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SoLoMo: A Balancing Act Built on Trust

Social, local, mobile: SoLoMo is today’s marketing rallying call for businesses. The ability to target receptive consumers in place — near or in your property, in real-time — with relevant offerings or services has huge potential. That potential, however, isn’t absolute. Note the word “receptive” in my description of SoLoMo’s potential. This is a key factor in striking the balance between enhancing the guest experience and increasing your share of their wallet, versus being a consumer stalker.

Many hotels and brands have already jumped on the SoLoMo train. Most are optimizing their websites for mobile, as well as adding “location aware capabilities” to these sites, like Loews Hotels has done. These capabilities, like those of a number of new native and web-based applications, enable the hotel to know the location of potential and current customers, and which local deals and services they prefer. Such applications give hotels an edge in offering guests relevant ‘push’ marketing offers, and a better chance at increasing their wallet share.

Checkins, whether using Foursquare, Facebook, or the hotel’s own mobile site, are a prime time for targeted offers. These could be an invitation to enjoy a free drink in the hotel bar after checking in, a customized guest greeting on arrival, or a special discount for spa services ‘pushed’ to a guest who checks in at the hotel gym.

On one hand, this kind of highly localized, personalized marketing could enhance the service you’re providing guests. But, if you don’t pay enough attention to receptivity, there’s a good chance guests could also view it as a creepy invasion of privacy.

The hospitality and travel industries continue to explore the balance between privacy and customized service in new media marketing. Take this example, which I use in my course, Marketing the Hospitality Brand through New Media: Social, Mobile, and Search: KLM Royal Dutch Airline’s Meet & Seat program.

Would you use this capability? If you answered ‘no,’ you’re not alone. A 2011 survey by Amadeus showed that a slight majority of respondents across ten countries would be happy to give up more personal information in order to get better, more efficient travel services. But in the U.S., that number dropped to less than 34 percent. In a recent PhoCusWright study, nearly 90 percent of respondents said they were comfortable receiving general information or promotional offers, but more than half were uncomfortable sharing their location with social media networks.

A key factor that determines customers’ receptivity to your targeted offers is choice: Customers who want customized service, and are willing to provide personal information to get it, need to choose — or opt-in — to this system.

This permission-based approach is not new, but it’s powerful. Asking permission is not only smart business practice, it’s the nice thing to do. Customers want to trust and like your brand. Make it easier for them by allowing them to opt-in when they step onto your property, visit your website, or ‘Like’ your Facebook page. If you want to be more proactive, reach out to your email lists specifically to offer them this choice.

By giving your guests a choice about how they engage with your property, and segmenting your targeted offers, you’ll be better able to reap the rewards of SoLoMo marketing and strike the balance between privacy and customized service. Over time, if you consistently demonstrate your commitment to choice and relevance, more guests may become receptive to getting personal with your property or brand.

 

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Customer Engagement Touchpoints

This week’s theme on the Hospitality Blog is customer engagement. Here is a section taken directly from my eCornell course Hospitality Demand Management with New Media Marketing. Using the customer consumption stages, we can identify eight touchpoints where the supplier can interact with the customer along each of those stages. Be sure to download the complete guide on Engagement Touchpoints after reading this introduction. 

Unlike many goods and services, hospitality is co-created between the producer and the consumer. Hospitality is jointly produced and experienced when suppliers like hotels, attractions, and restaurants individually or working together co-produce experiences with their guests. This means that innovation can occur at virtually every point when the customer engages with the brand. The key is identifying where value can be delivered by enhancing the guest experience.

The Customer Engagement Cycle

What if we consider customers with regard to these consumption stages? That is, how can we map new media innovation onto the customers’ hospitality consumption process? What should be the main focus of this innovation? The answer is relatively simple. It’s about engagement. That is, how can we create more and better opportunities to involve customers in the process of producing value through their hospitality experiences?

If you take the hospitality consumption process, the dreaming, planning, executing, and reflecting, and think of it more as a cycle as opposed to a linear process with a beginning and end, so that the reflecting stage may actually be considered the beginning part of a new dreaming stage, we get the Customer Engagement Cycle.

Engagement Touchpoints

Now let’s think of how we can map touchpoints where the supplier and the customer interact at the level of the brand. I’m going to discuss eight of these touchpoints. For more detail as far as what these touchpoints are and for examples of recent innovations that new media companies have used, there is a downloadable PDF file associated with this topic.

Dreaming: Targeting

Let’s start off first at the dreaming stage. There’s where suppliers can think about how to target customers either by placing, for example, advertisements on Web sites or by using new media to attract customers and to create a kind of virtual experience, such as with lifestyle videos.

Dreaming: Conversing

Also at the dreaming stage, there’s the chance to converse with customers and have a live discussion. This might be on review sites or even by having a link on a Web site where potential customers can have a conversation with representatives of the brand.

Planning: Socializing

Moving from the dreaming onto the planning stage, there is the socializing touchpoint. This is where customers can look at a Web site, and by examining pictures or videos of other guests they can get a sense through live or vicarious education of what that experience is going to be like and become socialized into it.

Executing: Producing

Moving further along the planning stage, there’s the producing or the execution touchpoint. And this is where new media innovations can be used for customers to help produce, and specifically co-produce new service processes. So, for example, using their mobile phones as a way to expedite the check-in process.

Executing: Co-Creation

As we move further along into the executing stage, we have opportunities for touchpoints through experiences where customers can help to co-create the experience for themselves with the supplier. Apps such as a digital concierge where guests can contribute information about their favorite attractions and dining in the area can provide an excellent opportunity for guests to co-create their experiences.

Executing: Responding

As the consumption process continues, there’s the responding touchpoint. And this is where the supplier, the brand marketer, or even the operations personnel can interact with customers such as through tweeting or even through some kind of satisfaction discussion, so that the customers can use their own voice and talk about their experience.

Reflecting: Promoting

As we move from execution into the reflecting stage, here’s where we try to enlist our customers as advocates for the brand. So we encourage them to promote the brand by communicating with others on their social network.

Reflecting: Relating

And finally, the very end of the stage as we go from reflecting back into dreaming again is where we look at relating as a touchpoint. And that is connecting with customers through specific brand communities, such as creating Facebook fan pages where customers–hundreds, thousands, or even millions of customers–can become a part of that brand family and continue their relationship with the company.

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3 Ways to Manage Consumer Generated Media

The continually rising number of people participating in creating media through social networks is increasing every day, which means the amount of consumer generated media about your company is also increasing on social sites like Facebook and Twitter, on review sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, and also on photo and video sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube. This means marketers no longer control or have as much control over the brand message. How do you align this consumer generated media with your brand and make it consistent with the target market that your property is going after?

The challenge is letting go of that need to control the brand message and figuring out how best to manage the consumer generated media instead. The key to managing instead of of controlling lies in a few strategies of engagement and understanding.

1. Engage in a Dialogue with your Customers

Use social media to respond to consumer comments. It may take some time, but a customer who receives a reply, a retweet, or a thank you feels connected to your company. Knowing that someone is listening and taking their opinions and comments seriously creates a relationship. Responding to negative feedback and letting a customer know that “that isn’t how we run things” and “next time, your experience will be more ____” gives you the opportunity to say what your brand promise is. Replying and retweeting comments and photos that are aligned with your brand promise is another way to promote what  your brand promise is to more eyes online.

2. Promote Conversations that Align with your Brand

You can encourage customers to talk about some of their brand experiences along key brand themes. If your resort is family friendly, marketers can invite customers to share their stories, photos, videos, testimonials, etc. of their family having fun on your property either on their own social networks or directly onto your company website.

3. Analyze What People are Saying

A tool that I found to be very insightful and illustrative in gathering social media data is to create a word cloud with a tool like Wordle. Just copy and paste anything from one review to dozens and it will use a kind of algorithm to count the words that are used in consumer text. It then emphasizes certain words that really stand out, or that are used the most, and it creates a visual picture of what people saying.

A more involved approach is what’s called content analysis. And this would require a team of analysts or managers reading through customer comments and manually pulling out key themes. What do people seem to be saying the most?

Given the deluge of customer data that’s appearing in social media today, it seems clear to most that a more efficient and effective way to measure brand consistency across multiple channels is a necessity. Few have time to crawl through five or even fifteen social networks looking for and analyzing comments and photos.

Fortunately, a fast emerging vertical in the hospitality analytics space is ORM, or online reputation management. There are a number of new firms (such as Revinate, newBrandAnalytics, and ReviewPro) that have appeared in the past few years that have looked at this problem of this massive amount of qualitative consumer comment data, and asked “How can we make sense of this to enable hospitality managers to understand what people are saying as well as to make better decisions?”

What they do is they capture consumer conversations across a range of social media channels. They then aggregate and even score this comment data to give marketers both a sense of what people are saying, and whether this they call sentiment is trending in a desired direction or not. Such intelligence generated by these and other online reputation management providers is an enormous leap in our ability to assess brand consistency. Not only in terms of the marketer generated brand messaging, but perhaps more importantly in terms of consumer generated messaging, and whether or not the two are aligned as intended.

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Getting into the Movie Making Business

It’s doubtful that hospitality firms, and for that matter, any company, will completely veer away from traditional advertising media such as print, television, outdoor billboards, PR, etc., but more and more each day, resources are being redistributed to make way for new media channels such as social media, internet search, and mobile. Some firms are even transitioning their entire marketing budgets over to new media!

New media offers an exciting and innovative way to communicate the brand promise. Today, where anything and everything can be online in a matter of minutes, potential customers have come to expect the ability to get a sense of what kind of experience you will offer to them, even before they buy. They want to know more about your brand and the promise it offers if they do choose you. And hotels have answered. Hotel websites have evolved from kind of of the web 1.0 version of online brochures to much more interactive sites where visitors can take virtual tours to explore property, check availability, engage in virtual experiences such as taking the guest’s view as they go down a water slide, and even watch short movies.

These short movies have recently exploded onto the scene as a particularly exciting medium which allows a consumer to be engaged with you brand promise for longer than the thirty or sixty second TV spots that used to be the industry norm. The ability to add live streaming video to websites or host entire YouTube or Vimeo channels of short videos has certainly ushered in a new era of very creative hospitality marketing, and a growing number of companies such as the Drake Hotel (featured video), the Ritz-Carlton (below), and Royal Caribbean are taking this opportunity to produce very slick, professional videos. And these videos run the gamut from one- to two-minute lifestyle videos that use highly stylized images of model target customers, to even longer video vignettes of ten minutes or more that tell a story of the brand through a fictional customer’s eyes.

Another branch of video marketing that many companies are now starting to explore is consumer-generated video. While these videos don’t require much time or effort on your part and they can reap huge benefits in the form of positive and organic testimonials shared by customers to customers, there is the risk of brand drift.

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What Defines Your Brand?

If you find developing the new media marketing strategy for your company frustrating and difficult, you aren’t alone! Many times, the information at your disposal is imperfect and not fully complete. This is where defining your brand, and whether or not your brand promise is actually appropriate for your company become very important.

First, of course, you need to think about what a brand really is. You need to think about not only the company focused perspective of the brand (the things that are trademarked and can be legally protected), but also the more important side, the customer focused perspective.

In today’s market, your brand is in essence a collection of meanings based on how the consumer perceives your brand. It is a collection of the consumer’s associations of everything from overall quality level of the stay experience and service to the kinds of amenities offered in the hotel bathroom to their takeaway experience after a stay, to the other kind of customers typically associated with that brand. These associations form a more complete picture of what that brand experience would be.

It’s the brand strategists’ job to try to then communicate those meanings through various marketing channels so that the potential customers understand exactly what brand experience they can expect. The basis of that is the brand promise: the articulation of what that experiential take away for the brand will be.

 

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Communicating in Circles: Why This is Good for You

Within the last ten to fifteen years, new media channels have exploded into the daily lives of the hospitality consumer. There are now dozens upon dozens of new ways in which we can communicate with our customers, not just market to them.

It’s no longer that you as the hospitality marketer come up with a brand, come up with a way in which to symbolize or communicate that brand, choose media channels, and send that message out to our target customers. That’s a very linear approach, or presentation-based marketing communications. With new media, in particular social media, the nature of that communication has really evolved, and it’s now something where the consumer has much greater control over that message and of the brand itself. We call this consumer-generated influence or consumer-generated media.

In other words, marketing communications now is much more circular. You have to think not only about how you can influence the consumers’ perceptions of your brand, but also how they’ll influence others by interacting with your brand in their own social channels. Will they tag their location while on your property? Will they mention what a great time, what a beautiful lobby, what great food, etc. while they are there? Upload photos of your property to their friends? This is where the opportunity for dialogue between the brand and your customers comes alive.

Responding to Twitter, Facebook, TripAdvisor posts and the like gives you an opportunity to directly communicate your brand to your customers as well as learn more about how they perceive your brand and what they expect from it.

 

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The Whys for Buys: Getting the Information You Need

Demographic information from convention and visitors bureaus, third-parties, or even your own central reservation system is easily accessible, but doesn’t give you a good picture of the nuances of your complex target market. Demographics won’t tell you the “whys for buys,” or why a consumer would be motivated to choose one brand over another.

Psychographics, or lifestyle information, and behavioral information, however, give you a much closer look at purchasing behaviors and also usage occasions (when consumers choose to purchase a product). Lifestyle is our pattern of living and it’s usually measured in marketing studies by AIO variables, or Activities, Interests, and Opinions. If enough members of your target market have similar activities, interests, and opinions, you can create a lifestyle profile that will give you a much more complete understanding of who that customer is, and more importantly, the things that would attract them to the property over a competitor’s.

Behavioral segmentation also helps. That would be the “why” someone chooses your property for usage occasions. Is it for weddings, conferences, romantic weekend getaways? In addition to telling us more about the customer, it also gives us information about the kinds of products, services, and design features they expect. It also helps us figure out better ways in which we can communicate with them so that it will resonate with them and hopefully drive their demand.

Now how can you get this kind of information? Well, one way to do it is hire a market research firm to do a lifestyle profile or a psychographic study, but of course this costs money, and it takes time. There happens to be, though, very rich information that’s readily available today for free, and that’s through social media.

Customers who are traveling to a destination often will have very detailed online conversations about what they seek and the kinds of activities they enjoy before they even make a decision on where to stay. If you’re able to pull down this information, aggregate it, and analyze it, you can come up with a psychographic profile of the potential target market. The challenge is figuring out what from that social media conversation is most relevant.