Hospitality Operators: Listen in on Social Media to learn who your guests think you are

As a CEO of a hospitality company, you have access to a powerful collection of guest feedback, you just to have to listen in on the conversation. As graduate student at Northwestern University and as a concept and branding consultant for a hospitality consulting firm, I’ve been studying how brands have been using powerful social media tools to better understand their customer’s opinions and feelings.

Social Media is more than a way to engage with your customers.  It is an effective and low-cost way to conduct market research.  Social Media Today offers some great strategic advice in the post: How to use Social Media for Market Research.The real-time nature of social media can cut months off of the process of conducting traditional market research.  Hidden in the chatter are often key learnings about the words your guests are using to describe your brand.  By listening in rather than surveying or leading focus groups, unnoticed trends and patterns can emerge. Most social media sites offer free monitoring tools, but for those companies who want to delve deeper, here is a great round-up also from Social Media Today of 25 Awesome Social Media Tools, some are even free.

(Image, market research/shutterstock)

Once you know what guests are saying, it’s time for some soul-searching.  Are they saying what you want them to say? Perhaps an even more difficult question is – what is your brand, really?  Branding Strategy Insider has some great insights in the post Measuring the Strength of Brand Identity.  In every industry, but especially in hospitality where trendy offerings come and go seemingly every week, it's important that leaders to go to a deeper level and outline with and for their teams the the unique characteristics that define how they create value in the world. As the author states, "Identity provides the seeds of differentiation."

Based on these two articles, here are the action items I would recommend you consider:

• Listen to the online conversation. Take note of both the problem areas and consistently positive comments.  Too often sites like Yelp are viewed by operators as a place to read about bad experiences, but the things people love about you are even more important to understand so you can give them more of what they want and amplify those positive sentiments  across marketing channels.
• Conduct a brand audit or concept clarity review.  Discuss key differentiators, core values and each touch point to define what your promise to guests should be versus what it is today.
• Join the online conversation  Develop a Cross-Channel Communications Road Map to further monitor your guests to ensure that you are effectively and consistently communicating your brand at each opportunity.

Often times day-to-day operational concerns can distract from this kind of high-level, strategic thinking and these kinds of conversations arise from desperation rather than inspiration.  This doesn’t have to be the case and regular monitoring cross–checked against an agreed upon concept offering can be just the preventative care the doctor ordered.

Candace MacDonald is a hospitality marketer and concept consultant, experienced at translating creative vision into marketing programs that build brands and generate revenue.  She has worked for hotels, restaurant operators, celebrity chefs, wineries, and a major food & wine festival.  She is a candidate for a Master of Science in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. Follow her @comacdonald.

Feeling empowered by Big Data

In today’s economy, business leaders and marketing executives must understand customers’ needs and behaviors to strengthen their competitive advantage. These valuable insights can be discovered by sifting through Big Data and identifying patterns. I’ve focused on analytics and behavioral marketing as a graduate student at Northwestern’s Medill IMC program to strengthen the skills that lead to such valuable discoveries. 

"Big Data: Cutting through the Noise"

In a recent article on the Discovery Channel’s News website, Big Data collected through self-tracking methods was predicted to become more prevalent with every advancement in data processing speeds. Experts in economics, psychology and health care expect “that personal monitoring devices will become so cheap and unobtrusive [in a few years]...that they'll be ubiquitous.”

Nick Barthram of Indicia offers several suggestions on how to more accurately identify true insights from Big Data rather than allowing “confirmation bias” (among other evolutionary traits in humans) to lead us to spurious correlations in an article he wrote for WARC’s AdMap: September 2013.

So don’t get overwhelmed with the thought of having to find (and of course validate through testing) an insight from massive data sets. Just follow three actionable steps:

    1) Embrace: As time passes, only more data is collected so avoiding it or ignoring

              what the data might be telling you is not an option if you want your

        company to be successful

    2) Challenge: Don’t blindly trust what the correlations an algorithm have formed from

         the data; as Barthram says, “Use testing to repeat the situation and

         check that it still stacks.”

    3) Stay Patient: It’s easy to rush to a conclusion and implement the information into a

business plan but time is for once on your side. The longer data spans,

the more likely it will show certain correlations as opposed to influences from external forces.

It’s time to take control of Big Data and make it work in your favor. That doesn’t mean drawing faulty conclusions to support a hypothesis, though. Stick to your clearly defined business objectives that support your strategy. Big Data is only going to grow so feel empowered by the opportunity to discover valuable information from it. The old adage of “knowledge is power” has never been more true than it is today.

Brand Managers - Drive Passion Using Your Brand Essence

Brand Managers are perennially in search of ways to not only maintain their standing with their customers, but increase excitement and strengthen passion for their products.  I have found articles reiterating the importance of allowing insight gained from your customers to drive innovation; ideas introduced to me as a graduate student at Northwestern University's Medill IMC program.

In the beauty world, there is the tale of two entities. There are the main industry titans and the newcomers garnering lots of buzz with their unique perspective yet both are fighting to attract customers, old and new. The most important action for each is to build desire, a thought expressed by Revlon’s CMO Julia Goldin.  This desire for the newest shades, trends and products helps your brand remain relevant. This is the charge for your brand; build, create and sustain desire.

After listening to your customer, the next and most crucial step is what you do with what you've discovered.  Translate this newfound information into customer-friendly innovation improving the customer experience with the products as done by cosmetic titan, L'Oreal.

How do we create this elusive desire?  The aforementioned articles and my studies in IMC have guided me towards these three items to implement and achieve your desired results. Listen to what your customers are saying and uncover what they are not able to express directly.  This can be done in several ways but none more important than engaging via social media, which provides a unique opportunity to learn more about the ways customers interact and use your product.  Capitalize by listening to your brand community on sites where they interact with each other most; the major social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Read comments left on YouTube video tutorials and gain a deeper understanding never before accessible.  Respond accordingly to customers needs and employ cutting-edge technology to create their desired iterations of products helping you retain and attract them.

In the cosmetics world with infinite possibilities for self-described "beauty junkies" companies are faced with the daunting task of differentiating their brand from competitors. Using the above actions will help your brand achieve the distinguishing qualities that build desire to draw your customer in and keep them coming back for more.

Jaclyn Bivins

@jaclynbivins

Jaclyn Bivins hails from Chicago, Illinois and is a graduate student at Northwestern University in Medill's Integrated Marketing Communications program. After graduation, she hopes to work in brand management and marketing strategy in the cosmetics and beauty industry. 

Effective Social Strategy = Foundation Success

As a graduate student at Northwestern focusing on foundation marketing, most managers know their corporate and consumer donors are using social media to discuss their passions, interests and needs.  They also know their foundation does not have an effective strategy to turn these discussions into donations and new volunteers.  This blog will begin to address this social media challenge

To create a successful social media strategy, a foundation must understand what outcomes will serve as indicators that they are using social media effectively?

·      Are you tracking new donors?

·      Repeat donors?

·      Fundraising?

·      Communicating your message effectively using the right platforms 

Groundswell  lays out  a  model  that can be used to segment and understand the consumers of the social media. As a foundation, you need to understand the existing and evolving social technographic profiles of your donors, supporters and volunteers to choose appropriate social media and engagement strategies (listening, talking, energizing, helping, embracing). The model also proposes a four-step process for developing a social media marketing strategy - People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology (called POST) 

Below is an explanation of  the process and framework:

P: People
Assess your customers’ social activity. That is current and potential donors, volunteers and beneficiaries.

O: Objectives
Decide what you want to accomplish. Is it increasing your brand awareness or donations? Recruiting volunteers? Reaching out to your beneficiaries?

S: Strategy
Strategy is a plan for how relationships with donors, volunteers and beneficiaries will change depending on what you are trying to accomplish (objectives). The strategy must be a long-term relationship that will keep growing over time.

T: Technology
Once you decide on the people, objective and strategy, then you can figure out if building a blog or starting your own community on Facebook or Twitter is the right thing for your organization. In essence, fit the technology choices to your particular people, objectives and strategy.

Consider the action points below to create the winning social media strategy for your foundation.

1) Listen to the groundswell - gain insights from what is being written and said

2) Talk to the groundswell - create  blogs and communities to engage conversation

3) Energize the groundswell - charge up your best online stakeholders

4) Embrace the groundswell - include stakeholders as collaborators 

You can also monitor the social chatter  using a free online tool Social Mention.

For more information on how social media can define success for your foundation click here

By: Farah Chaudhry

Northwestern University MSJ - Media Strategy and Leadership 

About Me: 

I am currently perusing my Masters at Northwestern University in Media Strategy and Leadership. My goal is to work with leading organizations to enhance media strategies and tactics. I am a Socialite, Change Maker, Artist, and Optimist  

Having worked on the marketing team at Camerapix, one of Africa’s oldest independent media production companies for 4 years, I joined the management in 2008 to help found Africa 24 Media, Africa’s first online video agency, in Nairobi, here i managed editorial  teams and global sales for the fast-growing agency, executive-produced award-winning documentaries and project-managed the show Africa Journal for Thomson Reuters.

You can also follow me on LinkedIn | Twitter

Fail Fast to Make It Better

Successful Internet companies feared about any kind of failures in product design and development. In past 10 years, all companies followed a single mode: they tend to first come up with brilliant ideas purely based on intuition, and then spend six months or even longer to build it, improve it internally with numerous of alpha or beta tests, and launch. They want their products to be perfect at launch.

However, today, successful companies intentionally fail. With small, fast, and well-controlled failures, the company can look on the data and move on. If we think engineering days as bullets, a large volume of days in traditional model is consolidated and built into an artillery shell, you have only one chance to hit the target and it cost expensively. In new model, officially called agile development, days are made into a clip of bullets. You shot, correct, and shot again. This way you have more chance to hit the target – customers. In other words, while companies keep a long-term vision, they should keep trying different strategies until one works. 

More important, failing fast involved customers into the product development. All changes made are based on consumer insights and aimed for improve customer experience in different levels. The final products are actually the result of crowd source. Customers will be satisfied by the products which they made by themselves.

Probably, trying and failing is the best way to keep you on the ground. You will keep customer-centric, curious, and humble. Mark Pincus said “Success is dangerous because often you don’t understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you’ve failed.” So, let’s fail in small, controllable scale to avoid true failure.

Terrence Ye is a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill Master of Integrated Marketing Communications program and is specializing in consumer insight from big data. Terrence will be graduating in December 2012. He can be reached on twitter using the handle @terrenceye

Be Customer Focused or Perish

In today’s interactive, network-based marketplace, the marketing process changes from “marketer in control” to “customer in control” since marketers hit the wall of over-supply making products hard to differentiate. Thus, the marketing process should start with creating solutions for the problems customers have. Understanding customer problems, instead of developing products and trying to fit them to customer needs, should be the new marketing imperative for marketers in the hotel industry.  

Today, the customer buys a solution bundle or a solution experience, not a product or service. Instead of focusing obsessively on price, value is what customers want. That is, while many marketers believe that price and promotion are the primary tools for increasing sales and gaining market shares, value can motivate customers to pay more. With the right value package, customers are willing to pay more to satisfy a style preference. Thus, identifying significant customer purchase drivers and assigning value to each of them become a critical element.

For example, the Puli Hotel and Spa, a new luxury hotel in Shanghai, penetrated a highly competitive market to compete effectively with the Peninsula and the Four Seasons in Shanghai. Typically, hotels start marketing when a property is complete. However, the Puli chose to understand its customers first before developing its hotel concept and then designed the property and service around their needs. This guest-centric hotel successfully identified a niche customer segment (aesthetic connoisseurs) that demands artisan design, cultural authenticity and local traditions of craftsmanship. Instead of appealing to the majority of people, the hotel deliberately provided exclusivity that their customers would appreciate. The hotel was later recognized by the Warc Prize for Asian Strategy, Asia’s first award established to reward brilliant strategic thinking in marketing.  To find out more about the Puli Hotel and Spa, click here.

Here are the action items marketers can take to start making a difference.

1.     Start with customers - identify their needs and develop products accordingly. In other words, place strategy ahead of product development.

2.     Be data-driven - IMC depends on the data to uncover customers’ needs, motivations, attitudes and behaviors. IMC is a blend of “art” and “science.” That is, both creativity and rigorous analysis should be presented in the IMC process.

3.     Communicate better with customers - based on the data, marketers make improved decisions regarding how to communicate with customers.

Today's marketers have more information than ever about their customers' behaviors and preferences. Therefore, they should redefine marketing in terms of what customers expect rather than in terms of developing or selling products. As a result, this innovative approach will create new opportunities for marketers in how they relate to their customers.

Phoebe Lin is a master’s candidate in the Northwestern Medill IMC marketing program and is specializing in consulting with companies on communication and social marketing. Phoebe can be reached on twitter @PhoebeLin4

Market Data Studies: Not a Problem Any More.

Obtain Cheaper and Faster Results.

Google has revolutionized us again? Traditional market research is an expensive and long process. We know that many of our interviewees don’t want to answer long surveys and/or answer in an inappropriate way. Google has made an important change in how data is been collected. With Google’s new tool, you can create online surveys and have answers in a very fast and easy way about your clients. With Google’s tool business decisions are made faster and with the same accuracy as with old methods.

Benefits

Market research is now easier; you don’t need to hire a lot of people for the research since Google provides you with the templates, finds your interviewees, and aggregates the data. With Google Consumer Surveys you will be able to produce timely and cost-effective results while still maintaining much of the accuracy of pre-existing surveying techniques. This new method will help you to gain insights about your customers, save time, and take more efficient and effective business decisions by analyzing aggregate data.

This tool provides both a new way to perform Internet surveys and a new method for publishers to monetize their content. Therefore, this new tool involves three different groups of users: researchers, publishers, and consumers. According to Google, “Consumer Surveys provides a new way for researchers to perform Internet surveys, for publishers to monetize their content and for consumers to support publishers.”

How it Works?

According to Google, companies create an online survey with existing templates. Then, customers complete questions to access premium content. Google Consumer Surveys runs multi-question surveys by asking people one question at a time. This results in higher response rates (15-20% compared with an industry standard of 0.1 - 2%), more accurate answers, and respondents may be more representative due, to the short survey length. Consumer Surveys infers approximate demographic and location information using the respondent’s IP address and DoubleClick cookie. Then, publishers get paid as their visitors answer. And finally, companies get aggregated and analyzed data.

Stop losing you time and money, and talk with your market research team. As soon as this new tool is incorporated to your market research, you will start receiving the benefits. I encourage you to visit http://bit.ly/I2v8Tt and http://bit.ly/J5ccZJ to learn how to use this new tool. Remember, it will help you to know more about your customers, reduce your costs, and increase business decisions’ accuracy, regardless of the size of your company. So, what are you waiting for? 


Paula Fuentealba is a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC program and is specializing in digital marketing and e-commerce.  Paula will be graduating in December 2012.  Paula can be reached on twitter using the handle @PaulaIMC.