The difference between Google and Twitter

After last week’s experiment, several months of testing various Twitter integration tactics, and reaching 100,000+ people in 36 hours, I’ve learned some interesting things.

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I’m trying a little experiment on Twitter.

For the next week or so, I’ll be publishing excerpts from my blog posts as tweets using Tweetlater. The idea? To provide value and complement the myriad of links people (including myself) are dumping into Twitter.

What do you think: do you like this idea? Would you find it useful, or is it just duplicating the content here on the blog?

Photo credit: visualpanic

While planning for a recent trip, I found myself conducting dozens of web searches to find information on my destination. These included:

• Flight information (Kayak.com)
• Airport transportation options (WikiTravel)
• The city’s best design hotels
• Guest reviews & photos of those hotels
• Best ways to get around the city (taxi, public transport, etc)
• Can’t-miss boutiques &  galleries
• Places to eat (Yelp)
• Special events going on
• Typical climate for that time of year (clothes to bring, etc)
• Best places with WiFi I can work from (bonus points if I can drink something caffeinated)
• Running paths for my marathon training (Google Maps & MapMyRun.com)
• Best places to photograph (Flickr is my favorite tool here)
• Interesting day-trips from the city

Keyword research tools confirmed my travel planning behavior is very typical. Every day, hundreds of questions are being typed into search engines to find this type of information about the city you’re in.

Your potential guests are turning to the web for information

Many online travel planning resources aren’t direct competitors, but relying on them to educate your guests is risky.  I see a huge opportunity for hotels to build their own destination information portals with a concierge mindset.

Are your potential guests going to find what they need from you or another website?

The web makes providing information easier

Before the web, it was difficult – if not impossible – for an individual hotel to publish a substantial amount of local information. Production costs would have been prohibitive, and distribution very difficult.

Now with just a simple website, you can share useful information very efficiently.

An example of proactive service

The Witt Istanbul Suites publishes detailed information on transportation options for getting around Istanbul:

Witt Istanbul Taxi Information

Since many of this hotel’s guests come from the UK and other English-speaking countries, the owner wanted to ensure the guests feel as comfortable as possible. To help overcome any language barrier, they offer printable directions in Turkish for the taxi driver:

Printable directions in Turkish

Providing this type of information is brilliant for two reasons:

• It helps guests to feel comfortable before they arrive
• It reduces the workload for your hotel service staff

Customer service 2.0

Instead of calling you directly with questions, tech-savvy travelers may prefer to communicate using the web. Twitter provides one opportunity to answer questions in real time. On the corporate level, we see Hyatt offering concierge services through a dedicated Twitter account.

HyattConcierge on Twitter

With just 131 updates, I assume many of their support requests take place via direct message (for privacy reasons). It’s not a bad start.

Actively engaging potential guests

My only complaint with @HyattConcierge? In my opinion, it’s not a huge improvement over phone or email support.

The real power of Twitter is in offering real-time service to people who aren’t aware of you (yet). Twitter search allows you to reach out to people needing help, and provide useful advice and information.

Independent hotels can do this successfully. A poster child of hotel social media success – New York’s Roger Smith Hotel – actively participates with guests to build their online fanbase.

@RSHotel Twitter Stream

Since this is a relatively new medium for customer service, little things like this gain a lot of attention and build a great reputation.

The best approach: Useful information + Real time support

Ultimately, hotels that want to use this ‘concierge approach’ to their marketing should use both approaches:

1. Build an accessible database of useful, insider information on their destination
2. Monitor real-time communications channels for opportunities to serve

It’s time to throw away the silver bullet

As marketers, we can fall for the trap of thinking all that’s needed is just one more tactic. One little trick that will cause sales to climb dramatically and eliminate our competition.

There is no secret

Great reputations are built around helping other people. It drives positive word of mouth – online and off – which ultimately brings you more guests.

It’s not unique or even particularly clever. But it works, and that’s what matters.

All the clever marketing in the world is useless if potential guests abandon you out of frustration. Hotels that figure out how to combine excellent customer service with new technology are the ones that will succeed online.

3 questions to ask yourself

• “What questions do I have when planning my own trips?”
• “What content could we publish that answers these questions for our destination?”
• “How can we get this information in front of the people that are looking for it?”

As much as I like to think of myself as a seasoned blogger, I still get surprised from time to time by which posts become most popular. Some articles I spent 6-8+ hours writing fail, and others I spend 15 minutes on are my biggest hits.

My post last week – Viral video disaster: what NOT to do – was a good example of this.

In case you haven’t read the post yet, it just contained some brief comments on what I saw as a social media campaign gone wrong. I wanted to share the videos with you as an example of something to avoid – but had no idea it would spread virally as it did.

As far as I can tell, the post was re-tweeted (shared) by 48 Twitter users within the first 36 hours, and I also received several hundred new readers from Chinese blogs I wasn’t aware of previously. Among the people sharing the post on Twitter was social media A-lister Chris Brogan, whose updates are read by over 73,000 followers.

Twitter traffic spike

A few thoughts on this experience:

1) Social media has a lot of real potential. There is a lot of hype out there (even I get tired of hearing about it) – but the results can be very real and tangible.  How else could I have spread my message for free to over 100,000 people that quickly?

2) The top social media power users have disproportionately large influence. Normally, it would take a lot more than 48 re-tweets to reach an audience this large. Thanks to Chris and several other marketing stars on Twitter, the traffic I received was very substantial.

3) Negative/controversial content gets attention. I have mixed feelings on this – even wish it wasn’t true – but that is the reality.

4) Viral traffic from Twitter has a very short lifespan – often no more than a few hours. For long-term traffic, you need to gain the attention of bloggers and website editors. Thankfully, many bloggers are active users on Twitter, so this often works out well.

Encouraging people to spread your message virally on Twitter is more of a science than I initially recognized. There are a lot of excellent tutorials and case studies on the web, but here are a few I found especially helpful:

• How I got my blog post retweeted by @problogger, @GuyKawasaki and 250 more (by Marko Saric)
• Make your blog go viral with Twitter ReTweets (by Marko Saric)
• What’s in a Retweet? The Data Behind Viral Messaging on Twitter (by Dan Zarrella)
• Retweet: The Infectious Power Of Word Of Mouth (by Jeremiah Owyang)

I would like to post some industry-specific articles and case studies of how hotels have used Twitter to virally spread a message or special offer. Have you experienced a similar results – or know a hotel that has? Let me know in the comments, and make sure you’re subscribed to receive future posts on this topic.

Twitter is one of the fastest-growing social media networks, a microblogging tool that allows its users to make text-based posts in 140 characters or less.  An estimated 5.5 million people now use the service, with website traffic up 573% over the past year according to Compete:

The whole service is based around letting you answer the question, “What are you doing now?”  While this may initially seem like a waste of time with little relevance to a hotel marketer, many organizations have found it useful as a one-to-many broadcasting tool.

Here are some ideas for using Twitter in the hospitality industry:

• First, use Twitter Search to see what people are saying about you, your competitors, your area, and your industry
• Like most of social media, Twitter isn’t just about pushing what you have to sell.  Try to be genuinely hepful to your followers. (JetBlue shares travel tips)
• Share ideas and links to interesting stuff you find.
• Ask your followers for advice on new ideas.  (Get way to get concise, helpful feedback.)
• Break news on Twitter, especially if it affects your web presence
• Use it as a tool to improve your customer service (like Frank at Comcast)
• View Twitter as a way to build customer relationships, and show the human side of your company

So go sign up for an account today, and be sure to follow us on Twitter for all the latest hotel marketing tips.