Marriott and the impact of social media: the conclusion
Marriott gave me a great opening to a speech on social media and a lesson in how anyone can create content, distribute that content and influence a brand conversation. Above the first four slides of a talk I gave at Sears.
If you’ve been here this week you know the story of my dripping hotel room ceiling and my frustration with Marriott’s initial response. But I’m pleased to report the story has a happy ending for all involved.
For starters, the ordeal gave me a brilliant opening to a speech I was making to Sears HC the next day. Perfect timing for a talk titled “The End of Us and Them,” and the thesis that media is now in the hands of two billion amateurs rather than a select group of privileged professionals.
I opened with a photo of the ceiling, thanked Sears for putting me up there, and then proceeded to reveal the early morning Tweet stream along with a video I’d shot and edited on my iPhone that morning calling out Marriott. (Truth be told I didn’t actually post the video on Youtube, but faked it in my presentation to make the point.)
Needless to say it got a great reaction and emphasized that in an age of social media, when consumers control both content and distribution, all brands need to learn a different set of rules and behaviors.
Anyway, the rest of the story worked out well on a number of accounts, too. When offered free nights and points by the Marriott (nice of them) I told them, “no thanks,” and instead requested a public apology on Twitter and a comment on this blog. The point wasn’t to embarrass anyone but simply to get the hotel to admit its mistake, acknowledge my frustration, and turn the entire mishap into a conversation from which people could learn.
It appears to have worked. The comment stream on the last post is a rich one. It questions whether one’s social footprint influences the response that they get from a brand. It reveals disappointments with service in general. It earns Marriott credit for engaging. And, perhaps most importantly, it shows that a blog post that exercises a little restraint, replacing the venom-filled rant with some productive advice, gets a slightly better reaction that one that simply vents.
Furthermore, the hotel actually suggests that there’s room for improvement in both customer service and employee responsiveness. We may even see a guest bill of rights.
Lance Misner, the manager of the Marriott Hoffman Estates, has become a reader of this blog, a Twitter user, and maybe even a convert to social media’s potential for learning, engaging and marketing.
Here, in fact, is what he’s had to say in response to my last post and his own exposure to the story playing out in the social space.
“Let me say first of all that I do not know anything about Twitter so if I sound ignorant I am. I signed up myself in order to publicly apologize. I hope that worked.”
“There are some incredible things going on in the business world as it relates to social media. This has been a real wake up call, I need to embrace these concepts and find opportunities to further market our property. In fact I am looking forward to showing your blog at my staff meeting on Tuesday.”
“I would love to pick your brain as this old dog needs to learn a few new tricks. I hope your presentation went well at Sears and if you are home, or wherever you are tonight, I hope you are able to get some rest.”
I supposed I should add that Lance also threw in a bunch of points and an upgrade to the big suite next time I’m in town.
Lessons?
We should make our issues public.
It’s smarter to offer suggestions than criticism.
We should welcome any brand or individual who tries to learn and engage.
If we want brands to deliver better service, it’s partly our responsibility to guide them there and hold them to it.
This just in: Just as I was about to post this, I got an email and phone call from Marriott headquarters letting me know they plan to use this as a learning and training experience. Not sure if it would have generated that kind of response if it weren’t posted, blogged and tweeted about, but that turns out to be just one more reason that consumers should wield their new power and brands should heed it.
Finally I made it clear to Marriott that I hoped no one employee would be called out, but that it the entire incident be turned into something positive.
Your thoughts?
Dear Marriott: Some free service advice after a bad night
The ceiling above my hotel bed leaked all night long, onto the mattress, the end table and the rug below. Had to sleep on the floor as a result.
OK, so maybe it’s not your fault that my hotel room ceiling leaked all night long. Though the fact that there was already a stain in the same corner of the room suggests you should have known about it. But what doesn’t really work for me is the response that I got when I called in the middle of the night. It went something like this:
“We’re sorry, the hotel is totally booked there’s nothing we can do.”
Really? Nothing you can do? How about a real apology? How about an offer of five free nights at any Marriott in the system? How about setting up a bed in a conference room? They’re not full in the middle of the night. Or perhaps it doesn’t really matter to you. After all, you’re full. Business is good. What do you care if you lose one customer or have an occasionally unhappy guest?
Well I think you should care. Because not caring is the beginning of the end. And whether you believe it or not, no business these days is indispensable.
My suggestion is this. Develop a customer bill of rights if you don’t have one already. Post it at the front desk. Place it in the rooms. Train your employees in what says and what it means.
Start with:
1. We guarantee your satisfaction.
2. We guarantee your room will be clean and that everything works: the clock, TV, lamps, bathroom.
3. If for any reason your stay with us was unsatisfactory we will make it up with comparable accommodations on us.
4. We will take any complaint and suggestion seriously and respond as quickly as humanly possible.
5. We encourage you to Tweet, blog, and post images and video of anything you find below standards or unresolved.
The last point is to me the most important. It acknowledges that Marriott recognizes it lives in an age of social media and expects to be held to even higher standards as a result.
What do you think? Do brands have to be even more responsive when all of its customers can create, share and disseminate opinions and reactions?
Digital ideas, platforms and eco-systems
For years, digital agencies have strived to distinguish themselves from traditional advertising agencies that practice digital with the claim that they build platforms – applications and utility that delivery functionality and integrate into people’s lives – while ad agencies come up with digital gimmicks. In fact it was in the news today. As the argument goes, the latter may generate awareness and buzz, but like all offline advertising campaign, they quickly lose their impact when the media buy comes to an end, calling for yet another campaign and then another.
This is true. It was true of Subservient Chicken, true of the Cadbury Gorilla, and true, inevitably, of Old Spice’s recent social media frenzy. In fact, once these campaigns end the only people who tend to remember them are agency types scrambling to replicate their temporary success while making it look as if they didn’t copy the idea.
Meanwhile platforms like Garmin Connect (bet you never even heard of it unless you’re a road cyclist and a Garmin user) and iPhone apps like Stylebook, Zipcar and Timberland Expeditions (one of ours) continue to attract users, generate downloads, and provide the kind of functionality that earns both loyalty and repeat business.
The fact is brands and marketers need both. Without awareness and buzz, the kind of utility that makes a brand indispensable (if that’s possible) never gets embraced. Nike Plus would be invisible if it weren’t for the brand equity built up with years of advertising.
However, the challenge now is more complicated than what’s implied by the debate between idea and platform. The new frontier is the ecosystem. (Yes I know that term gets used to mean a lot of things; but for this purpose it means the interdependency of a brand’s multiple digital properties.) Think about it. Most brands have an advertising campaign. They probably have a website that offers more than brochure-ware and delivers something of genuine use — either applications, commerce, customized user-experiences, community or how-to videos.
But with the proliferation of social media, chances are good that a brand also has a Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel and at least one if not three iPhone apps. (I recently had a prospect tell me, “We need apps, lots of apps. It’s important for you to know that we’re app happy around here, so whatever you do bring us apps.”) And since the pre iPhone craze was “build me a micro-site,” chances are good it also has half a dozen of those.
Years ago, John Wanamaker said he knew that half his advertising worked, he just wasn’t sure which half. Today, with all the metrics and analytics baked into everything we do there’s little doubt that we know which stuff works. But do you know whether it all works together?
My suggestion is that if digital agencies and traditional agencies continue fighting over the idea versus the platform they’re wasting words and energy. The new frontier will be the brand’s overall digital ecosystem and figuring out how to get advertising, platforms, social media, conversation strategy and a brand’s existing community of customers to reinforce each other in a way that generates awareness, allows prospects to enter a relationship on their own terms (whether they want to learn, connect, join, transact, share or simply watch) and then holds onto them, ideally turning them into advocates.
Got eco-system?
Build a community that you can actually market
Earlier this week YouTube announced it would pony up $5 million, and eventually more, to back emerging auteurs whose videos attract viewers to the popular site. There are two ways to look at this new initiative.
First it’s an effort to get more quality content onto the site. The funding will motivate professionals and talented amateurs alike to create, upload and promote their content.
But second, and more importantly, it’s an acknowledgment that it’s not YouTube the brand or YouTube the platform that draws traffic, but rather the videos and the people who create them. YouTube will inevitably recruit better content creators and then have something new to market.
Customers are your greatest asset
Youtube, of course, isn’t the only brand that’s figured this out. Plenty of smart businesses realize their customers and users are their most valuable asset. They not only represent repeat business, they become advocates whose endorsement (whether on blogs, Twitter or conversation at a cocktail party), content and participation drive more business. (If you’re not yet thinking this way, you may want to read Joesph Jaffe’s new book Flip the Funnel; it will both convince you that it matters and present you with some useful tactics.)
But an active community might be worth even more
But the YouTube initiative isn’t just about attending to customers. It’s actually closer to “ladies night.” You remember ladies night. A bar lets women drink for less in hopes that more single females show up and act as a magnet for the opposite sex. Neither sex comes for the bar or the venue as much as they do for one another. Essentially the bar is gathering a community worth marketing.
Offline advertisers have always done this. VW built an entire brand image around the people who drove the cars rather than the cars themselves. Ralph Lauren Polo did the same. However in those cases the “communities” were contrived and lived only as two-dimensional images on magazine pages or as scenes played by actors in TV commercials.
A community can be the reason to “join” a brand
It strikes me that one of the next opportunities for brands is to market the real communities they build. Or at least promote them as an added benefit. Aren’t there people who purchased Dell computers in part for the customer-run service is? Or runners who bought Nike not only because it offers Nike + but because the community itself is a virtue?
Red Sox Nation: a made up moniker for the team's fans used as a marketing tool by the organization
So far it appears that most brands see the value in creating a community only as a service to existing customers but not as a feature worth marketing. But why not make it another reason to embrace their brand or buy their product?
The “gift of community,” as I like to call it, should be part of every brand’s marketing plan. Offer customers and prospects a way for them to connect with each other so they can meet, share, learn.
As Clay Shirky reminds us in Cognitive Surplus “humans intrinsically value a sense of connectedness.” Smart brands realize that customers can create value for each other. In the future smarter brands will learn to market that fact.
Some communities worth marketing:
Harley Davidson’s Facebook fans
Got any others?
Amazon, Barnes and Noble, are you paying attention to #booksthatchangedmyworld?
The first "changed my life" book I read. I think I was 12.
I missed it when if first appeared, but #booksthatchangedmyworld, a hashtag created by New Yorker writer Susan Orlean has been getting a fair amount of buzz on Twitter and on blogs over the last week. The rather long hashtag started as a way for Orlean to catalog her own favorite reads, but as happens on Twitter, the community joins in when it wants, deciding whether or not a topic or subject deserves attention and buzz.
One one hand, there’s not much more to this than the fact that lots of people (anyone who reads, for that matter) have been influenced by books and that in an age of social media people like to share.
What’s a little amusing is that it with all the attention that The Shallows, Nicholas Carr’s new book, is getting, the New York Times actually referred to the hashtag in a post suggesting that perhaps Internet addicts aren’t getting stupid as quickly as Nicholas Carr suggests. They actually read books. Or at least they can remember the titles of books they should have read.
Within a day, someone paying attention scoffed up the URL booksthatchangedmyworld.com, recognizing, if not a monetizable idea, at least a subject worth developing further.
But the only folks who should be jumping on this bandwagon – booksellers Barnes and Noble and Amazon – seem conspicuously absent. Search for their Twitter handles and the hashtag, and as you can see, nothing, At least when this was written.
Are they completely unaware of the greatest book and publisher marketing program of all time? Courtesy of Edward L. Bernays. (They sell his books, so you’d think they’d know something about him.)
For the uninitiated, in 1930 Bernays was retained by a consortium of book publishers. His charge was simple: sell more books. Bernays solution: build more bookshelves. Knowing that man hates a void, he figured if he could get architects and builders to include more bookshelves in homes and apartments, they’d fill up with books.
How did he do it? Bernays asked respectable public figures – CEOs, senators, lawyers, doctors – to name the books that influenced and inspired them. He released the findings to the press with a spin: “accomplished people have all been influenced by books.” He then marketed the significant press coverage to home builders with the recommendation that if they wanted to sell to a more desirable clientele, they needed to install built-in bookcases. Ever notice how all homes built in the late 30s, 40s and beyond have built-ins? Needless to say, the sale of books increased significantly.
Barnes and Noble and Amazon were just handed a similar opportunity. The chance to get behind a social media initiative that celebrates books, their impact on people’s lives and the fact that even the Twitterati, those allegedly least inclined to read (according to Carr), willingly share the books that mattered to them is an easy marketing idea waiting to happen.
From the looks of it neither Barnes and Noble nor Amazon bought the URL inspired by Orlean. But they should have.
It’s not too late for them to get more active on Twitter, pick up on discussions like this and turn them into ideas that help sell more books. Whether it’s simply to engage with the community already commenting or to take the idea and turn it into something even bigger.
What do you think? Don’t you wish your brand were handed opportunities like this?
