Bowen Payson, Online Marketing Manager at Virgin America

I run the online marketing team, responsible for all digital communications from Virgin America
There’s four of us working on social media: 2 from marketing, 2 from corporate communications
My workday is 50% managing content development, 50% on promotional activities generating direct revenue
We’re focused on fare promotions, and also on telling people about our unique amenities
People may say something online, but do something else. On our recent Facebook promotions, for every person that complains, 5 are buying a ticket
We have a matrix approach to promotions: if we only did one type (discount, giveaway, etc) it would burn out the audience. It’s all about creating a mix.
Twitter a year ago was totally different than Twitter today. Facebook is the same way.
Early adopters used be the only ones on some social media; now it’s more mainstream
For me, Twitter is a newsfeed; for others it may be something else
We plan some social media promotions months ahead of time
Our editorial calendar is pretty lose and open, so we can change and update as needed
Our most successful channel in terms of views, clicks, and sales is Twitter
Facebook is growing, but user behavior is different. Facebook can bring a very engaged audience.
Nick Schwartz is our voice on Twitter
If there’s a basic question, Nick takes care of it. If it’s bigger, we work closely with our guest services team to resolve issues.
A big project for us right now is finding the right buzz channels. Last week we launched a promotion around “awkward family photos,” where people send in photos for a chance to win prizes.
It’s great because the photos are viral and funny, but it’s also a good offer for our customers.
Our website is intended to be fun and user-friendly. It’s meant to be relevant and intuitive. We’re using big photos and less text to quickly get the message across.
If I could start over, I would have focused more on search optimization. I’d work on deeper integration of the social media into the website.
One of the best things we ever did was in emails to our Elevate members: including a “tweet this” button in our emails. Different people at different times need different things from email. Sometimes people aren’t buying, but want to share an offer with their friends.
Social media takes a lot of work. What you invest, you get out. You need to invest in people, thought, time and strategy. It’s not like buying traditional media.

See Bowen next week at EyeforTravel’s Travel Distribution Summit North America 2010.

In today’s interview, I talk with Steve Lambert, General Manager of the Radisson Nashua Hotel. We discussed the practical details and day-to-day skills for using Twitter successfully, including:

1. How they took advantage of a renovation and rebranding to launch their social media activity
2. What types of content work best with Twitter
3. How to gather stories for sharing online
4. The system Steve built on his iPhone for capturing ideas as he finds them
5. Does syncing Twitter and Facebook updates automatically work well?
6. The metrics important to Steve
7. How he attracts new followers
8. Criteria for deciding who you should follow and interact with
9. How to stay on topic while at the same time maintaining diversity in your updates
10. Who in the hotel should be managing Twitter and your social media marketing
11. How Steve involves his whole team in the process
12. What’s next in social media

Listen here:

Bonus: The Twitter tools that Steve uses

Steve mentioned some of these tools in the interview – you may want to check them out for your own use:

• Itweet.net
• Twittearth
• Twinfluence
• Tweetmeme
• Futuretweets
• Song.ly
• Twiturm.com
• Tweetvisor
• Tweetvolume
• Asktwitr
• Backtweets
• Tweetbeep
• Friendorfollow

Not many people in the hotel industry know this, but my very first venture was an RSS software company. I saw RSS as the direct distribution channel of the future, but it turned out Twitter largely fills this purpose.

You don’t have to be a Twitter power user to set up searches and lists that provide you with a customized flow of information and content. This was the vision of RSS, and I’m pleased to see this come true – even if through a different technology.

I used to promote Feedburner. Today I set up @HMSblog for those who want new post notifications from this blog… and none of the thoughts, ideas, and chatter on @HMarketingHelp

More and more hotels are seeing Twitter provide actual sales, and as we move from “ain’t it cool” to power users, it’s time we had a toolbox to match.

Here are the best tools for anyone using Twitter…and then at the end are custom Twitter buttons we made just for you.

HootSuite

HootSuite

A “professional Twitter client,” HootSuite is a web-based tool with powerful publishing and monitoring features. The ability to manage multiple accounts simultaneously make this the tool of choice for many social media managers. The “future tweet” scheduling tool is something I use extensively because of my international audience in different time zones. Since HootSuite includes many of the features from the tools below, I use this tool exclusively for all my Twitter activity.

Read more…

Last week I caught up with Fairmont’s Public Relations manager, Mike Taylor, to discuss how Fairmont uses Twitter to communicate with their community:

Josiah: What’s your overall goal or strategy for Twitter?

Mike: On Twitter it’s about two things: developing awareness and understanding of what our brand is and what we represent. The second part of it is the engagement factor. We are interested in having a dialogue with the people that follow us — be it guests, media, travel planners, travel agents — we have a wide variety of people that follow us. So I tried to drill down and have a dialogue with all of these individuals that want to know more about us and want to speak with us.

The type of content do you try to share through Twitter?

Again, it’s a wide variety. We push out news and information; we think that’s valuable. We include package and rate offers. We don’t see Twitter primarily as a distribution tool. But if we have something that’s a great deal we’re going to let people know about it.

We are really trying to provide “behind the curtain” type of insider details that you may not know about either.

And we’ve also created specific hash tags that are audience specific. So we have one for our environmental news, and another for our travel agents when we’re speaking to that community. So we’re trying to use hash takes to funnel information down to a very specific focus and reach a certain audience.

Do you publish all of this yourself? I know you have hotels around the world — how do you work with individual properties — and how do you manage all of that?

At a brand level, I am the guy that does it all! I’m coming up with content — I don’t want to say we develop a publishing calendar, because that seems much too formal — but I definitely have information that isn’t time sensitive. That will be sitting at the ready for when there may not be much to talk about. I would say a high percentage of our content is either things that land on my desk that day, or else a result of what someone else has posted.

So at a brand level, I would say I’m the person that is responsible for all the content. But we definitely do have a number of our hotels at local levels that have Twitter pages. Their focus really tends to be on a local or regional market, trying to develop a presence there. They’re posting more on things that would be of interest to that local market. For example, maybe there’s a drink special at one of the properties they want to promote. So the content is a little more focused on the local, regional market.

I would probably say we have about half of our hotels on Twitter. The rest just leverage our brand level account.

How do you gain followers? You currently have around 6,000 people receiving your updates…

Our focus really isn’t on follower count. It’s certainly one metric we look at, but that’s not where our focus is. I don’t just randomly follow back anyone who follows us. We really try to follow people that are influencers, people that are interested — genuinely interested — in our brand and that we want to have discussion with. And of course we follow media.

But we definitely don’t just go out and start randomly following as many people as we can…just to bump that number up. That’s not natural, and that’s not why we’re on there.

Finally, give us a success story — what’s the best thing that’s happened as a result of your participation on Twitter?

Narrowing it down to one is a pretty big challenge! There’s been a few things. Twitter has introduced us to people we otherwise wouldn’t have a relationship with. So it’s sort of that global neighborhood concept where these people wouldn’t have reached out to us or vice versa if we were not participating. We wouldn’t have been able to develop relationships with other brands and other individuals which have been very beneficial for us.

We’ve had a lot of fun, but that’s a hard question to answer — there has been so much value we have received.

You can follow Mike’s updates for Fairmont @FairmontHotels

Today, I received an e-mail from someone saying that they are no longer following @hmarketinghelp because I update too frequently. At the same time, I have Twitter power users with more than 30,000 followers encouraging me to update more frequently…using automated tools if needed.

Which advice do I follow? More importantly, how frequently should your hotel update its Twitter account?

There are a few things to understand here. The less followers you have, the more common it is for one of the people you’re following to dominate your updates page. I know this happened to me.

Once you start getting more followers, this is less of an issue. Sure, there are spam accounts that churn out new updates every few minutes — around the clock — but those are pretty easy to detect and remove. Additionally, Twitter power users often use software such as TweetDeck and HootSuite to monitor specific terms and search queries — or follow their favorite users.

I think some common sense is useful here:

• If you have something worth saying, say it.
• If you have something particularly important, feel free to re-tweet it several times during the day (day parting).

I often do 3 to 5 updates in rapid succession several times a day. I think this is a natural way to update your account. As long as you’re not making 50 updates all at once in a five-minute minute session, most people don’t mind.

What do you think? How often do you update twitter? What do you think is the best update frequency?

Observing the masters is often the best way to learn. Today, let’s take a look at the top 20 Twitter users (by number of followers), and see if they can teach us a thing or two about using this site.

First, let’s categorize these accounts:

• Celebrities: 16
• News: 3 (if you include The Onion)
• Companies: 1 (Twitter)

Now, what can we learn?

Leverage your celebrity

Most of these people were already celebrities with massive followings. They simply used their existing fan base to reach the top of Twitter.

Oprah on Twitter

Ashton Kutcher on Twitter

Lesson for hotels: Use your popularity online and off to direct people to your Twitter account. This is one of the most reliable strategies available.

Read more…

Our recent article about TripAdvisor’s top London hotel got me excited.What additional hotel marketing and management lessons could we learn from other top guest-rated hotels? I’m going to start a little series interviewing management at these TripAdvisor all-stars to find out.

Today we’re going to talk with Adele Gutman, VP of Sales & Marketing at HKHotels. All four of their Manhattan properties are among TripAdvisor’s top 10 New York City hotels, including the Casablanca Hotel and the Library Hotel.

Let’s begin.

Josiah: Give us a little introduction to your hotels.

Adele: Let me share what I wrote on our website, which I think says it all:

HKHotels & Hospitality is a family owned and operated collection of small luxury hotels in New York City that takes a unique approach to the art of hospitality. Each of our small European-style New York hotels has its own distinctive personality and charm. What they share is a commitment to providing timeless beauty, exceptional value, and an outstanding travel experience for every guest visiting NYC.

HKHoteliers care about people, and we care about building lifelong relationships with our guests.  To achieve that, our philosophy is to hire the kindest, happiest people we can find, people who are naturally inclined to love to help people. Then, we develop their natural talents and train them to become professional hoteliers so that they are more than simply their title, whether it be Bellman, Guest Service Agent or Housekeeper; they are all professional luxury hoteliers dedicated to providing personalized luxurious service to each traveler who crosses their path.

All four of your Manhattan properties are among TripAdvisor’s top 10 New York City hotels. How did you do it?

Several years ago when we first began to notice TripAdvisor, we saw that one of our hotels was number seven, and another was number 56. Because one of our hotels was at the top of the list, it never seemed out of the realm of possibility to have them all up there. So, this may sound very “Oprah” but seriously, several years ago we “set an intention” to have all of our hotels in the top 10%. We started making a big deal out of the reading of every review at our morning meetings, to observe what our guests really responded to and learn what we could do better. We shared ideas between the hotels, and included all our staff, including every bellman and housekeeper in the process. Our staff loved it.

We strive to hire the nicest happiest people so between their good nature and the training they get at the hotels, they take so much pride in the appreciation of the guests, and it is addictive. The result, at least for us, is a team of people who are strongly motivated to make the guests happy.  Happy staff make for happy guests and vise versa. With the right support from the leadership in terms of empowering staff to take initiative, it is self perpetuating.

Sometimes, hotels have a problem bridging the “offline to online gap.” How are you encouraging guests at your hotels to talk about their stay online – and share their positive experiences with others?

We believe that satisfying your guests’ needs and expectations is not going to get you any reviews. If you want your guests to shower your hotel with good word of mouth, both on and offline, you have got to wow them with exceptional service and a unique experience that leaves them with something to talk about. If they get home and their friends, colleagues and  associates ask them how their trip was, you want them to be able to say, “you’ll never believe what an awesome hotel we stayed at. They had this, that and the other thing, and the people there, that was the best part of all.”

Casablanca Hotel

Let’s move beyond TripAdvisor. What other internet marketing tactics are your hotels focusing on right now?

We are a small company, so our time is limited, but we are tinkering with Citysearch, Yelp, Facebook and Twitter.

But TripAdvisor is the powerhouse that brings guests to us from Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. Nothing else comes close.

Anything online that has little to no cost yet drives visitors to our website, we love to work on. We have about 1,100 fans between the four hotels on facebook, and that is with no financial investment and really, just a small amount of time, so it gives us another way of communicating with our audience and strengthening the bond with our clients.

In the past, which marketing tactics have performed best for you? Which ones don’t quite live up to the hype?

Giving each hotel a bit of a concept, a unique identity, gives the guests and the journalists a hook to rest their story on. The Library concept in particular is so unique, everyone loves to talk about it and write about it. Creating interesting packages at the hotel also gives people something to talk about.  We get a lot more play and exposure from that than anything else we can do.

We really avoid paid advertising, because we feel our resources should all go towards things that enhance the guest experience instead, but we have on rare occasion traded for some print ads. We never felt any big benefit from that as much as we do from the on and offline word of mouth. Free wine and cheese in the evenings makes people happy. That is what performs well for us.

Library Hotel

What has been your biggest obstacle in designing or launching your online marketing campaign? How did you overcome it?

We came to realize that there was no shortcut or easy way out. We had to make the time to learn about internet marketing for ourselves as opposed to relying on outside experts, and test our ideas, evaluate the results, and continually grow to become experts for our own needs. If you have a true entrepreneurial spirit at your business, there is no one outside the company that will care as deeply about the results as you will.

There is so much great advice available on the internet for people who seek it out. People are so generous about sharing ideas. We are still in the learning process, and perhaps always will be, but everyone at our company has begun to embrace the work and we are getting better at it all the time. The thing I feel we really are strongest at is the key to making any business a long term success. We build our business brick by brick by making sure everyone who checks out is delighted enough not just to return but to create more future business through referrals both on and off line.

Do you have any favorite marketing resources you would like to share with our readers?

I have my Google Reader programmed to send me anything that gets written on the internet about Internet marketing particularly with regard to hospitality. That’s how I found you, Josiah!

What’s the most exciting trend you see in hotel marketing? Why?

I guess would have to say that I really have my eye on Twitter. I am not doing much for the hotels on it now, but we just launched a new restaurant in the Broadway Theater District called Montenapo (@Montenapo) so I am experimenting with the joys of Twitter there.

We are just in the baby steps, but already, there is no doubt about it: Twitter has definitely brought new customers to Montenapo who would not have found us otherwise. And it’s free so you’ve got to love that!

Thank you for your time, Adele.

Twitter can be a powerful promotional tool for your blog or website, but it also makes a great supplement.

Twitter adds personality to your brand

Many top blogs are becoming like online magazines. Staffed by full-time professional writers, there is a tendency to become overly factual.

But through a Twitter account, many corporate bloggers feel more free to be themselves and lighten up a bit. By bringing these two tools together, you can provide both informative content and a little personality behind it.

Twitter helps you get to know your readers

Blog discussions in the comment section can serve the same function, but I find them to be less spontaneous than the back-and-forth nature of Twitter. For any blogger, it’s important to build relationships with your readers, and regular communication is the way to do that.

Twitter expands your network

I’ve probably met more new people through Twitter than any other social networking tool. Whether it’s another blogger or a business you wanted to find, Twitter can help open doors and establish connections.

Twitter is an idea goldmine

If you follow the right people, just watching the tweets stream by for a few minutes can give you lots of fresh ideas and interesting links. I use TweetDeck to carefully monitor a select group of people’s tweets, and usually check in a few times each day.

Additionally, you can get a lot of very good ideas by asking questions to your followers. Whether you just want a second opinion on your logo design, or need to do a more in-depth survey, it’s a very convenient to have real time feedback.

Twitter is also a great research tool

Twitter is a recorded stream of consciousness of the web. Entering keywords into search.twitter.com helps you measure the pulse of what people are thinking.

Twitter is the preferred subscription method for some

Some people would rather receive your blog updates on Twitter than through RSS or email. Whether the motive is accessibility or security, cross-promoting blog updates on Twitter is a good idea for these people.

Let me ask you: Does Twitter help you as a blogger? Drop by my shiny new Twitter page and let me know.

Kristy and her husband were not happy with their recent stay at a Utah Comfort Inn. A lack of daily room cleaning and the busload of noisy teenagers staying on the floor above (“like sleeping under a herd of elephants”), caused her to complain to hotel management. Unsatisfied by a discount offer and apology letter, she tweeted about the hotel – getting the attention of Choice Hotels (the parent company).

This story was posted on the Consumerist yesterday, with most of the readers siding with the hotel in this case. Whether this person had a legitimate grievance is debatable, but the bigger issue is that guests are now taking their complaints online.

They go to Twitter

Kristy isn’t alone. A quick search on Twitter reveals hundreds of hotel complaints each day. The stream-of-consciousness format makes it very easy for guests to share what’s bothering them.

They go to their blogs

Ranting about a poor hotel experience on a blog is nothing new: there are whole blogs built around this concept.

The problem with a negative blog review is that it typically has a long shelf life – and can rank highly in search engines for your hotel’s name. This greatly increases the chance a potential guest will find it when they look for you.

Another interesting thing I’ve observed is that unhappy guests will sometimes post a complaint on a seemingly unrelated blog. For example, Wyn complained on my Hyatt Twitter Concierge story that unless the company fixes their customer service and loyalty programs, Twitter isn’t going to help. (point taken)

They go to TripAdvisor, Yelp, Qype…

Of course. You know that.

But even if you have the good humor to create staff t-shirts with 1-star reviews – like San Francisco’s Pizzeria Delfino – these negative reviews can seriously cut into your hotel’s profit.

They go to OTAs

In my experience, hotel marketers generally check guest reviews on sites like Travelocity and Orbitz less often than TripAdvisor.

Unless you monitor your reputation here as well, negative comments could fly under the radar and reduce the revenue you receive through these channels.

They go to Facebook

More and more hotels are moving to set up a presence on Facebook, and as with Twitter, the convenience makes it easy for people to share a bad experience with hundreds of their friends.

They go elsewhere

People can post complaints anywhere on the web: YouTube, Flickr, forums – the possibilities are endless. The reality is that the internet empowers consumers like never before. Anyone can say anything – with a megaphone.

It’s a control freak’s nightmare, but shouldn’t be a huge concern to hotels that make guest satisfaction a top priority.

The lesson

Customers are quickly taking their complaints online if they don’t receive a satisfactory resolution. Neglecting to solve problems offline could really damage your reputation online.

Your Homework: Make sure you’ve set up “listening tools” to quickly catch if someone makes a comment about your business like this.

For a list of free listening tools – plus an action plan for managing your online reputation – see my article on beating negative hotel reviews.