A few colleagues and I are starting a new community to encourage innovation around social responsibility and environmental sustainability.

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.

Last May, The Langham Hotel in Hong Kong unwittingly created a firestorm of controversy on the internet. A series of three videos were produced to present the hotel as a safe haven for culture-shocked travelers. After the videos were released, they received a lot of negative criticism as “racist” and “offensive.” The videos were pulled from YouTube, and the hotel had to issue a formal apology.  But as this hotel learned the hard way, you can never completely erase negative buzz online.

Of course, the solution isn’t to avoid all forms of online interaction. Social media can serve as a powerful channel for your staff to serve guests.

The Internet marketing managers at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City have developed a web presence that shows what’s possible when social media is done right. Through a dedicated website, blog, Facebook fan page, YouTube channel, Flickr photo stream, and a Twitter account with over 3,000 followers, the hotel is able to build loyalty and attract attention using social media.

And then there’s the vast majority of hotels that have either a nonexistent or a mediocre social media presence. The problem there is that their social media campaign is so boring it doesn’t attract any attention: negative or positive. They’re simply not on the radar.

This is why a social media policy is so important

A good social media policy serves as a roadmap for encouraging your staff to take part in promoting your hotel online…but also serves as a safeguard against tarnishing your brand’s reputation. It recognizes that social media is by definition a personality-powered platform. It encourages your staff to actively participate in spreading the word about your organization online.

It’s not so much a set of rules as it is a written philosophy to clarify your engagement strategy.

The two parts of a good social media policy

Read more…

Over the past few months, I’ve seen hotels creatively use Facebook to successfully attract new guests and connect with past ones. This has led me to recommend a new situational approach to using Facebook: what works for some hospitality companies may not work for others. It seems you must have clear goals for being on the site before you can succeed.

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 Read more…

To followup on Guillaume’s series on hotels using Twitter, I wanted to examine how hotels are using another popular network: Facebook. While Twitter seems to be getting all the press, a traffic comparison chart from Compete.com may surprise you:

A couple big takeaways from this:

• Facebook reaches nearly four times as many people as Twitter
• Facebook is growing faster than Twitter (especially over the past 3 months)
• Twitter growth has plateaued over the past month (Quantcast even shows a drop)

For these reasons, I wondered how hotels are using Facebook to engage their fans and attract new ones.

Read the whole story: How hotels use (and misuse) Facebook: 5 examples, 14 ideas for you