Social media & hotels
Hospitality.net featured an interesting article on hotels & social media today. Read below:
If anything strikes fear in the hearts of hoteliers these days, it’s social media. Seemingly overnight, we’re expected to tune in to dozens of websites each day to make sure no one has badmouthed us or posted an embarrassing video. If they have, we’re obliged to respond in a courteous, guest-is-always-right manner, knowing that everyone is listening—travelers, clients, media and the competition. No pressure there.We’re also expected to generate original content. Not the easy pleasantries we’re used to exchanging with guests, like “Good morning!”, “Superior or deluxe?” and “How would you like to pay for that bathrobe in your suitcase?”, but clever, meaningful things in text, image and video format. And regardless of how desperate we may be to fill our rooms, we’re forbidden from being salesy or overtly promotional. That will cost us friends and followers.
Social media is like a difficult guest who demands so much attention we’re not convinced she’s worth the effort. She’s in our lobby now, demanding to speak to the manager, because she didn’t get her wakeup call—and missed her daughter’s wedding. Like any great leader, our first impulse is to run and hide. But that will only make things worse. So we gently take her aside, listen, learn, and use every tool at our disposal to turn her around. In essence, we tame the social media beast.
Social media has wrestled control over what is being said about hotels out of the hands of hoteliers and placed it into the hands of our guests—and then handed them a megaphone. This is fantastic when guests are singing our praises, but vexing if they’re crying for blood. Fortunately, new tools are now available to help us harness the powers of social media.
For the hotel industry, social media is an all-encompassing term that includes traveler review sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, online travel agencies like Expedia and Travelocity, social networking sites, blogs, and content-sharing platforms like YouTube and Flickr. Hoteliers can debate the power of platforms like Twitter and Facebook to drive room sales, but the influence of traveler review sites, where a “Book now!” button is never far away, is undeniable.
A major point of resistance to developing a comprehensive social media program is the time commitment involved. As a former general manager and director of sales and marketing, I recognize the hunted look in the eyes of my colleagues. During these challenging economic times, who has time to actively seek feedback when there’s a line of neglected guests outside our door? And yet we’re all too aware of the risks of turning our backs on the conversation.
Part of the solution is to reduce our dependency on traditional marketing activities that have diminished in effectiveness, things like print ads and brochures, direct mail, print publicity, voice reservations and three-martini lunches. Our resources need to shift to where the action is; increasingly, travel research, decisions and bookings are taking place online.
At the same time, we can adopt time-saving applications that do the work for us. Tools that scour the web for text, photo and video mentions of our hotel and our competitors and deliver a daily summary to our desktop. For the cost of a room night per month, we can monitor performance in real time, share and respond to feedback, and drill down in areas where improvement is needed. A simple, intuitive interface is essential, of course, since hoteliers reserve all our patience for our guests.
By bringing guest feedback into the open, social media empowers travelers to compare not only rates but multitudes of opinions in a variety of categories, from service and rooms to value and overall satisfaction. By collecting, qualifying and organizing this feedback, tools like Revinate enable two game-changing new standards of performance measurement in the hotel industry: market share of guest satisfaction and market share of voice.
Whether we’re a hotel owner, general manager or department head, we can no longer avoid that guest roaring for our attention in the lobby. By reallocating resources and utilizing newly-available tools, we can convert the social media beast into a powerful ally for managing our hotel’s reputation and strengthening our business.
Social media for small business
Here’s an interesting articles from Mashable:
The University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business looked at the relationship between social media and small businesses and found that the technology adoption rates in the U.S. have doubled in the past year from 12% to 24%.
The data comes straight from the university’s third installment to its Small Business Success Index report and is based on a December 2009 telephone survey of 500 small business owners. Adoption rate calculations are compared against a baseline report conducted in December 2008.
The study concludes that one nearly one in five small business owners are integrating social media into their business processes — Facebook and LinkedIn were the most popular sites. In fact, 45% of surveyed respondents even believe their social media initiatives will pay off financially in 12 months or less.
As the graphic below details, the small business owners who are using social media are primarily engaging in social media through company pages (75%) and status updates (69%) on Facebook or LinkedIn. What’s especially intriguing is that a much smaller percentage of respondents — just 16% — are using Twitter as a customer service channel.
Another interesting notion is that small business owners now believe social media can help them on the lead generation front, and that is the primary motivating factor for engaging in these new customer service channels. So while half of surveyed respondents found the time it takes to use social media sites more daunting than expected, 61% are still putting in the hours and making active efforts to identify new customers.
Clearly social media has become a valuable tool for small businesses, but we’re especially curious to see how Twitter adoption rates fluctuate over the time. While we expect more small businesses to use Twitter as a customer service channel in the year ahead, as it stands, Facebook and LinkedIn have become the predominant platforms for small business owners.
social media & higher education
My first semester of college, I took an Honors Intro to Mass Communications class that required us to buy clickers. With these clickers, we could answer polls in the middle of class, “buzz in” to ask a question, take attendance, and participate in class in a new way.
All through college I was told what I learned my freshman year would be outdated by the time I graduated. Turns out that was true. By my last semester of college, the clickers were long gone and professors were beginning to use social media. The university opened its first class dedicated to advertising and social media, I was required to blog in two classes, and I knew more than one professor who used Twitter to take attendance. By the end of the semester, I’d met several people who were doing final projects or independent studies through blogs, and one professor even made a YouTube video to promote his class for the upcoming semester.
I don’t think it’s a question of whether or not social media and higher education go hand in hand anymore. Instead of asking “To use or not to use,” the question is “Which social media platforms do we use and how?”
Here’s an article from Mashable on how professors are using Twitter & why it’s working:
Professors who wish to engage students during large lectures face an uphill battle. Not only is it a logistical impossibility for 200+ students to actively participate in a 90 minute lecture, but the downward sloping cone-shape of a lecture hall induces a one-to-many conversation. This problem is compounded by the recent budget cuts that have squeezed ever more students into each room.
Fortunately, educators (including myself) have found that Twitter is an effective way to broaden participation in lecture. Additionally, the ubiquity of laptops and smartphones have made the integration of Twitter a virtually bureaucracy-free endeavor. This post describes the two main benefits professors find when using Twitter in lecture.
Increased Participation
Classroom shyness is like a blackhole: Once silence takes over, it never lets go. In my own experience, in a class of hundreds, the fraction of students who speak up is small, and a still tinier fraction contribute regularly.
That’s why, Dr. Monica Rankin of the University of Texas at Dallas was pleasantly surprised when her experiment with Twitter began pulling more students into discussion. “It’s been really exciting because, in classes like this, you’ll have three people who talk about the discussion material, and so to actually have 30 or 40 people at the same time talking about it is really interesting,” said Megan Malone, Teaching Assistant to Dr. Monica Rankin’s United States history course, in the video below.
During lecture, students tweet comments or questions via laptop or cell phone, while the TA and Dr. Rankin respond to a real-time feed displayed prominently in front of the room. Students who manage to live off the grid for 50 minutes can still pass in hand-written notes for the TA to tweet after class.
Students in another Twitter-friendly classroom at Purdue University agree that digital communication helps overcome the shyness barrier. “It’s just an easy way to answer questions in class without embarrassing yourself and raising your hand in a big lecture hall,” said one student. Studies frequently discover that greater participation translates into better academic performance, motivation, and a likelihood of adopting different points of view, which is why it is so striking that Twitter can foster that type of communication.
A Community of Learners
The dynamic of an intellectual ecosystem, where students dive deep into class readings and argue contentious issues outside of class, is difficult to create if discussion ends when class is over. Fortunately, Twitter has no time limit. In fact, Dr. Rankin’s colleague David Parry, Professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas, found that Twitter chatter during class spilled over into the students’ free time.
“The first thing I noticed when the class started using Twitter was how conversations continued inside and outside of class,” Parry wrote. “Once students started Twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space, rather than just students they saw twice a week for an hour and a half.” As a result, classroom conversation became more productive as “people were more willing to talk, and [be] more respectful of others.”
Parry’s experience is in line with results of one of the first education studies of Twitter, which found that students do indeed carry on discussion outside of the classroom.
In part, students find themselves checking the feed after hours because the public trail of Twitter chatter doubles as an excellent study aid. As one student from Rankin’s class put it, “The significant terms that we’ve talked about in discussions, we’ll tweet that, and you can [go] back [to] that, and it’s a pretty good study aid.” This, in turn, keeps Twitter on their minds, fueling the cycle of involvement.
Conclusion
For schools hit hard by the recession, Twitter is an inexpensive solution to the growing problem of increasing class sizes. It is a tried-and-true platform to let conversations flourish. Indeed, Dr. Parry declared that “it was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I’ve ever done teaching.”
the state of the internet: another awesome & current video
I love these kinds of videos.
JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.
Protect your Social Media accounts from phishing.
This article from Mashable discusses the newest phishing attack making the rounds on Twitter.
With metric tools and applications that require logging in to connect with Twitter, it’s increasingly difficult to judge which links are beneficial and which are hacks. A couple of things to keep in mind:
1. If it doesn’t specifically tell you the purpose of the link, don’t click it.
Vague descriptions like “Is this you?” or “Have you seen this picture” or “Have you tried this?” are meant to stir up curiousity and entice you to click. Resist the urge.
2. If you can’t verify the sender, don’t click.
This is a personal rule of mine. I realize this is controversial as many auto-messages send you to Facebook, blogs, or other interesting websites. If you do click a link from one of these, you shouldn’t have to re-enter your Twitter account information, so don’t do it.
3. If you didn’t seek it out, don’t enter your information.
If you’re setting up an account on Hootsuite or attempting to measure some Twitter metrics with one of the many free programs out there, you will need to enter your Twitter account information. However, you usually seek out these types of programs. If you didn’t seek out a program that pops up or sends you a DM wanting your account information, don’t give it to them.
This You????: Yet Another Phishing Attack
In the last couple of weeks, Twitter users have been the target of several large-scale phishing attacks, and according to security experts over at Sophos, the latest one is no different.
The attack spreads via messages with the text “This you????” followed by a link that sends the user to a fake Twitter (
) login page. Don’t fall for the trick. If you enter your credentials there, you’re not actually logging into Twitter, you’re just sending your username and password to the attacker.
If you suspect you’ve fallen victim of this attack, you should change your Twitter password immediately. Check out a video demonstration of the attack (created by Sophos) below.
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