19 (more) Social Media 2.0 tips

From left: Ted Raynor, Justin Holmerud, Jeff Higley, Chris Jackson and Jerry Stafford. 

MEMPHIS, Tennessee—Social Media 2.0 involves more than just building a platform and watching it grow. Several experts participating in a panel held during the recent Southern Lodging Summit @ Memphis said the idea of advanced social media is to focus on the age-old art of conversation.

“We want to change, or at least lead, the conversation instead of following it,” said Jerry Stafford, regional director of revenue management, Davidson Hotels Resorts.

Justin Holmerud, field marketing social media, mobile video manager, Starwood Hotels Resorts Worldwide, said engaging social-media followers in conversation is the first step in establishing them as advocates for a hotel.

“Only 36% buy more after they become a fan,” he said. “These are the people who follow you. They read your Facebook posts. They get your e-mails. They read your tweets, but they don’t go further than that. They don’t engage with you on any level.

“The next step is the engagers who do comment, they interact, but where we want people to get is that advocacy stage,” he said. “If we can create advocates for your hotel or brands, they take your message, your Facebook presence, your Twitter feed, and they push that to their friends, who then push it up to their friends.”

“Ultimately, social media is all about is driving brand assistance and what we call co-creation,” said Chris Jackson, VP, GCommerce Solutions. “It’s working with your guests or potential guests and creating an experience and find what they’re looking for. Once you’ve created that with them, they feel they have some buy into your product feel they have some ownership, they’re more willing to talk about it, use it and share with their friends and family.

The panel went on to share 19 tips for second-level social-media programs.

Read “33 tips for effective social media platforms.” 

1. Determine your purpose.
Jackson said it’s better to be purpose driven than channel focused. “Know what you are trying to achieve before trying to determine the channels you want to use to achieve it,” Jackson said.

A key to start the process is determining the hotel’s long-term sustainable competitive advantage—what sets it apart from the competition, according to Jackson.

Ted C. Raynor, attorney/mediator, Burch, Porter Johnson PLLC, said branded hotels should reach out to their brand leaders for guidelines to follow.

“But I do want to mention one caveat to that: If you start a Facebook page or Twitter, you must keep it up and use it at least daily,” Raynor said. “If you can’t do it on a daily basis, then my advice to you is don’t do it.”

2. It’s OK to use social media to learn about potential employees—just make sure you go about it the right way.
“When you’re talking to an applicant, it’s OK to screen them by looking at their Facebook page,” Raynor said. “You need to make sure your forms on your application include consent to get that kind of information. Your applicants can also friend you on a temporary basis so you can go out and look.”

Raynor said it’s extremely important to be up front about the process.

“Do not create any sort of false personas to look at applicants,” he said. “Don’t go through the back door if you have a friend or family member that might know the applicant. You really have to have that written policy, because if you don’t have a policy you can’t have any discipline against it. You can’t charge somebody for violating a company policy when you don’t have one.”

“Take a look at their Facebook page, take a look at what they’re Tweeting,” Jackson said. “It gives you some sense of who they are.”

3. Be an expert—know your locale.
One good strategy is to monitor message boards and respond to posters looking for information on the destination at which your property is located. With the right username and armed with good insight, you won’t need to hit visitors over their heads in regards to who you are—you’ll win them over by simply being a knowledgeable source.

4. Establish your voices.
Yes, that’s plural voices, not a singular one. There is a different customer on Twitter than there is following you on Facebook and Foursquare.

“They’re looking for different things; they’re talking in different ways,” Jackson said. “You need to understand that conversation, not shout at them necessarily, but participate in that conversation the same way that the group is participating in that conversation.”

5. Be positive, too!
Stafford said responding to negative and positive comments keeps guests from guessing.

“When you’re not responding, the guests consider you to be indifferent, and that means that they don’t know the good reviews are actually legitimate and they don’t know that the bad reviews are legitimate,” he said. “You need to respond to all comments.”

6. Be flexible.
There should be a Plan B, a Plan C, and so on—even though you might not know it yet.

“Social media is a dynamic situation; it’s constantly changing,” Jackson said. “All plans are made to be revised. So after you launch it, you’ve got to measure it and be prepared to adjust it.”

7. Understand the basics.
“Walk before you run,” Jackson said. “The review sites are really the biggest, most powerful form of social media in terms of influence. We find a lot of hotels will approach us and say, ‘We want a Facebook page.’ Well, you’ve got to start by first looking at your reviews, monitoring and responding before you can take the next leap of faith.” 

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8. Focus on the conversation.
Holmerud said hoteliers would be wise to consider “return on conversation” instead of “return on investment” when it comes to social media.

“That’s what social media is about—creating conversations,” he said. “There’s an opportunity for you to find that tweet, get in front of that guest and have the next conversion.”

“I don’t think we are ever going to be able to fully track return on investment for social media,” Jackson said. “How many times does that guest comes back, how many other people did they influence? I don’t know of any technology that’s out there to track that accurately; maybe in a year or two, but I don’t think it’s possible to measure the true return on investment.”

9. Know the details.
Raynor said managing the process of posting social-media messages is of the utmost importance. “You need to make sure these online conversations and media coverage are under your watchful eye,” he said. “Anything that is posted is not private. It’s not considered private, and usually it’s very, very difficult to erase and retreat from.”

He noted that Facebook recently issued major revisions to its privacy and promotions policies, and hoteliers should have someone responsible for knowing those policies.

10. Ask your followers what they want.
Jackson said hoteliers might think they know which is the best basketball package to put together, but why not ask your social-media followers?

“You can put it together and then come back to your fans, your followers and say, ‘we listened to you and here’s this package.’” Jackson said. “They feel like they’ve got some buy-in, some ownership of that. They’re going to want to participate in it. They’re going to want to share it.”

11. Don’t always be formal.
Stafford said it’s best to use “genuine language.”

“‘Thank you for responding…’ they don’t need that junk,” he said. “We all see that in spam and in our e-mail, spam, snail mail, and we understand what a form letter looks like, and nobody likes to get them. A customer doesn’t want to see it on a review site, so we need to make sure that we are talking in genuine language, something that’s personable.”

12. Take responsibility.
Even if there’s nothing a hotel could have done to change the outcome of a situation, a good mantra is to take responsibility for what caused it, Stafford said.

Stafford said most reasonable people understand that things don’t always go the way they want them to, so having a hotel own up to an issue’s cause can score some quality points in the guests’ eyes.

13. When using Foursquare, make sure the mayor of your hotel is not an employee. That just doesn’t sit well with other users.
“With Foursquare you can see who is checking and how often they’re checking in,” Holmerud said. “You are rewarding them for their loyalty, and that’s really what Foursquare is about, being able to monitor how loyal fans are. In the hotel industry we’re all about loyalty creation.”

14. Have a policy for what hotel representatives can give to positive and negative followers.
Call them ‘tweetie pies,’ ‘freebie mongers’ or any other name—they are the social-media users who complain and/or praise with the hopes that their shouts will be rewarded by the recipient of the message.

Tread carefully, but have a definite plan for such instances, Holmerud said.

“That’s our society,” he said. “They think we owe them something just because they’re engaging with us on a social level.”

The risk is that those users might respond negatively if they don’t get what they want, and hoteliers must weigh the ramifications of such a situation.

“Absolutely (have a policy about what you can give away to those types of posters) because you want to have some rules around how your team is communicating and how they’re managing these issues that are coming up, and they’re coming up constantly in the course of the day,” Raynor said.

15. Be unique.
Having a social-media program that simply churns out the latest special rates to all of the audiences just won’t cut it, Holmerud said.

“We’re all trying to drive heads in beds,” he said. “It’s a combination of having good contact and good conversations with your guests and creating content that has is engaging and mixed with some marketing essence. But it’s got to be unique.”

16. Don’t micromanage!
On the other side of the coin is not having anything to say. If that’s the case, the best course of action is to keep your fingers still.

“I get asked, ‘What do I do when I have nothing to say? What do I post?’” Holmerud said. “Well, nothing. You know, people aren’t going to miss you if you don’t post something for a week.

“As much as we’re talking about how you have to spend time doing it, it’s not something you have to micromanage 24 hours a day,” he said. “As long as you’re responding within the same day a comment comes in, I think that’s perfectly fine.”

17. Know there are costs.
Despite popular belief, having a social-media platform is not free. The biggest costs come with the time and personnel it takes to produce the content.

Every hotel has a different cost formula, but there is one common denominator regardless if it’s a college student, a front-desk clerk or senior manager manning the platform, according to Holmerud.

“You have to make time for it,” he said, adding that it’s not going to evolve into an automated process any time soon. “It’s talking to people. It’s really as simple as that. It’s not as complex as it seems.”

Jackson said the responsibilities should be shared.

“It is important that you’ve got a lot of contributors, but one administrator to make sure it is still on strategy, it’s on theme, it’s on brand, and that it meets all legal requirements and policies for your company,” he said.

Stafford said Davidson’s platform is property-directed and usually is headed by someone in convention services or a sales manager.

The first people to look to for potential social-media duty are those that have an interest in it in their personal lives. But be sure to have a thorough policy developed prior to starting a social-media platform, Raynor said.

“Do they speak for themselves or do they speak for the hotel?” he said. “You’ve got to be really careful because that message can be mixed.”

18. Consider adopting an identity for the hotel.
Jackson said his company worked with hotels that have adopted identities—an avatar or sorts—to help create a multi-faceted personality that allows multiple employees to be part of the platform.

“There’s a strategy, a theme and a tone behind that personality that everybody has to be behind,” Jackson said.

19. Establish a training program for long-term success.
Training is an essential element for all departments of a hotel, and social media is no different.

“The more channels you have, the more complicated it’s going to be,” Holmerud said. “Regardless of the number of resources you have dedicated to it, training is important because everyone is going to need it.”

Jackson said having multiple employees know the basics of social media is important. “If your social-media champion changes, how quickly can you get a new one up to speed?” he said, adding that advance training helps reduce that ramp-up time. 

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