Martin Kubler is owner, director and chief cook and bottle washer of Iconsulthotels FZE, an ultra-boutique hospitality consultancy in Dubai. Martin Kubler is owner, director and chief cook and bottle washer of Iconsulthotels FZE, an ultra-boutique hospitality consultancy in Dubai.

Over the past years, the role social media plays for the region’s hotels has changed considerably and we have seen a shift from tentative, experimental usage, to day-to-day, strategic usage amongst many hotels and restaurants.

Part of this growing-up process also is an increasing involvement of marketing, PR, and specialised social and digital agencies in the social media activities of many hotels.

Personally, I am still a firm believer that a hotel’s social media activities are best done in-house - after all, you wouldn’t outsource your guest relations activities and, frankly, social media should be done by the people who know your guests and visitors best, which is usually your in-house team.

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On the other hand, social and digital media are very fast changing fields and new websites, and services are popping up all the time, never mind the constant changes by stalwarts like Facebook and Twitter that require re-strategising and constant learning. It is perhaps not surprising that more and more hotels hire agencies to help them with their social media activities.

So what are the pros and cons of agency support and how do you know whether you should get an outside company involved?

Agencies are great to get things started and can save you a lot of time and money when it comes to doing audience research and initial setup of the various social media platforms. They’re also good partners during extraordinarily busy times like pre- and grand-openings, large refurbishment projects, or during flag changes.

If your resources (people as well as money) are tight, agencies can provide cost effective and flexible ongoing management of your social media platforms, too, but you do need to make sure to check regularly that things remain on course and are aligned to your overall business goals.

As such, it is a good investment to get one or two of your senior associates digitally certified, e.g. via an internationally recognized diploma course as offered by the DM3 Institute (www.dm3institute.com) in this region. This will ensure that you have people in house who have the skills and knowledge to supervise and critique the work your agency partner delivers.

As so often, the devil is in the detail. There are numerous agencies and bigger isn’t always better, but they will all be able to update your social media platforms with content on an ongoing basis. The question is whether they are equally good listeners and understand the peculiarities of our industry sufficiently to ensure that your “social” customer service matches the quality of your on-property service. Too many times I have tweeted hotels in this region with outsourced social media management only to not get a reply to my comments or questions at all or to get a fairly bland reply in the afternoon of the next business day — too late, too little.

Let us not shift all the responsibility and blame onto agencies, though! Your outsourced social media partners are only as good as the information you provide them with. Very few agencies will be able to work without regular updates, briefings, and content submissions from your side and none will be able to work wonders. Sure, some are more pro-active than others (usually the smaller, more boutique agencies fare better here), but even then, you need to feed the mouth that tweets, facebooks, and instagrams for you.

Lastly, let me share a sure-fire and amazingly common sense tip for picking the right agency with you: once you have drawn up a shortlist of potential providers, but before you approach any of them, send them all tweets with questions or leave a message on their Facebook walls with a request to contact you. Sit back and see what happens. Discard any agency that either does not reply at all, replies after more than 24 hours (and that’s being kind, really!), replies with an impersonal request for your contact email address, or replies in less than perfect English or Arabic. You’ll be surprised how quickly the field narrows. Whatever you do: Keep it social!