Who’s managing social media in your hotel?

Dear hoteliers,

Courtesy of Milestone Internet

You’re spending hours trying to make your hotel profitable, get customers in your bedrooms, manage inventories, solve problems, answer travelers needs / dreams / habits / complains… And now, those tripadvisor, twitter, facebook, flickr, blogs, youtube, foursquare… are making your days endless.

You probably heard about companies proposing to manage your social media channels or to take care of your reputation. However, you should strongly think about managing social media on your own.

While buying keywords on search engines or in Tripadvisor might be out-sourced because of its quite automated process, you should really listen by yourself.

It might be the director, a marketing member or anyone else actually but you will soon realise that if you want your hotel to be successful in this social era, you need to give this person plenty of liberty and allow her to speak and engage with most of your employees from human resources to cleaning ladies, chitchen…

It doesn’t have to be a full-time job (at least not at the beginning when you’re testing all the possibilities) but the optimal approach should represent a full-time employee in term of hours spent on it. 39 hours = 6 hours by a marketing person, 6 hours by the director,  …

Some of you might be scared or don’t know where to start but you don’t really have a choice (Or maybe, but I would really appreciate to read the cons!). Travellers from all around the world are already taking pictures of your toilets, writing reviews about your cleaning ladies or your breakfast… And that’s where the beauty of Internet and online communities stands. But if you blind yourself, your competitors will soon bypass you (Maybe they already did but you don’t realize it because you don’t know your brand image).

You do not have to actively engage with Internet users like happyhotelier (A Dutch hotelier whose approach is really good considering the fact he is managing it by himself) but LISTENING is mandatory.

And please, do not ask me where the Return On Investmen is! It’s way to complicated to explain it in details but the impact you should look at are clear:

- Customer satisfaction

- Return customers

- Employes loyalty

- …

The benefits of social media do not stand in the bottom-line but truly in how it can help you improve your service. It gets you into the mind of your customers and helps you understand what they are looking for. Internet has had a weird impact on travel: it made most of travellers start looking at 10s of websites in order to get the best deal and hotels reducing their costs in order to remain competitive but this is coming to an end. Offers are not clear enough (breakfast or not, wifi or not, late check-out…) and I personnaly see myself looking more and more at the engagement of hoteliers towards their customers instead of spending endless hours looking for the cheapest offer.

One example: I haven’t been to New York for a while but I know for sure in which hotel I will stay next time: The Roger Smith Hotel. Why?Because I know they truly care about their customers and are try their best to satisfy them. That’s an extreme example as they have 2 full-time employees managing social media but you get the idea.

Why listen then?

As a customer, if I see a lots of complains about the cleaning state of a hotel, I won’t go there. As a hotelier, it certainly means that you have a problem in your cleaning staff. And if you spend some time reading reviews about it and contacting certain customers (I can assure you that they will be more than happy to help you if you show them respect and a will for improvement), you may even realize that this problem comes from a certain person and you will act in consequence.

Another example:

- Breakfast ; I’m always reading bad reviews about price and quality of breakfast in luxury hotels. Fake orange juice, disgusting coffee… I could go on and on but the point is: if a customer didn’t like his breakfast, he will speak about it and maybe forget about all positive aspects of his stay.

Consequence: your breakfast might help your financial results on a short term but it will cost you money on the long term. I know it decreases your margin but why not, then, reduce its price even more, cut costs in it, recommend the closest baquery to your hungry customers and use the money you saved for other things like free wifi…  Or simply buy a better orange juice! You can’t be good at everything so don’t try to do it all, focus on your competitive advantages.

Human nature is made in a way that pushes us towards critic. If you can avoid all those small negative details, your reviews will drastically improve in quality and soon, you will see your occupancy rate increase.

Social media is not a marketing tool, it is a support to your overall strategy, your HR policy, ect…

So if you are a hotelier, start thinking about it:

Do not hire an agency for that and start actively listening. And do not consider this lightely. Really educate your employees, give full power to the person responsible for it and try to understand that a social media manager is not only a marketing dude but someone who sould be able to discuss with everyone in the company and have a certain liberty of action and a vote for taking certain decisions in your different departments.