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Brand Sites: Critical Mistakes

From accepting bookings to projecting your unique brand promise, your brand site is crucial to the success of your property. Yet our faculty and affiliated experts in the field find properties making critical mistakes on their sites every day that are preventing them from maximizing revenue and reach.

We’ve done an audit of some of the most common brand site crimes being committed today. Many of them come to life in this tool built by Cornell School of Hospitality Administration Associate Professor Rob Kwortnik and Senior Lecturer Bill Carroll. It provides four static landing-page designs for a fictional property, all with unique flaws. You can explore and identify those flaws yourself before comparing your findings against the faculty’s.Read More

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3×3: What’s Driving Your Organization’s Remote Work Decisions?

The recent decision by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to end the company’s remote work policies provoked a storm of reactions from all sides. Working parents are calling it unfair, especially when Yahoo doesn’t provide on-site childcare. On the flip side, some office workers think it’s a move toward fairness, not away from it. And other companies see it as a sign to reevaluate their own policies.

The primary reason Mayer gave for ending these policies was a perceived lack of collaboration and communication due to remote working. Mayer also argued that quality is often sacrificed when employees work from home. Apparently, something wasn’t working. However, to accurately assess the success or failure of Yahoo’s program, one needs to understand why the company adopted remote work in the first place. What were the objectives of the program and to what extent were those objectives being met?

My research and consulting experience suggests that companies use remote work to help drive two broad categories of objectives: strategic business objectives and human capital objectives.

Business Drivers

These are ways in which remote work can directly contribute to your organization’s performance and bottom line:

  • Cost Reduction — One of the primary reasons many organizations adopt remote work practices, at least initially, is to reduce cost. For example, remote work could allow you to close sites, shrink your real estate footprint, or save travel costs by using technology for employee collaboration, rather than face-to-face meetings. The desire to cut costs often spurs remote work initiatives, but such savings are elusive. Many companies I’ve worked with have actually found that unless they close sites, remote work can increase costs due to spending more on expanding the scope of technology systems.
  • Expand Globally — Beyond cost reduction, companies can use remote work to expand globally. Remote workers enable you to move into new geographies and serve new customers, at relatively low cost and risk. And having a global footprint of remote workers allows your business to follow the sun — with individual contributors and teams handing off to each other, around the clock.
  • Employee Productivity — Finally, remote work can enhance employee productivity. In fact, some organizations explicitly require higher levels of performance from employees who work outside the office. But, many companies I’ve worked with have found that remote work policies provide minimal productivity gains. Generally, companies are satisfied if their remote workers are as productive as their office-based counterparts.

Human Capital Drivers

These are ways that remote work can impact your organization’s human capital outcomes:

  • Applicant Attraction/Accessibility — Increasingly, companies use remote work as a critical component of differentiating their employer brand. Offering remote work can also attract talent that, in the past, was unavailable to your organization. For example, one company I worked with uses remote work to attract nurse practitioners located in rural areas, a very difficult group to access. By offering remote work, the company is able to recruit employees that, in general, it’s previously been unable to access because they don’t live near any of its locations.
  • Work/Life Balance — Remote work also can help employees better balance their work-life demands; better balance often helps promote employee health and wellness. One company I’ve worked with surveyed their remote workers and found that these employees had lower stress than their employees overall.
  • Engagement/Retention — Finally, companies often find their remote workers to be more engaged than office workers. The autonomy and flexibility remote work provides seems to play a significant role in enhancing employee satisfaction and retention.

Insights and a few important caveats

For organizations contemplating remote work, understanding these drivers — and their contingencies — is critical to success. It’s true that advances in technology are enabling remote work to contribute to business and human capital outcomes. Employees can now access the same information and systems regardless of their location. And they can interact with each other, customers, and clients just as they would if they were co-located. It’s this capability that can allow remote workers to sustain, and sometimes even enhance, their performance.

But technology is just a tool. Remember that the business and human capital benefits of remote work aren’t guaranteed. You can’t simply implement remote work practices and expect to see enhanced outcomes. To realize these benefits, employees must believe that your organizational culture supports and values remote work. In particular, they need concrete assurances that they have the same status and career development opportunities as their office-based colleagues.

Finally, by understanding the drivers of remote work in your organization, you’ll be in a better position to evaluate the program holistically — identifying not only where it may be falling short of expectations, but also where it is adding significant value — and be better equipped to make decisions about the future of the program.

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Segmentation and Psychographic Profiles in the New Media “Continuum”

Segmentation and segmentation strategy in the hospitality industry vary widely. Even as you identify psychographic profiles and segments for your target customers, keep in mind that there are often sub-segments within larger segments. It’s pretty complex, but Professor Bill Carroll recommends viewing segmentation as taking place within a “continuum”.

Here, Professor Bill Carroll from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration discusses market segmentation in depth. This video is part of eCornell’s free online course Marketing the Hospitality Brand through New Media: Social, Mobile & Search. This course is your virtual toolkit for driving revenue through new media. It’s 100% free. 100% online.

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4 Areas of Social Media Risk

With so many risks involved with social media and your organization, you may be tempted to say to yourself, “Let’s make it easy. Let’s have our social media policy be… No social media!”

There are two significant problems with this approach:

  1. Such policies are impossible to enforce. Most employees can access social media at work through their own mobile phones, which employers cannot control.
  2. Employees can easily use social media outside of work. Even in one of the most highly regulated industries, the financial industry, more than half of financial services professionals use Linked-In or Facebook for work or personal reasons.

To be clear, banishment is not a policy. It’s a fantasy.

When designed holistically and communicated correctly, policies help to influence all major actions and activities that take place within the boundaries set by them and can help eliminate or at least mitigate risk in one of the four major risk areas:

1. Regulatory Requirements

Restrictions, licenses, and /or laws applicable to a product or business, imposed by the government.

Examples:

  • Social media policies created by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA). Under GLBA, financial services firms are obligated to protect the privacy of consumers and their non-public personal financial information. Intentional or even accidental disclosure of such information, possibly via your your organization’s social media platforms, could put you at severe regulatory risk.
  • SEC Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD). Regulation FD is designed to prevent an issuer of stock from selectively disclosing material non-public information.

The ubiquity of social media and its “S2 Twins” Speed and Scope make for powerful downside risks if employees are not fully aware of the expectations on their behavior 24 x 7. So ask yourself, “Do our employees know what they can and can not share publicly? With whom? And when? If you said, “yes” how do you know this? Can you point to specific documentation that indicates your organization has both clearly written policies as well as has communicated these policies to all relevant employees?

2. Legal Requirements

Those areas associated with the communication of unlawful content – either intentionally or accidentally.

The first legal area we’ll discuss is that of Vicarious Liability. This is the legal term that is used when an organization is held legally (and financially) responsible for the unlawful, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate action of its employees. Vicarious Liability applies regardless of whether the offending employee’s violation was accidental or intentional.

As it relates to social media platforms, it also may apply regardless of whether the employee commits the offense at the office using company-issued computer resources OR at home using personal devices and private accounts, sites tool and technologies.

Put very plainly, thanks to Vicarious Liability, an employer might be held legally responsible for the obscene, harassing, discriminatory, or otherwise illegal or objectionable blog posts, tweets, Facebook comments or Youtube videos…Regardless of where, when, or how the offending content was created, posted or published. Not something to be taken lightly given the enormous potential for both financial and reputational loss.

3. Security

The presence of social media in the workplace greatly increases the risk of potentially devastating security breaches and/or data leaks.

While many organizations spend millions of dollars on sophisticated IT infrastructure and complicated access protocols, social media in the workplace can expose this confidential information.  It is therefore critical that employers clearly communicate their policy as it regards the safeguarding of confidential data.

They should also make it clear that in the United States, employees have “No reasonable expectation” of privacy when using the company’s computer systems, sites accounts or devices.

The Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) makes it clear that the company’s computer system is the property of the employer. Note that laws do differ from state to state on whether the employer must notify employees that their computer use is being monitored.

4. Culture

How you want your social media policies to impact your organizational culture: loose or tight?

The fourth area that impacts the development of your SM policies is probably the one that is the most flexible but also the one that can have significant organizational ramifications.

Examples:

  • Do you want “loose” policies that puts the behavioral responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the employee? “Don’t put anything on the internet or in an electronic communication that you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see.”
  • Do you want “tighter” policies which go into great detail around what is and is not acceptable behavior.

It’s very important to note that while there are no “right” or “wrong” cultures, organizations who are lax in promoting strict compliance with both regulatory, legal, and security requirements may find themselves inadvertently directing their cultural norms in ways that they had not intended.

And while no specific “right” or “wrong” policy approach exists, what does exist is the ability of poorly administered policies to either directly or indirectly cause employees to exhibit inappropriate and even illegal behaviors. Behaviors which could have been far different and caused far fewer headaches if only more time had been spent on both the thoughtful development and communication of well thought through policies.

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Demand Management: A Deep-Dive

Success in the hotel business hinges on getting demand management right. It’s a key driver in hotel operations, revenue optimization and overall customer experience.

Today we give you an entire chapter on demand management from The Cornell School of Hotel Administration on Hospitality book. In this chapter written by Cornell Professor Bill Carroll, you’ll get both a broad overview and incredibly detailed instruction on how to manage demand at your hotel. This chapter on demand management is an absolute must-read for anyone in hospitality working at the crossroads of revenue generation and customer service.

Permission to redistribute Dr. Carroll’s chapter courtesy of Wiley Publishing.

From the publisher: This cutting-edge and comprehensive book—with contributions from the star faculty of Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration—offers the latest thinking on the best practices and strategies for hospitality management. A must for students and professionals seeking to enter or expand their reach in the hospitality industry, The Cornell School of Hotel Administration on Hospitality delivers the authoritative advice you need to:

  • Develop and manage a multinational career and become a leader in the hospitality industry
  • Maximize profits from franchise agreements, management contracts, and leases
  • Understand and predict customer choices, and motivate your staff to provide outstanding service
  • Manage hospitality businesses and the real estate underlying the businesses
  • Control costs, coordinate branding strategy, and manage operations across multiple locations

 

 

 

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The Risk of Social Media on Any Given Day

Social Media is Everywhere

Social media has changed the way we behave in almost every aspect of our lives and even our philosophies on leading an organization. Do a search on any company and you will probably find they have at least one or more profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and maybe even Instagram. It’s a whole new way to engage with your customers. If you are not using social media in your organization, you should want to!

However, new tools bring benefits as well as risks. As leaders we need to balance those risks and benefits. As we consider the risks, consider the supporting policy to mitigate those risks…putting your head in sand and ignoring it is not a policy…no choice…it is here and not going away.

So maybe you are thinking: “I don’t need to worry about this, I can keep doing it my old way and not be affected by the social media hype.” But social media is being used everywhere and will continue to increase in use. Your employees are using it. Your future employees are using it. Your customers are using it. Your business partners are using it. And, your competition is using it. Heck, even my 85 year old grandmother is using it! But every day your organization is using social media without the associated risk mitigation that well thought through policies provide is a day rife with significant organizational risk: legal, regulatory, financial and reputational.

If that doesn’t convince you, think about operating with outdated or non-existent policies as a game of organizational Russian Roulette. While on any given day, the odds may be in your favor, over the long haul they are not. Let’s drive this point home with a little math.

Assume that on “any given day”, there’s only a 0.1% chance that nothing bad will happen.

However, the problem is not with “any given day” but rather what happens when a series of “any given days” are strung together. When we apply a little math and look at the odds are over a longer period of time, we should get very very worried. What the math shows is that over a 1-year period (365 days), even if the daily odds are only 1 in 1000, over the long run, there’s a better than 30% chance that we’ll experience a serious issue. Over a 2-year period, this number rises to almost 52%. 3-years? 67%. So, for those of you who don’t think you have an issue, you’re probably living on borrowed time.

So get comfortable with the uncomfortable and jump into the proverbial deep end of the social media pool! But start with a healthy social media policy. Is your company already involved in social media? If so, does your company have a social media policy in place?

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The Moneyball Effect: How Data Will Transform Student Success in 10 Years

In his 2003 book “Moneyball,” bestselling author Michael Lewis chronicled the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team’s unprecedented run to win their division championship through a specialized analysis of baseball data called “Sabermetrics” (also referred to as “Moneyball”).

By analyzing objective, evidence-based data on historical player performance, the cash-strapped Oakland team built a repeatable, winning strategy that challenged conventional baseball wisdom. More than a decade later, the vast majority of professional sports teams — including the Dallas Mavericks, Los Angeles Clippers and Tampa Bay Rays — now employ statisticians and data analysts to turn player data into actionable coaching insights.

Just as player analytics have transformed decision making in professional sports teams, higher education and learning organizations will use student analytics to transform teaching models, better meet students’ needs and improve learning outcomes over the next decade.

Let’s explore how three types of learning analysis — predictive, adaptive and personalized — will harness the power of student metrics to impact performance.

1. Predictive learning analysis

Whether online or in the classroom, students today interact with various data systems. Learning management and student information systems are chronicles of students’ past and current learning activities. By analyzing this data using evidence-based research, organizations can identify trends, behaviors and patterns to better predict student outcomes at the individual and group level.

For example, learning organizations will analyze:

  • Time spent in class and online, relative to course completion rates;
  • Engagement with faculty, relative to outcomes;
  • Interim assessment scores, relative to final grades; and
  • Prerequisite knowledge and coursework, relative to success rates.

The most powerful predictive data is historical data, so it will be the accumulation of data longitudinally that will become particularly predictive and interesting. With predictive analysis, organizations will gain objective insights into student behaviors and the ability to adapt and personalize future learning to improve student retention and success.

2. Adaptive learning analysis

Combined with predictive analytics, organizations will use adaptive learning analysis to identify individual student needs and quickly intervene to improve the odds of success. Student metrics — such as learning time, response latency, engagement levels and assessment results — form the basis for these analyses.

Armed with these insights, instructors will:

  • Redefine student inputs based on successful outcomes;
  • Adapt assessments, relative to past performance;
  • Adjust student interaction dynamically;
  • Provide on-demand tutoring based on responses; and
  • Offer real-time prompts, clues and grading.

Beyond simply making adjustments to the course materials and delivery pace to improve student retention and outcomes is the ability to constantly and iteratively test those changes. As suggested in a recent article by Chris Proulx, “Three Archetypes of the Future Post-Secondary Instructor,” he suggests the emergence of the “Course Hacker” role in higher education, where:

“…the Course Hacker would be a faculty member with strong technical and statistical skills who would study data about which course assets were being used and by whom, which students worked more quickly or slowly, which questions caused the most problems on a quiz, who were the most socially active students in the course, who were the lurkers but getting high marks, etc.  Armed with those deep insights, they would be continually adapting course content, providing support and remedial help to targeted students, creating incentives to motivate people past critical blocks in the course, etc.”

For example:

“The data tells us that this student is having a hard time getting through the materials in the allotted time. Let’s make Tweak A and see if that improves course completion. No? Let’s try Tweak B and compare the data.”

And as large-scale participation courses, such as MOOCs (massive open online courses), become more prevalent over the next decade, adaptive learning analysis will allow learning organizations to provide scalable, agile interaction to meet the unique needs of individual students.

3. Personalized learning

As organizations use analytics to better understand students’ distinct learning behavior profiles, it will open the door to personalized learning. Where adaptive learning is used to quickly intervene when students are struggling, personalized learning focuses on providing the student with choices to determine when, what and how they learn.

For example, organizations will personalize learning by:

  • Adjusting the pace of learning;
  • Creating personalized learning paths based on interest and existing knowledge;
  • Localizing the curriculum to regional or cultural needs;
  • Developing communities of similar students;
  • Offering alternate learning times to accommodate personal schedules; and
  • Using algorithms to dynamically create peer-to-peer relationships.

Winning: Data analytics to drive student performance

Already, new technology tools are making it easier for learning organizations to access and analyze student metrics. But data alone is not actionable information. Instead, learning organizations need objective analytics that help them predict, adapt and personalize their pedagogy to maximize learning outcomes online or in the classroom. Over the next decade, organizations that can do this, and do it well, will prove to be the winners.

Guest Post on The Evolllution

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6 Steps to Creating the Right Social Media Policy

There are about a million different ways to develop your social media policy, but are they right for your company? Sticking to a process that is easy to remember will keep you focused and on track in developing your policy. We have found that the following 6 steps, happily listed in a mnemonic ABCDEF, keep things simple and yet cover all the bases.

A – Assemble the team

Bring together those folks best suited to help you. Ensure that it is composed of people who are both “officially” recognized by the organization as well as those who are influential and therefore “unofficial” experts. Do it early in the process to decrease the odds of downstream resistance.

B – Baseline your current state to assess your level of risk

What are the things you need to evaluate to determine if you have an issue? Is anyone aware of which SM platforms are being used by which functions? Are people aware of the Regulatory, Legal, Security and Cultural constraints under which they are to operate?

C – Create the Project Plan

Agree upon roles and responsibilities for both now and in the future. Determine who will write the policies. Determine who will review the policies. Determine what specific role each member of the SM Policy Team will play. Agree upon WHO will do WHAT by WHEN.

D – Develop the Policies

What makes for “good” vs. “bad” policies. Content rules – or Who gets to say What.

E – Educate

What are some of the things to consider when managing large-scale change efforts. How should you segment your education efforts. Should Managers and Individual Contributors receive differentiated training.

F – Forever

How do you decide when old policies need to be updated or are no longer relevant? How often should you refresh policies?

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The Dos and Don’ts of Length of Stay

How far in advance can you predict demand for your hotel? In hotel management, we continually stress the importance of creating demand, rather than simply responding to it. How to do it?

Well, proper use of length of stay controls during high-demand periods enables you to control customer demand, plan for the future, and maximize revenue.

Minimum Length of Stay

When to use

Minimum length of stay can be used at any hotel where there will be a period of high demand (a string of busy nights) followed by a period of low demand. Some example scenarios are: a resort hotel over a winter holiday or any hotel in the vicinity of a major national festival or conference.

What to do

Implement a rule to accept longer-duration reservations and reject shorter-duration reservations for arrival during a hot period. That way you can fine-tune demand during hot times to increase occupancy during the slow period that follows.

Potential problems

You may not have anybody who wants to stay longer than the minimum you have in mind. Also, your guests may decide to leave early.

Requirements

Be sure you have sufficient demand for longer lengths of stay. Otherwise, use of this control could have a detrimental effect on RevPAR instead of improving it.

Maximum Length of Stay

When to use

This control is used when you are expecting to be able to sell out your rooms at higher rates. Using maximum length of stay, you can limit the number of rooms sold at large discounts during the high rate time period by limiting the (discounted) multi-night stays extending into that time period.

What to do

Do not accept reservations at specific discounted rates for multiple-night stays extending into the sold-out period. To do this, use the start of the sold-out period as a guide to determine the maximum length of stay allowable for discount customers. To accommodate guests who would like to stay at the hotel longer than the maximum length, it is possible to charge two rates: the discount rate for nights up to the maximum and the rack rate for subsequent nights.

Potential problems

Your guests may decide to stay longer. By law, you can’t force them out of their rooms.

Requirements

Be sure you have high demand. Otherwise, you could decrease RevPAR instead of improving it.

Closed to Arrival

When to use

This control can be used to restrict arrivals during a time when you expect to reach maximum occupancy through guests staying on at the hotel for multiple nights (through “stayovers” as opposed to through new arrivals). Using this control would only make sense if you believed you would achieve higher occupancy by selecting a particular set of guests (i.e. those arriving before the closed-to-arrival date).

What to do

Do not accept reservations for arrivals on the day in question. Allow guests staying through from previous nights only.

Potential problems

Be very, very careful with this control, because using it will have an impact on the day you’ve closed to arrivals, and the day after, and the day after that. You may end up improving revenue on some days, but decreasing it on others.

Requirements

Be sure you have extremely high demand.

Fill Your Hotel

To better understand how length of stay controls actually work, we suggest you try your hand with the interactive activity, Fill Your Hotel, used in eCornell’s course, “Forecasting and Availability Controls in Hotel Revenue Management,” taught by Dr. Sheryl Kimes. This activity simulates a length-of-stay tool as it relates to variable demand and overall occupancy rate. Learn how you can not only predict, but control for your hotel’s demand.

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Social Media Policy Today

Let’s take a look at the current landscape of social media policies. To start, let’s look at a Wikipedia (a popular social media site in its own right) to see how it  defines social media. In Wikipedia, social media is defined as interactive platforms via which individuals and communities create and share user-generated content social software which mediates human communication.

The key words to focus on in these two definitions are “sharing,” “user-generated,”  and “content.” The technology and gee-whiz software applications are just window dressing. At its heart, social media is the sharing of user-generated content.

While I find Wikipedia’s definition to be very good, it doesn’t really highlight the two reasons why social media policies sometimes become the central focus of an organization’s overall risk management framework. I refer to these two reasons as social media’s S² Twins: Speed & Scope.

Speed

Information can travel around the world almost instantaneously. What previously took hours or days to be known around the world is nowadays shared with potentially hundreds of millions of people in a matter of seconds. Without appropriate social media policies in-place, an organization runs the risk that it is not information but rather misinformation that explodes into cyberspace, resulting in a PR nightmare from which an organization may never recover.

Scope

Previously, communication missteps tended to be limited in distribution by the reach of the physical media through which they were transmitted. Newspapers, Magazines, even radio and TV stations tended to have defined geographies within which they operated. With the internet, this limitation on distribution or scope no longer exists. With the push of a button, information (or misinformation) is as easily accessible in Antarctica as it is in London or New York.