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Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned at SXSW

Call me an early adopter. Since graduating from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration in ’03 – I’ve implemented digital marketing strategies for 65 hotels located everywhere from Atlantic City (holy rollers!) to Jerusalem (holy cow!). From San Francisco to South Beach, the digital marketing world moves at the speed of light. In order to keep up, hospitality marketers often have to look outside the industry.

SXSW Interactive, (aka today’s marketer’s Disneyworld), is a great place to catch wind of emerging interactive trends. In anticipation of SXSW Interactive 2013, I took a look back at my big 3 takeaways from SXSW Interactive 2012 (still totally relevant to today’s hospitality marketer!). 

You Are What You Curate: Content is King

Content is viral & short lived. Managing it across your touch points is time consuming. But, give me good content all day long, because good content is a marketer’s best friend. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a two- or four-star property; your physical room ain’t going to sell itself in today’s competitive marketplace. Dismissing content that engages consumers is a lost opportunity. You’re only as good as the company you keep, so choose your content partners wisely. Associating your brand or hotel with the “right” partners is a quick & dirty way to build cachet & generate buzz.

At SLS South Beach, we recently brought on Net-A-Porter & Mr. Porter as content partners during Art Basel. Net a Porter was willing to create a co-branded SLS South Beach site, featuring Art Basel worthy looks for guests. Additionally, they’d offer free same day shipping for SLS South Beach guests.

In exchange, we agreed to promote the SLS / Net-a-Porter site across our social, web, email, & in room iPad touch points. The cross promotion was a win-win for both partners. Net a Porter gained some sales, but moreover, each brand leveraged the other’s audience to promote a cool piece of content that added to their user/guest experience & brand cachet.

Capitalize on Consumer FOMO

FOMO is the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you’re missing out on something that your peers are doing, in the know about, or in possession of more or something better. FOMO may be a social angst that’s always existed, but it’s going into overdrive, thanks to real time digital/social updates, and to our constant companion, the smartphone. Smart marketers manifest FOMO in social media-heavy viral-prone campaigns.

To build buzz on the Grand Opening of SLS South Beach and promote Hyde Beach, the hotel’s day/nightclub, we launched the “Hyde Beach Escape Sweepstakes”. We created a PR-worthy package, chock full of indulgent glamour & promoted it across our channels with “last chance” and “limited time only” messaging in order to create urgency and, of course, jealousy. The campaign’s success was multi-faceted–we gained hundreds of new Facebook followers & ended up selecting a socially influential winner amongst hundreds of applicants.  To top it off, we even sold a few Hyde Beach Escape packages for those who couldn’t wait to win!

Practice Agile Marketing

As an interactive marketer, you want to capitalize on consumer’s FoMo. But, suffering from FoMo in your professional life, can be dangerous. For example, just because the hotel down the street hopped onto Spotify doesn’t mean it’s the right social strategy for your property. Social media may be cheap, but it’s certainly not free. Engaging social content & community management requires time & human capital – better to build a community than to build empty house (or profile). Get your Facebook timeline strategy in place,  & chances are you can apply what you learned to the next hot social media platform. Stay nimble & plan in six-month broad strokes. Plan like the industry moves, allowing your strategy to remain nimble & needs based. Work on a great piece of content & get your Facebook Timeline strategy in place before hopping onto the next emerging platform.

Key Takeaways

  • When producing content, audience is the primary focus. – Ask: What would my audience love?
  • We’re moving toward a feed-based system, and companies will have an increasingly tough time squeezing in overly promotional content. For this reason, brands have to be entertainers. – Think beyond your product, evoke emotion, think lifestyle. capitalize on consumer FOMO!
  • Great content published on a persistent basis takes an enormous amount of work, but smart brands understand it can have a powerful impact – Quality over quantity, practice agile marketing.
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Recapping the Effect of Online Reputation on Revenue

Last week, Revinate and eCornell co-hosted a webinar that outlined five ways hotels can improve their online reputation. By measuring their reputation management efforts, involving the entire operations team, and tying compensation rewards to reputation achievements, hoteliers will see improvements in their overall guest satisfaction scores and, in turn, will receive higher review ratings. In case you missed this informative session, you can listen to the recording and view the presentation deck.

As our Cornell University co-host published in a recent study, proactive online reputation has a direct impact on your hotel’s revenue; their Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) report shows that a one-point increase in a hotel’s average user rating on a 5-point scale makes potential customers 13.5% more likely to book that hotel. Moreover, hotels with great online reviews can charge more than those that do not rate as high. Finally, hotels that use social media for service and engage in the space to surprise and delight customers earn more positive guest sentiment scores, which positively effects hotel revenue .

As mentioned during the webinar, eCornell has, in partnership with Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, developed 14 professional certificates and 38 courses in hospitality management. Among them is the new Hospitality Marketing & New Media Strategies for Revenue Growth. This course in new media marketing, called Marketing the Hospitality Brand through New Media: Social, Mobile & Search, is free and open to all.

Revinate received a number of questions that came in during the session via live Twitter chat that are answered in greater depth here:

How again can property management be awarded bonuses or compensation benefits for better online reputation?

By paying close attention to Revinate‘s guest satisfaction (Gs2) reports, hotels can leverage aggregated hotel review data to set goals for hotel staff to meet across all functional areas. Overall guest sentiment scores, for example, can make a valuable incentive for hotel general managers. Department heads could be awarded bonuses based upon departmental sentiment, while front desk managers could be given goals around response time or social media management. To learn how social media will change hospitality compensation plans, have a look at our blog post on the topic.

What are some ways that hotels can involve their entire hotel team when it comes to online reputation management?

A few ideas that we covered during the webinar included having your front desk employees engage with guests on social media to maintain responsiveness or offering spot bonuses to employees who are recognized by name in online reviews. To ensure that all employees see this feedback, one of our webinar attendees shared that her hotel posts all positive reviews in employee elevators, locker rooms and cafeteria. Ideas like these will guarantee staff involvement and engagement.

Is there any data available that is focused on the limited service or economy hotel sectors? A lot of the studies discussing the relationship between online reputation management and property performance seem to focus on the luxury segment.

While the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research study showed a direct relationship between revenue per available room and online reputation scores, the report did not include the economy segment. Nevertheless, the study showed that revenue grew by chain scale from the top down: A 1% boost in reputation led to a .49% increase in RevPAR at luxury hotels, .74% at upper upscale, .83% at upscale, 1.13% at upper midscale and 1.42% at midscale. Moreover, about 20% of Revinate’s 15,000+ customer base fall into this limited service segment and firmly believe that online reputation is equally, if not more important, in the category.

re-posted via the Revinate blog.

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7 Ways You Can Use Vine to Market Your Hotel

It’s been nearly a month since Twitter launched its new video-sharing mobile application Vine, and it’s not just individuals taking advantage of these six second looping video clips, companies and hotels are joining in this new marketing opportunity too. This app, which is currently only available for the iPhone and iPod touch, allows users create videos which can be straight shots or stop-motion format (which is very popular) with no editing capabilities. Similar to Instagram, the videos can be tracked by hashtags and subject matter as well as Vine’s 12 organization categories such as food, travel, and even how-to.

In just a few weeks, one of the major groups to attach to the new app is not surprisingly travelers, many posting brag-like videos of how great their hotels are. Six seconds can capture an entire tour from the front of your building, through the lobby, into the bar, into the room, and even a view from the balcony. Of the 30 or so videos I watched, at least ⅔ of them showed the bathroom amenities.

So how can you use Vine to market your hotel?

1. Virtual Tours

Make them yourself or encourage your guests to make them and tag your hotel to show off your space. You can do this with your different guest rooms, ballrooms, dining facilities, and even fun things to do around the property.

2. Welcome Message

Record from the point of view of an arriving guest to show prospective customers what a warm welcome you give the second they arrive at the front of the building.

3. How-To

Serving a special drink at the bar or specialty dessert at dinner? Try filming a short “how-to” make it and post it for all your guests so they can take their experience home with them.

4. Daily Menu

Why just post your beautiful nightly specials in just the printed menu? Why not show them off in a short series of styled stop motion videos to give guests something to think about all day?

5. Weather Reports

First thing in the morning, hop outside and film a few views from your hotel to show what it’s going to be like outside that day.

6. Contests

Ask your potential guests to submit their own Vine videos under a certain theme like “what is love” or “fun in the sun” and award the best video with a weekend getaway.

7. You: Behind the Scenes

Take the opportunity to show off your employees doing what they do best. Show off a little personality and you will humanize your brand and give customers a reason to connect emotionally with you.

While it is just starting to find it’s legs in a crowded media market and it’s unknown whether it will stick around, Vine is quite an entertaining opportunity to engage with your customers. Have you already jumped on the bandwagon? How are you using Vine? Or, if you’re new to the game, how would you use it to market your hotel?

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DealAngel Offers Hotel Pricing Intelligence to Other Sites

DealAngel Offers Data for B2B

DealAngel may be best known for allowing consumers to search for hotels and compare the prices to hotels with similar market value to ensure they are really getting the best deal before buying. They are now causing quite a buzz over their recently launched new API that adds an interesting B2B element that Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) and “daily deal” websites will love. While still in beta and private, social trip planner Gogobot has already integrated DealAngel’s new API, but it should go fully public by April.

What Does it Do?

While many hotels often offer “30% off today, what a deal!,” no one really knows the true value if compared to similar hotels or what you would normally pay on any given day. It may not even be a deal at all when compared to its true market value. With this new option, sites can build DealAngel’s technology into their own, letting consumers know if it is actually a deal they are seeing, or just your regular ‘ol “always discounted” rate.

  • OTAs can actually rank their hotel offers by how good the deal really is
  • “Daily Deal” sites will be able to check that “30% off, what a deal” out to verify if it actually is a good deal before adding it to the day’s list
  • Hotel wholesalers or bulk rate negotiators could compare their offer from a particular hotel with historical data

It’s certainly an interesting move for DealAngel, but potentially a very lucrative one. In the age of “deal fatigue,” consumers are going to want to know just how good their deal is compared to all the others and this new API could offer that solution.

Source: TechCrunch originally published “DealAngel Launching API to Let Other Sites Build Hotel Pricing Intelligence into their Wares” – Please see their article for more detailed information on this topic.

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5 Best Practices for Managing Online Feedback

What a difference a few years make in your reputation

When I started working at Revinate in 2010, I spent a lot of time speaking to hoteliers about why it is so important to monitor online feedback and proactively engage with guests over social media. At the time, less than 4% of hotels were responding to online reviews and many hotels weren’t even reading their public guest feedback, let alone using social media in a business capacity. At the time, the research didn’t exist to show the impact that reviews make on booking decisions but over the last couple of years many studies have been published that leave very little doubt as to the importance of online reputation management.

In 2010, TripAdvisor and Forrester began polling consumers about the impact of management responses. The results showed that for the majority of consumers, a management response to a bad review is reassuring and that all things being equal consumers would book with a hotel that responds to reviews versus one that remains silent. TripAdvisor now reports that hoteliers now respond to 25% of new reviews. And, in 2012, Cornell Center for Hospitality Research published a study that put the impact of great ratings into perspective for revenue managers – – hotels with great reviews can charge more than those that don’t rate as high. While intuitive, the study was a big wake-up call for many who have been waiting for a serious ROI study before dedicating time and resources.

Today, the conversation has shifted from why it is so important to manage online feedback to the best ways to operationalize this data and measure it. Working with more than 15,000 clients across 120 countries, I see a lot of different practices around online reputation management. Following are my top 5 best practices, most of which were rarely seen a few years ago.

1. Get serious about measurement

In 2012 I saw many hotels getting serious about understanding the impact of online reputation management to their own bottom line. I saw tremendous presentations by clients, such as qualia in Australia, who used the multi-channel funnel in Google Analytics to measure the direct traffic and assisted conversions from TripAdvisor. In the case of qualia, with dedication to responding to reviews and focusing on improving quality ratings, the team drove 7% more revenue in 2012 than in 2010 and 2011 combined.

2. Show me the money

We all know that what gets measured gets done and what gets compensated gets done the quickest. Many management groups are now including online reputation metrics in employee and management compensation plans. Traditionally, management compensation packages have been based on factors such as market share, financial performance, traditional comment cards or guest satisfaction surveys and staff satisfaction. But what these measurements fail to account for are the factors that are driving real booking decisions today such as TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index, online review ratings, management response rates and social media engagement.  If you’re not already doing it, start setting goals and rewarding your hotels that do a great job. Then invite me to your next GM’s gala and I will happily give out the online reputation award for 2013.

3. Involve the right people

This best practice may sound obvious, but for a long time, many hotels had one or two people responsible for reading and responding to online reviews and they largely acted in a vacuum. Today, many hotels involve all teams in the process of monitoring feedback, responding to reviews, engaging guests and ensuring that feedback is used to improve the operation of the hotel. Many hotels and portfolios are forming committees to review feedback or ensuring that the leading issues from online reviews are presented during weekly stand-ups and action items are assigned to the people empowered to resolve the issues.

4. Use social media for service recovery

The press still likes to cover stories about Twitter being used at hotels for service recovery, so it’s clear that these types of engagement are still few and far between. Given the real-time nature of Twitter, actively monitoring your account gives you the best chance of nipping an issue in the bud, before it becomes a full-blown PR nightmare. The New York Times covered the story of basketball star, Chipper Jones, who was unhappy with his room at a large hotel in New York and took to Twitter to complain. Luckily, the hotel, a Revinate client, was monitoring Twitter and saw the complaints in real time. With a process in place to deal with guest complaints, they dispatched an engineer who went right up to his room to take care of the issues.

Another best practice for Twitter is to monitor the Twitter hash tag of any group meetings or conferences taking place in your hotel.  Doing so will allow you to monitor the comfort of your guests, and as a result, the satisfaction of your clients. Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego has made this a practice at the hotel and has caught issues around temperature and wi-fi in real time, leaving the clients floored by the hotel’s responsiveness.

5. Surprise and Delight

While engaging on Twitter and Facebook provides many ways to forge tighter bonds with your guests, there is nothing like merging the virtual world with the real-world by sending an old-fashioned amenity to the rooms of guests that check-in on foursquare, tweet positively about the hotel, or post photos to your Facebook page while they are on site. These surprise and delight tactics go a long way towards driving loyalty and word-of-mouth about the great service at your hotel. I have been the recipient of many fruit plates, cupcakes and bottles of wine as a result of my tweets and I never fail to take a picture to share with my network, praising the hotel for its great hospitality.

As we move deeper in 2013, I am looking forward to seeing these programs put into practice by more hotels. With real-benefits and hard ROI to back you up, we wish you good luck as you delve deeper into a new frontier.

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What’s in Store for Hotels in 2013

Recently, the team at Web in Travel asked Sabre Hospitality President and General Manager, Felix Laboy, for his 2013 reflections and predictions. Felix has also appeared in eCornell’s Ask the Expert segments for our Free New Media Course for Hospitality Professionals.

What are the three things you think will happen in the hotel space in 2013?

• RevPar will continue to grow, driven primarily by continued demand and decelerating supply. Price pressure created by the unprecedented shopping capability of consumers will direct hotel investment towards converged and interfaced technology solutions that support micro adjustments to ARI and cascade to all electronic channels seamlessly. Channel connectivity will continue to be critical.

• Mobile device activity for hotels will approach 50% of all electronic shopping activity (think all mobile devices or non-desktop  and not just mobile phones).

• Hoteliers will require integrated distribution and marketing technology in order to support the increasing convergence of these disciplines and rise of ancillary selling strategies.

What are the three things hotels should invest in for the new year?

Invest in solutions that will:

  1. Increase profitability;
  2. Maximize efficiency;
  3. Enable the personalization of your guest’s complete experience.

In our space that certainly means investing in better booking solutions, including a device responsive solution as a brand standard. The ability to engage and serve consumers consistently across all devices globally will be paramount.

Also, consider investing in attribution modeling to supplement current tracking and measurement tools.  The key to managing a constantly evolving digital media space is the ability to truly understand contribution of each media channel or touch point vs. just costs or outcomes.

What are your predictions for hotel distribution and marketing next year?

The continued shift towards convergence of Revenue Management, Demand Creation (marketing) and Distribution will be the biggest trend to watch in 2013.

Non-room inventory will become more important to hotel brands.

Innovation around points of sale will encourage Hoteliers to adapt distribution and marketing strategies

Which hotel groups are the ones to watch next year, and why?

Hotel groups to watch are those that continue to focus on customer service and use technology (pre-stay/during the booking process, during the stay and post-stay) to help them provide a better all around experience for the guest.  The web and social media facilitate greater transparency and consumer empowerment. Personalization and recognition delivered in the travel experience has become an (consumer) expectation.

Three important events that happened this year that you think will have significant impact on travel in the future.

• Apple’s increased level of interest in the travel market.
• Continued Political Unrest in the Middle East.
• Fast-growing middle and upper class in BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) who are embracing (far) travel.

Most over-used word/s of 2012?

Mobile, Social Media, SoLoMo: There has been too much focus on the new buzz topics – these tend to get over-discussed and explored, often times leading us to neglect the basics of distribution and digital marketing.

Google: We’ve all heard continual concerns from the hotel industry on Google’s intent to become a travel merchant. Google will continue to provide consumers with the best search results and try to monetize advertising, remaining a referral partner to the hotel industry and not a merchant of record

Most under-estimated word/s of 2012?

SEO: A well-optimized hotel should be seeing 50%+ in organic search traffic – too little time is being spent discussing and leveraging this channel. There is a lot of potential in a strong SEO strategy and it deserves the continued buzz in the marketing world.

Ancillary: The airlines have established their approach to ancillary revenue with consumers and smart hoteliers will embrace this opportunity in a manner that will support their brand position and profitability. All inventory sets (hotel restaurant seats, spa beds and retail) will find their way into the broader distribution and marketing landscape.

What word/s will disappear from the hotel vocabulary?

“OTAs are the enemy” – OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) have a critical place in any hotel distribution and marketing strategy – what is critical is to manage them with a holistic view of all true costs by channel and also impact they have on other channels and vice versa.

As the year winds to an end, what will you remember most about 2012?

2012 was the year that hotels started to question whether technology should be a core competency internally or a service that can be successfully outsourced.

What are you most looking forward to in 2013?

Taking a holiday with my family.

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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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Following the Consumer Path in Decision Making

Why would a hospitality company want to invest so much into creating a strong presence through video, Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, and other social media? Frankly, it’s part of the dreaming and planning process that consumers might consider with regard to a property. Moreover, it controls for consistency with your brand promise, your target market for the property, and even your hotel’s objectives.

The fact of the matter is, today’s consumers take alternate paths over time to making a booking and even sharing their experience while at your property.

Think for a moment about the pre-stay. You could have a leisure customer checking the national or state tourist organization site to find out what’s available and what the destination has to offer. They could be contacting the convention and visitors bureau to find out what information there might be about that particular location. And they could be using a website like Passkey to find out information about what leisure activities are associated with some event.

Pre-stay can also involve interactions with an online travel agency, your brand site, or even sites like Groupon where individuals may be putting together a package to offer before they even think about staying at your property.

Continuing along that time continuum, you can think also about the stay. With over a billion bloggers and Facebook users, 500,000 Twitter accounts, and 100,000 Instagram users out there, you can bet that a good percentage of your consumers are saying something while staying at your property. Did they snap a pretty picture of the lobby, the lounge, the view from their room? Did they have an especially helpful interaction with a concierge while staying at the property? Did they find interesting things to do or places to eat using your property’s interactive mobile application?

And finally, there’s the post-stay. That opportunity for the customer to savor the experience, download or upload pictures from the property, or post a TripAdvisor review.

And it’s not just the leisure consumer. There are business consumers, there are individuals who are traveling by themselves, with groups, or as part of a large event as well. There are even transition consumers such as your business travelers who also stay at your property for leisure purposes.

There are many paths, many consumers, many objectives.

The entire decision making process is evolving with media and often can involve multiple forms of imagery, emotion, and cognition before arriving at a complicated decision. The time has come to forget about the traditional one dimensional view of the consumer.

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The Mothership of Your Brand

The brand site is the mothership of new media. It is a website that should convey your brand at every turn. It is a repository of information and a transaction engine for new media. It is the place where your brand is projected and potentially protected. It is a source of information. It is a device to improve or enhance service while the experience is being enjoyed on the property. It’s a transactor. Ultimately, it can even be a relationship builder for the hotel.

Your brand site needs to be consistent. It needs to be consistent for the user regardless of the device that’s used (a PC, a tablet, a mobile phone). It also needs to be able to interact easily with internal systems like the centralized reservation system or the property management system as well as externally with online travel agency (OTA) sites, with search engines, with social media sites, and for that matter, with mobile devices with regard to particular applications.

And finally it needs to be efficient. Efficient for the user, and efficient for the hotel in terms of its ability to transact execute, provide information.

As brand sites in the hospitality market continue to evolve, it’s important that you see what’s out there and how other brands—including your competition—are leveraging their sites to serve a multitude of important functions. Are they meeting the all of the above criteria? Are you?

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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.