In the past 2 years, Indigo Pearl Resort witnessed a clear shift in its market mix: Growing from a heavy reliance on tour operators to direct bookings and online channels. Micheal Nurbatlain and the team at Indigo Pearl led this growth by developing a presence in a variety of channels, with Facebook emerging as one of the biggest successes. In just one year, Michael grew the resort’s Facebook fan page to more than 8,000 followers. This case study shares the lessons learned from this process.

First, a little background

The Indigo Pearl Resort is an independent, luxury design property located in Phuket, Thailand.  Michael joined the resort as a sales manager, but this role quickly expanded to include managing digital marketing, e-commerce, and social media.

While Michael is running a number of interesting projects right now, we decided to focus on his work in Facebook for this case study . “While Twitter is beginning to gain popularity here in Asia, Facebook has nearly complete market adoption with our customers.”

Indigo Pearl Resort’s Facebook page

The Facebook page for Indigo Pearl Resort uses a mix of custom design and standard pages. Note the little details in how they engage with their fans:

But what really makes their Facebook presence stand out is their approach to special promotions.

Facebook contests: the key to growth

“Last September we wanted to give something to our Facebook fans,” said Michael. At the time, they had about 3,000 fans, and decided to create a photo contest around what symbolizes Indigo Pearl.

Fans were asked to post pictures, and then vote on their favorites. But Facebook contacted them, saying the contest setup violated terms and conditions. This forced them to setup an independent voting scheme allowing their fans to vote, which worked even better in the end. The contest generated great interaction among existing fans, strengthening their online community. Additionally, the contest generated a couple of hundred of new fans – which was a considered a great success at that time.

Latest Facebook contest: Ultimate holiday package

This year’s idea was to setup a new system. Rather than just asking fans to submit pictures, they wanted to add another layer of involvement. Michael and Indigo Pearl Resort asked fans to design their dream 3-day holiday package. What would they like to do in Puket? They were not very strict with the guidelines, so that if someone wrote some poetry about the perfect holiday – for example – it was still accepted as an entry.

“I imagined Mercedes running a promotion around designing your dream car. Although I’m a big fan of cars, I wouldn’t know what horsepower to put in or the details of the engine. While our guests travel a lot, they are not hoteliers, so it would be somewhat difficult for them to come up with a breakdown package of all the amenities – so we left it very open.”

They didn’t buy any Facebook ads or spend much time promoting the contest. Micheal worked a bit with the local media to get mentioned on their websites, and sent out some tweets to promote it. But no other PR or press releases – everything was done though Facebook.

“Within days we had 10-15 entries, and then we started to get a snowball effect from there.” They asked fans to send in their pictures, screened them, and placed the photos in the album called “Ultimate Family Package.” Once the photo was approved, the contest participants could ask their friends and family to vote on their entry.

This is what created a viral marketing effect for the resort – one photo had over 1,000 likes. “It surpassed our expectations and we could hardly believe it!”

Lessons learned from the contests

It’s all about planning. “Have a solid plan when it comes to Facebook, and create an editorial calendar. Be very strict about creating and following deadlines.” Too many people just wake up in the morning and try to create content on the fly.  “If there is no solid plan for 3-12 months, it’s difficult to consistently deliver good quality results.”

Always respond and interact with your online community. Don’t get arrogant and forget to thank fans. “I think you should thank every single person who contributes to your Facebook page or Twitter account – whether than have 5 friends or 5,000 followers. Each fan is an immense asset to your community.”

Have more than one prize. Last year the prize was a 7-night stay in a suite. “But if one guy in the contest has 1,000 votes for his entry, other people could be discouraged from participating.” This year, having two good prizes encouraged more people to enter the contest.

An “economy of photos” and additional thoughts

• Photos are the lifeblood of Facebook. As Guy Kawasaki says, Facebook is a pictures economy. “Often I just put a picture of our sunset or property, and it gets me a few hundred Likes and 30-50 comments. A few times I’ve spent hours creating a huge post, and it doesn’t get nearly the same levels of feedback as that beach picture gets. Sometimes the easy route gets the best results.”
• Avoid constantly bombarding fans with Facebook promotions. For every 20 posts, put only one promotional post if you must include sales messages.
• “Instead, develop the art of soft selling. Create and share images, experiences, smells, and tastes that represent your brand.”
• Act as an online concierge on Facebook and Twitter, helping people by providing answers and suggestions.
• Try to reflect the hotel’s personality without being too flamboyant. There has to be class, but presented in a very accessible way.

Thank you, Michael!

Become a fan of Indigo Pearl Resort on Facebook, follow @_IndigoPearl_ on Twitter, and connect with Michael on LinkedIn here.

A Hotel’s Guide to Facebook

Download this PDF guide now to learn all you need to know about promoting your hotel on Facebook:

• Statistics on how people use Facebook today
• What does (and doesn’t) work on Facebook
• Five different approaches to Facebook
• New developments to be aware of
• How to design an engaging brand page
• Moving beyond setup: integrating Facebook with your website
• Best practices for running promotions on Facebook
• Case studies from outside the hotel industry
• Reputation management considerations for Facebook
• Putting it all together: Action steps for planning your Facebook strategy

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The same principle is true on Facebook.

By using FBML – the Facebook coding language – you can create “hidden” content that is only visible when someone becomes a fan of your page.

What incentives could you offer to encourage people to become a fan of your hotel’s Facebook fan page?

• City guides?
• Insider access?
• A discount coupon?
• A value-added incentive that doesn’t cut profit margins?

Some examples of this

According to ClickZ, Levi’s picked up 45,000 “likers” by hosting a fan-only concert:

Levi’s brought in rock band Nada Surf to perform live via the company’s Facebook page on Oct. 23 and picked up around 45,000 “Likers” in the process. To push the branded content event, Levi’s purchased Facebook.com ads leading into last weekend, while the copy encouraged viewers to hit the “Like” button in order to watch the concert.

And as detailed in an earlier story we did, Hotel Seven in Paris offers the very lowest rate available to their Facebook fans. (Screenshot above)

Want to add this to your page?

HyperArts posted some code to support this, and John Jantsch posted a good technical how-to article on Duct Tape Marketing. If you’re implementing the functionality yourself I encourage you to check those out – otherwise just start planning what giveaway you could offer to encourage fans joining your Facebook page.

How did Hotel Le Seven build their Facebook community so quickly? Today I got on the phone with Vice PresidentMartin Soler to learn about the strategy he used to attract nearly 12,000 fans through Facebook. Martin’s company, World Independent Hotel Promotion, works exclusively with independent hotels, with a focus on hotel openings. (Martin is also a talented HDR photographer.)

The Background Story (In Martin’s words)

Seven months before opening we started the campaign. It was an ambitious project – great to work on, because the hotel concept was very unusual. We built a strategy where we would be creating some mystery, and leaking ideas on what every suite would look like.

We were lucky because we had a test room to work with for imagery – the rest were just sketches. We started by talking about the owners, and the other projects they did – like Hotel Five. We talked about all the gadgets and special things there were.

We coordinated with our PR agency to make sure there was no communication with the press. We only wanted to talk directly with the consumer.

Josiah: What communications channels did you use?

Facebook Only

Facebook was our exclusive communications channel.

I haven’t found Twitter to be very reliable for promotions. I feel it’s a bit more of a flash in the pan.

And of course we made a website with very dramatic music and imagery of what guests could expect. Facebook pointed to the website, and the website was very high-production – lots of rich media.

No Press Releases

If people wanted to know anything about the hotel, they had to follow us through Facebook. No press releases went out, and we did not take any questions from the media.

What Caused Rapid Growth

We tried some contests through Facebook, but the results were not impressive as we thought. We tried sending offers to our fanbase from Hotel Five – since the design concepts were similar. If they liked the Five, they’ll love the Seven. So cross marketing was possible there.

So a lot was just telling people about it. Pushing traffic from the website. We also wrote some bloggers, telling them to check out the page since we were going to do something interesting.

It was a bit of a risk because not many hotels have filled their rooms through Facebook yet. But it worked for us!

After Opening

We’ve continued our strategy after opening, and made it clear to our colleagues that it was Facebook that attracted our fans initially. It helped us achieve 80% occupancy on the soft opening – and that was in low season.

The owner was amazed – he didn’t expect that at all.

So we had to remember that our Facebook fans helped us achieve this success. We give them an exclusive room rate – the fans-only rate is the best rate you’ll get – better than our own website or any distributor.

We also reward our Facebook community by notifying them of anything that’s going to happen before we tell anyone else. (Even before we post to our website).

Martin’s Top Five Facebook Tips

1. Treat your Facebook “Likers” like an artist treats their fans. That is, realize they make you important and therefore you need to make them important. Special treatments etc. when they arrive at the hotel is a minimum.

2. Keep your Facebook page as personal as you can. This is an information communication channel to friends. Try to involve them as much as you can.

3. Find out what people want to know about the hotel and give them more of that. It’s not about what you “think” is important; you may be totally off the mark. Listen to them and your page will be a success.

4. Use all the media of Facebook, write articles, post photo albums etc.

5. Treat every post like a “news story;” don’t give it all at once. Give it to them bit by bit and maximize the yield from your stories.

Thanks, Martin!

Dan Sherman is Director of Marketing Communications at Ski.com

Ski.com is North America’s largest provider of mountain vacations
My day-to-day changes every day
I wear a lot of hats: the two largest are public relations and social media
The link between social media and PR is managing messages and keeping the dialog going
You skip the middleman and go direct to your target audience
Unlike PR, with social media you can somewhat control your message
When you’re pitching media, you just hope they write about what you want
Facebook and Twitter are two different vehicles for two different purposes
I do more offers on Twitter than Facebook
Facebook is more engaging in my opinion – it lets you have more of a dialog with more people in one place
Twitter is better for lead generation, driving traffic to a website
If I do a sales message, I don’t get a lot of action
But if it’s just relevant information, like a photo of new snow, people like to engage with that
When people comment on anything on Facebook, all their friends see that
Through this method, we got a $70,000 booking from someone who had never heard of us before
I generally do all the Facebook updates myself – and I manage multiple pages
The last thing I want to do is post too much, and have people hide us in their newsfeed
Our business is seasonal, so I want to be tapping people on the shoulder, but not too much
Facebook Connect may become a thing of the past
I have very high expectations for putting Facebook functionality on our own website, allowing their friends to see they’re engaging with Ski.com
We just implemented ‘like’ buttons on all of our resort pages
When people click that, on their friends’ newsfeed they’ll see John Doe likes Ski.com
Advice from strangers on TripAdvisor is great, but people really trust their own circle of friends
Recommendations from friends are more likely to encourage a buying decision
People have always been influenced by what other people like, but Facebook makes this much more visible

See Dan this October at EyeforTravel’s Travel Distribution Summit North America 2010.

Is your social media ambassador not working during the weekend? Not to worry: just use a tool like HootSuite that allows scheduled future posting on Facebook.

Here’s the video intro:

This community will start out on this Facebook page: I invite you join here. In fact, I’ll make it super-easy for you by including the Facebook widget here – just click the “like” button below:

A note about Facebook privacy: Joining does not open up your personal network. We’re just using the Facebook Connect platform to get as many people involved as possible. It’s just to let you plug into the community without separate registration.

Once you’ve “liked” our page, please share links, articles, or examples that you think would inspire innovation in this space.

Email signup

With a little bit of FBML code, you can embed an email signup form on your page. On the right, you can see how email marketing provider VerticalResponse does it on their page:

Once you build up this list, you can create special email promotions targeted directly to your Facebook audience.

Special deals module

Swiss-Belhotel uses Facebook to drive people to their “Red Hot Deals” landing page:

From here, they are sent to a highly-optimized landing page that probably earns high conversion rates:

Custom landing pages

Or you can go a step further. By setting up your page so that visitors see the “promotions” tab first, you can highlight a special offer or package. Here’s how Hard Rock Las Vegas does it:

Booking module

Over the past couple months, I’ve seen more and more hotels adding booking modules directly to their fan pages. Here’s how Design Hotels added their reservations tool:

How are you making money on Facebook?

(For step-by-step assistance setting up these features on your Facebook page, join our Insider’s Circle)

Megan Harrod is the director of marketing for Mosaic House. I’ve been watching them develop a new website for their soon-to-be-opened property for a while now. When they added Facebook Connect to the homepage, I knew we had to talk…

Josiah: What were some of your goals when redeveloping the website?

Megan: We wanted to focus on the things that makes Mosaic House, Mosaic House. For us, the biggest thing is the atmosphere created by all the communal areas in the building. For the website, we really wanted to show this element. We’re still building out the full website – it’s in progress right now.

Design is also important to us. We wanted that to come through in the imagery.

You mentioned one of the key selling points of your brand is the social aspect. How do you communicate this through design?

The biggest thing for us is the addition of the Facebook Connect feature. What I was talking to the designer in the planning stage, we decided to add this because it’s all about engagement. We haven’t even opened yet, but have nearly 800 fans on Facebook.

The Mosaic House is all about bringing people together. So adding Facebook Connect to the website enables us to bring people together online. We have further integration planned as we rollout the full version of the site. So when people land on the home page, they see a whole mosaic of faces…and then we can direct people to our Facebook page where we encourage further interaction.

I love how you’re integrating Facebook into the website – I don’t see a lot of hotels doing that. Very few hotels are able to reach 800 fans so quickly. Can you talk a little bit about how you promote your Facebook page? How did you get so many people signing up?

I read an article the other day by Seth Godin about faux followers. It was talking about the loyalty of your social media fans: are they really friends? Is it just about getting as many fans as you can?

With us, it’s cool, because we have staff that are really engaged in the project. It’s very much a family environment. So there are people back home (a lot of us are expats) that are following this project and have been for while – because there’s a lot more history in the project than a lot of people know.

So we just told our friends that we’re all involved in this project. They’re all young tech-savvy people: people that would love to stay with us when they visit Prague.  We posted pictures and information as the building was developing, and information about the launch party and special promotions. And our friends told their friends, which passed it along to their friends.

We didn’t expect to get so many fans so quickly, but it’s because our team is so engaged in the project. That’s growing our fan base naturally. Everyone’s really excited about the opening…they’re not faux followers.

Our designer said “You need to integrate [Facebook Connect], because you have 800 fans and you’re not even open yet!” And these people are actually interacting with the page.

I think that’s a really cool story about the organic approach you took. I’d like to briefly touch on the Facebook page itself. Do you have a system to manage things?

A lot of people have a strategy, but we haven’t defined a specific strategy — like “we’re going out Monday, Wednesday and Thursday to update it.” It’s just myself and a few others that are closely involved in the project. So it’s just like we would update our own Facebook statuses. It’s organic. It’s not anything that’s very scheduled… and I don’t think it needs to be. I think it feels more genuine this way.

So what types of content do you like to share on Facebook?

Yeah, we want people to get jazzed about the location, so that’s a big thing. What actually just shot a video of around the area. Also images around the space, so people can see what it will look like, and what a sample room looks like. Any events going on in Prague, so people can see these cool places like art galleries in the neighborhood.

So people start getting excited about the things that they could see in Prague when they come here. Any relevant information we find, we post. We posted some stuff about Tom’s Shoes, which is an organization which was started by a traveler, and is a great cause. So we’ve discussed some options for promotions in the future as a way to give back.

So that’s what we’ve done. We will be posting more promotional information in terms of generating a stronger following in the future, but that is more of the strategic approach that we’re talking about.

Do you have plans for further Facebook Connect integration on your website?

The design of the homepage will change when we have the full site launched. But it will still be a feature on the home page. We will direct a lot of people from our website to the fan page, so they can leave reviews and what they liked about staying there.

So we’ll use it a little differently once we fully open. But Facebook connect will still be an element of the homepage, very much front and center.

It’s a cool thing because people feel special when they see their picture on the home page. They feel like they’re being recognized and a part of the project.

Great! I’ll be very interested in watching this website as you roll it out.

The Pros & Cons of using Facebook

Pros

• It can serve as a rich media sharing platform for collecting and distributing photos and video of special events at your hotel
• You can extend your page functionality through various applications
• It can serve as a good social media hub, sharing content from various sites around the web
• The new enhanced wall feature encourages interactivity and creates a sort of “lifestream” around your hotel
• Event promotion seems to be something that works very well – considering how people tend to use Facebook
• You can rally people around a cause
• Access to statistics has improved over the past few months, making it easier to track metrics

Cons

• Your potential guests may not be using it
• Your guests may not want to use it to interact with a hotel
• People may even get annoyed by receiving marketing messages from a hotel on Facebook

“I thought Beverly Hilton was an old girlfriend, but then realized I’d been friended by a hotel. #HiltonFail” @simmonet

But perhaps the most powerful argument I hear against using Facebook is that is doesn’t reach people in the decision making stage of the travel planning process. This is something you must consider carefully if you are starting a brand-new Internet marketing campaign with limited resources. You may get a higher return on investment by focusing on online reputation building and search marketing.

Should your hotel have a Facebook presence?

Here are some questions to ask yourself

Who is our target market? Yes, the fastest growing demographic is users above 35 — and maybe even women over 55. But I recommend using tools such as Quantcast to see if the people that you want to reach are actually using this site.

Could this help our search marketing efforts? Most likely, it will.  Facebook pages sit  outside the secure firewall — allowing search engines to crawl their content. Given the good relationship that Facebook has with Google, there’s an excellent chance that your page will appear highly in search results.

Do we have upcoming events that we want to promote? Some of the best Facebook marketing campaigns that I’ve seen are centered around event promotion. If your hotel or restaurant regularly has special events this is a great place to get the word out.

Do we have photos and video that we can share? Facebook is becoming more and more centered around media. The more content you can upload to your page, the more interactive it will feel.

Do we have enough time to create an effective presence here? With so many social media options, it’s important not to lose focus. If you have the resources to effectively promote your hotel on Facebook, go for it. Otherwise, you may want to wait until you have more time or support for producing your page.

What is our long-term strategy? If you acquire 5,000 fans: what will happen then? It’s easy to get caught up with meaningless statistics in social media. Avoid this by having a real business strategy for participating in a site like Facebook.

Alternatives to Facebook

If you asked yourself the above questions, and decided that Facebook isn’t for you, here are some smart alternatives that may give you a better return on investment:

Blogs. Publishing a blog – either about your hotel or about your destination – has the potential to bring long-term traffic to your hotel website. By being accessible outside the network, you can reach more people. It also can serve many of the same media sharing functions that work well on Facebook.

Flickr & YouTube. Sharing rich media seems to be one of the most effective uses of Facebook. But sharing your photos and videos on these popular websites allows them to be viewed by people who may not be members of a closed social network. Again, this gives search marketing benefits, and increases your overall Web visibility.

Take a look at how other hotels are using Facebook.

One of the best ways to get marketing inspiration – and help you decide whether you should be using Facebook as a marketing channel – is to look at how other hotels are using this platform.

A few months ago, I analyzed five different types of hotel Facebook pages on Guillaume’s blog. You can also see this list of hotels on Facebook…or read HotelChatter stories about Facebook.

What do you think: what is the best criteria for choosing Facebook as a hotel marketing tactic?