Video sharing and photo sharing sites are becoming more prevalent in the hotel industry; Best Western International has hosted contests on YouTube, and following Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide’s success with TV commercials and brand videos on YouTube, it launched SPG.tv, a video platform that provides video on properties, destinations and more.
“Guests can browse thousands of videos and embed them within their personal blogs and/or social networking pages and/or share them directly with other guests,” said David Godsman, VP of global Web for Starwood. “We firmly believe that video is a powerful tool for creating significant brand awareness and loyalty and undoubtedly an emerging driver for influencing the consumers’ purchase decision.”
Hyatt produced “webisodes” for a contest it ran, the Hyatt Ultimate Adventure Challenge. The webisodes became so popular that Hyatt created a YouTube channel to hold the episodes, and it now has added more content, including videos of property events, said Bill Bernahl, VP of e-commerce at Hyatt.
“The traffic we’re seeing for the Hyatt content on YouTube is small compared to our brand websites, but we believe the interest will grow dramatically as we add more content and as YouTube continues to grow,” he said.
For national brands, the sheer traffic to YouTube might be small, but it’s a way to pick up customers who might not have chosen the brand otherwise, said Cindy Estis Green, managing partner of The Estis Group and author of Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International’s special report “The Travel Marketer’s Guide to Social Media and Social Networks: Sales and Marketing in a Web 2.0 World.”
“On a larger scale, for a national brand, … they may get 50 or 100 entries on a contest, and that’s very small,” she said. “But they get visibility for search engines and there’s a whole YouTube audience who wants specific content and a visual aide, so you want to be present there.”
YouTube also serves another role: Brands or hotels can create videos on the site and then embed them either in their own website or blog. The same holds true for photo sharing sites like Flickr—slideshows can be created there then added to a different blog or site.
Hotels also can add a photo-sharing aspect to their own sites to attract guests to post favorite shots from their stay. Green noted that the Kiawah Island Resort in South Carolina launched a new website, Kiawah Moments in which guests can post photos into different categories. “The effort that you place into a specific group of customers when you do it in [an online] community setting will be expanded to their network,” Green said. “They’re going to share it with people who never went to Kiawah and now you’ve created a forum that’s attractive, and you will get more visitors.”
Marriott International takes the use of photo- and video-sharing sites a step further—they created slideshows and videos on Flickr and YouTube and then send them out through Twitter, a free social networking and micro-blogging service in which users “tweet” in text-message-based short posts. Updates are displayed on a profile page on Twitter, and also are delivered to users who sign up to receive updates. Users can get updates through the website, text message, RSS feeds, e-mails or applications like Facebook.
Marriott’s public relations department, which heads initiatives like Twitter and Bill Marriott’s blog, will tweet with links to press releases, slideshows or videos to its approximately 450 subscribers to read. “We understand two things are happening: It’s all about mobility, mobile phones. … And it’s visual. It’s getting away from text to imagery—quick snippets of information because people have information coming from so many different ways that they can pick and choose,” said John Wolf, senior director of PR at Marriott International. “You’re really able to define a community online in Twitter, and they’re following you because they’re interested in you and your company and what you have to say.”
