-congratulatory “we are using a cool sounding tool” than people actually using P.O.S.T.’s methodology.
What’s more, the conference presenters so aggressively focused on ROI (and I am aware that was the structure for the panel presentation), it seemingly dismissed the social conversation of social media COMLPETELY. Not only does that strike me as disingenious, it seems like they are missing a lot of the point if it is only measured in cold ROI. I think there is a chance to miss a lot, frankly. I understand you need to measure ROI, but you negate the power of and functionality of social media by being so myopic.
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!
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!
Social Media is one of the more important tools for business in a long time. But there are those that sort of treat it like a cult or religion. I am doing my best not to get sucked into that wormhole. I note that when I do, all the other operating world seems distant and out of touch, when it is in fact that I am residing inside my little bubble and missing 90% of what the business world is doing. This is an exagerration to say the least, but I note that some people compartmentalize their lives into this spectrum of “those using social media” and “those not using social media”. Then a lovely dichotomy breaks: the hip 2.0 social media crowd scoffing at the archaic and obsolete approach of baby boomers and more classically trained business crowd; while the old timers think of social media as zero productivity game playing used by capricious facebook generation kids.
It is the nature of our polarizing culture, and the either “this or that” mentality we automatically separate things into. To make it easier to digest:
1) You young judgmental whippersnappers! Remember that there has been business successfully run for thousands of years, and it will happen in other ways 1000’s of years after now. This isn’t the be all end all, it is simply something that is useful to *DO* business. In itself, it is *NOT* business…. and the problem with monetizing these networking sites and creating profitability is of paramount concern to keep these tools alive. Why put all your eggs in one basket when the business model is completely unsound?
2) You old crotchety types that don’t get it! Just because you have done business without it for decades doesn’t mean you don’t need to start now. You are losing leads, sales, networking, potential opportunities… all this and more by ignoring it. It isn’t a church, it isn’t a video game… it is just another tool to sit aside your traditional rolodex. But just because it is foreign doesn’t mean you can ignore it. Ignoring it will cost you business in some capacity, be it an actual sale to long term branding and presence.
It comes down to needing to be aware of it and how it can be used, coupled with knowing it has some serious critical faults that are going to come around and haunt these people that have adopted it like a cult.
It’s like when I help build and open a property….
You look for critical flaws while building.If you miss it, or smart people ignore it, then you keep building and doing what you need to do. You keep “doing” business. You open the property, you launch the website.
The problem is when it is supposed to be at its peak and functioning its best… when everyone is excited and bought into it (opening day)…. that is when the critical flaw comes crashing down and you have to rip out an HVAC system or jackhammer leaking radiant heating in a concrete floor. Or… build a network so effectively strong that it is too big to scale to and support.
Whether there is a problem or not, you still need to maintain and finish business. Ignoring a problem, or opportunity, will just come back in the end and bite ya back.
There is a critical flaw in social media that will come crashing down, possibly.It is best to be aware of it and know how to do business the right way, as well as the modern way.Some people even think social media *is* business (I would say it helps business). But that may beg a larger commentary on our modern working world:
I think a lot of people aren’t sure how to do business the right way. That is a critical flaw that doesn’t even involve social media.=)
There is sudden, endless interest on how to instill the labour for a social media person on the property level of a hotel. But if you look back in my posts, you will be reminded that hotels are not technological innovators, and are typically behind the curve. Nothing to be ashamed of, as we aren’t in the technology business. We are the hotel business. Sometimes, however, it feels like we have been co-opted (Some of us still remember punch card days).
Until we end up back in the “guest ledger on a lazy Susan” days, much of this “social” or “new” media is being thrust toward the marketing and PR firms of hotels, and they are panicked looking for measurable impressions, calculable effect, and readying themselves to be in control of a massive and daunting visual display of graphs, charts, and quantified data.
But data is not readily available, and measurements are confounding at best (Just because we have become comfortable with a tool of measuring impact of dollars spent, doesn’t mean it’s flawless. For this reason, I still suspect print measurement).
In the end I think “ROI” conversations will fall by the wayside as properties recognize that you simply need to be part of the conversation. It will be like a “internet concierge”, and just part of your overall labour budget.
Back to the PR people.
It is damning for marketing groups however, because in a world of too much information these poor people just became responsible for so much more – keywords, tags, blogs, videos, user generated content, etc. Frankly, keeping up with my google alerts is a job within itself. So I have a empathic concern for marketing groups that will have to hire some Gen Y kid just to watch the stream of internet consciousness…. It is confusing, and overwhelming. Learning to not waste your time with some, while being hyper-aware of other data… this is the ultimate experience of separating the wheat and chaff, as well as looking for a needle in a haystack the entire time.
New Media and old Marketing have about as much in common as <insert witty dichotomy>, but these companies are still tagged with the responsibility of following this new stream of information. It is like when a F&B manager is fired, the floor manager fills in the F&B Manager spot… and then what do you have? You have a floor manager (someone skilled at a specific job) acting as an F&B manager (a totally different job)… you haven’t increased the floor managers salary (limiting incentive to fill the role), but that person becomes taxed/stressed and is doing a job outside their experience level or role. Such is the path of social media being slopped on top of traditional marketing firms responsibilities.
Until hoteliers, operators, marketing teams, and ownership step back, recognize what social media is, and implement someone who is meant to grow into the role and focus on the online concierge aspects of web 2.0…. owners will be anxious, marketing groups will be taxed and confused, and hotel management will be nervous.
Social media is not Marketing & PR the same way college degrees or public relations have prepared people for. Giving the job to someone that doesn’t understand it in the hopes of being successful with a campaign, while performing on the job training, is dangerous and we need to move past it.
At least, let’s let them focus on their skill set, while allowing already operating members of the social media conversation to fill in as “online concierge”. Traditional marketing and PR is changing, but it will never go away. It will be in flux for some time, and might put a new notch in the belt buckle, but it will always be necessary and vital. It won’t be, however, the long term mitigator of social media. This is a slapdash approach to new media, and in time it will move to a property level, corporate/property specific job.
What’s more is that this is an exciting moment in hospitality. This is new job forming! How often does that happen? We have been skilled at getting rid of the labour pool for years (just think of the last time you saw an elevator operator or shoe shine booth). This new position will be a customer relations specialist , and will be filled by erudite, excited, savvy people that have hospitality’s core beliefs at their forefront: Be aware of the guests needs, and service them based on those needs. Whether they are in front of you or not is irrelevant. It isn’t about controlling your brand, damage control, or PR. It is about earnest concern about a guest’s reactions, needs, or thoughts. It is about being real in your conversation with a guest, precisely what much of marketing is not. To be fair, at least we can lighten the load on these confused firms that overreact to one bad review, or panic because they still don’t “get” twitter.
I look at this as a great opportunity for hotels to transcend the limiting mentality that web 2.0 is all marketing and PR. It is daunting to be sure, but it is also humbling, fulfilling, and vital to the ethos of your brand, and the core of your offerings.