Social Marketing in Travel and Hospitality: Consistent Engagement and Accessibility are Essential

"Social marketing is a very engaging process that requires skills and consistent engagement with the travel consumer."


This very important point was stressed in a blog piece by Max Starkov, Chief eBusiness Strategist at Hospitality eBusiness Strategies, Inc., the hospitality industry's leading full-service hotel internet marketing and direct online strategy firm. He continues, "If your hotel cannot allocate bandwidth and resources or cannot afford to hire an external social marketing firm, do not start with social media initiatives such as Facebook fan page or Twitter profile. The social media battleground is full of "corpses" of abandoned hotel fan pages and profiles that do more harm than good to their owners."


I think this is true across the business spectrum, not just for hospitality and travel. To initiate a social media presence is to engage with the larger on-line world. To utilize a social media site,  i.e., a Facebook Fan Page, is to make a commitment to a community of "fans" that you intend to engage them and interact with them, not leave them high and dry with unfulfilled expectations which can produce undesirable results.


Mobile sites


Starkov, speaking to a travel and hospitality audience (but the application can be used elsewhere), suggests a mobile-friendly site. 


"An excellent first step is to create a mobile site, which by default is the "gravitational" center for all future marketing efforts: from text messaging and Google mobile ads, to mobile sweepstakes and applications. Budget limitations are no longer an excuse for not launching a mobile-ready hotel site. 

Between 1% - 1.5% of visitors to hotel websites are from travel consumers accessing your property site via mobile devices.

"Imagine the user experience of trying to squeeze your wide-screen hotel website, designed to fit screen resolutions at 1280x1024 pixels and above, onto the tiny screen of a mobile device. Our analysis shows that more than 90% of mobile users access the hotel website via mobile devices with screen sizes of 320 x 480 pixels. Accessing a "conventional" website via a mobile device, even the latest iPhone, often results in an undesirable user experience: the inability to find information needed, and a predictable outcome of abandoned websites and reservations."

This is so important when it comes to making information accessible.  We know that smart-phones usage is only going to increase, so having a web presence that is basically useless for these devices is strategically disadvantageous.


Image from: Social-media.co.uk

Blog It - Tweet It - Facebook It: It Depends On The Content

 A writer for The Guardian, Cory Doctorow, makes some great points about how content often determines which social media platform gets used. So, the perception that blogs are diminishing is not really the case. It's just that other social media venues are better suited to the specific content that is being delivered.

From The Guardian:

Reports of blogging's death have been greatly exaggerated

A report last month in the Economist tells us that "blogging is dying" as more and more bloggers abandon the form for its cousins: the tweet, the Facebook Wall, the Digg.

Do a search-and-replace on "blog" and you could rewrite the coverage as evidence of the death of television, novels, short stories, poetry, live theatre, musicals, or any of the hundreds of the other media that went from breathless ascendancy to merely another tile in the mosaic.

Of course, none of those media are dead, and neither is blogging. Instead, what's happened is that they've been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics, and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.

When all we had was the stage, every performance was a play. When we got films, a great lot of these stories moved to the screen, where they'd always belonged (they'd been squeezed onto a stage because there was no alternative). When TV came along, those stories that were better suited to the small screen were peeled away from the cinema and relocated to the telly. When YouTube came along, it liberated all those stories that wanted to be 3-8 minutes long, not a 22-minute sitcom or a 48-minute drama. And so on.

What's left behind at each turn isn't less, but more: the stories we tell on the stage today are there not because they must be, but because they're better suited to the stage than they are to any other platform we know about. This is wonderful for all concerned – the audience numbers might be smaller, but the form is much, much better.

When blogging was the easiest, most prominent way to produce short, informal, thinking-aloud pieces for the net, we all blogged. Now that we have Twitter, social media platforms and all the other tools that continue to emerge, many of us are finding that the material we used to save for our blogs has a better home somewhere else. And some of us are discovering that we weren't bloggers after all – but blogging was good enough until something more suited to us came along.

I still blog 10-15 items a day, just as I've done for 10 years now on Boing Boing. But I also tweet and retweet 30-50 times a day. Almost all of that material is stuff that wouldn't be a good fit for the blog – material I just wouldn't have published at all before Twitter came along. But a few of those tweets might have been stretched into a blogpost in years gone by, and now they can live as a short thought.

For me, the great attraction of all this is that preparing material for public consumption forces me to clarify it in my own mind. I don't really know it until I write it. Thus the more media I have at my disposal, the more ways there are for me to work out my own ideas.

Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling says: "The future composts the past." There's even a law to describe this, Riepl's Law – which says "new, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms."

That was coined in 1913 by Wolfgang Riepl. It's as true now as it was then.

Experience-Based Design: Designing Experiences

Experience-based design is, essentially, design focused on looking at the way the enduser engages or interacts with the design in question. Huh? Some may see it as simply "putting people first". I think that is a good way of seeing experience-based design - the human element. The UK's NHS (National Health Service), for instance, has instituted experience-based design, or service design, as its basis for innovation going forward. In doing so, the NHS can bring its focus in line with patients and the way they interact and experience the services they receive.

This design concept certainly has other applications, and if we look at the environments we each create for ourselves, hopefully we have employed the principle liberally. For example, think of the objects in your home that, no matter what, you would never part with (aside from the ones that cost a blooming fortune, but maybe that's just the way you roll). Why won't you part with them? They have sentimental value, perhaps. I know that the items I am most emotionally attached to have definite, recallable experiences that accompany them.

A friend and I were having drinks the other day when, in the context of a conversation about this very subject, he recalled the story of how he came about obtaining his and his partner's dining table. Said partner was shopping for a new dining table and found a fine one by Ralph Lauren, at an amazing price. It occurred to him that the table would be perfect in his parent's dining room, and they needed a new one. So he got the table for his parents, and decided to take theirs for his and his partner's (my friend) dining room. Well, it turns out that this table is the one his father, a very good artist of abstract painting, used as a work table. It's not a particularly gorgeous table, and it has intermittent splatters of paint all over it. Yet, as my friend pointed out, they love this table. Said partner's mother always finds it fascinating that they never cover it with a table cloth, and having dined at this very table myself, I can attest that to do so would be just wrong.

Bringing it back to experience-based design, my friend's table is the factor around which any attempt to redesign his dining room has to revolve. In the same fashion, that memorable Kholer commercial where the woman tells the designer, after he has established his very impressive bona fides as a designer, to design her new house around a faucet, plays on this principle.There is something about her experience with the design of that faucet that practically makes it a prototype. Based on the experience she has derived from that piece of design, the designer receives his directive.

A designer who intends to utilize experience-based design methodology must take into consideration: 1. The emotional value that the design will have for his client, very important in the area of healthcare, and 2. How will the design enhance their client's experience in living with it.

Process -vs- Contest: Bravo's Work of Art - The Next Great Artist.

What makes a great artist? Is a great artist someone who creates consistent magnificence in one primary medium, or is greatness characterized by showing competence across a wide array of artistry? The newest contest show from Bravo Network, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, explores this very question, though indirectly. The primary focus for the show's producers is to maximize the entertainment value. Where Bravo is concerned, this usually means "drama". Given the array of characters cast, drama will be among the primary things on display, along with the art.

So what about the art? Off we go to the communal studio where the fun ensues. The first challenge for the 14 contestants, including a young artist with OCD (imagine that) and an overbearing, tactless performance artist, was to pair off and create a portrait of each other, loosely based on the self-portraits each artist produced. Seemed pretty straight forward, and for the most part, it was straight forward, with just enough of a glimpse of the artists' various temperments to intrigue viewers, allowing them to begin classifying characters along the usual lines: bitch, flake, freak, nicey nice, and general egomaniac.

Most of the drama takes place as the artists begin to get into their processes, begin creating, and eventually begin freaking out. Then the snarking begins as the artists themselves begin reacting to each others' mode of operation. When that included the OCD kid, Miles, using power tools and generally making a lot of racket, the dead-pan looks thrown at him by the other contestants were priceless. This is one of the basic elements of conflict that is omnipresent with these shows; the head-on collision of uncomplimentary creative processes can be tragic, but as with most car wrecks, everyone cranes their neck to see if there is any spilled blood.

When the judging commences, with the prerequisite coterie of heavy hitters as judges, the question that is the show's raison d'etre begins to get answered. But, it's only a beginning. Requiring a conceptual, abstract artist to produce a portrait is a trickier proposition than one might expect. As Indianapolis based artist and blogger of all things art, Scott Grow, observes, "I was left wondering, of all the abstract painters I know, how would ANY of them have faired in a portrait challenge and still remain true to their process and vision? How would an artist like Anish Kapoor or Richard Tuttle have faired?"

That question of staying true to process while adhering to what the rules demand will be asked over and over again of the artists on Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. Abstract artist and creative director for Q7 Associates, GK Rowe, points out that, " a good artist, when given rules to abide by, will immediately devise some way of bending the rules."

Rowe adds, "At the end of the day, the show is more about entertainment than art. But, it does raise awareness, and for all of us in the creative world, that is only a good thing. It gets people talking."

For me, I'm happy to see a program for mass consumption centered around art that is contemporary, abstract, and deserving of more exposure.



Image courtesy of Bravo Network

Using Social Media: Why Would You Not? -or- How I Taught Stevie Nicks How To Use Twitter

I find it remarkable when I am around professional people, especially people in the sales or business development realm, who do not use social media, and are even a bit hostile to the idea. It makes me ask, "What's really going on here?" I have conversations about this with a couple of associates/friends whose feelings tend to veer toward those of a Luddite, who feel infringed upon and, possibly, personally displaced. This is natural. We are still in that period when many are still processing how they define the parameters within which technology and media and modern culture, etc, may inhabit, within the greater context of their lives. I find that people rest all over the spectrum of possibilities, existentially.

For some, the extent of the interaction with social media is their daily check-up on FaceBook, including the games they happen to play. That's better than those who filled out a page on either FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, et al, and then never went back. I interact with the social media world to a far greater extent than most, particularly people of my age, and older. I get that. It's my job. But, it is also my passion. For others, not so much.

And yet, I wonder about the failure, by some, to get ahead of the curve and identify social media as a necessary component of professional life, a component that will become even more vital.

I made an observation when the internet was just starting out about how important it would be to become one who is "connected". To be unconnected would eventually amount to residing in a kind of third world. So now, not be plugged into social media, especially as a professional, comes across as an obstinate dismissal, as if to say, "I can't be bothered by all of that."

All the while, I'm thinking, "You're not being bothered is getting you passed by."

I guess I'll say this, as I used to say to my dad when he remarked that he did not like fried chicken, "Good! More for me."

I say all of this as someone who is among the converted. I used to pooh pooh FaceBook and Linked-In too, until I got into them. My business partner at Q7 Associates, The Right Rev. Dr. GK Rowe, experienced the same thing. Once I was into FaceBook, I kept urging him to do it, and he would condescendingly close his eyes and dismiss me, outright. "That was until I got into it, " he said, "then it was Balls to the Wall, total buy-in once I saw the possibilities."

That's what I love, the endless, intriguing possibilities. Why, just the other day, I got to teach Stevie Nicks (@RealStevieNicks) how to use twitter. How many people get to say that?

Using Social Media: Remember - Great Content Never Goes Stale

That line about great content appears in an article from Canadian site, Financial Post, and I immediately latched on to it because it speaks to a fundamental truth about content on the net. Great content is timeless and endlessly useful.

But, many entrepreneurs, including the ones at an Ontario conference where a social media consultant was explaining how social media channels can help in the sphere of recruiting talent, are still skittish, fearing a lack of interpersonal interactions will turn potential clients off. Nay nay, the author reminds us:

"Recognizing that many business owners are still shy about Twitter and Facebook, he suggested they look at these new channels as a recruiting tool.

"Social media let you spark conversations with potential employees and promote your business as a great place to work. When you're satisfied with your results, he said, you can tackle more marketing-oriented conversations.

"I found that suggestion sensible, and sensitive to many entrepreneurs' doubts about social media. So I was shocked when some delegates denounced the consultant's proposal. They said people are the most important part of business, and expressed fears that social media will wipe out face-to-face relationships.

"The consultant adroitly responded that social media don't replace anything. Blogging, Web video, Twitter and Facebook help you build new relationships, by promoting and sustaining conversations with the growing numbers of customers who don't read your brochures or prefer interactive media."

The article, by Rick Spence, goes on to tell the story of how a Vancouver entrepreneur, Michael Jagger, founder and CEO of Provident Security, has gained expertise in using social media to advance his business and provide better service to his clients.

"Jagger uses all possible media to promote his company. So he's become an expert at public relations, public speaking, video, blogging and, most recently, Twitter.
He believes in integrated promotion. When asked to make a presentation on security, he has the presentation taped. Edited portions of the speech -- say, talking about new security technology -- may be uploaded to his website and his blog. Then he'll tweet about the videos on Twitter.

"A key advantage of social media is that content posted online may remain there forever -- and great content never goes stale.

"One day last week, Jagger tweeted about "Disabling a burglar alarm."
Clicking the accompanying link took you to Jagger's 2007 blogpost explaining how a clever thief in Kitsilano had broken into an office and disabled the burglar alarm before roving the office stealing computer parts.

Jagger proves you don't have to be a professional writer to maintain an intriguing blog; he just writes about what he knows, using an even, "just the facts" tone reminiscent of Dragnet."

Spence's closing thoughts should be embraced by all who want to move in the direction of Jagger, et al.

"Social media don't replace relationships or marketing practices that are working for you. Social media provide new channels for getting your message out.

"But before you can reap any of these benefits, you have to lower your natural defensive shields against new tools with silly names."


Image by Sylvar

Indianapolis Social Media Breakfast

I am attending the Indianapolis Social Media Breakfast in the morning. The subject of this breakfast, "Using Social Media in the Travel, Tourism and Attraction Industries", should be interesting. I'll be giving a full report tomorrow.