Besides being funny-sounding words, what do Doof, Habbo, Gik, Orkut and Issuu have in common? How about Bebo, Viddler, Twixter and Gather? OK, I’ll make it easier: how about Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor and YouTube? Yes, they are social media tools — all of them, not just the latter!. Most of us are familiar with those last four, but they are literally four out of thousands. And even if we are “aware” of these sites, few of us still understand how to use them, when to use them, why to use them and, finally, what to use them for.!
More than any other industry, the hospitality industry is positioned to take advantage of all that social media has to offer. Why? Because so many guests are having conversations online about their travel and hotel experiences. Yes, it can be a double-edged sword because those guests could be raving about your hotel, or simply raving mad about poor service. However, we have the opportunity and obligation to participate by enhancing the positive or responding intelligently to the negative. No other industry has the sheer volume of conversations happening on these networks. In fact, many social networking sites are dedicated solely to hospitality and travel.
What do we do with all this opportunity? It’s easy to see how we can use social media to market our services, and many businesses are doing just that. As of today, more than a million websites now integrate with Facebook, and companies like Dell use Twitter to announce special promotions (Dell Outlet). However, social media can, and should, be much more than a vehicle for pushing marketing messages. It has value in recruiting, internal communications, product/service development, publishing, research, productivity, public relations, reputation management and so much more. Social media should be part of your overall strategic plan, not just a part of your marketing plan.
Developing a social social-media strategy requires a commitment of time and resources. Internally, we need champions to push the effort and it can’t reside just in marketing or sales. It needs to be a company-wide effort. More difficulty comes in paring down the mountain of data and tools available into useful information and tactics to align with our needs. At Signature Worldwide, we started at the top and worked social media into every area of our business.
By the “top,” I mean we read and re-read our mission, vision and values statements, and lookeded for every chance to further our company mission by capitalizing on social media. Words like “communicate,” “partner,” “entertain” and “educate” jumped off the page as we began to explore these opportunities. Next, we formed teams of staff members from all functions who felt they could contribute to each of these areas and assigned them homework to explore the outlets and tools. For example, our “partner” team may find ways to better partner with our clients, but could uncover ways to partner with complementary businesses too.
Once we had a social media strategy mapped out, the last piece of the puzzle was to understand the value it was adding to our business. Not all social media activities will add dollars directly to the bottom line, but we do want those efforts to bring some measurable value. We knew we needed to evaluate all of our efforts, and guess what? There are social media tools for that too.
We are a few years into our love affair with social media, and I’m confident it, like the Internet, is not a passing fad. We have dedicated time, resources, and energy into the strategic process and learned a lot of lessons along the way. And all of us involved would agree that it was definitely worth it.!
John Ely is senior vice president of marketing for Signature Worldwide, a training and business solutions company dedicated to helping clients create legendary experiences for their customers. Ely is responsible for developing, implementing and evaluating strategic marketing and corporate growth plans, and has more than 16 years of industrial and consumer marketing experience. For more information, call (800) 398-0518 or visit www.signatureworldwide.com. For more from Ely, visit his blog, www.OnceUponACustomerExperience.com or follow him on Twitter @johnrely.
