I’ve come across a variety of news outlets who are reporting on how hospitality outfits are leveraging social media to engage and respond to guests’ customer service inquiries or complaints, but some brands are leveraging social media to offer helpful hints on how to make their stay that much better.
Some hotels have stepped beyond using social media simply as a customer service medium. The Wynn Las Vegas, for example, has a strategy to greet guests who check-in via Foursquare and they also plant tips on how guests can have a superior experience.
I had the fortune of sitting down with Zeta Interactive’s own VP of E-Mail Marketing, George DiGuido, who shed some light on the confluence of e-mail marketing and social media, specifically in the hospitality vertical. Social media can heighten a brand’s awareness of what is most relevant to specific guests, inevitably crafting better, targeted content.
“Social monitoring can help drive larger, bulk style email campaigns.,” DiGuido said. “A perfect example is using [Zeta]Buzz to determine how people are talking about your brand and start to draft communication that uses that buzz as a backbone to how the content is generated and the overall tone of the piece.
It can also help establish and set what is relevant to the user… it is the summer season… people are all jazzed about getting out and hitting the pool… email campaigns should pick up on this and message with content that supports the trends.”
Within direct marketing, relevancy is incredibly important. One way to achieve relevancy is to closely monitor the channels which customers are using to communicate with one another.
Social media is the ideal forum to tap into, not to just to see how a customer feels toward your brand, but also to see who is recommending your brand and to whom they are recommending.
DiGuido added, “The thing about hospitality and hotels in specific is that people are more inclined to share their experiences with these types of businesses. People are always looking for the best place to stay… recommendations from peers… and more importantly recommendations from people that they trust. From this perspective the best offense from a hotel/resort is to stay connected where their customers are communicating. It makes social media monitoring extremely important.”
Ignorance is not bliss. Customers are continually inundated with information on where to spend their vacation time and dollars from. The brands that toe the line between 1:1 communication, which is akin to having two ears and one mouth,” will be highly successful. The brands that listen, but respond with irrelevant, annoying messaging will miss out and see their customers jump ship. It’s time for them to adjust their listening aid.
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