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Chris is President of New Marketing Labs, and one of the masterminds behind the Inbound Marketing Summit Conferences. He is also the co-founder of the PodCamp new media conference series. His blog ranks #1 on the Ad Age Power 150, and in the top 100 on Technorati. Chris is the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller, ‘Trust Agents,’ with Julien Smith. Trust Agents is about using the web to build influence, improve reputation, and earn trust, as explained on the cover of the book. Tom O’Rourke, founder/president of O’Rourke
Hospitality
Marketing caught up with Chris at the Chris responded by giving a couple examples of hotels and car services that captured his business and attention, just because they were listening and responding in the social media space when he needed them. I travel every 2 days – I’m in
a
hotel more often than I’m in my own bed. There’s
so much you can do in this space.
My repeat study is this - The
Roger
Smith Hotel. I said on Twitter, just to the general audience, ‘Hey,
where are
cool kids staying in Manhattan
these days?’ As you know Manhattan
has 400 hotels, probably more than that even. I received an answer
right away
from this guy Chris who said, ‘The Roger Smith Hotel.’ The very next
guy was
Brett Petersel from Mashable, ‘The Roger Smith Hotel – they treat you
really
nice there.’ The third person was The Roger Smith Hotel. They tell me,
‘You
should come by, we have a blogger’s discount.’ I said, ‘well sure.’ I
stayed, I
had a great time. They are always
vigilant, they are always paying attention, they are always bringing in
revenue
by being kind. They are doing nothing harder than saying we’d
love to have
you here, there might be a discount.
I’ve seen lots of other hotel
chains do it. I mentioned I had to come down to Miami. Three hotels
talked to me. I mentioned
I’m going to this location and they said, ‘If you’re ever in our area
we’d love
to have you here.’ So if nothing
else,
the listening element of the social media tools is business generation.
Pure
and easy.
Tom agrees with Chris, and emphasizes the importance of listening in the Hotel Industry. Tom states, “A lot of the hotels I see out there today, and the way they are using social media tools like Twitter, it’s kind of taking a social media tool and still using it in a traditional way – in so far as ‘here are my special deals.’ Are they listening or are they speaking too much?” Chris responds: They’re just talking, and we
don’t
care. The difference is, it’s called listening and point of need.
Marcell
LeBrun from Radian 6 had that term. He said that it only
comes when you are at the point of need. For example, I’m
in
So if someone’s saying, ‘We’re
heading to Vegas,’ or if someone’s saying, ‘We’re planning to take a
beautiful
golfing trip to Sanibel Island
Here at O’Rourke, we hope that after having watched this video you begin to think about your own hotel’s reputation management and social media strategy. Are you listening to your guests? They are talking! If you aren’t participating in the social media space yet, we recommend that you start by listening. If you are participating in Social Media, are you listening and responding as much as you could? It does take some time and commitment to listen, however it has become a necessary task if you want to know who your guests are, what they are saying about you and your competition, what they like and dislike, and how you can improve your hotel. Listening is also imperative in order to stay on top of reputation management. Many companies now have positions such as ‘Chief Listening Officer,’ and that person does nothing but research and listen to what customers say and want. John Jantsch, creator of Duct Tape Marketing, and a presenter at the 2009 Inbound Marketing Summit, compiled a list of a ‘do it yourself’ tools that help you monitor conversations surrounding your brand or hotel. The list can be found on his blog, and we have recreated it below: • Google
alerts – Google
Alerts allows you set-up customer searches for any phrase and receive
email or
RSS alerts any time your phrase shows up in online media, blogs, web
pages and
news. • Search.twitter – For now, monitoring twitter is a separate
stream (Google seems to be adding twitter conversations to SERPs) –
using the
advanced search function allows you set-up very specific searches, even
including
geographic details. These searches produce RSS feeds and can then be
subscribed
to. • tweetbeep.com – Similar to Google Alerts, but for twitter.
Set-up search phrases and receive notification any time your phrases
show up in
twitter conversations. • Boardtracker.com – focuses on the most popular bulletin board
conversations and can turn up responses that don’t show up anywhere
else. Some
industries still have very heavy bulletin board use. • Backtype.com – Backtype is a search engine of sorts that
focuses on blog comments. Blog comments don’t often make it into the
mainstream
search results so this is a way to listen in on this set of content. • Social
Mention – this is a
mashup search engine of many of the formats of content such as audio
and video
– I’ve found it a very nice way to turn up some mentions that don’t
occur
anywhere else. There are also many
advanced paid services
that allow you to organize and filter the data you collect. These
services also
help you analyze the information which can help you see trends and new
opportunities. John has also compiled a list of some popular paid
services. • Radian6 – Robust set of analytics, relates data in
some very cool ways • Trackur
– advanced set of tools, well worth the cost • Buzzlogic
– focuses on helping you find key influencers driving conversations. • Filtrbox
– very easy to use, powerful and low cost These tools and
services are very helpful and
they can capture many comments about your hotel on Twitter,
travel-blogs, and
forums. However, they may not be capturing all the user-generated
reviews from
travel review sites such as TripAdvisor, Expedia, Hotels.com,
Travelocity,
Orbitz, Travelocity, and Fodor’s. If you are using a reputation
management
service check to see if they include reviews from these travel review
sites. “Hotels
today cannot afford to continue thinking in a traditional marketing
format.
They need to stop pushing their message through conventional channels
that tend
to interrupt their audience. It’s time to make a change. Listen,
Participate,
and Engage through Inbound Marketing,” says Tom O’Rourke.  If you would like to develop a social media and reputation management strategy but don’t know where to start, give us a call at 978-465-5955 or send an e-mail to [email protected] |