Hotel Marketing Association Blog

Four key Trends from Microsoft

Pam Carvell, Marketing Consultant — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:41:36 +0000

Another fascinating presentation at Internet World 2012 was by Dave Coplin, Chief Envisioning Officer for Microsoft. He identified 4 key trends that will increasingly impact our on-line experiences and thus our day-to-day lives:

Everyone is a storyteller (just look at how friends recount tales of their weekend on Facebook, or how people like me write blogs!)
The internet is the new face of fun (we do so much on the internet, from watching TV and movies, to interacting with friends, playing bingo, placing bets on the football match we are currently watching, videoing and uploading our friends having a picnic, skyping our loved ones abroad etc)
Screens will disappear….I heard this one from BT many years ago. This assumes that any surface has the potential to have the functionality of a screen. Would we really want this though? Only time will tell.
We expect more human experiences e.g. we don’t just want to ‘google’ Italian restaurants, we want to know which ones our friends on Facebook have recommended or ones that our friends are currently sitting in.

None of these have a direct impact on hotel marketing, but if we don’t fully embrace social media and keep up-to-date with current trends as to how people are researching things, recounting their experiences and making choices, we could find ourselves getting less and less of the consumer pound. We also need to acknowledge that part of a guest’s or diner’s hospitality experience will inevitably include them being on a smartphone or tablet during their stay / meal, with the potential of them writing about, photographing or videoing the experience and sharing it there and then.

CISCO go BIG

Pam Carvell, Marketing Consultant — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:04:57 +0000

A great presentation by Phil Smith CEO UK of CISCO at Internet World a few weeks ago. A recent employee survey by them showed that a third of people believe the internet to be as important in their life as food, air and water (I assume they are under 25 to think that?!). More meaningfully 40% of their staff would take a drop in pay to get increased flexibility in their work (I assume they are already highly paid or very stressed parents?!)

Interesting to hear that the network for London 2012 is 35 times greater than that for the games in Beijing, showing how internet communications have exploded.

Learned about the British Innovation Gateway (BIG) to create a technological legacy from the 2012 games.

But, most interesting for me as a marketer was the statement that we now live in a world of BYOD….bring your own device! Even an increasing number of employees prefer to work on their own personal device of choice in the workplace. Hotels have stressed for years over what equipment and systems to provide for guests. Barely had they installed fax machines in executive rooms than the world moved on. Just as they opened business centres we all started carrying laptops. As they debated phone charges we all carried mobile phones. I find it almost comical when I stay in a hotel with no wifi and an old-fashioned 2ft deep TV with just a handful of channels. I suspect most business travellers carry both a smartphone and either a laptop or tablet. So the provision of devices is no longer what we want in a hotel room – just give us free wifi and a great 3g signal and we can communicate with the outside world and listen to and watch whatever music, films, TV channels we want. I love SkyGo, so I can even watch the footy on Sky Sports 1 no matter where I am – wifi permitting – from my laptop. When even companies like John Lewis are going to provide free wifi throughout their stores, surely the time is here for hotels to just bite the bullet and accept that free wifi everywhere will become like radios in cars – no longer an optional extra that you have to pay for, but an integral part of the product you are buying. And those hotels who argue that this is not relevant to leisure guests who want a break from their emails etc clearly haven’t spent time with people under 25, to whom interacting with their friends, listening to New York radio stations live and watching funny videos on YouTube is how they relax…they don’t sit down with a newspaper and watch the local TV channel like in ‘the good old days’!

Thomas Cook-owned Hotels4u.com £50 Xmas Day offer generated £120k+loss

Pam Carvell, Marketing Consultant — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:37:40 +0000

Thomas Cook-owned Hotels4u.com has been rapped by the advertising watchdog for a Christmas Day social media promotion.

The Advertising Standards Authority received 19 complaints from people who had tried to redeem the £50-off voucher deal, advertised in an email, on website ads and on Facebook and Twitter on Christmas Day 2011.

Hotels4u said the promotion aimed to stimulate demand on what was traditionally a low booking day.

However, it backfired and by 6.30am on Christmas Day more than 2,600 bookings had been made, generating a loss of over £120,000, as 2,478 had a sales value lower than £10 after applying the £50 discount.

http://www.e-tid.com//News-Home/£50-Xmas-Day-offer-generated-£120k–loss.aspx

So many lessons to be learned from this. At least they had staff working on Xmas Day who were monitoring the promotion and had the authority to make decisions! ‘Vouchers off’ are distributed onwards by so many different companies and channels that they reach a far wider audience than you can often imagine. Also people are very clever at multiple redemption and then selling on what they have bought through channels such as Ebay. The biggest lesson is to make sure that you fully understand the multitude of ways in which social media work before using them for a heavily discounted promotion!

LinkedIn is 277% more successful than Facebook or Twitter at generating leads

Pam Carvell, Marketing Consultant — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:40:04 +0000

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30030/LinkedIn-277-More-Effective-for-Lead-Generation-Than-Facebook-Twitter-New-Data.aspx

A few good tips from Danny Bermant of Brainstorm Digital at Internet World

- the text under your name shouldn’t be your job title, but rather how you add value

- personalise your recommendation requests so each recommendation covers a different aspect of your services

- use add-ons such as Slide Show, Events, Amazon Reading List

- company pages are very important for SEO

- create status updates for your company page

- set up a LinkedIn group for the clients of your business

- have a social media strategy that becomes a weekly plan of activities, with targets.

Internet World – what a great show

Pam Carvell, Marketing Consultant — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:11:47 +0000

Last day of the show at Earls Court today. Any marketer worth their salt needs to go to this show to hear truly great speakers, attend informative seminars, learn about new innovations and generally keep up to date with what’s happening in digital marketing. Yesterday I heard from the IDM how to use LinkedIn to create brand awareness, from the CEO of Cisco about great initiatives such as BIG (British Innovation Gateway), from the Chief Envisioning Officer of Microsoft about 4 key trends and from the head on on-line retailing of John Lewis as to the future of retail….I’ll cover some key points from these in the coming days.

Pinterest of Interest to Hotels?

Pam Carvell, Marketing Consultant — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:18:01 +0000

At a HOSPA event last night Ally Dombey mentioned Pinterest, which I have to admit I hadn’t heard of and which sounds as if it could become an interesting component of a hotel’s social media strategy. As I try to use this blog to announce ‘new’ things in marketing , I have pulled the following extract from Wikipedia and haven’t yet had time to investigate it further…..

Pinterest is a pinboard-styled social photo sharing website. The service allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections. The site’s mission statement is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.” Pinterest is managed by Cold Brew Labs, a team based in Palo Alto, California. The website has proven especially popular among women.^[2] The site’s founder is Ben Silbermann, of West Des Moines, Iowa.^[

On August 16, 2011, Time magazine listed Pinterest in its "50 Best Websites of 2011" column.^[5] Pinterest is similar to earlier social, image bookmarking systems based on the same principle, such as David Galbraith’s 2005 project Wists.^[6]

The Pinterest app for iPhone was last updated in February 2012.^[7] An iPad app is being developed.^[4] The company has a mobile website.

In December 2011, the site entered the top 10 social networks, according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week.^[8] The next month, it drove more referral traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+.^[9][10]

Users of Pinterest curate themed boards, populating them with media found online using the “Pin It” button, or uploaded from their computers.^[13] Each such item of media is known as a “pin”, and can be a picture, a video, a discussion, or a product. Pins can be grouped into “boards”, which are sets of pins focused on a specific topic. Pinterest can be accessed by adding the “pin it” button to the desktop bookmark bar, “follow me” and “pin it” buttons added to personal website or blog pages, and the Pinterest iPhone application available through the App Store.^[14]

To register for Pinterest, new users must receive an invitation from a friend already registered on Pinterest or request an invitation directly from the Pinterest website. The registration process currently requires users to link their Pinterest account to their Facebook or Twitter account. Users choosing to log in via Facebook must currently be using (or opt in to) Facebook’s “Timeline” format.^[15][16]

While “pins” can come directly from the user, one of Pinterest’s main features is the ability to see what others have pinned, and in turn, users can “re-pin” such media to their own boards. Pinterest allows users to follow the activity of other Pinterest users. This essentially allows for a more centralized way to browse and bookmark the web using the interests and likes of others. A “Tastemakers” page suggests relevant users to follow.^[13] When viewing the site’s homepage, a user sees a “Pin Feed” that shows activity among the boards and pinners that the user follows.

Pinterest users can keep a track of “re-pins”, boards and their own popularity through Pinterest analytics tool called Pinpuff

Hotel Social Media Monitor

Pam Carvell, Marketing Consultant — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:02:57 +0000

A presentation to members of HOSPA by Ally Dombey of Revenue by Design revealed the findings of the 2nd Hotel Industry Social Media Survey. Some key facts:

32% of hotel companies are now fully involved in social media

68% carry out the function from within their own company i.e not using agencies

Over 50% of the companies have no involvement of senior management in social media

Marketing have overall ownership of social media

50% have no governance regarding social media posts

62% of hotels don’t train their staff on use of social media

Less than 30% have a formal strategy agreed by management

One of the most important key challenges of Social Media is identifying a return on investment

The recovery of damaged brands

Pam Carvell, Marketing Consultant — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 09:38:11 +0000

We all know case studies of brands that became damaged and then took years to recover (think Perrier for example). But I read a fascinating piece recently about 2 brands that are considered iconic nowadays and yet had a very murcky past…. I am still shocked at the revelation that Hugo Boss created the all-black uniforms for the SS and Hitler Youth and that Volkswagen collborated with Hitler on the development of the Beetle!

Senior Management don’t understand Social Media

Pam Carvell, Marketing Consultant — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:30:01 +0000

The first wave of the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s social media benchmarking repost shows that almost a third of the 1,000 plus marketers surveyed say their senior management team doesn’t understand why it’s important to use social media. Lack of management understanding was ranked a lesser evil than lack of budget to tackle social media. Personally I’m surprised the figure is that low. I would have expected it to be over half. Part of the blame for this situation has to lie with the marketers themselves. Too much commercial use of social media is driven by the need to be seen to be doing it, rather than in the pursuit of specific corporate objectives and with a clear strategy as to the part that social media has to play. I know many companies who use social media but don’t really know why they are doing it!

Starbucks ‘Come & Introduce Yourself’

Pam Carvell, Marketing Consultant — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:29:34 +0000

Starbucks have launched a new campaign today, with very clever visuals using one of their paper cups. I’m not totally convinced by the Scouse voice-over though! Their idea is to start calling customers by their names, so when my drink is ready instead of calling out ‘skinny peppermint mocha’ they’d call out ‘Pam’. Now, I’ve already had this experience in busy Starbucks stores in London and New York, where they do it at rush times just to make sure people get the right drink and don’t queue-jump and pinch each others cappuccinos to get to the office on time. But I have to question if this nationwide initiative is something that most customers really want or is it just a gimmick – and I hate marketing gimmicks! I don’t mind people in my local Starbucks knowing my name, but at a motorway service station I may be tempted to give out a false name, rather than have strange truckdrivers know my name! I did chat to 2 staff at a Motorway Starbucks yesterday to get their views. They have already been practicing on customers and await the arrival of their name badges today. They are meant to say something along the lines of ‘Hi I’m Susan, may I take your name and order?’. I can think of many people who will be totally shocked by this approach, many will not understand, many will challenge it & refuse….and while theses debates ensue, a long queue of customers is forming. My gut feel is that this is one of those ‘clever’ ideas thought up by Marketing without thinking through the operational repercussions and whether it is something the customers actually want. Only time will tell.