This was my first introduction into the world that is Pinterest and according to ReadWriteWeb, the excitement that is Pinterest has to do with the way the tool leverages everything that’s hot in social right now: great user experience, a clean retro visual design, content curation, social collaboration and subscription – and calls everyone who isn’t using it “a big dork”.

As many of you know I fancy myself as being up-to-speed with what’s going on with social media but I have to admit that I had no clue that Pinterest had been around for almost two years.  If that makes me a “big dork” then so be it.

In order to shed this newfound description of my presona, I decided to open a Pinterest account to try to get a handle on what’s so intriguing about this new “top 10 social network” and how it may benefit the hotel community.

What is Pinterest? - Pinterest is designed as a place to organize and share online images that you find interesting or inspiring. Once uploaded or shared on Pinterest, these images become known as Pins, which the user can place on customized, themed Boards. You can create Boards for any topic imaginable and the possibilities for hotels are endless. Here’s how the Travel Channel uses Pinterest.

The Audience - Before we go any further it is important to note a couple of things as it relates the Pinterest audience (mainly women) and their purchasing power and social influence.  I’ve provided you with some demographics below but keep in mind that women should not be considered as a ‘niche’ market because they account for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from autos to health care and a robust 92% of all consumer purchases as it relates to vacations!

In addition, interaction between women through online community Web sites, forums, and message boards have a ‘dramatic’ influence on driving product preference, loyalty, and purchases.  Reaching women more effectively isn’t rocket science but is well worth the effort no matter what the channel.

According to Experian Hitwise and comScore the site has over 4M registered users and 1.5M visit the site on a daily basis spending 14 minutes on the site on average.

Google Ad planner shows that users are:

• Largely women (a 80% to 20% ratio). So there’s some truth to Matt Buchanan’s post on Gizmodo yesterday that proclaims Pinterest as “a Tumblr for ladies”.
• Aged mainly between 25 and 44 (accounting for 55% of the group, 30% are 25-34, 25% are 35 – 44)
• Just 25% of users have a bachelors degree or higher
• The majority live off a household income of $25-75k

Not sure what the situation is in your neck-of-the-woods but the dozen or so women that I know who are immersed in Pinterest have college degrees, don’t work because they don’t want/need/or have to, drive expensive cars, live in large homes with well manicured lawns, and their husbands are doctors, lawyers, and indian chiefs who make low, mid, and high six-figure incomes.

Creating an Account – I’m going to gloss over this step because most of you know how to create an account but it’s important to note that you can’t become a member immediately because you have to be “invited” by Pinterest to join the community.  This process takes about a day or two.  After you have been approved you can start Pining.

Settings – If your hotel is on Facebook and Twitter make sure you enable both of these networks through your settings so followers can potentially connect with you through these channels.

Pining - A Pin is an image added to Pinterest. You can link to an image from your Web site or upload an image from your computer. Pins can include captions, like “A relaxing day at the spa” or anything else you’d like to include in the caption.  I experimented with the caption and found that I could add a detailed description (this test was over 175 words) and was able to include a link to my site as well as my email address.

Thought - If you’re say the Omni Fort Worth and your hotel is running a promotion on your site called “Soothe Your Senses at Mokara Spa” you can use Pinterest to market the same promotion.

Here’s a quick example of how this hotel can use Pinterest to market this spa promotion:

1. Create a Board and name the board “Spa”.
2. From the Board Category drop down menu select “Hair & Beauty”.
3. Select “Just Me” in the “Who can pin” question (you can invite others but that is and advanced lesson for another time)
4. Select “Create Board” and your ready to start Pining.
5. Next go back to your Web site page that contains the details of the spa promotion and Pin the spa photo and assign it to the “Spa” Board.  Here are the instructions to Pin a photo from your toolbar to your Board.
6. Next Copy and paste the verbiage that has already been created on your Web site page and paste it into the “Description” field.
7. Lastly, copy the page link of the spa promotion from your Web site (http://www.omnihotels.com/FindAHotel/FortWorth/Spa.aspx) and paste it into the “Link” field located underneath your caption.
8. Run to your GMs office and show him how you’ve created another distribution channel for your hotel and make sure you let him know that it didn’t cost a dime.  Next book a ticket to Paris and pay for your vacation with the bonus money he included in your next check.

SEO – I have purposely side-stepped the topic of SEO and how it relates to linkable image assets so I have provided those details for you here or just forward the blog to your e-Commerce team for their review.

Thought - If you are a full or limited-service hotel think of all of the amenities that you have on site and outside of your four walls and create separate Boards to attract members of your Pinterest community (possibly your next customer).

In the “Description” field make sure that you include links back to your hotel’s Web site and any other pertinent information that will allow a member of the community get in touch with you or the hotel.

• Create a Board that features your room categories and include some salient points
• Create a Board that features dining options, your menus, and promotions
• Create a Board that includes background information about your management team and fellow (front and back-of-the house) associates
• Create a Board where you can share photos of a guest’s wedding or family reunion
• Create a Board that includes information about your city
• Create a Board that includes information about upcoming events in your area
• Create a Board that includes local restaurants and nightlife
• Create a Board that includes attractions such as historical buildings and museums
• Create a Board that includes the location of a movie theater and shopping
• Don’t forget video.  One of the best channels to market your hotel is through YouTube videos. If a video link is Pinned, Pinterest embeds that video inside the Pin. It’s a good way of sharing additional info with your current and prospective customers.

When you get comfortable with some of the marketing options at your disposal start inviting your audience to contribute to your Boards.  To add a contributor to one of your Boards, click to the Board’s edit page. There, change the Pin setting to “Me + Contributors.” Then, you can add his/her name. You must be following at least one of that user’s Boards to add them as a contributor.

Here is how I am experimenting with Pinterest and I see some great opportunities with which to incorporate it into my client’s social media strategy.  Let me know if you come up with anything that could be helpful!

As they say, “Happy Pining!”

Tom Costello is a Partner & Co-Founder of Groups International, a company that provides marketing, consultative services, and technology solutions to the group and leisure travel markets.  Connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter or contact him by email.

I’m not the only one who has been harping about how hotels should up their ante with social media but if TV networks can effectively incorporate it into their marketing strategy then hotels can’t be too far behind can they?

Here’s how some of the networks have recently used social media with some degree of success.

FOX News uses Twitter to measure viewer reaction to its GOP debates and VH1 provided a four-hour live stream of analysis for its Critics Choice Movie Awards broadcast.

Integrating social media from viewers following along with computers and smart phones fosters greater engagement while also broadening the audience for programming. Best of all, it provides consumer data.

The question now is how will networks monetize it?

Let’s consider for this conversation the idea of monetization as Return on Interaction as compared to the more traditionally accepted performance measurement…Return on Investment.

Those of us who are involved with social media consider Return on Interaction as the new Return On Investment.  The difference is simple IF you can get your GM to agree about the value of the return.  With Return on Investment you put money in to get more money in return.  With Return On Interaction you put in interaction to get back more interaction which returns tenfold in trust, loyalty, and the development of advocates and influencers for your hotel.  What’s most important for now is showing that your social media campaign is an integral and effective part of your overall marketing strategy.

Here’s what the networks are saying about the same subject and see if there’s any commonality.

Twitter reaction to the 2009 U.S. Airways crash into New York’s Hudson River is one of the first times the social media service influenced NBC News coverage. The network news team quickly determined the story was legitimate and got a jump on what became a major story.

FOX has used Twitter to measure popular sentiment on issues and candidates, with the metrics finding their way onto FOX’s website and into its on-screen post-debate analysis.

Other networks, like Bravo and VH1, have encouraged stars to tweet during their shows, hoping to build buzz at key moments. Still more have show-specific hash tags that can become trending topics and convince those not viewing to tune in.

Of course, the ultimate quest is monetizing all this interaction. Networks increasingly include not just Nielsen ratings but Twitter mentions, second screen streaming, and other supplemental numbers.

So what are your thoughts on the subject of how hotels can better target consumers and utilize social media for a greater Return on Interaction?

Tom Costello is a Partner & Co-Founder of Groups International, a company that provides marketing, consultative services, and technology solutions to the group and leisure travel markets.  Connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter or contact him by email.

There is so much buzz about Room Key, I thought it would be a great time to take a detailed look at the new kid on the block to find out what makes it tick and why consumers should consider using it to book their next guest room. This just in…Best Western has announced that they have signed on to become the first commercial partner to supply hotel inventory to Room Key.  More on that news in another post.

The Homepage - At first glance I like the clean approach to the homepage.  It’s simple and straight forward and leads the visitor to do mainly one thing only…search for a guest room.  Yes the search process is simple and fast but I don’t see where the “fun” comes in.  Their “We Believe” preamble suggests that the consumer should feel “uber-confident” that the rates they are looking for are the best ones out there.  This is going to be a tall order knowing that most of these hotels have contracts with OTAs that may not allow the subject property to provide the best rate possible.

Suggestion – If you’re going to stick your neck out to suggest that the rates are the “best ones out there” then uber-upgrade the comment to include the words “best rates guaranteed”.  If you can’t guarantee the best rate then don’t imply that the rate are the best out there.

Also, there is no social share options/icons anywhere on the homepage.  What is one to do should one like to share the site with family and friends?  Since this is so obvious I’ll write it off as an oversight or TBA.

If you want to be downright picky, I’d move the “Search” button to the right of the “Guests” drop down.

Search – I’m going to conduct a search for Chicago.  Since it’s a new site and not all hotels are participating I’ll choose the third largest city in the country just to be fair.  I like the idea that I can conduct my search by City, Address, ZIP Code, and Airport Code.

Search Return – The search return is fairly complete and manageable and offers some simple sort by features that don’t clutter up the page like the OTAs are so good at doing.  Another thing you will note there are no ads on the sidebar or at the footer of the page.  Job well done.  I’m curious why the Park Hyatt Chicago landed in position one so I started the search over and found that the Park Hyatt Chicago showed up in position one again.  Maybe Hyatt has more skin in the game than does Marriott.

Suggestion – Let’s return to the subject of rates.  If I can’t compare rates from other sites (you know that prospective customers will feel the uber-urge to do so) then what information can you provide that suggests otherwise.  You didn’t convince me, as you suggested on the homepage, that this is the best rate out there.

Hotel Selection – I’m going to walk through the options for The Drake Hotel (Hilton brand) to see what details are provided.  When I click on the hotel link, a separate page appears with the hotel details to include photo, map, price, amenities, etc.  I also discovered that I can email this (email icon in the upper right-hand corner) with family and friends via email.  Good idea but not good enough for what your prospective audience may expect.  When I click on the bed configuration the same screen pops up.

When I click on the rate or the book button (displayed at $139) I am transferred directly to the hotel’s booking engine.  All of my original search perimeters are transferred as supplied previously and I can choose from “Best Available Rate” (this is an unrestricted rate at $159), Advanced Purchase Rate (full payment in advance – non-refundable rate at $139), “Bed & Breakfast Rate” (restrictions at $189), “Drive In Special Rate” (includes overnight valet at $184), “American Grill Package” (breakfast, Internet, American Girl doll at $194), “Senior Rate” (age restricted at $149), and the good ole “Romance Package” (romance not included at $199).

Suggestion – If the search return features a rate at $139 then place that rate category at the top of the booking options return. When your prospective customer sees the rate of $159 in position number one when the previous page suggested it was $139 then it only serves to confuse the customer.

Booking Process – I chose the $139 rate, click to continue, and now have the option to complete the booking process to include guest, contact, and credit card info.  I can sign in using my Hilton HHonors rewards number and pin to bypass the need to enter my personal data manually.  The balance of the page contains all of the legal stuff that one would expect and finally the booking process is complete.

A cross-check on the hotel’s website listed a non-refundable rate for the same set of dates and bed configuration at $134. Can you say busted!!!

Summation – All-in-all Room Key is a welcome addition to the direct connect distribution channel and I am confident that John Davis and staff will include future bells and whistles that the site will need to attract and retain an audience.

Pros

• You’ll be dealing direct with the hotel and not a third-party (should something go sideways with your reservation)
• You will be accruing rewards points with all hotels that offer a program
• Nothing to influence your purchasing decision
• No hidden fees

Cons

• No P2P architecture at this juncture
• Can’t share on social media (just email for now)
• Limited hotel participation (Inventory will grow quickly – Best Western is now #7 to join)
• No rate comparison
• No air options
• No car options

Tom Costello is a Partner & Co-Founder of Groups International, a company that provides marketing, consultative services, and technology solutions to the group and leisure travel markets.  Connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter or contact him by email.

Six of the major brands, InterCon, Hyatt, Choice, Wyndham, Hilton, and Marriott, announced today that they have launched Roomkey.com, a search engine site that allows customers to search for and book direct with member hotels.

This concept is nothing new (we launched a similar platform a year ago called Hotelmine.com) and is another great disruptor of indirect distribution channels.  Nonetheless, it is about time that these brands figured it out and agreed upon standards that will allow them to keep from sending customers to third-party sites like Expedia, Travelocity, etc.

Not surprisingly, since the six hoteliers launched the company, the site is limited to their brands but there is an addendum on the site for hotel brands to reach out and apply to be featured in the search results – time will tell if this is a pleasantry or a legitimate admissions process. The site is also limited, at the moment, to amenities within the US and is only offered in English. The group stated that other English-speaking countries would be next on the roll-out.

I read the FAQ section available on the site and wonder why they are “sugar coating” the why behind “How is Room Key Different”?

“Room Key was born out of a question posed among a group of hospitality experts: “How can we make it easier for our customers to find the right hotel?” We believe that finding a hotel is a different experience than choosing a flight or renting a car, and that requires a different kind of search experience.”

John, let’s be honest with each other.  Room Key was designed to gain more direct bookings and to lessen a brand’s dependency on third-party distribution channels.  It’s OK to spin it another way but at the end of the day we know why the big six are a part of this equation and support this endeavor 100 percent.

Best of luck!

Chinese mainland visitors has more than tripled to the U.S. since 2000 and several Los Angeles area hotels have seen a growth of 30–40 percent increase of Chinese visitors at their establishment.

In order to cater to the needs of Chinese visitors, The Hilton Hotels & Resorts and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide have decided to market their venues to Chinese travelers with the comfort of home which will include having one Chinese–speaking employee on staff, a tea kettle and slippers in each room, traditional Chinese breakfast items such as congee known as rice pudding, and chopsticks.

Los Angeles is the second most popular travel stop in the U.S. for Chinese visitors and with an average of $6,243 per person per visit including airfare spent last year, it’s no surprise the hotels are each planning to open additional hotels in LA and China.

Lesson Learned?

Get rich in a niche. Focus your business’s attention on marketing your product or service to a specific target audience and become the only company people want to conduct business with over your competitors.

Tom Costello is a Partner & Co-Founder of Groups International, a company that provides marketing, consultative services, and technology solutions to the group and leisure travel markets.  Connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter or contact him by email.

Then came the boom of social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn that heightened one’s ability to create and exchange User-generated Content and substantially changed the way organizations, communities, and individuals communicated and shared information.

I was hopeful that hotels would discover the value of social media channels but for all that has been written about how hotels can create “buzz”, target an audience, stimulate website traffic and customer interactions, most hotels haven’t advanced much past “small talk”.

If you’re a hotel that’s serious about getting past small talk you’ll have to develop a strategy, trust it, and stick with it for as long as it takes to bear fruit.  You’ll need to apply realistic timeframes to each element of the strategy and identify metrics (those that are definable and verifiable) that will allow you to measure whether you’re achieving expectations (this goes well beyond friends and followers).

Let’s start with the obvious.

What Are Your Objectives? -  You can’t get past small talk until you define your objectives.  If you don’t have objectives then you will be apt to continue to produce more inane drivel.  No matter what your list of objectives looks like at the end of the day you’ll need to build a foundation that looks something like this:

• Listen
• Learn
• Listen
• Share
• Listen
• Support
• Listen
• Inspire

Your first and foremost objective is…you guessed it!  Please pass go and collect $200.  Your next objectives are learn, share, support, and inspire (not necessarily in that order) which will help you to eventually forge an active relationship with your audience and convert as many of them from a passive to an active participant.  This creates a network of advocates capable of spreading your message and sharing your brand in and outside of their networks.

The best use of social media channels is to help your hotel:

• Build brand awareness
• Launch new campaigns or services
• Increase reach
• Research and insight
• Create word-of-mouth activity
• Protect your brand
• Drive traffic to your hotel’s website
• Improve SEO
• Competitive analysis
• Provide customer service

I can hear you now.  “Tom, you didn’t include anything about sales.”  Here’s the thought.  You won’t convert a recognizable amount of sales through your social media channels.  You will convert a majority of sales through your hotel’s website.  Communicate with your current and prospective customers through your social channels…sell through your hotel’s traditional sales & marketing channels (see To Sell Or Not To Sell for more on this topic).

Who Is Your Audience? - You can achieve your objectives when you know whom you are communicating with.  Defining your audience is one of the most talked about, and least understood, challenges. You can establish yourself as the expert when you connect your expertise with the needs of your audience.

Here are 10 questions that will help you to define your audience:

1. What’s their name?
2. Where do they live?
3. How can I inspire them personally or professionally?
4. What’s the tone of their conversation?
5. What do they do for a living?
6. What activities do they enjoy?
7. Where do they hang out on and offline and what are they talking about?
8. What defines them?
9. What keeps them up at night?
10. What problems can I help them solve?

Oh BTW.  Do any of these tweets or posts reflect a hotel who has defined their audience or is it more of the same old same old?

“What’s your favorite winter drink?”

“What’s on your wish list this Christmas?”

“HG-YUMMY. HGTV for gingerbread people.”

Did I hear someone say OMG?

Who Are Your Influencers & Advocates?- Contributors and creators are your next influencers and advocates.  They say “I want to be a part of this”, “I want to own this”, and “I want to share this”. Be on the lookout for these tippers, reach out to them, be transparent, and instill their trust in you.  Provide them with a path to THEIR goal which often is not the same as YOUR goal.

Influencers – for the most part, require an incentive.  Some are exceptional at sharing a message but offer little in the way of engagement with their peers. Others generate little groundswell or buzz, but the peers they do touch take their advice.

Advocates – they talk about your hotel or brand (pay strict attention to them).  McKinsey & Co. reports that 90% of advocates write something positive about their purchasing experience; 40% of consumers recommend brands according to Comscore; and a study by Forrester Research Inc. says that while only 14% of consumers trust online ads, 94% trust word of mouth, making it among the most influential, cost effective and high return forms of marketing.

Regardless, it’s important to note that you should have a “guideline” in place prior to reaching out to your influencers and advocates.  Here is an example of Ford’s Rules of Engagement with Online Influencers.

Tracking Return On Interaction – Return on Interaction is the new Return On Investment.  The difference is simple IF you can get the GM to agree about the value of the return.  With ROInvestment you put money in to get more money in return.  With ROInteraction you put in interaction to get back more interaction which returns tenfold in trust, loyalty, and the development of advocates and influencers for your hotel.  What’s most important for now is showing that your social media campaign is an integral and effective part of your overall marketing strategy.

Three tools that can help you gauge your social interactions are Google Analytics, Grader, and Hootsuite.

To Sell Or Not To Sell – Let me be perfectly clear about this subject.  One of the components of your sales and marketing strategy, whether it be on or offline, is designed to generate revenue.  Too often hotels feel the need to push “deals” on social channels when most have no clue as to what percentage of their audience is ready, willing, and able to purchase what your selling?

Yes companies like 1-800-Flowers have a fully functioning Facebook store and Dell has sold $6.5 million in products through its Twitter feed, but social commerce, as of this correspondence, is still nascent.  By 2015, the dollar volume of goods sold through social media should rise from $5 B to $30 B but this estimate is only for hard goods.  It’s coming but if you build it, IT won’t necessarily guarantee that they will come and convert.

Collaborate With Your Audience – Whether we realize it or not, we are a culture that is emerging from a Broadcast Era and now entering into a Collaboration Era.  This simply means that there is and will continue to be a marked change in the way we communicate.

How do you effectively mobilize your audience and enable them to collaborate with your hotel?  You open the door and invite them in because the opportunity to participate is changing us from content consumers to creators, participants, collaborators, and communities (please refer to my opening statement).

What are the benefits of collaborating with your audience?  Identify touch points, create new ideas, products and services, decrease costs, increase sales, customer retention, new vendors, and on, and on, and on.

Take a look at what Roger Smith hotels is doing with Roger Smith Life…the life of a New York art hotel to see what I mean.

What do you think?  Are you ready to communicate, connect, and collaborate with your audience and engage in a meaningful conversation instead of just small talk?

Tom Costello is a Partner & Co-Founder of Groups International, a company that provides marketing, consultative services, and technology solutions to the group and leisure travel markets.  Connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter or contact him by email.

Here are five steps that will help your hotel get more guest reviews:

1. At check-in – provide your guests with a “tool” that invites them to write a review about your hotel.  Include a guide and a variety of links to sites that provide the greatest exposure for your hotel.  There’s no better time to plant the seed than after a flawless check-in.

2. On property - station post cards at various locations throughout the hotel that gently reminds your guests about your eventual goal.  If you feel this approach is overkill then place QR codes in high-traffic areas for your tech-savvy guests.

3. Incentives – great service and value provide the best impetus for your guests to write reviews.  Never entice them with “other incentives” to write a review about your hotel.  If you do and you’re exposed, you will lose any credibility that you’ve established on review sites.

4. On your site – if you can, have your web designer create a simple form that is available on your site or can be delivered as a link via email to a guest that has stayed at your hotel.  Keep in mind that if you provide third-party reviews on your site along with a link that will send customers away from you site, they may not return.

5. At check-out – since TripAdvisor will assume that your hotel generated a fake review if you allow guests to use a computer on site (TripAdvisor monitors the hotel’s IP address and will flag a review if it comes direct from the hotel) see suggestion #1.

It’s important that you develop a guest review strategy that everyone will embrace.  You will immediately notice that your campaign will quickly gain traction and provide you with new customers as the fruit of your marketing labor.

Tom Costello is a Partner & Co-Founder of Groups International, a company that provides marketing, consultative services, and technology solutions to the group and leisure travel markets.  Connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter or contact him by email.

I’ve gotten to the point where I explain to them, as kindly as I can, “With all due respect Mr. X, I only understand about half of the conversation that you just shared with me so you’ll need to go back to the opening of our conversation where you said ‘Hi, Tom’.

Do you feel the same way?  The following is Dan’s take on the subject.

I’d say that in about half of my business conversations, I have almost no idea what other people are saying to me. The language of internet business models has made the problem even worse. When I was younger, if I didn’t understand what people were saying, I thought I was stupid. Now I realize that if it’s to people’s benefit that I understand them but I don’t, then they’re the ones who are stupid.

There are at least five strains of this epidemic.

Abstractionitis
We have forgotten how to use the real names of real things. Like doorknobs. Instead, people talk about the idea of doorknobs, without actually using the word “doorknob.” So a new idea for a doorknob becomes “an innovation in residential access.” Expose yourself repeatedly to the extrapolation of this practice to things more complicated than a doorknob and you really just need to carry Excedrin around with you all day.

Acronymitis
This is a disease of epic proportions in the world of charity. I was at a meeting just two days ago at which several well-meaning staff members of a charity were presenting to their board, and the meat of their discussion revolved around the acronyms SCEA and some other one that began with “R” that I can’t recall. In the span of three minutes these acronyms must have been used eight times each. They were central to any understanding of the topic at hand, but they were never defined. So I had not the vaguest idea what the presenters were talking about. None. Could have been talking about how to make a beurre-blanc sauce for all I know.

Valley Girl 2.0
My partner and I were at a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley five years ago, and a real-live Valley girl was sitting in the booth behind us talking on her cell phone. We couldn’t stop listening to her. She had a world-class ability to string together half-sentences devoid of any substance whatsoever. And yet you felt as if something important were being discussed! “And she was like, ummm, and I was just like, you know, umm, no way, really, like, yeah, and when she was like that, I was just like..umm….” She could go on in this way for extended periods of time without mentioning any actual people, actions, or thoughts. There’s a business version of this illness. It involves the use of words such as “space,” “around,” “synergy,” and “value-add” with a healthy dose of equivocators like “sort of” and “kind of” to ensure that there is no commitment to anything being said: “I’m in the sort of sustainability space around kind of bringing synergistic value-add to other people’s work around this kind of space.” Oh, OK, that explains it.

Meaningless Expressions
I wrote about the phrase ”thinking outside the box” recently and how overused and utterly misunderstood the expression is. There are many more. Another term that has lost its meaning is “Let’s exceed the customer’s expectations.” Employees who hear it just leave the pep rally, inhabit some kind of temporary dazed intensity, and then go back to doing things exactly the way they did before the speech. Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer’s expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? I was at a Hilton a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, “Our goal is to exceed the customer’s expectation.” The best way to start would be to take down that bullshit sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do. My expectation is not to have signs around that tell me you want to exceed my expectations.

Abstract Valley Girl 2.0 Acronymitis Using Meaningless Expressions
This is when you combine the four diseases above. So you get phrases like, “You should meet this guy with the SIO. He’s sort of this kind of social entrepreneur thinking outside of the box in the sustainability space and working on these ideas around sort of web-based social media, and he’s in a round two capital raise in the VP space with the people at SVNP.” How many times have you heard what you now recall to be precisely this sentence?

This would all be funny if it weren’t true. People just don’t make sense anymore. You’ll save yourself a lot of trouble if you internalize this. Observe it, deconstruct it, and appreciate just how ridiculous most business conversation has become.

You will gain tremendous credibility, become much more productive, make those around you much more productive, and experience a great deal more joy in your working life if you look someone in the eye after hearing one of these verbal brain jammers and tell the person, “I don’t have any idea what you just said to me.”

Hotel prices have dropped significantly in a number of Italian cities, such as Venice (125 pounds, down 44 percent), Rome (100 pounds, down 31 percent) and Florence (91 pounds, down 30 percent). In Krakow, at just 51 pounds (down 23 percent), travellers are paying the lowest price for an overnight stay in a standard double room so far this year. In Vienna, the average has fallen to 99 pounds (down 14 percent) while Paris stands at 143 pounds (down eleven percent).

These documents indicate that Mr. Crockett would spend an hour each day in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee reading smoke signals sent by a local Creek Indian tribe.  He would then analyze the tribe’s sentiment and take the necessary steps to protect he and his loved ones.

“Mr. Crockett had a keen sense of what was happening in his surrounding area because he devoted the necessary time to monitor what the Indians were saying about him in order to protect his scalp and keep his family out of danger,” stated Rowland Pembrokeer, Director of the Society.

Historians go on to suggest that these documents also prove that Mr. Crockett saw the value in reputation management and continued the practice of monitoring his reputation throughout his three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and during his brief stint at The Alamo.

So let’s get serious about your Online Reputation Management Strategy.

Reputation Management has come a long way since the days of Davy Crockett and today hotels can choose from a variety of solutions such as TrustYou, ReviewPro, Radian6, and Revinate so you no longer have to rely on smoke signals to gather customer sentiment.

Keep in mind that ORM is not just about the prevention and repair of online reputation threats and replying to guest comments on hotel review sites.  It can also be used to design marketing campaigns based upon positive customer sentiment and distributed to hundreds of targeted social communities, you can enlist the support of your advocates to bang your drum, and you can collaborate with your audience to develop new ideas and services.

Tom Costello is the CEO, Partner & Co-Founder of Groups International, a company that provides marketing, consultative services, and technology solutions to the group and leisure travel markets.  Connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter or contact him by email.