Martin Kubler is owner, director and chief cook and bottle washer of Iconsulthotels FZE, an ultra-boutique hospitality consultancy in Dubai.
Gathering data
LinkedIn is also a superb business intelligence gathering tool. You can use LinkedIn Events to find out who is attending conferences and congresses in your local area and get your corporate sales managers to contact attendees to see whether they require accommodation or a business lunch or dinner venue. You can also use LinkedIn’s Answers functionality to find LinkedIn users asking for hotel and restaurant recommendations in cities around the world and reaching out to somebody asking for, say, a hotel in Dubai, only takes a minute. Your sales managers can use LinkedIn’s company search function to find out information about potential new corporate accounts in the run-up to a sales blitz or discover entirely new corporate clients. They can also export all their LinkedIn connections very easily and even split them into geographical or industry subsets before importing them into your CRM system.
I honestly think that all your sales managers should be on LinkedIn — it’s a natural extension of their ‘work space’ and makes it easy for them to find and contact new clients. They should also join one or more of the many groups on LinkedIn. Groups often provide excellent networking and business opportunities, but are also an important source of industry news.
Does your hotel have a blog? Ask your team-members who are using LinkedIn to add it to their profiles via one of the many LinkedIn applications. That way, every LinkedIn user looking at one of your team-members profiles will see your hotel’s latest blog posts. Does your Chef want to show off his latest menus or culinary creations to the worldwide LinkedIn community? It’s easy and free via LinkedIn’s SlideShare or Portfolio Display apps.
Most information you enter into your own or your company’s LinkedIn profile is accessible to search engines and LinkedIn results usually rank highly in searches thanks to LinkedIn’s large user base, so you can support your property’s Search Engine Optimisation (see page 107 for more on this) efforts through effective use of key words in your LinkedIn profiles.
Martin Kubler is owner, director and chief cook and bottle washer of Iconsulthotels FZE, an ultra-boutique hospitality consultancy in Dubai.
Email: info@iconsulthotels.com or visit facebook.com/iconsulthotels
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