Circos Brand Karma

Hoteliers: suppose Justin Bieber, the fastest rising international pop star, comes knocking on your door in the following way, what would you do?  (see video below — it’s only 46 seconds)

You would:

1. Do nothing
2. Respond privately to Bieber and invite him to come back
3. Apologize to Bieber publicly
4. Respond with humor to Bieber publicly
5. Fix the revolving door then assure the public what happened was a one-off

Justin Bieber currently has over 4M “likes” on Facebook, over 2.6M followers on Twitter, and has 2 videos on YouTube with over 100M views, one of which, “Baby features Ludacris” is currently the 3rd most viewed video of all time on YouTube.

The correct answer? Any of them, but more importantly, before you chose your answer, did you:

• Click on the link to see Bieber’s Wikipedia entry?
• Check out his Facebook fan page?
• Look at what his most recent tweets were about?
• See if he tweeted about running into the door?
• Watch all or part of his video?
• Google Justin Bieber to see if you can find out anything else about him?

If you did, you’d find, among other things, that Justin Bieber regularly creates mobs with his appearances.  In New Zealand the crowd of teenage girls knocked down his mom at the airport upon his arrival.  He is sad because Twitter changed its algorithm so that he’s no longer a trending topic which he has been for a long time.  And also, several articles have already covered his unfortunate head kiss with the revolving door.

Although Bieber is only 16 years-old, his entire life is digitized in an accessible way that allows someone to easily understand his personality, fan base, actions, aspirations, and why he’s become such a phenomenon.  Some of the content come from Bieber himself, and some are collaborative content from people who either know him or think they know him.  Nonetheless, the Radisson Blu in Frankfurt can get to know Justin Bieber quickly with the aggregate information that exists.

To summarize, Justin seems to be a wonderful and talented human being, one with passionate fans.  He was discovered on the internet as a result of his mom uploading him singing onto YouTube.  He has been praised as being down-to-earth and homemade, not manufactured like so many other pop stars.  His wipeout was covered by the Associated Press, HotelChatter.com, and was on the front page of MSN.

Justin was very gracious about his own unfortunate encounter with the door.  In his own words:

i think my head still hurts from running into that door…haha. only thing u can do in times like that is laugh at yourself…and laugh hard    3:07 PM May 20th via web

In the age of social media, the question isn’t which customer do I have is a “Justin Bieber.”  The real question is, what is my brand doing to get to know every customer as though s/he were Justin Bieber and actively incorporating his/her public social profile to provide better service in a non-exploitative way?

Justin Bieber may share a lot in his social profile, but not a lot is needed to gain a better understanding of a customer.  Every service provider in the travel industry should incorporate looking into public social profiles as a standard part of their operating procedure for customer service (and for that matter, employment as well!)

As for Radisson Blu in Frankfurt, given what we know about Bieber, any of the responses listed above would have been fine.  Because Radisson Blu Frankfurt has a Twitter page, a Facebook fan page, and is already active in social media, at least from a guest perspective, I think a public response would be great and appropriate given Bieber’s (and his fans’) preferences for this medium.

Will social media go from a cultural phenomenon to a commercial force?  Yes, I believe so.  If last decade’s new new thing for marketers was SEM, I believe this decade’s new new thing will be SMM (social media marketing).

However, for SMM to become legitimate its efficacy must be measurable, otherwise it’s tough to justify devoting any resources to it, particularly because in the last decade marketers learned how to calculate ROI by looking at conversion revenue from CPC traffic referred by their Google (and subsequently, other online) campaigns.  Not only did ad budgets shift, discipline was instilled.

We advise our clients to think about ROI of SMM in 4 major categories:

Brand satisfaction – how do operational improvements and investments increase your overall guest satisfaction over time?  In Brand Karma it’s the Guest Satisfaction Index, which is a composite index of your perception from various public sources, but if you don’t have Brand Karma you can also use something simple like your ranking or ratings on a review site.  When your guests post reviews about you, they’re giving you feedback on their stay.  Because their reviews are public, their words also shape how favorably viewed your brand will be for consumers researching your property.

Brand loyalty – related to overall brand satisfaction, the loyalty measurement lets you know if the guest stay experience is compelling enough that it moves your guests to recommend your brand.  Like satisfaction, this is a measurement that needs to be trended over time as well.  In Brand Karma it’s the Loyalty Index, but again, if you don’t have Brand Karma you can look at the “recommendation” rate on reviews that are written about your brand.  Different sites do this differently, but most have a way for their reviewers to recommend a property.  This index and the Guest Satisfaction Index gives you a good idea of how favorably the public perceives your brand.

Many internal guest surveys also measure satisfaction and loyalty.  Just keep in mind that the surveys guests 1) give you solicited feedback — i.e. questions you ask, not necessarily what the guests want to evaluate, and 2) aren’t viewable by the general public — so they don’t give you insights into how public perceptions may be impacted.

Guest Satisfaction Analysis in Brand Karma

Brand awareness – how do sites with social media increase the awareness of your brand?  In the social media world, in addition to the traditional metrics having to do with volume, awareness metrics must take into account the idea of relative frequency.  Relative frequency lets you know how recent is the content about your brand vs. your competitors.  This is important because if people haven’t been talking about your brand recently, then either you’re not interesting or your competitors are more interesting than you, neither of which is good.

Campaign performance – the ultimate metric that measures ROI.  Suppose you run an ad on Facebook, you’ll want to see what is your ROI for every dollar spent.  This means that you must have a way to measure what you’re advertising.  For example, to execute you can set up a landing page on your ecommerce site so that you can track the referrals and conversion rate from that specific campaign.  Use the traditional ROI formula to calculate what your return is (should be no different than your calculation for search engine marketing).  As you get more advanced, try to establish a link between your brand satisfaction, loyalty, and awareness to your campaign performance.  For instance, how much better does your campaign perform after your brand satisfaction has increased by 10 points?  If you have lower brand awareness than before, do you have fewer click-throughs?  Is there a correlation between guest loyalty to your campaign responses?

In a way, the above points are the fundamentals of marketing, and that’s precisely the point.  Brands wanting to leverage social media for marketing should measure what they’re getting out of their investments in it.  However, like traditional and other online marketing tactics, SMM takes a bit of trial and error to perfect into a strategy, particularly because the ability to micro-target is superb, and so brand owners should consider developing an expertise over a few marketing campaigns.

Some progressive brands are considering hiring a marketing manager to focus on social media in 2010.  Once again, this person’s salary minimally should be considered an investment to improve brand satisfaction, loyalty, and awareness.  List the activities that your social media manager engages in with your fans, followers, and friends, and see how much time they take.  From there, you can calculate the dollar investment (percent of time to salary).  Over time, see what activities lead to gains in satisfaction, loyalty, or awareness, and what activities don’t make a difference.  If you’ve established a link between increases in satisfaction, loyalty, and awareness to increased campaign ROI, then you’ll know how much your social media manager can help you improve your bottom line and guide him/her to engage in activities that increases your key metrics.

The one-to-many branding paradigm favored and perfected by advertising agencies utilizing traditional media changed irreversibly in 2009 with social media going mainstream.  Hundreds of millions of people shared their brand experiences in social networks, generating exabytes (EB) of raw content about brands in text, photos, and videos in all languages (1 EB = 1 billion GB, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes).  The world economy also accelerated business changes: giants had to be nimble or fell, small players had to differentiate to survive.  Everyone, including all of us at Circos Brand Karma, had to do a lot more with less.  Though recovery is widely forecasted to begin sometime in 2010, we all know that the twists and turns aren’t over.  As we close 2009, here are our parting thoughts on what to expect in 2010 based on what we saw this year.

Relevant Engagement is the new paradigm in branding — for too long brands have talked at consumers, with social media going mainstream, now customers are talking back.  The amount of time people spend on social networks like Facebook and Twitter make them places where brands should interact with consumers.  These interactions can not be forced; like dating, brands must be attractive to the consumers they want.  Authenticity is one of the most attractive quality a brand can have with its online fans and friends.  See my post on Taming the Social Media Beast for what to do, and what not to do.

Don’t bore me: commoditization is your enemy, and you can no longer afford to be just like everyone else.  People look for reasons to spend their dollars on your brand.  In other words, what defines “value” for consumers includes what your brand does that no other brand can do.  I wrote about this recently in my post about Finding Your Brand Differentiators.  And a word of caution for those who have relied on price as their primary differentiator: whereas in an economy with ample demands you can do that to attract business, in this economy where there’s an overabundance of availability and supply, using pricing as your primary competitive strategy might actually kill your business or prevent you from recovering because you can’t raise your price back up.

The demise of traditional retail travel agents is greatly exaggerated; the savvy travel agents will find a new niche and be even more relevant.  All the information available on the web can become an info-glut problem for travelers doing research.  According to Forrester Research the satisfaction level of online booking has gone down in the last 2 years.  This presents an opportunity for the traditional retail travel agents to filter out the noise and serve as a friendly and trusted voice to frustrated customers.  Further, while booking point-to-point travel is fairly efficient online, complex itineraries that include multiple stops or special needs are still difficult, if not impossible, to book online.  Robert Cole recently wrote an excellent post How Smart Travel Agents and Agencies Rise from the Ashes which is a must read for every traditional retail travel agent AND suppliers, who should explore what they can do to foster an even more intimate relationship with traditional retail travel agents to give their shared customers an easy way to have a holistic travel experience.

Who will come out on top in the battle between Brand vs. Search? Search has become an integral part of the discovery strategy, with billions of dollars being spent yearly on SEM, mostly benefiting Google, the dominant player in this space.  Getting a higher search result placement organically is also a vexing issue confronting brand marketers who don’t have the traffic of say… Expedia.  Executives in the Board Room are already questioning whether 1) it’s wise to rely on search as the primary driver of brand discovery and website traffic, 2) is the industry overall feeding the G beast to become ever more powerful by training consumers to always go to Google first, and 3) if all competitors are optimizing for search, has Search marketing become “tax” and therefore, non-differentiated?  To which we answer 1) No, 2) Yes, and 3) Yes.  To wean themselves off Search, some brand owners have already moved budgets away from SEM/SEO to develop favorable awareness the old-fashioned way: by creating exceptional experiences for customers who then positively recommend the brand to their friends.  Except this time around, by leveraging social networks, the word-of-mouth takes minutes not months, and the page on the other side of the click is not Google or another OTA, but their own branded site.  Bravo to them, and to all who do this in 2010!

Say hi to Facebook, your new Frenemy. Much as Google has helped your business in the last few years, Facebook will help in the years ahead.  Yes — it’s still run by a 25 year-old, but the team that surrounds him is also serious about making money now… which means that there are lots of opportunities for you to benefit from their focus to monetize the online attention of over 350 million users worldwide.  Facebook will become the new titan in distribution (you can check out Facebook’s impressive current stats and think of the possibilities).  So if you haven’t done it already, it’s time to set up a fan page on Facebook for your brand and start engaging with your fans.  At a minimum treat Facebook as an extension of your CRM.  For some extra credit, you might want to consider Twitter as well, though if you could only focus on 1 social network, start with Facebook.

Have you thought of HR lately? The new branding paradigm, where social media is a fundamental pillar alongside well-crafted agency/brand communications, requires an update to your corporate policies  For example, how, if ever, do you expect your employees to participate?  If you’re a hotel management company, how do you ensure brand integrity when a property goes rogue locally?  Who in the organization should be responsible for brand perception in social media?  Where do you find the talent that can understand and bridge how you think v. how the social network thinks?  Because social media has become mainstream, 2010 will present scenarios that will put your HR and corporate policies to the test.  You must be proactive about setting expectations and diligent about learning from your own and other people’s best practices or epic fails.

And last but not least, Cloud Computing isn’t just for startups anymore.  The amount of computing power and storage that is now available at bargain basement prices has helped startups like us keep operating costs down.  But now that most of the security and reliability issues have been ironed out, cloud computing is a game changer enabling technologists everywhere to innovate cheaply.  This means that there will be more disruptive technologies coming faster on the landscape.  But it also means that your IT departments might need to migrate its technology from the client/server model of the last 10 years to the new, more powerful AND cost-effective distributed computing model to stay current.  Since technology is the backbone to most businesses, it behooves brand owners to have at least 1 person in the IT department whose head is “in the clouds” to ensure that backbone isn’t becoming quickly obsolete and more expensive to maintain.  Ouch.  But consider this: legacy technology systems have a way of sucking budget away from other departments when its migration is not carefully and proactively planned.

And… that’s a wrap for 2009.

From all of us at Circos Brand Karma, we wish you happy holidays and a prosperous new year.  See you in 2010!

Thanks to an invitation from Giancarlo Carniani, I recently had the pleasure of presenting social media for hoteliers with Laura Valerio at the Buy Tourism Online Conference in Florence.  Laura, who is Expedia’s Director of Market Management for Northern Italy, is highly knowledgeable about the Italian travel market.  This post is an epilogue to our presentation, and given that the great majority of Italian hotels are independents, this post is dedicated especially to them.

Independent hoteliers need to truly understand their differentiators, because it’s the differentiators that will enable hotels to attract the right guests who are willing to pay a premium for what you offer.  Differentiators must meet the following 2 criteria:

1. It’s absolutely good by your own standards (however measured, either through internal guest satisfaction surveys, word-of-mouth feedback on the web, or because your guests tell you when they check out)
2. It’s relatively better when compared with your competitors (from looking at social media feedback and editorial reviews)

Given this framework, location is rarely a differentiator if your competitors all face the same piazza.  While it may satisfy criteria 1 (the location is absolutely good), it fails criteria 2 (it isn’t relatively better — at least not discernible to most guests evaluating where to stay when all hotels are in the same piazza).

Design, however, can be a differentiator.  For example, let’s say you’ve recently renovated, “modern rooms in a classic building” could be a differentiator, and an especially strong one if other hotels in the piazza haven’t renovated in the last 10 years.  Service can also be a differentiator.  For example, “fresh-picked fruit from own garden” or “regional cooking lessons” can all be differentiators.

And herein lies the absolute beauty as it comes to the Italian hotels: it’s easy to spot the differentiators in independent hotels once you move away from the “obvious” criteria that often appear on guest satisfaction surveys.  In most cases, you can find the answer in social media about your hotel.

Spotting Design as Potential Differentiators

According to the Italian State Tourism Board, Italy is consistently one of the of the world’s top 5 destinations (the other four being USA, France, Spain, and China).  In 2007, for example, 42.8M visitors contributed to 163.5M bednights, with cities of historical and artistic interests contributing to nearly 1/3 of the bednights.  The rest is primarily made up by visits to sea, mountain, and lake locations.

This information suggests that travelers to Italy are naturally inclined to seek out picturesque things (artistic, sea, mountain, and lake).  To find out what are the picturesque things that guests find exciting about your hotel (and want to share with their friends and strangers), go to Google (or Flickr and Picasa), type your hotel name in, and look at the “Image” search results to see the pictures that are available about you.  And then follow the pictorial links to sites that have user-generated content to see what pictures your guests are sharing and how they are describing your property.

You might find pictures of your amenities, rooms, certain design elements, or you might find pictures of nearby attractions, or you might find pictures of the outside of the hotel, or the view from the balcony at sunset.  Whatever it is that you find will tell you precisely what guests found to be interesting about your hotel — and took the time to download the pictures from their camera into their computer, uploaded it from their computer to their account on the social media site (assuming that they’ve already created an account), and then told their friends that they’ve uploaded these wonderful photos about you.  These photos give you a pretty good idea for what in the design of your property (either internal or external) could be differentiators.

Leveraging History as a Potential Differentiator

Secondly, travelers to Italy who are interested in historical cities might also be interested in the history of your property.  For example, what did the building used to be?  How did it become a hotel?  Is it a family business?  Did anything interesting happen on premise?  Hotels in Italy (and many other countries around the world) have built-in stories that make the stay experience even more special.  Why not share them?

Even though it may be more relevant if the property’s history is connected to the historical attraction in the city, sometimes it’s the people that own the building or run the property who have the interesting history.  For inspiration from a familiar source, think of the wineries that are all over Italy.  Many of them are run by families who have owned the same winery for generations.  Behind each of these wineries are stories of colorful characters overcoming (or facing!) problems.  Even most wine labels have a story behind them.  Can you relate this to your hotel?

The great thing about the history of your hotel is that it’s always unique to your property.  If you share your history and your guests begin to write about it in their reviews about your property, then that history might very well be a differentiator — one that you don’t have to spend any more money on improving.

However, you won’t know until you share and see how your guests respond.

Getting People to Talk About Your Service

I have a third tip on differentiators.  In the past 12 months I’ve sat on more planes crisscrossing the globe than I can remember.  On a recent KLM flight the safety video projection was not working, so the flight attendants had to demonstrate in person.  I saw that most people actually stopped what they were doing to watch the flight attendants demonstrate how to buckle and fasten a seat belt.

This is because people pay attention to people.  Extended to hotels, especially good service will not be ignored, and can become a differentiator that is not easily replicable by your competitors.  Whether it’s in the way of a welcoming attitude, or thoughtful anticipation, or speed to solution, or personal recognition, or something else quirky but wonderful, what you and your staff create in terms of the human experience can often be your strongest differentiator if you construct the experience with empathy in mind.  For Italian hoteliers, empathy can solve guests’ language obstacles, dietary needs, lack of familiarity with local culture, attractions and customs, bad/long transportation experience, etc. and win your guests’ loyalty.  If they are so moved as to recommend you to their friends, they also become your best marketers.

4.5 years ago I stayed at Villa La Favorita in Alba which was up in the hills.  I had bought some wine and needed to get to Turin, but this would have required me to get down the hill with a bulky box, take a train from Alba to another town, and then switch trains to get to Turin.  Roberta, the owner, after helping me decipher the train schedule, voluntarily offered to take me to the train station.  At first I thought it was nice of her to take me to the Alba train station, but she ended up driving me right past it and on to the 2nd train station.  To this day, I’m still referring people to her 6 room property, and look forward to going back.  On TripAdvisor, Villa La Favorita has a 100% recommendation rate and is ranked #1 of the B&Bs in Alba.  Roberta is mentioned by name in several reviews.  The most recent one reads:

Last but not least the owner Roberta goes out of her way to make each guest feel special and welcome. She provides for most anything you could ask for and will arrange for special tours or activities in the area if you wish. She will definitely succeed with Villa La Favorita.

An Example from an Independent Hotel in Italy

To summarize, let me use Villa La Favorita as an example.  If you go to the Villa La Favorita website, you’ll see the following description amidst beautiful pictures of the property and Roberta.  My analysis of why this is so effective is in parentheses below each paragraph:

Welcome!  It gives me great pleasure to present my country home.  Dating back to the early 1900′s, it is officially recognized as a historic residence, and has been meticulously refurbished in recent years.  Set amidst a 10,000 m² estate of vineyards and fruit orchards, it is located on a hillside just 1 1/2 kms outside Alba.

(Roberta displays her pride of ownership and introduces the historical significance of her property)

The farm produces fine doc-status wines – Nebbiolo d’Alba and Grignolino Piemonte – which can be tasted free-of-charge, as well as a large variety of organically-grown fruit (cherries, apples, pears, apricots, plums, persimmons, figs, mulberries, peaches and pomegranates), some of which are used to make delicious jams.

(introduces potential differentiators: tasting of fruits, jams, and wines made from on-premise orchard and vineyard)

The villa’s four highly original, en-suite bedrooms are tastefully furnished with period family pieces, and have satellite TV, air-conditioning, bath with shower and hair-dryer.  Each “room with a view” brings guests into close contact with the hills.and the towers and roofs of ALBA‘s old town centre.  A stroll along the path leading through the vineyards to enjoy the picturesque view of the sunset from on high is warmly recommended before the sun disappears behind the rooftops and bell-towers.

(with the pictures available on the site, introduces design as potential differentiators of the guest experience, both internal and external)

Every morning a plentiful breakfast offering a wide choice is served outdoors in the large garden, on the terrace or in the bright lemon-house. I will recommend the best restaurants in the Langhe and Roero, and visits can be arranged during your stay to the countless castles in the area, as well as to wine cellars – famous estates or family-run concerns just waiting to be discovered.

(service as the strong differentiator, addressing convenience and access to local knowledge backed by her personally )

Alba is a lively town, standing at the feet of the celebrated “Langhe” hills. It is famous for its mediaeval towers, “Via Maestra” (the main street, animated by plenty of shops and a busy Saturday morning market), and cultural and food & wine events. It is also the starting point for many interesting outings, on foot or by bicycle, motorbike or car.

(sells Alba.  Note that she isn’t selling her proximity to the town center — those may be strong differentiators for other B&Bs that are competing with her)

What is effective about this simply laid-out page is that the description presents the property’s strong differentiators and sets guest expectations on the location.  The property is exactly where it is, and not only is the description transparent and upfront about it, it moves the value proposition to design, history, and service.  These differentiators are then further backed up by social media.

All in all, a consistently great story, which makes for a great business.

It’s been a hectic summer at Circos-land.  My wife and I welcomed a new member into our family this summer.  Also, we launched a re-branded Circos.com, and equally importantly, formally launched our b2b service, Brand Karma, which has been well-received, especially by hotel marketers responsible for managing their reputation online.  Brand Karma has been a transformational experience for Circos, and we head into autumn with cautious optimism despite the gloominess brought on by the meltdown in the financial market.

Baby Winston is an infrequent communicator — he’s quiet most of the time because he’s sleeping.  But when he needs something, he’s expressive enough to let us know that 1) he needs something and 2) how much time we have to satisfy his needs before a total meltdown.  WinstonSpeak (TM) gave me an insight into how to explain why the Circos technology is different, and why marketers in particular, should care about Brand Karma.

Many brand reputation monitoring service does an admirable job of counting frequency of mentions on a specific topic.  A smaller set also tries to evaluate valence — namely, using semantic technology to determine whether a brand mention was positive or negative.  These 2 dimensions, used together, can give brands insight into how they’re doing (for example, you can do a simple net brand index by taking the calculating the percentage of positive mentions and subtracting from that, the percentage of negative mentions).

Similarly, I can monitor the frequency of WinstonSpeak.  And depending on whether its cooing (positive) or crying (negative), I can monitor Winston’s general state of being for a specific time period.  The problem is that if the net index is unsatisfactory (i.e. more negatives than positives), neither brand marketers nor I would know what to do because we don’t know what the driver(s) of dissatisfaction was.

To get at the driver(s), we have to understand what kind of brand mention was mentioned (in WinstonSpeak, the parallel would be the type of cry emitted), as well as the intensity of the mention.  These additional semantic understanding helps me/brand marketers’ to be very targeted in addressing complaints effectively (and thereby, improving overall satisfaction).

The semantic engine powering Circos already takes all of this into account, which, when applied to online reviews about hotels and displayed within Brand Karma, tells marketers not only how well their brand is doing, but also, how to go about making it better.

And that, in this economy, is just what’s needed to achieve better ROI on marketing spend.