Placing a Value on Your Fans

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In the hospitality world, we measure the effectiveness of what we do daily through RevPAR (revenue per available room), CPOR (cost per occupied room) and a lot of other metrics. In the online marketing world we are used to measuring CPA (cost per acquisition), conversion, commission, etc. We like to have numbers to operate by. After all, isn't that the promise of doing business on the internet the ultimate channel to track performance and tie it back to our marketing activity via analytics, log files, heat map studies, and more. But we often get stuck when it comes to tracking what our activity in social media is getting us.

You can have thousands of followers on Twitter. How many of those are real people and how many are bots just sending out tweets, but not looking at what you have to say? Fans on your Facebook page may just be following friends. What value are they providing to you if they don't interact?

There was a good post over at Search Engine Land today about measuring the value of Fans and Followers. So this made me dive deeper to see if there was any commonality to what people were using to measure effectiveness of social media. Here are my conclusions -

1. Start with an objective in mind - if your goal is to spread the word about a promotion or package at your hotel. Then you'll want to track how often the goal is retweeted, or mentioned on Facebook pages. If you are trying to improve customer service, then track the performance of your overall satisfaction scores on guest surveys or online review sites after you place the social media campaign in to place. This makes it easy to see if they are getting to your About Us page or downloading the floor plans for meeting space.
   
2. Look at both Quality and Quantity of Fans and Followers - Quality is important because a true fan spreads the word and gives you feedback. They are also usually more able to influence their friends. Also, it is less expensive to keep an existing customer than to find new ones. Quantity is important as it helps with reach. Did you know that the average person's newsfeed reaches 164 people on Facebook? Consider that there is a CPM value to having fans on Facebook because of the "Suggestion" function.
3. Try an outside reporting service - Many companies specialize in tracking what is being said about companies online. They measure sentiment, guest reviews, mentions and things of that nature. There is some value to companies like this as they can help you look at the data from a broad perspective and can actually give you some data for comparison. Some examples of reporting services that exist are: ChatterGuard from Lodging Interactive, eBuzz Connect from Milestone Internet Marketing and Radian6.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on tracking Fan / Follower benefits and overall social media impact. Also, what if any service are you using to measure impact or compare hotel against your comp set?

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social media, analytics, hotels

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Now's the Time to Start Your Blogger Fam Program

If you've been in the hospitality business for any length of time, you're familiar with travel agent familiarization programs.  If you're not, then here's a quick summary. 

Travel agents help to direct customers to your service (airline, hotel, rental car, etc.).  You as a supplier want the travel agent to refer guests more often to your service than that of your competitor.  To do this you offer perks to travel agents.  One of the most popular travel agent perks was the familiarization trip or FAM trip.  The supplier drastically discounts the service, or comps it, when the travel agent uses the service for himself.  The idea being to attract them to stay at their property.  While there, some suppliers required the travel agent to take a tour and/or fill out some type of questionnaire to show that they could better sell their property.  Occassionally, CVB's or clusters of hotels would arrange these tours for groups of travel agents.

Fam trips haved declined in popularity and effectiveness over time as travel agents do less research for clients and have less of an impact on the actual decision making process.  Additionally, hotels and travel suppliers are looking to cut costs and reduce these marketing expenses that have no proven ROI.

Well the idea for familiarization trips may be making a come back.  Actually, it may be more of a familiarization meeting.  Bloggers have more influence and power than ever.  As more people look the internet for recommendations, reviews and resources on booking their travel.  Bloggers in the travel field are putting their mark of approval on hotels, airline seat placement and rental car programs.  More importantly, Jane Q. Consumer is listening.

This post from Chris Brogan about his recent visit to St. Louis and why local tourism agencies should be building relationships with bloggers highlights a program being started by VisitPittsburgh to reach out to influential people coming in for conventions to educate them about the city.  What struck me about this is that in the hotel industry, we often look at guest reviews as the holy grail of what's happening online, but we tend to lose focus on the influencers that are out there in our industry.

To that end, I am advocating that hotels start up their own "Blogger Outreach" program.  Here is my formula for getting this started at your property or organization:

• Start by tracking what is being said about your hotel and your competition using tools like Google Alerts.  (Let me know if you have other tools you use to track buzz on your company.  I'll talk about them in future posts.)
  
• Participate in online forums and leave comments on web sites that mention your hotel.
• Identify the bloggers that have influence and forumulate a plan to educate them about your service.
• Reach out to the bloggers and ask for more information about their stay and for additional feedback.
• Next time the blogger is coming to town invite her to lunch.  Don't expect a review from it, but you never know.  Just opening up the door for conversation is what is important here.

Before long, you'll be ahead of the competition in using social media to make a difference to your bottom line.

blogging, social media, travel

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A Tribe, a Village, a Community

The current social web trends are really changing the way we do things. Seth Godin - the author that is always looking to change the way we think about life in general and marketing in specific - is starting his own "tribe" to promote his new book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.

Membership is only being promoted through his blog. With Seth's track record, I think this is one "tribe" that I want to be a part of. Sign me up or should I say "What right of passage will get me in the tribe"?

Technorati Tags: social media, seth godin, marketing

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HOT TOPIC: How to Measure the Success of Social Media Campaigns

If business getting into the social media conversation is hot, then determining how to measure the success of social media participation has to be one of the hot topics of the year.

Do you measure increased conversion? How about increased time spent on your web site? Or do you look at how often your hotel is mentioned in blogs, review sites, etc.

The trouble for most advertisers, and specifically hoteliers, is that we want to get some type of measurable ROI because in the end it is all about the revenue it has generated for us. I have to be honest and say that in the current environment, I don't think anyone has the perfect set of measurement tools. Depending on the level of integration you have with your site, your booking engine and your analytic tools you may or may not be able to get to an ROI calculation.

This post from m-Travel shows the discussion that Eye For Travel had with industry executives and what they look at in their social media campaigns.

What are you using to measure the success of your social media campaigns?

Technorati Tags: social media, ROI measurement

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Hotel Internet Marketing - A Squidoo Lens

I follow Seth Godin's blog. He frequently mentions a company that he is a part of called Squidoo. The idea behind the site is that individuals create lenses that shares their recommended resources for a specific topic (i.e., Elvis Presley movies, sports collectibles, etc.). So in short, everyone is an expert as Seth explains in his blog.

So I created my first lens for hotel ecommerce and internet marketing. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

Do you have a lens you'd like to share? Send me a link and I'll share it here.

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How to Recession Proof Your Hotel? Engage Your Customer

According to a new PeopleMetrics study, hotels that do a better job of engaging their guests also have better financial results that those with low engagement scores.

"At a time when business and personal travel budgets are being slashed, a focus on guest engagement is key to surviving the economic downturn."

Engagement doesn't necessarily happen only online, since we are on an eCommerce blog I needed to point that out. It is important for your front line employees to be engaging and interactive with your guests. Do they smile and say hello, do they take the time to talk with your customers or quickly answer and then go back to work? According to PeopleMetrics, customer engagement is the hotel industry is impacted by functional and emotional elements of the guest experience.

Of course, there is also a lot of recent talk about continuing the engagement process past the stay and to the sharing part of a person's trip. I think this is key because if you can create that wow experience, by following up to see how the trip was afterwards, you will get return customers. When was the last time you followed up with a customer?
Technorati Tags: guest engagement, hotels

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Where Do You STAND on hotel reviews?

Love 'em or leave'em online travel review sites are here to stay. In the hotel industry the current trend is using a report or monitoring system to track what travelers are saying about your hotel, staff and outlets.

Starwood Hotels have weighed in with their choice to provide this service. They are going to use ReviewAnalyst by Standing Dog Interactive. The selling points for this product is that it allows you to. . .

Track - you can look at your hotel in comparison to your top 3 competitors for the major travel review sites with a convenient dashboard.



Analyze - What trends are you seeing in customer reviews? Track both positive and negative comments. The great benefit of many services like this is that they can easily aggregate the data for you and usually provide a search function to look for specific phrases, like "housekeeping cleanliness".


React - If you are not participating in the discussion, you are in trouble. Web 2.0 is all about the consumer taking control and suppliers participating in the discussion. Their report makes it easy for hoteliers to easily post a response to TripAdvisor (currently the only company that allows for this).

Once I get a chance to use the product, I will post a review about it.

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So, You Want To Know How To Respond - Management Response 101

I love it!

Someone finally boiled it all down in one place. Read this post on Marketing Pilgrim for a quick down and dirty "how to" for responding to guest reviews of your hotel online. It covers responding to both positive and negative comments online.

What? You say you aren't paying attention to guest reviews. And you're not about to respond. Before you say that consider that over 60% of people who purchase travel online refer to other consumer reviews prior to purchasing travel. Now, read this article and get over to TripAdvisor - in that order.

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Reputation Management is More Than. . .

When you think of online reputation management, you may think of what consumers are saying about your hotel or how your competition is using your hotel name or content to trick guests in ppc advertisements. While those are two good examples of what is important in online reputation management, there are many more. This post from Marketing Pilgrim outlines the 10 different areas of your hotel reputation that you should be paying attention to online.

They break the items down into categories:

• Critical - Hotel Name
  
• Important - Legacy Hotel Names, Restaurants, Hotel Management
  
• Valuable - Concierge, Niche Travel Writers, Disgruntled Employees
  
• Optional - Resort Area, Parent Chain, Competition

Several of these categories, I hadn't even thought of before. It can be difficult to keep up with just tracking what is being said about your hotel, let alone all of these other areas. Here are some tools I would suggest to assist in monitoring your online reputation:

• Google Alerts - If you haven't already sign up for a Google account and have them send you daily alerts about the keywords related to the topics above. This can be very insightful and is FREE, a word every hotelier likes to hear.
• Use Yahoo! to look at who is linking into your site. In the search box, type "link://http://web address". This will show you who Yahoo! shows is linking into your site. Again another free tool.
• While we have tested a couple of different reporting services, we like TravelCLICK's SearchView product. Their review tracking portion of the report is very good. However, I would be remiss to say this report is right for everyone. You should find what works best for you. Here are some other report you should look into: Avalon Report, TIG Global's Hotel Protect, Lodging Interactive's Chatter Guard are several to look at.

Regardless of which methods you use, please don't think that this is going away. Web 2.0 is all about consumers taking control. You can either join the conversation and flourish, or ignore it at your own peril.

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New Channel of Influence - Yahoo! Answers

Add this to your social media to do list - start participating in the conversations on Yahoo! Answers. The team over at Tourism Internet Marketing 2.0 posted this article about using Yahoo! Answers to become a Knowledge Partner. At the time of this post, Travelocity was the first travel company to gain this status.

According to Yahoo! the program is still in beta and requires an invitation to participate.

It makes sense that the program could work. As the current evolution of the web is all about finding trusted sources of information and carrying on a conversation with them. Does anyone know of any other programs like this?

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