Free Seminars on Social Media and Web Marketing for Hotels

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By Daniel Edward Craig, Reknown.

Hotel Marketing Seminars in Europe: Reknown, ReviewPro, WIHPLook out Europe, here I come! I’m excited to announce that I’m partnering with ReviewPro and WIHP to bring this free European seminar series to Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, London and Rome this month. Here are the details:

Social Media and Web Marketing for Hotels: Driving Higher Guest Satisfaction and Revenue

Social media has had a disruptive effect on the travel industry, and hotels are struggling to accommodate it. Where should you channel limited resources, and what kind of results can you expect?

In this free seminar brought to you by ReviewPro and WIHP, hotel marketing experts from North America and Europe will show you how to prioritize resources, measure results, and drive higher guest satisfaction and revenue.

Topics include:

  • The Trend: How social media has transformed traveller behaviour and why online reputation management has become a critical function for hotels.
  • Web Marketing: The role of social media, OTAs and your website in the traveller’s path to booking decisions.
  • Online Reputation Management: How to monitor, respond to and generate reviews and use online feedback to optimize guest satisfaction and revenue.
  • Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, online travel agencies and review portals: where to focus resources and what results to expect.
  • The Tools: The latest technology for managing and tracking results in web marketing and reputation management.
  • Q+A Panel Session: Your chance to ask the experts.  Read more »

Trends in Hotel Marketing: Social Search, Utility Marketing and Converged Media

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Reknown Blog, Social Media and Search for Hotels

By Daniel Edward Craig, Reknown.

For hotels, the first priority in online marketing is to make sure travelers find you when planning trips. That’s become increasingly challenging in the realm of paid search, where online travel agencies, big brands and now Google Hotel Finder dominate results, driving costs up and organic results down.

Why even try to compete? Instead, shift resources to where you’ll get a bigger bang for your buck: owned and earned media.

Paid vs. Owned and Earned Media
Whereas paid media is purchased content like cost-per-click and display advertising, owned media is content you own on platforms you control: your website, social profiles and listings on third-party sites like TripAdvisor, Google Places and OTAs.

Earned media is user-generated content (UGC), or content your guests and other third parties post about your business. It includes reviews and ratings, blogs, media articles, photos, videos and social endorsements like pluses, shares and likes.

Unlike paid and owned media, you can’t control earned media, but it’s more influential because consumers trust the opinions of other consumers more than any other advertising source. (Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising survey, 2012).

Plus it’s free. Well, almost. To maximize reach and impact you must incorporate earned media into marketing strategy.  Read more »

Is Your Hotel Prepared for a Social Media Crisis?

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It’s an incident guaranteed to make any hotelier shudder. After a power outage at a Texas hotel last summer, a paralyzed American war veteran called the front desk to request help from his room. For reasons not entirely clear, the clerk allegedly laughed at the request and mocked him.

The guest got down by throwing his wheelchair and bags down three flights of stairs and sliding down on his backside. Then he went to straight to the media.

The incident incited a public furor that quickly spread to social networks. The hotel, its employees and the entire brand came under attack, with expressions of outrage and calls for a brand-wide boycott. Despite a solid reputation, it seemed nothing the brand could do—issue a refund and a public apology, dismiss the employee, implement staff training—would appease detractors.

Given the rapid-fire pace at which content can spread via social networks, hotels have never been more vulnerable. A seemingly minor issue can quickly escalate into a full-blown crisis, causing serious damage to reputation.

So how to prepare for, avert and mitigate a social media crisis? A look at recent incidents can teach us some valuable lessons.  Read more »

How to Manage Review Blackmail

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Reknown Travel Marketing, Daniel Edward Craig I’ve written about Social Media Coercion and Social Media Ambush in the past, and it continues to be a hot topic.

Whether engaging in a bit of harmless social media strong-arming or outright blackmail, it seems that more consumers these days are flexing their social media muscle to exact special treatment from businesses.

If the customer is being mistreated, then fair game. I’ve done it myself. When a client wasn’t paying a bill, after months of chasing and broken promises I warned him that if he didn’t pay up I’d feel obliged to share the experience in a review. Ironically, I had helped his company with a reputation problem, and this certainly wasn’t going to help his cause. Like magic, payment arrived by PayPal within hours.

Social media has empowered consumers, and that’s a good thing. But what if the customer is making an unreasonable, unethical or just plain sleazy demand? Given the adverse effects negative reviews can have on a business, should employees allow themselves to be held hostage to such threats in order to preserve the peace and protect reputation?

Do we really want to reward such behavior?

The good news is, we’re far from helpless. There are ways to combat review blackmail and to mitigate the fallout.  Read more »

Webinar – Visual Storytelling

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Visual Storytelling Webinar with guest Daniel Edward Craig, Reknown, hosted by VFM Leonardo

Happy New Year, folks!

I’m excited to be collaborating with VFM Leonardo once again to bring you another free webinar on the theme of Social Media and Storytelling.

This one is about Visual Storytelling for Hotels and how to use it to drive meaningful engagement.

Here are the details:

Wednesday, January 23, 2013
8:00 a.m. Pacific/11:00 a.m. Eastern/5:00 p.m. Central Europe
Click here to save your space.

The webinar will be hosted by VFM Leonardo Vice President Darlene Rondeau. Danielle Vallenchis of North Point Hospitality will also be a guest.

We are expecting a strong turnout for this one. Hope you can join us.

I look forward to working with you in 2013 – lots of exciting things on the horizon!

Posted by: Daniel Edward Craig

How to Generate More Reviews, Followers and Engagement on the Social Web

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So you just want to be liked? You’re not alone. Hotels are discovering that the old maxim “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t necessarily apply to social networks.

Consumers, bombarded by “like” requests and promotional posts, have become more selective about which brands they follow and engage with online. As a result, many Facebook brand pages and Twitter feeds are lonely places, with stagnant followings and low interaction.

To breathe new life into your social networks, experiment with these tried and true tactics for increasing reviews, followings and engagement on the social web.

Mind the gap. Social success starts and ends on property. The gap between expectations and results is where reviews and social commentary are incubated—rants, raves and everything in between. If you run an unremarkable property, you can’t expect a lot of social media love. Train and empower staff to exceed expectations time and again and the love will flow organically.

Be likeable. Don’t get too hung up on how many followers you have; quality and engagement are more important. By quality I mean people who are truly interested in your brand; by engagement I mean how well you interact with them and garner likes, shares and comments. To accomplish both you should be helpful, responsive, curious, a good listener and supportive of other businesses. Oh, and funny helps too.

“Engagement is our number one priority,” says Todd Iseri, director of sales and marketing at the Marriott Napa Valley Hotel and Spa in California, which has attracted over 11,000 Facebook fans. “We go to great lengths to provide information and resources for our audience, specifically related to the Napa Valley, wine, food, the arts and travel.”

More eye candy. Photos and videos grab attention and get more visibility and real estate on the social web. According to a recent HubSpot study, Facebook posts with photos receive 53% more likes and 104% more comments than other posts.  Read more »

Review us, like us, follow us – it’s your choice

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As more travelers make review sites and social networks a compulsory stop on the road to trip decisions, hotels and travel businesses are making efforts to enhance their presence by stockpiling reviews, likes and social media followings.

But with so many sites to manage, how to make the ask without bombarding guests with requests?

Washington, D.C-based B. F. Saul Company has come up with a unique solution. The company, which operates 19 hotels in the eastern United States, including InterContinental Hotels Group, Marriott and Hilton branded properties, has a dedicated website called ReviewOurHotel.com. There guests can link to the social network of their choice, whether it’s TripAdvisor, Yelp, Google+ Local, Yahoo! Travel, WeddingWire, Facebook or Twitter – or a dedicated review page on the brand.com website like the one IHG recently launched.

“We thought one single, consolidated domain would be a good way for us to drive reviews across our entire portfolio,” says David Attardi, vice president of interactive marketing. The original site, launched over three years ago, linked to TripAdvisor only.  Read more »

Taking Ownership of Reputation

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No one has a higher stake in the reputation of hotels than ownership, so how closely are owners paying attention to online reviews and ratings?

Very closely, for some. When I was a general manager, whenever I received an email alert of a TripAdvisor review and it was a bad one, my eyes would shift nervously to the phone. Soon enough it would ring, and the hotel’s owner would be calling to find out exactly what went wrong and how we were going to fix it.

More recently, at a conference in August I had the opportunity to chat in-depth with Steve Busch, owning partner of the 68-suite Jefferson Clinton Hotel in Syracuse, New York, and I discovered a forward-thinking and refreshing perspective.

The term “hands-on owner” can send shivers of dread down the backs of hotel managers, but Busch is no typical owner. A longtime hotelier himself, he started as a bus boy while attending the University of Las Vegas and worked his up and around, eventually becoming a general manager.

Busch’s intimate knowledge of hotel operations is evident not only in his team-oriented approach but in the remarkable success of his hotel, which has ranked #1 on TripAdvisor for five years running.

In this condensed version of our Q&A session, Busch discusses how his team goes beyond reputation management basics like monitoring and responding to feedback (he personally responds to many reviews) to advanced strategies and tactics, like always striving to be “remarkable”, why “cleanliness is godliness”, and why he stays in the worst room in the hotel.  Read more »