The Revinate Blog

Social Media Dilbert Style: #WebWednesday Marketing News

2013-05-22T08:27:39-07:00

Happy #WebWednesday social media fans! If you are a social marketer and work in an enviroment like the one portrayed in the Dilbert comic strip above, well...we feel for you. On a more positive note, we've had quite the exciting week thus far at Revinate. We recently launched our new inGuest™ Surveys which we believe will revolutionize the hospitality reputation management space and have already received a lot of great feedback from clients and prospective customers.

Moreover, we're readying for not one, but THREE upcoming webinars that will focus on a variety of topics. On May 30th, we will discuss the importance of mobile for hotel marketers. On June 5th, we will review how social media is used for hotel crisis management. Finally, on June 11th we will partner with Cornell University to address the next generation of guest satisfaction. Finally, we have uploaded a new video to our YouTube channel that provides an overview of our new survey solution. We hope you have an enjoyable rest of your week!

ARTICLES AND NEWS:

How to Measure Your Marketing Performance

Everything You Need to Know About Google's Big Announcements

Thoughts on How to Execute Hotel Social Media Marketing Strategy

Google+ Redesign Looks a Lot Like Facebook, Pinterest

Visual opinions - Understanding video reviews in the travel industry

Social media strategies: Show, don't tell with Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook

Social media: The new face of disaster response

Hotel digital conundrum: brand building VS demand generation

5 Hospitality Tips for Achieving Top Rated Customer Satisfaction

Google Local businesses get new rating system

5 questions brands should ask before using any social media tool

How Can Vine Improve Your Hotel's Social Media Options?

Rethinking Traditional Guest Satisfaction

2013-05-21T02:05:00-07:00

The Popularity of online reviews and the importance of social media are changing the way that hotels are approaching how to gather customer feedback. Historically, hotels have relied on extensive post-stay surveys and mystery shoppers to ascertain service levels, customer satisfaction, and areas for improvement. Today, online reviews are providing hoteliers with rich data about guest satisfaction to help them please customers. In addition, online reviews provide a social currency that drives new bookings and trust in hotels.

We can learn a lot from the growth of online reviews to determine better ways to administer and use survey data. First, and perhaps most obvious, online reviews are useful to both hoteliers and consumers because of their free-form structure that allows guests to talk only about the services and amenities that impacted their stays. With traditional surveys, primarily closed-ended questions such as “please rate your satisfaction with your room from 1 to 10” will not yield rich data about what a customer liked or disliked about, for example, his room, or who at the hotel made his hotel special. Rather, traditional surveys are formulated by hotels to focus on areas that they feel need to be measured, rather than what is most important and top of mind to customers.

The highly structured nature of traditional surveys used to be critical for accurately measuring and reporting on guest satisfaction but today new sentiment analysis technology makes it possible to easily analyze and report on unstructured data in just as reliable a way, with a much richer data-set. Through reports that show which topics, from ontology specific to hospitality, are trending positively or negatively, management doesn’t have to know what to ask in advance to find hot-button issues or get detailed feedback about any service or amenity on property.

With reliable reporting comes the ability to fully operationalize the data, even basing compensation plans on the results. Equally important, it allows you to bring voice of the customer data into your discussions around capital improvements, training programs and operational changes.

The second reason why many hoteliers are rethinking traditional guest satisfaction survey methods is because they recognize the value that public guest feedback has on new bookings. The TripBarometer Survey states that 93% of travellers worldwide say online reviews have an impact on their booking decisions. This trend, in addition to SEO benefits and the fact that TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index takes review frequency in mind, makes it clear that hoteliers should focus on driving guests to share feedback publicly, through social channels, to reap the best rewards.

For hoteliers that worry what will happen when survey feedback can be shared publicly, it’s time to accept the reality that your guests are already writing and reading online reviews, tweets and posts about your hotel at an increasing rate. Embrace the transparency as it drives consumer trust, allows you to connect with guests and access data not only about your hotel, but your competition. This competitive data can be easily mined to understand where you are winning and losing in guests’ eyes.

In April, 2012, the largest hospitality company in the world, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts replaced their traditional guest survey system with a solution that collects review style feedback directly from guests. The decision was based on extensive research and testing, and this bold move has successfully unleashed the power of feedback to drive marketing exposure and bookings, in addition to providing even richer intelligence. As a result, the hotels are benefiting from powerful insights about their guests that they can easily analyze with sentiment analysis technology, along with more public reviews, which is helping drive awareness of the hotels, in addition to popularity index scores.

For hotels and brands that believe in customer-centric approaches and aren’t afraid to rethink conventional solutions, Revinate, eCornell and Cornell University invite you to learn more about inGuest Surveys, Revinate's 360° approach to guest feedback. Join us on June 11th at 11am EST for a free Webinar with Cornell University’s Bill Carroll, PhD. Space is limited. Sign up here.

Revinate’s new inGuest™ Surveys Reinvent Guest Feedback, Turning Guests into an Army of Marketers

2013-05-21T02:00:00-07:00

Revinate, the hospitality industry’s undisputed leader in reputation management, announces the launch of inGuest™ Surveys, creating the first true 360° approach to guest feedback. The new product, already in use by hotels across the globe, fully integrates modern, innovative guest surveys with Revinate’s market leading online review and social media solution. With over 20,000 hotel customers, Revinate is now helping hospitality businesses fully harness the power of guest feedback to improve operations, engage with customers and drive more bookings.

With inGuest Surveys, Revinate can now turn hotel guests into an army of advocates. Where solicited feedback was once considered only private intelligence, inGuest Surveys allows leading hoteliers to cash in the currency of feedback, using it to drive exposure and new bookings.

Feedback has always been the lifeblood of successful hospitality companies. The growing popularity of online reviews has shown that consumers prefer to write free-form reviews describing their hotel experiences. Reviews also provide hoteliers with a rich source of feedback that can be used to improve operations and, ultimately, guest satisfaction and loyalty. In fact, well over 90% of travelers worldwide say online reviews have an impact on their booking decisions (TripBarometer, March 2013).

With inGuest Surveys, Revinate improves on traditional post-stay surveying methods with an innovative, social approach inspired by online reviews. inGuest Surveys includes a customizable survey that is remarkably easy to manage and deploy. Revinate’s new product also allows guests to share their experiences on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. This social sharing not only appeals to today’s travelers, it is also designed to drive more online exposure and bookings for the hotel. In addition, inGuest Surveys can also be easily and automatically published on hoteliers’ own web sites, improving site engagement, SEO and booking conversion rates.

inGuest Surveys is tightly integrated with reviews from online travel agencies and review sites across the globe, and analyzed with powerful yet intuitive sentiment analysis technology. This complete 360° view will help hoteliers quickly understand what guests love about the property and what needs to be improved, regardless of whether the feedback was published on TripAdvisor, booking.com or any other review site, or solicited directly through inGuest.

Jay Ashton, Revinate co-founder and CEO says, “Today more than ever travelers love to provide feedback, and they do so for two main reasons; to feel empowered and influence other customers, and because they genuinely want to improve a product. Traditional surveys will only meet the second need. A streamlined digital survey that is inspired by online reviews, and that has social-sharing capability, has more to offer. It can meet the needs of hotels to ask specific questions and the needs of customers to influence other people, providing both critical business intelligence and online marketing exposure.”

Kelly Wouters, DotCom Manager at The Hotel Brussels, has been using inGuest Surveys since March. She says, “After using Revinate for online reputation management and seeing the impressive difference that it made across our organization, I was very excited to use inGuest Surveys. By combining our unsolicited feedback from social media channels and multiple review sites with solicited surveys from verified guests, we now have an even more powerful solution for tracking what matters to our customers, allowing us to make impactful changes that impact guest satisfaction. We can automatically share that feedback on our website and post it on Facebook and Twitter to increase conversion rates and drive more bookings. But, what’s really great is that we can now check all our customer insights in one place, making it very easy to take action and improve our service, which benefits our guests,” Kelly adds.

To learn more about inGuest Surveys, visit www.Revinate.com inguest and join our Webinar on June 11^th, in conjunction with Cornell University and eCornell. Sign up here.

Revinate Success Story: B. F. Saul Company Hospitality Group

2013-05-20T07:21:30-07:00

Thanks for checking out this Revinate Success Story. You may download a PDF version of this article. Please check out additional success stories, and contact us for more information about Revinate.

At Revinate, we consistently hear that we help hotels, brands, and portfolios operationalize social media and reviews. We take pride in this news because it means that hotels are finally able to do something that was once very difficult: accurately measure the results of their efforts in social media and even, in many cases, tie bonuses to the results. A great example of a company that has operationalized social content is B.F. Saul Company Hospitality Group. The Hospitality Group operates a portfolio of 20 business class hotels, including 18 that are branded under franchise agreements with Intercontinental Hotels Group, Marriott International and Hilton. The B. F. Saul organization fully owns the properties and employs a team of 1,100 enthusiastic hospitality professionals.

One of those professionals is Frank O’Hara, a Cornell graduate that recently moved from a marketing position with the company into an analytics role. In his marketing role, Frank became very familiar with Revinate since his company signed up the portfolio for Revinate service in 2011, and, as a result, became very focused on monitoring and managing their online reviews.

To operationalize the process of responding to reviews, the team implemented a flow chart and workflow for responding to online reviews to ensure that the General Managers responded appropriately to the right reviews. Frank says, “I was in Revinate every single day and I loved it. I would use the ticketing system to assign reviews to General Managers and then proofread their management responses to ensure they were in-line with our standards. Responding to reviews is critical for a good service recovery experience and it was great to play a role in that process.”

Recognizing the growing importance of positive online reviews for hotels, B. F. Saul created a landing page, www.reviewourhotel.com, to allow guests to easily access the correct review pages for each hotel and restaurant in the portfolio. The site, in conjunction with an internal contest to drive results, led to solid growth in the amount of reviews the properties received, which had the added benefit of driving many hotels up on TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index.

Understanding the competitive nature of hoteliers, the hospitality group has launched a series of contests across the portfolio to get the GMs and operations teams excited about their online reputation. The first contest was all around TripAdvisor. Frank tracked the Popularity Index and percentage of people that would recommend the hotel and developed a composite score that would be comparable across properties in different TripAdvisor markets. When he launched the contest, seven hotels were below five in their markets and by December of the same year, those seven were in the top five in their markets. Frank says, “This growth was, in my opinion, due to constant engagement and reminders, from me, to be cognizant of TripAdvisor and its impact on the hotel. Treating each guest as a potential review writer drives staff to perform better. And, seeing how the hotels were ranked every month provided the competitive push that many GMs needed to really pay attention.”

When it comes to making data-driven decisions, B. F. Saul relies on Revinate’s Sentiment Analysis reporting to bring the voice-of-the- customer data into discussions. Frank O’Hara shares a couple of examples. “We noticed a low sentiment score around internet service for one of our hotels. When we drilled down into the comments around our service, we realized that we weren’t providing good instructions so we created better documentation around how to connect and log in. After making this improvement, we saw the sentiment return to positive.” Sentiment Analysis has also been used to make improvements to front desk teams, transportation directions, HVAC and carpeting at the properties.

In January 2013, B. F. Saul made the decision to add social media scores into the “Big Three Report Card,” the company’s internal guest service scorecard, which is tied directly to incentive plans. Frank says, “As soon as compensation plans are affected, the reliability of data becomes critical. Luckily, we have a lot of confidence in the reporting in Revinate for our social data.” In addition to traditional metrics around Occupancy and RevPAR, the new Report Card also takes into account overall review rating, new reviews per occupied room, custom review response metrics and comp set index on review sites. Frank says, “It’s great that we are now measuring our team across all facets of the business, including reputation. Revinate has not only made it possible, but it has made it easy.”

Social Media News for Marketers - #WebWednesday Late-Edition

2013-05-09T15:56:43-07:00

Hi everyone! So clearly we're a day late this week with our weekly #WebWednesday social media news round-up. It's been a VERY busy week here at Revinate HQ, as our sales team is holding it's annual Sales Summit. Their energetic presence has certainly gotten us even more fired up to continue trailblazing in the online reputation management world and we hope you're as pumped up as we are! It was also a very busy week in the social media and online reputation world so we have lots of social media trends and news to report on below. Enjoy the rest of your week and the comic above - we live in that kind of world these days!

Twitter Advertising Now Open to All U.S. Users

Mining the Facebook social graph to work out what travellers want to do on a trip [INFOGRAPHIC]

Online Marketing 101: Are You Prone to Shiny Object Syndrome?

Best Practices in Hotel Crisis Management

Decoding The Value Of Social Media In Marketing

Posting Best Practices for Facebook Brand Pages

Top 10 Social Media Measurement Tips

Four Seasons Hotels: Engagement carries more value than number of social followers

So You Want To Work In Social Media? 5 Challenges In A Social Media Career

How Hoteliers Can Leverage New Pinterest Features to Enhance Their Online Marketing Strategy

INFOGRAPHIC: 18 Sweet Tips For Facebook Page Posts

TripAdvisor steps up process to include more verified reviews of hotels

Social Media Workflow [INFOGRAPHIC]

6 ideas to help take advantage of Facebook’s new cover photo rules

Reviews & Online Reputation 101 Webinar Recap

2013-05-03T06:45:33-07:00

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our most recent free webinar on Reviews and Online Reputation Management best practices. We have held this webinar several times this year, and each time the content has been updated and well-received by attendees. As we do after every session, we are providing you with both the webinar slide presentation as well as video recording so that you can review the material covered. The assets are below:

Webinar slide presentation
Webinar video recording

Finally, be sure to visit our website soon as we'll be updating our upcoming events page with future free webinars to attend this month!

Social Media News and #WebWednesday Comic

2013-05-01T17:06:17-07:00

Happy #WebWednesday friends! We hope you are having a great week and are staying up-to-date with the latest developments in social media and online reputation management. The stories below are a round-up of the best articles we have come across this week.

Marketing Research Chart: Marketing analytics challenges

Facebook Makes It Easier For Advertisers To Target Feature Phone Users

How a Higher TripAdvisor Ranking Can Help Hotels Book More Room Nights

Facebook travel chief dismisses talk of 'fatigue'

TripAdvisor launches Rave Review widget

Facebook Revamps Brand Pages for Mobile, Desktop Coming Soon

8 Reasons Why You Need to Establish Authority on Google+

How Facebook's EdgeRank works

Cost Per Like: A Subjective Valuation of Your Facebook Fans

Watch Out Foursquare, Twitter Is About To Steal Your Worm

Infographic: Social Media Battle of the Sexes

The 10 Business Growing Pains that Social Media is Going Through Right Now

Tips for how hoteliers should handle social media during a crisis situation

4 Free Tools to Measure Your Instagram Success

Best Practices in Hotel Crisis Management

2013-05-01T07:19:35-07:00

In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing a few weeks ago, the Boston police quickly instructed bystanders to leave the area and return to their homes and hotels until the imminent danger had subsided. As the race finish line was in the tourist-trafficked Copley Square, dozens of hotels were impacted by the event.
With attendees frantically rushing out of the area and desperately trying to contact loved ones, it was imperative for the hotels to engage in the real-time social media conversation, especially with cell communication cut off. Fortunately, many of the area’s hotels took to their respective Facebook and Twitter accounts swiftly and effectively to communicate with worried guests and assure their families and friends that all everyone was safe.

A few of the nearby hotels stood out during this crisis period with their real-time responses. The Fairmont Copley Plaza took to Facebook soon after the news of the disaster spread to assure followers that the hotel’s colleagues were safe. The hotel also responded to each and every tweet directed at the hotel. The Lenox Hotel was similarly quick to update its Facebook page with updates on when the hotel would be re-opened and answers to guest questions. Finally, the Mandarin Oriental, Boston posted updates on Facebook and Twitter assuring followers that everyone was safe, despite the evacuation.

The Importance of Crisis Management

What we can learn from each of these hotels is that, in the wake of an unexpected disaster, real-time, responsive communication is essential. These hotels were cognizant of followers’ concerns and swiftly allayed them with direct and transparent messaging. Each property addressed incoming questions received through each channel promptly and worked hard to broadcast the safety precautions they were taking. Finally, each hotel appropriately suspended any form of communication that was not relevant to the ongoing disaster and avoided any form of promotional or unrelated posts that may have been originally scheduled.

Contingency Planning for a Crisis Situation

While no one wants to think about disasters, it pays to be prepared and have a social media crisis plan in place. Clearly, each of these hotels was prepared, evidenced by the swift and effective communication. Here are some tips when crafting your hotel’s contingency plan for a crisis situation:

Create a social media crisis policy.In times of sudden crisis, having a social media policy in place can certainly fast track your response time and mitigate any negative impact to your hotel.. Consider who will respond to social media and who else has access to the accounts, in case the primary person is unable to respond. Are social media managers allowed to comment on the situation, or only the hotel’s response? In case people are injured, how much information can be shared? While scary to imagine, you must consider all possible scenarios and document your expectations.
Respond in real-time. Each of the hotels above took immediate action on social media soon after the bombings occurred. Each property deviated from its normal social media planning process and took to each social network to communicate updates in real-time. When doing this, be sure that your most senior social media communicators are involved to ensure that you maintain your brand voice and stay consistent with your messaging.
Keep only necessary stakeholders involved. When there are too many “cooks in the kitchen” when managing your social media presence, you lose brand consistency and face the potential of damaging your hotel’s reputation. To avoid this problem, make sure that you involve only the necessary stakeholders at your property. These individuals will usually be members of your marketing, communications or public relations team, as they will possess the best writing capabilities.
Follow-up with an official response. Once the main crisis period has subsided, have your PR team craft an official hotel response to the situation. This message should be shared across all social networks and can also be fed to media, guests and colleagues around the hotel.
Resume planned content strategy in time. The worst thing a hotel can do in a time of crisis is to continue sharing self-promotional messaging that has been scheduled in advance. Nothing leaves a worse impression than showing a flagrant disregard for a real-time crisis. After suspending this messaging, engage with fans in a responsive way until order is restored and business is back to usual. Only then should you resume your planned social media content strategy.

If you follow these five tips, your hotel will be well positioned to handle any crisis scenario. Situations like these come at unexpected times and almost always require real-time, responsive response over social media. Therefore, having a crisis plan in place is imperative and will empower your communication team to nimbly navigate the turbulent waters during the state of emergency.

A version of this story originally appeared in Lodging Magazine on April 30, 2013.

Social Media Inspiration – It’s time to celebrate

2013-04-30T12:01:51-07:00

Many hotels, especially those catering to business travels, suffer from a lack of inspiration when it comes to social media posts. Amy Greenwood, e-commerce director, at Sun Development and Management Corporation, a 37-property portfolio, solved the problem in a fun, creative way.

Last year, when brainstorming unique ways to drive engagement on social media, she recalled the joy and excitement that her daughter experienced at school when celebrating quirky national holidays and decided to test the tradition at work. She brought the idea to the President and Sales and Marketing heads, and all were on board.

Amy combed through the list of holidays and pulled three each month that she thought would be fun ffor the hotels to celebrate in 2013. She brought the list to the Annual Leadership Conference and asked the General Managers to vote on one for each month. With a list of twelve holidays decided, Amy and the team got to work driving excitement.

As the primary Facebook Page owner for the hotels, Amy posts about the celebrations a month out, two weeks out, a few days before and then the Monday of the week the day is celebrated. The hotels are required to take photos of the events to share on their Facebook pages. In January, the hotels celebrated National Popcorn Day. In February, the hotels celebrated Ice Cream for Breakfast Day.

Amy notes that the benefits go beyond having fun content to share on social media and sparking online engagement. She says, “These holidays have brought our employees closer to our guests. Our employees look forward to the celebrations and our guests love that we do things a bit differently and it always drives conversation and photo opportunities."

Some hotels even go so far as to reward loyalty points to guests that get into the spirit and dress up for the celebration. For example, Red Hat Day was celebrated on April 25^th and guests sporting red hats at certain hotels received 1000 loyalty points for their participation.

How do you inspire fun social content? Let us know in the comments.

Best Practices for Showcasing Your Independent Hotel Webinar Recap

2013-04-26T13:32:23-07:00

Thank you everyone for joining us for our webinar yesterday. Also, we'd like to say a special thank you to buuteeq for co-hosting the session with us. In case you missed the webinar, here is a recording of the presentation, a copy of the deck used and a compilation of Twitter notes.

Webinar Recording

Presentation Deck

Live Webinar Tweets

If you have any questions about buuteeq's digital marketing services, please email info@buuteeq.com.

Also, please subscribe to the blog for more tips on how to manage your hotel or brand's online reputation and social media presence.

Finally, please take advantage of all the free content that we develop for hoteliers by visiting our Best Practices page and signing up for future Webinars with us. And, if you liked what you saw and would like pricing information or want to learn more about Revinate, please let us know by e-mailing info@revinate.com.