The travel industry has embraced the power of user generated content while social media management is becoming a core competency.
Travel companies are monitoring Twitter and creating Facebook fan pages to control brand image. These efforts have been designed to create online community, improve customer interaction and provide a new outlet for special offers.
But the immediacy of mobile social networking is changing the dynamics of this process.
With location at the heart of mobile applications, connecting user reviews with the immediacy of mobile feedback presents new challenges for our industry.
How does a restaurant control the fact that an unhappy customer blasts the meal or poor service while at dinner and immediately posts a review on Yelp, Twitter or Facebook?
How can a hotel control the damage of an irate guest when his or her feedback is immediately published on Foursquare or Gowalla?
Clearly monitoring brand is becoming a difficult task.
The smartphone has become a major access point for social computing.
According to a recent comScore report, 30.8% of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5% one year ago.
Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112% in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347% jump.
This trend will continue to accelerate. Immediate annotation of real world experiences is today’s reality.
As travel companies refine their social media strategies, the immediacy of customer feedback will likely cause added stress to the system.
Panelists at the recent PhoCusWright@ITB Bloggers’ Summit, including Robert K. Cole (RockCheetah), Samuel Daams (Travellerspoint), Uwe Frers (Escapio) and Claude Benard (Tnooz and HoteliTour), agreed that posting both positive and negative reviews provide a sense of honesty to online brand management.
Responding to negative reviews is a natural customer service activity, but dealing with individual complaints is not the issue.
A broader concern is the impact a given traveler has on his or her social graph. Location and mobility go hand in hand and travelers are the early adopters of next generation smartphones.
Therefore the immediacy of customer feedback will likely impact our industry first. In order to meet this goal we must move beyond simply monitoring of brand and embrace social network analysis so the supplier or intermediary can respond quickly to those travelers that have broad influence and large numbers of followers.
Yet not all Tweets are created equal.
Yes, all customers need to be treated fairly, but understanding those with the greatest influence and insuring that their issue is dealt with in a timely manner must become a core competency of all travel providers.
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About Special Nodes
SmartStay is already there as a mobile platform with hotel back-end control of content. Designed specifically for hotels to enable a property-driven connection with the guest, delivering special offers and an interactive ‘virtual concierge’ guide to the local neighborhood/city. This app lets users simply tap to make the phone call for information/reservations and tonce guest downloads the SmartstaySM app from iTunes the hotel’s icon appears on the iPhone screen as a visible call to action. The hotel manages the content, on-line. SmartStay gives hotels the opportunity through a mobile channel to connect with a guest before, during, and after their stay.
Watch a demo video: http://www.smartstayapp.com/
or download the app for a free test at:
http://itunes.apple.com/app/smartstay-guest-services/id360990086?mt=8
I’ve seen some buzz on a new online leisure travel site that will launch in June called HotelMine. Appears they will incorporate social media, mobile apps, and other distribution channesl that will allow members and hotels to communicate with one and other.
@hotelmine – err, well of course you would say you’ve seen some buzz given that as you’re from the company!
Smart phones are making social media mobile. I know I have tweeted comments on the fly at hotels and restaurants. The challenge is for economy strapped companies in travel to find a way to cope with all this new technology. The timing is tough.
The ability to leave instant, real time feedback needs to be embraced. If your company is worried about what customers are going to tweet, it sounds like you need to take a look at how your company is operating. The mindset should be: “Alright! Now our customers can brag about us in real time.”
There’s a wonderful chapter in Mitch Joel’s book Six Pixels of Separation, which notes that if dealt with correctly and immediately, customers will often sympathize with a company that acknowledges a negative review and publicly works to fix the issue.
Chase – I could not agree more:
“If your company is worried about what customers are going to tweet, it sounds like you need to take a look at how your company is operating.”
It is key for companies to embrace this thought – and use the information flying around the web via mobile technologies to improve their operations, product and service level.
Another quote I use often: “if you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.”
Totally agree with this article, Norm. Also want to point out, however, that mobile has enormous potential to transform how guests interact with hotels/resorts while onsite, too.
The savviest hoteliers will begin to focus on how mobile can be used to improve guest experiences and also create new revenue streams. I wrote a post a few months back that provides a rough sketch of what’s in store… http://ow.ly/1pYnF
Thanks!
-az
I am in the auto transportation business and the mobile/social media platforms have changed our car shipping business in the last couple of years. From apps to track our auto transports to the business increases we have seen because of our stance on social media sites they have changed our business.
Like many things which have positive and negative ramifications. On one hand it will help in improvising the ways of functioning of many service provider but on the other hand it can help the customer to abuse his capacity and make the service provider suffer as he will wants everything as per his whims and fancies. As a service provider you can not give everything to everyone. Though it is a powerful tool but the biggest issue will be how to use it. Efforts of years and serving thousands of customer with good service can go down the drain with few bad write-up’s. It becomes a moral duty of media providers to check before posting what has been written and anything without checking can ruin many business as whatever one may do there are customers who are bound to be unhappy. Getting such a luxury of posting through mobile can help the customers take the travel companies or hotels for a ride too. We are also developing such system but plan to have few executive checking the issues with an offended customer before it being getting published on our website.