Are You Helping Your Customers Create Photographable Memories?

Neal Schaffer: 0:04

Welcome to maximize your social actionable 10 minute advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hey, everyone, this is Neal Schaffer. And welcome to another episode of maximize your social, I am just getting back from a spring break family vacation, we're actually traveled overseas. And it goes without saying that sometimes you need to just well, it's impossible to 100% unplug from social. But to unplug from work, get out there, spend more time family and see the world. In fact, I am waiting for my daughter's gymnastics class to end. So as always, I always say whenever you have the time to do a podcast or create content, there's never any excuse not to. So here I am in the parking lot in my car recording this podcast, you know that I like to do these down and dirty. And this is going to be another similar episode. So I just talked about how I've been traveling a lot. And before this trip where I went to Europe, actually, I was doing a lot of business travel here in the US as well. In fact, I was invited by the Courtyard by Marriott Fifth Avenue Hotel, which is on 40th Avenue, and fifth or so right near the New York Public Library. And I was their guest and that experience as well. As you know, booking my own hotels and staying at various hotels really gave me a lot of well ideas, I should say as to what I think hotels are missing out on in terms of one of the biggest opportunities they have with social media marketing. Now as you know, if you're a avid reader of maximize social business, which you should be, we have Debbie Miller as our contributor on social hospitality. In fact, she owns social hospitality.com. So really proud to have her on as a contributor. But, you know, above and beyond the advice that she's given. And she's given a lot of great advice, I wanted to throw out another piece that I recently shared at Social Media Marketing World, when, during my presentation, I mentioned Ritz Carlton as the leading company, in hotel social media marketing, according to the data that I acquired, and share with everybody. And one of the questions I got was from a local hotel here in Southern California, about what else they could do to increase engagement. And, you know, my thoughts and, you know, it was the answer that I gave to that person. But I really felt it when I stayed at all these various hotels throughout Europe, as well as the Courtyard by Marriott and other properties of state and recently in United States. You know, I think hotels, obviously, from a marketing perspective, have a few things that they can do if they are affiliated with a certain brand. Obviously, they have a branded websites, where it is a search engine where they can be found if someone is looking for a hotel of that brand and a certain city. So that sort of passive traffic. There's also the online ad world, which obviously we see a lot of hotels participating in. And when people are looking for a hotel, often they're going to Google so I don't see that world changing at all. And then we get to the travel review sites. And when someone wants to book a hotel, where do they go. And I found myself this time, you know, going to cities in Europe that I've never been to before, of really relying on not only TripAdvisor, but also sites like kayak and others, that aggregate reviews. booking.com actually has their own reviews. But reviews for hotels are still really, really critical. Maybe not so much for the big brands, but for independent hotels out there, as well as in major cities where big brands compete with each other for many, many different things. So above and beyond this, we have social media. And social media is interesting, because there's many, many different ways that hotels like any other brand can utilize it. And, you know, you can only go so far in sharing discounts and coupons and trying to get people to book in contests. What have you, you know, Ritz Carlton has been the most successful hotel in social media marketing, according to data that I compiled, because they don't ask for your business. Their marketing is more about memory, memory creation, memory recollection, and it's extremely visual nature. Now, this leads to my point, which is for hotels, I believe to be successful and social. It comes down to often that visual aspect. And I'm not just talking about Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest. I'm talking about what is it that when someone stays at your hotel now I talked about all these other avenues these other engines that are out there that will lead people to potentially staying at your hotel To ensure if you tweet, you're on Facebook, what have you, these are other avenues that may help people discover your hotel, especially if you use paid social, which I would recommend, obviously, for one of those reasons. But going beyond that, the missed opportunity that I find with hotels and social media is what you do after you have the customer, once someone has committed has booked a room at your hotel has checked in at your hotel. And after they check out of your hotel, have you knowingly maintained a relationship or created a relationship which social is really the perfect avenue for you to do that with, but to create an experience that would make them want to share with the world? Now let me explain what this means. I was recently contacted on Twitter by a company, they were saying, you know, Neil, we're having a hard time growing followers to our Pinterest account. And my answer to this businessman was, hey, you know, Pinterest isn't necessarily about your account. It's also about making images on your site accessible, allowing your tribe your community to promote them, on your behalf Have you added images that people want to pin on your website. And a lot of companies really haven't like a lot of companies still don't even have pin it buttons on their website. And they're examples of companies like Sony or indigo and Canada that have achieved incredible results just by adding a Pin It button and making it easy for others to pin their content. But going above and beyond that, if all these images are being shared in social media, and for hotels to really leverage that. It's not about them taking pictures of their own hotel and sharing them. It's about creating areas within your hotel where people can create a photographic memory. Now Ritz Carlton, and I had a chance to interview their VP of public relations, really select only those locations that are incredible as far as locations go. So they have a natural advantage, because every Ritz Carlton is going to be in a location that people want to photograph. And above and beyond that we all know that the interior is probably another area that people would want to photograph. But if you're a you're not a Ritz Carlton, what are you going to do? And that really is the challenge to create areas in your hotel, whether it be the check in counter the lobby, the restaurant, each hotel room inside the elevator? Where could you create a photographic moment that on average, if someone was staying at your hotel, and they were an active social media user, meaning they're probably taking photos with their smartphone, and sharing them on Instagram, we all know that even Instagram has surpassed Twitter, in terms of mobile usage and social networking, it's probably second only to Facebook, what is it that would make them want to snap that shot. And this is only half the missed opportunity that hotels have part of it is creating that photographical area that photographical moment that experience that others are going to share. The other half is you have people that are probably already sharing experiences they've had in your hotel, via their photos on Instagram, when they add it to their photo map and they tag you or on Foursquare for that matter. Have you actually recognize those people? Have you re posted their photos? This is a very, very simple way of engaging of acknowledging and reciprocating that Ritz Carlton as well as Disneyland and many other brands are doing. Is this something that you've even looked into before? And if you haven't, you really should as soon as possible. And this goes above and beyond hotels, obviously, I think any brick and mortar establishment, the advice is the same. Creating an area just like you would want to create shareable content if you were blogging or creating content. But above and beyond that actually engaging, curating, responding to those that are already promoting your company out there and social media. Sounds simple, right? Well, sometimes the simple things are lost in the shuffle in social media. So as always, I try to keep these podcasts real short and sweet. I'm hoping that this approximate 10 minutes of my words resonate with you provide you value for your own social media marketing. I appreciate all the questions that I continue to get, and I'll be responding to all of them. Please feel free to ping me in any which way you would like and I'd be more than happy to respond to your social media for business questions. And as always, wherever you are in the world, make it a great day. Bye. Bye, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com make it a social day.