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.

The TFM&A show takes place at Earls Court 1-2 March. I have attended for the past couple of years and the free seminars are a brilliant way of keeping up-to-date with the latest advances in marketing, with great presenters and up-to-date stats on what’s happening.
Visit www.t-f-m.co.uk for more info.

QHotels researched 3,000 of its guests and found that the 3 most important factors for business travellers when choosing a hotel were unlimited free wi-fi access, a king size bed and luxury bedding. I hope they didn’t spend too much money on this research, as firstly these shouldn’t be a surprise, but secondly I would [...]

I saw the new Andrex ad for the first time last night. I had read that new CGI puppies were being introduced, but nothing could have prepared me for how tacky they are. The Andrex puppy is one of the all-time-greatest-icons in British advertising, so why mess with it? It’s cuteness comes from it being real [...]

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!

It has come to light that Range Rover gave a free vehicle to 40 celebrity ‘trendsetters’ to tweet about the vehicle. Now this blurs the boundaries between marketing and non-marketing and has the potential to mislead consumers, who assume that tweets reflect genuine individual views. Is this paid-for space? If so, it is covered by [...]