Do I think we need to remind ourselves that the way hospitality should be respectful and noble in how we manipulate, interpret, extrapolate, and use all this data, in lieu of guest privacy and respecting them? Yes. Yes I do. I am going to ask our travel professionals an hoteliers to think deeply about how they want to treat a guest – and to understand their is a difference between understanding their datas, and using it to manipulate them. The pace of business is too fast for people to have gotten to this last sentence, but those that did might proactively walk forward into the world of big data with respect to the people that choose to keep our hotels in business. The hotel business is conservative for a reason – we don’t have the money to get burned on trying new ideas. If you exploit your guest’s data in a way that burns bridges, no amount of data analysis will ever fill your hotel again.

Hotels, arguably, are among the most sensitive organizations in the world when it comes to respecting all levels of it’s guest’s / patron’s privacy. It’s not our responsibility, however, to be blamed for the growing pains involved with the greatest shift in human communication’s history. Unfortunately, until we resolve these issues…. everyone will grimly fantasize about being important enough to be stalked. It’s not that I am that cynical, it’s just that I know we may not be *that* interesting.

Assuming you got here because of our industry, we travel and hospitality professionals forget we are dabbling in technologies that not only resolve significant problems for the human race, but which can also completely alter what it means to be human, to begin with. Even at this point, superhuman technologies bolster our frail frames and help us to walk, to breathe, and much more. Even now it would be difficult to gauge where a human ends, and biogenetic, biotech, or bionic extensions begin. It’s interesting to think… to remain human, we may need to become more human than human.

How will interaction by the brand influence, connect, or impact the future of the social graph legitimizing and strengthening search? *That’s* not even the important question – The real question will be how will a search built off network science control and influence brands? Will there, finally, be a thwarting of the spam through human powered relevance ranking? Will poor management styles, lack of interaction, or opaque manipulation of the consumer made to be transparent in regards to the brand?

Our level of engagement is going to be more important in the future in a way that we can’t measure or perceive right now, and we are laying the groundwork to be heads and shoulders above other hotels in revelance and footprint. Just as some hotels are *still* reeling from missing out on the SEO boom, some hotels & brands that think social is a joke will be in the same boat when the semantic web gains a stronger foothold. It’s just – *how* will a brand’s engagement alter or impact a socially engaged search?

Are numbers this small to be expected? In the world of hard to track impressions and marketing measurements that provided some data and guidance (however skeptical I always am) – some people have said, “so what, who cares, it’s to be expected”. But numbers *THAT* small? Is that part of the Pareto Efficiency, or does the principle come into play (if you believe in that)?