On the flip side, what challenges does social media present for the GM?
Klaus: It’s a small thing but it really drives me nuts. Now we as consumers can just post whatever we want and really have the brutal power of damaging someone’s business. Uneducated comments are being made on Expedia for example, or Tripadvisor, where guests can post whatever they want because it doesn’t have an administrative arm to it.
But as a hotelier protecting your business — when you say ‘listen I can take comments when we made a mistake but comments that are absolute false statements, please remove those because that should not be posted to the world’ — it takes weeks to get that comment removed.
It has a brand-damaging effect, a hotel-damaging effect where I have to come to the conclusion that these third parties just don’t have enough manpower to remove comments and that is a small thing, but it’s annoying to see after weeks and weeks a terrible comment sitting there even knowing that it’s absolutely unjustified.
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They create a platform to allow this; therefore they have the responsibility, in my opinion, also to manage it both ways. It cannot just work on the customer side, it also has to work for us on the business side.
So if they allow random postings, they also need to ensure that, when we can prove that something is an unjustified comment, it can be removed immediately and not let it sit there for weeks and weeks.
Sami: Yes but consumers today, when they talk on social media, they don’t want to be controlled. Sometimes comments are quite strong and we have to accept them and we’re allowed to answer the guests. To remove things, it’s quite complicated because they have to do a lot of checking and it will take time.
Eddy: It is a shift that we have to deal with and we have to engage with it. Yes, its annoying, I agree, sometimes you get unfair comments so I think we need to try to get more positive comments to highlight.
Klaus: Oh I completely agree, in the world of blogging you cannot influence that, but established platforms need to be controlled by that platform for being fair and square. I don’t mind people posting something if we really made a mistake — we should be absolutely transparent!
Sami: You have also in many hotels the [need for a] full time job for somebody who is taking care of social media and digital. It doesn’t really exist today. We really need somebody who understands the consumer, who knows how to write online, and can answer the guests 24 hours, because when you are on Twitter you need an answer immediately.
We have to be prepared in the future to have somebody really dedicated to the social media in each hotel or maybe we have to revise the whole strategy in terms of sales and marketing, reducing one position from here and adding one in there.
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