Great quote from Emma Roffey of Cisco at the TFMA show, “Just because it’s social doesn’t mean it’s casual” – talking about social media.

A very strong message to come out of the National Hotel Marketing Conference in February 2011 was the need to monitor and manage what is being said about you and your business on-line.
A hotel can not control what is said about it on-line, but if this is picked up immediately and then acted upon, a positive comment can become an amazing global word-of-mouth endorsement and a negative one can be dealt with by various means to prevent it damaging the business. The sooner hotels embrace the digital world in which we live and the impact of global word of mouth, the quicker they can ensure that in 10 years time potential guests are not reading a horror story about your hotel from 2011.

Etap have launched a social media campaign to find Britian’s best musical snorer, creating a micro-site where people can upload clips of snorers! Wow, who came up with this? I know hotels need to embrace social media, but this smacks of PR for the sake of PR to me!

You learn something new every day. It took us Brits years to work out what a hash key is #. Now it’s being used in front of the word ‘fail’ on social media sites to register criticism of a brand or product. Evidently it started on Twitter as disgruntled Apple users took to sharing their [...]

I quickly checked a few major hotel chains and found that Hilton have 47,000 Facebook fans, Best Western just over 20,000, Holiday Inn a measly 1,300, Premier Inn 1600 & Malmaison 1 person!!!! This suggests that hotel companies don’t have professional social media strategies.