Those of you who understand my cynicism about social media will also understand why I just have to repreoduce this article from Marketing Week – well here goes . and get the reader comments here –  http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/opinion/social-media-myth-doesnt-measure-up/4001592.article

I cannot confess to knowing much about the boy band One Direction except that my niece, Amy, is very keen on them. I know this because every time I call them One Dimension she corrects me with the kind of sigh that only a 10-year-old girl can emit.

Despite my ignorance, I appear to know more about Britain’s hottest teen band than the world’s media, which seems determined to label the band as a phenomenon bred from the cauldron of Twitter and Facebook. US magazine Advertising Age, for example, ascribes their sudden rise to a “social media campaign featuring a super fan”. Australia’s Herald Sun calls them the UK’s “social media heroes”.

And that’s all rather odd because, although social media played a role in the rise of One Direction, none of it would have been possible without appearing on The X Factor and the newspaper coverage that followed it. Long before the first tweet had been sent, five young men auditioned for and then performed individually on a TV programme and were later combined into a group and performed regularly for the next eight weeks on that same TV show.

Why not call One Direction a product of an old fashioned talent show? Or the result of primetime 21st century TV coverage? It would be just as accurate an explanation for the band’s meteoric rise as social media.

But of course we are not dealing with accuracy when it comes to social media. This is a world filled with exaggeration, inaccuracy and hyperbole. In 2009, when 10,000 protesters took to the streets in Moldova to protest against their country’s Communist government, the subsequent events were quickly dubbed the Twitter revolution. As Stanford University scholar and digital heretic Evgeny Morozov later pointed out, this was despite the fact that Twitter had no cultural impact whatsoever in Moldova because very few Twitter accounts actually existed there.

Similarly, when students rioted in Tehran a few months later, the world’s media dubbed it another social media revolution. But when writers like Golnaz Esfandiari and Malcolm Gladwell studied the events leading up to the protests both concluded that there had been no Twitter revolution of any kind in Iran.

And I see the same thing occurring across marketing. Headlines scream about the shift from traditional to social media but the data does not support it. TV ad spend was up by 8% last year in the US and Procter & Gamble not only remains America’s biggest spender on TV media but is committed to continue that investment in the years ahead.

Headlines scream about the shift from traditional to social media but the data does not support it

We continue to espouse the myth of social media without adhering to the critical approach and return on investment principles that are meant to be our disciplinary watchwords. Better to ride along with the bullshit wagon that portrays social media as helping us design hot new products, conduct innovative research and craft amazing campaigns. Just don’t let reality get in the way.

I worked with the marketing team of a large European private bank last month. This is a company with 7,000 clients who are all multimillionaires and positioned on exclusivity and discretion. Yet its marketers had spent four troubled weeks trying to work out how to fit their round peg into the square hole of social media.

In survey after survey of marketers, the same depressing picture usually emerges – 90% of marketers think social media has changed the way marketing should operate, 70% are spending more on social media, 60% are unable to show any ROI for their current efforts, 50% of social media campaigns are disconnected from the rest of their brand building strategy and 100% of us should be ashamed of such numbers. The myth of social media is making all of us look like morons.

It’s possible to embrace the practical potential of social media without falling victim to its mythic distractions. Follow the lead of proper independent thinkers like Tracy Stokes at Forrester, who recently published a splendid overview of how social media is and isn’t being used to build brands. Forrester concludes, for example, that social media performs poorly in creating a critical mass compared with broadcast media and proves relatively useless for product launching. Big clients like JetBlue, after experimenting with social media, concluded that traditional media are a better fit for much of its brand building approach. Forrester notes: “When it comes to a big launch like a new service to Dallas, the airline still turns to TV broadcast for broad impact and awareness.”

Social media is often a poor choice compared with other traditional options. Be critical. Be clever. Be cynical. Not just towards social media but all the tools you are considering investing your shareholders’ money in for 2013. No more separate budgets. No more mythical beliefs. Treat it in exactly the same way you would consider direct mail or a print campaign.

Some time ago I subscribed to Michael Stelzner’s excellent and insightful blog on www.socialmediaexaminer.com – whilst getting the usual gluttons’ helping of social media tips and articles from the latest breed of so called  ’expert’ from all over the world. Michael’s site is a masterpiece insofar as it is a blog and website nicely rolled into one.

End of advert. now to the reality. Every day he tells me what to do about this that and the pother thing social media and my brain has finally given up trying to digest this lot. The problem – I just don’t need a social media tip every day, what I need is so empirical evidence of what has worked very successfully commercially and what hasn’t/doesn’t, from a (presumably multi-millionaire or even billionaire) social media consultant or expert – if you know a good one, please put me in touch, the qualification for me has got to be a proven track records of delivering £/$ millions of ROI to hotels and travel companies.

So when I DO actually read Michael – some real classics come up in the comments – here’s one from  a masters student on this post - http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/5-tips-for-moving-social-media-leads-into-the-sales-funnel/#comment-517841989 – hav a read and enjoy below – - – -

“Hello Nicole, thanks for the above, I have enjoyed reading it, especially seeing there is serious conversations and threads finally to turn social media into a proper money maker for companies!

I am a Masters student in a university in London with few years of marketing experience, and my Masters dissertation is on ‘Social Media Fashion Brands’ fans: spectators or actual buyers’. I still cannot get to grips with how much emphasis is placed on social media today without no actual and accurate metrics in place today to measure its overall efficency in leading directly to sales. No doubt it is a great tool for communication and brand building and updating etc, but the constant question is why has no brand come forward saying for example I have 5000 Fans which i have invited purely to an event, out of the 5000, 200 attended, and out of the 200, 50 bought. Wouldn’t an experiment as easy as that help us better understand the power of these ‘like’ buttons that till date doesnt seem to mean much more than “i have my eye on you”! The social media craze has been around for over 5 years now, don’t you find that simple tests like the one I am suggesting above could help at least start a discussion on the potential of social media generating sales?

Any comment is appreciated if any insights on experiments already carried, and would surely help with writing my dissertation!

According to the latest Global Mobile Media Forecast from Strategy Analytics, consumers are expected to increase the spend on mobile media by a further 13.4% from $121.8 billion in 2011 to $138.2 billion in 2012.

In contrast, advertiser spend on mobile media is expected to almost double from $6.3 billion to $11.6 billion, resulting in the total mobile media economy reaching $149.8 billion in revenue in 2012, a 17.0% increase on 2011.

60.2% of consumer spend is on data plans and web browsing, $82.8 billion in 2012, up 9.5% on 2011. A key driver of growth is the apps market on smartphones. Over 23 billion apps were downloaded globally in 2011, increasing by 38% to over 32 billion in 2012. Apps, now the second largest category for revenues for both consumer and advertiser spend, are becoming the key distribution mechanism for media on mobile phones.

Apps are expected to account for 18.9% of global consumer spend in 2012, $26.1 billion, up 30.7% on 2011, but the strength of the apps ecosystem is also demonstrated by advertiser spend. For example, across the USA and major Western European markets as a whole, revenue from display ads on the mobile web ($934.5 million) has been overtaken by in-app advertising at $1.7 billion.
Despite remaining relatively flat in terms of spend, Music remains one of the top mobile media categories globally, accounting for $16.0 billion or 11.6% of 2012 consumer spend. However, the way consumers’ access and pay for music is changing. Ringtones are declining fast, but streaming music services such as Spotify, Pandora and Deezer, paid for by subscription or through advertising, are gaining good traction in Western Europe and the USA.

As with apps, growth of mobile video usage is increasing dramatically. 108 billion videos were watched on mobile phones in 2011, almost trebling to 280 billion in 2012. However, unlike apps, this isn’t translating into symbiotic revenue levels. Despite a 23.8% revenue growth, Video is likely to account for a mere 2.4% ($3.6 billion) of total mobile media revenues in 2012.

David MacQueen, Strategy Analytics’ Director of Wireless Media Strategies, notes that “… while ad revenues will more than triple to $726 million in 2012, it is still clearly challenging for advertisers looking to reach consumers through video ads on smartphones…”

The US mobile media economy is expected to outperform the global growth figure, increasing by 22.1% to nearly $38 billion in 2012. Advertiser spend on mobile media is projected to more than double in 2012, increasing 128.9% to just under $4.2 billion.

US consumers are expected to spend $6.7 billion on mobile apps in 2012, a 24.6% increase over 2011, and accounting for 20% of all US consumers mobile spend.  In direct correlation, US advertising revenue on mobile apps is projected to reach $1.2 billion in 2012, a 118% increase over 2011. In-app advertising revenue is more than double the revenue from mobile Web display advertising in 2012, which is only projected to reach $556 million.

124.9 million Americans are expected to access social networks via their handset in 2012, yet the amount of revenue this will generate for social networks is only expected to reach $412.7 million or $3.48 per mobile user during the year.

Public health warning number 1 –  EMBRACE THE CONCEPT OF RISK/REWARD

Meaning – flash sales are extremly high risk, very low reward. Throwing the baby (the loyal customer) away with the bathwater( the non-loyal Groupon customer) comes firmly to mind. Chasing low/the wrong demographics business at very little return is high risk in Innfinite’s language -what about yours?

A recent survey by Travelclick conducted amongst almost 400 chain and independent properties in mainland Europe and the UK, revealed five main reasons why hotels were unhappy with the group sale experience. These were:

- Did not make enough revenue per room

- Gave up too much revenue to the sale site

- Deal wasn’t as successful as expected

- Failed to see any repeat business, and

- Did not attract the right calibre of customer

Anecdotal evidence has indicated that hotels are also concerned that a large percentage of the customers who book had actually stayed with them before and cannot be ‘up-sold’, which discourages incremental business.

Then today I get this – http://www.eyefortravel.com/distribution-strategies/making-apt-use-flash-sales-both-distribution-and-marketing-initiatives. At best this article is a veiled promotional piece for flash selling websites, at worst its total economic nonsense. Hoteliers all over the world have been snared and entrapped by these flash selling sites and their slick, and often detestable and bordering on illegitimate, sales tactics. Remember Booking.com started with a handful of hotels, then just about all the world’s hotels played follow my leader, and look where we are now. Lets hope that follow like sheep phenomenon doesn’t infiltrate the flash selling recruitment market – there are even views out there that some of them want to become mainstream OTA’s – perish the thought, that would be a potentially fatal ‘second phase’ OTA development

The fact is gthat the current hotel distribution market is a mess, corrupted also by over-technologisation that neither hoteliers nor travel shoppers want, and crazy beliefs that technology can de-humanise not only the sales process but thye hotel experioenmce itself, in turn turning it into a process. Technology will never make up for, or accurately predict human behavior, often what we say and what we do are two entirely different things.

Hoteliers have cottoned onto the flash selling fad too. They dump flash sales customers into the worst rooms, they use artificial ‘rack rates’ to demonstrate arguable discounts – what is rack rate anyway. To the customer this kind of manipulation represents all the worst attributes of the hospitality experience. The flash selling site also demands the lowest deal available anywhere – where is rate parity here, it’s a joke. If you have a lower rate/deal on your own website they make you take it down. The fact is they should be competing with other channels for your business, not being given a lowest rate monopoly.

Here are three economic truths which should confine flash selling activity to the wastepaper bin

First commoditization – the deal is a product of the flash sales company, not the hotel. The hotel has to conform to a list of criteria, mainly about price, not product. The higher up te quality chain, the worse this can actually become, as we see 5 star hotels selling cheap tacky deal that do their peers absolutely no good at all. This driving down of quality perception, standards and price in one fell swoop is economic  madness. The article http://www.eyefortravel.com/distribution-strategies/making-apt-use-flash-sales-both-distribution-and-marketing-initiatives tells hotels they need to understand better the ‘process, viz

“But a specialist like LivingSocial believes hotels need to understand what they want to achieve and need to work with the social buying platform to create deals that offer guests the best of the property, fulfill the hotels goals from running the promotion and recognising the costs and revenue requirements of the social buying company.”

What abject nonsense. The hotel is being ripped off, self inflicted in many case yes – but it is under no obligation, nor should it even care about, understanding the deals company better.

Secondly, opportunity cost. Whatever the top rate is, call it rack, best available, high season or whatever, the hotel is fundamentally offering a huge discount on its publicly available rates. Comments such as (this is for a well known 4 star hotel )– BB per couple for £54, save £138 = 72% – Ok lets take that example to illustrate the point – that hotel is prepared to pay £138 to get £192 – then it has to

Pay the VAT – 20% = £11

Pay the deal company – lets say 25% = £14

So £138 in fact gets it £167.

A discount is a cost of sale, if it isn’t then what is it? IS THAT HOTEL SERIOUSLHY SAYINGIT IS PREPARED TO SPEND £138 to get £167?? And get all the drawbacks mentioned above and below thrown in!

If that same hotel did an on line ad campaign, or posted a rate of £54 on its website, it would be overwhelmed with business in 5 minutes.  OK this is probably overkill to prove the point, but at least the 25% to the deals company would be saved. What the flash sale activity actually is, is controlled disaster, a slow death, at least the ad or web activity would certainly produce and urgent change in  strategy!!!

Third, and possibly most potent – receivables  management./extortionate loan finance I just can’t put it any better than this piece by Rocky Agraval about Groupon- – -

“Well, for starters, it’s not a coupon company nor a marketing company. At its core, Groupon’s U.S. business is a receivables factoring business, as I wrote last year. They give loans to small businesses at a very steep rate (the price of the discount plus Groupon’s commission). They get the money to fund these loans from credit card companies such as Chase Paymentech. Groupon is essentially a sub-prime lender that does zero risk assessment. And as word continues to spread about what a terrible deal running a Groupon is for many categories of businesses, the ones that will choose to run Groupons are the ones that are the most desperate. For U.S. based businesses, the only time I can definitely recommend running a Groupon is if it is otherwise going to go out of business.”

The best analogy I can think of in the UK is pay day loans, companies such as Wonga.com and Quick Quid are charging up to 4734% APR pn pay day loans and desperate customers are daft enough to buy them, rather than think of other ways of how to deal with their predicament. 4734% APR – is that extortion, or what. It should be outlawed.

Epilogue

I read this from a Vizergy piece recently

Take control of your hotel’s on line presence < In today’s evolving world of hospitality digital marketing, it’s important that all properties take inventory of their online presence, assess strengths and weaknesses across multiple channels and effectively take action to enhance visibility and bookings with integrated marketing.

My interpretation – don’t let a flash sales company destroy your on line presence.

Let’s get more hotels talking about all this and their experiences and lessons.- virtually all the industry talk on this is tarred with the same brush – its all about the flash sales company, and usually fairly positive too.

A very well known Scottish hotel closed its door recently, and while the reasons may be many, co-incidentally it did undertake a lot of flash sales activity and when the bills came in it had run out of cash.

Public health warning number 2 – GROUPON DOESN’T PAY YOUR BILLS!!

Firstly, do not equate this post with ‘how to manage Trip Advisor reviews – there are reams already out there on this, and its part of, but anything but the whole story

We will focus on online reputation management, and try to give you some interesting pointers as to how independent hotels can score over their branded counterparts in this area. For brand, read ‘hard brand’ or major hotel brand, or what we call ‘rational brand’. Many independents may be ‘soft branded’ – i.e. branded by emotional factors.

For all hotels, brand or independent, reputation management is an integral and essential component of, but not the same thing as

1              Sales

2              Marketing – especially content marketing and local marketing

3              Ecommerce

4              Revenue management

5              Operations

and it needs to be present as a component of all these to be effective.  Additionally these areas need to work together. This is rarely present these days, especially in brands, see below. Reputation management is a process – which integrates all 5 above with each other, and with organisational engagement and communications. The reputation management process essentially has 4 parts

Building reputation

Maintaining reputation

Growing reputation

Recovery of reputation – e.g. where there has been a complaint

Reputation management is a relatively new phenomenon surprisingly. Travel shoppers rely heavily on peer experience when making buying decisions. Today is the day of the ‘its all about me’ customer – so that your online reputation is shaped by these customers, not by you – yet you have to manage it, and you must – and yes you can evaluate, act. communicate positively, and shape your on line image on line – blogs, posts, tweets, PR, mobile, social media, internet new sites – you name it..

The stronger your on line reputation the more likely you’ll grow sales, revenues, and rate/yield. You’ll also have a viral effect people more likely to recommend you) – and a displacement effect (people looking for hotel A on e.g. Trip Advisor, se you (hotel B), and switch to you.

Many small businesses think reputation management is only for the big boys (brands &c), or that they can’t afford it, or that its too big a chore. We will hopefully dispel these myths below and give you some instances where independent hotels can actually steal a march over brands when it comes to reputation management – hence converting it into an unmissable commercial opportunity. Here we go:-

1              You are closer to your organisation than a big brand can possibly be to a unit franchisee or licensee, or managed unit. So you can effectively merge the 5 essential parts of reputation management outlined above. Big brands are corporate monoliths. They are slow to change, they are ruled by corporate governance. We know of brands where reputation management is seen as unimportant, there is no separate department for or manager of it, and it seems to fall into a black hole usually somewhere between operations and marketing. In other words, there is no place for it in the corporate organisational chart with many brands currently – or it is not high on the strategic agenda.

2              This is borne out very convincingly if you look at trip Advisor. In most of the top UK destinations, brands are way behind independents in the popularity/review ranking stakes. This corroborates both brand lack of interest, and the opportunity for the independents to gain an advantage

3              Many years ago when the internet began seriously, all hotels had a level marketing playing field, we remember it well. Over the last 15 years, the evolution of travel distribution on the web has meant that this playing field has been massively eroded, what with OTA,s paying for preferred placements which only the larger hotels can afford &c ^&c.  However one way currently that the independent or small hotel can redress this imbalance is actually in the area of reputation management.  Here are some tips – -

A             The big OTA’s are now huge sources of travel shopper reviews, either  their own, or in partnership with e.g. Trip Advisor.  Independents are in a unique position to manage these more carefully and aggressively than brands, and OTA’s will tend to place properties with great reviews and competitive rates higher in the pecking order, we know this to be the case in practice.

B             The billboard effect means that, whether they meant it or not, OTA’s are used as search engines and the booking is made elsewhere e.g. on the hotel website or over the phone. Another good reason to manage your reviews on third party websites.

4              A hot topic in web and social media metrics right now is ‘attribution’ – tracing the channel/s that ultimately lead a traveller to book a room.  Once commentator, Josiah Maceknzie, says that 30% of travellers switch hotels at the last minute after looking at Trip Advisor scores. Need i say more?

5              Reputation management is part of the SEO success pyramid. It fosters trust, higher traffic, better conversions, and better and more proactive feedback. Independent hotels have the flexibility of operation, and don’t have the barrier to change of the large corporate brands where there is often a relationship imbalance between the macro(brand) and ,micro (individual/local hotel) level.

6              A brand is a reputation, a unit hotel is a business at the micro level where reputation services are not offered by the brands, nor do they care. They see reputation management as a macro thing on social media(where it has been widely reported that brands are finding SM a virtual waste of time as an engagement tool) – again this is is an opportunity for the independent.

7              With the major brands, there has been a recent obsession with the room as the ‘default’ unit of sale and the core of everything they do, a multi product independent hotel doesn’t need to suffer from this and needs to, and should easily be able to – ensure that its reputation management is spread over all products – rooms, weddings, packages, meetings &c – brand website are woefully short when it comes to market segmentation. Again here is a big opportunity for the independent – remember if you are a wedding hotel, one wedding booking  is worth many room sales!

On another issue, integrity and trust are huge components of reputation management. We believe that small businesses in particular, as opposed to brands, live or die by customer referrals. This has 2 implications for independents and reputation management

1              remember that iof you are doing flash sales e.g. with Groupon, these may introduce a demographic mix to your business that may be uncomfortable. Additionally, we find paradoxically that a hotel’s highest [paying/yield ing customers are often their least ‘complaining’ customer segment. Lash sites have the potential to greatly disrupt your value equation and your integrity.

2              practice market segmentation in reputation management, as you would with channel management and revenue management. To illustrate this point, a stayer may be a potential wedding customer, if you do weddings. Therefore make sure you have great wedding reviews from guests, and remember to manage all your key channels right across the board from a reputation management point of view. Big brands just don’t do this.

Here at Navarino, we take a serious interest in all critical control points in the ecommerce and conversion process. We do not provide reputation management services, but two of our partners do, Innfinite and Review Pro. You should take the ReviewPro demo, arrange this through Innfinite (www.innfinite.co.uk) You’ll be staggered at the scope and management capability of this tool, and also by the amount of reviews you have that you don’t even know About.  Your Trip Advisor reviews may be less than 20% of your total on line reviews, yet the current press and ob sessions about Trip advisor would sometimes suggest it is the only game in town.

Alos as a point of interest, many of the big brands have joined together to create RoomKey (www.roomkey.com) – this further polarisation of brand from independent will yield opportunities to the independents. Also social media sites, especially Facebook, are hot on the heels of brands for ad campaigns, yet many Facebook users have said they don’t want to be served adds on their pages. There are issues for reputation management here. Also as two further suggestions

1                      ask your webmaster to create an on line guest survey for you, so that you can ‘use’ your guests to evaluate you on the key products and services you are most concerned about

2                      if you have a social media page e.g. a Facebook Fan page, get your trip Advisor links embedded here, this is easy to do, most webmasters can do it for you

That’s it for now on reputation management, this is an evolving topic, no doubt we will revisit it

Innfinite are now very much key players in the mobile space with our revolutionary, affordable mobile website for hotels. As suche we are getting much useful first hand info, stats and feedback about market behaviour, and great pointers to present and future strategy. Imagine my dismay when i read this – from PhocusWright -

“PhoCusWright’s recent Innovation Edition report Mobile Hits the Mainstream: Technology and Industry Trends, features findings from interviews with over 50 travel executives to identify the key areas of mobile focus for each. Both suppliers and intermediaries are looking for ways to exploit mobile’s unique characteristics, with many aiming to fill out their mobile offerings with end-to-end services. Below, a hint of what’s to come in selected segments/channels:

Hotels: Hoteliers put their initial mobile efforts into building out booking capabilities – and the strong growth of mobile hotel bookings suggests this strategy was a good one. With booking now under their belts, hoteliers are shifting their focus to in-stay/on-property services.”

What planet are they (Phocus Wright) on? At a push this may be planet USA but it most certainly ain’t planet GB. Hoteliers should not be alarmed by these misinformings, and be panicked into the wrong responses.

Furthermore the market consensus is very firmly that the amount of hotel booking by mobile commerce is currently low, as travel shoppers need to gain real confidence in the process and its security. Not so for the click or tap to call button – which is showing significant use, and many/most  of these calls should lead to bookings, and even upsells – dependent of course on the efficiency of the hotel telephone sales process.  Mobile and smartphone websites for hotels, in the first instance, will generate more telephone bookings – a bit of a no brainer really.

We advise you get a balanced veiw, and a far more relistic one, by reading – -

http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/Articles.aspx?ArticleId=7752&par1=NuwJKIvg0AcAJio7I4EOMQ==&par2=zMNhA/BDW2Hsp034hDFkAOmSctvuoBa+6QoHIpFw4aJ0xfgILwJKcsIga46qG4FM

and

Max Starkov’s – as usual, excellent (though you may not always agree with them) observations at

http://www.hospitalitynet.org/external/750280298.html

After my last post, I just had to post this article I cam across, by Janet Morrisey

Published: March 12, 2012. ENJOY!

The hotel industry, struggling to recover from the depths of the recession, has begun to contemplate a group of travelers it sees as crucial to its economic growth — those in their 20s to mid-30s who are obsessed with technology, social media and design.

Many hotel owners and operators are remodeling existing hotels or introducing new ones that offer free hotelwide Wi-Fi connections; large, welcoming lobbies with plush, comfortable furnishings; state-of-the-art fitness areas; in-room power consoles to plug in iPads, laptops and other devices; and stylish bars that spill into the lobby.

Some are also scheduling nightly social events, like happy hours and free wine tastings, aimed at luring the iPhone-toting generation to their hotels.

“All of the major brands — Hilton, Starwood, Marriott, InterContinental — have developed hip products that are targeted at the younger traveler,” said Chris Klauda, a vice president at D. K. Shifflet & Associates, a travel and hospitality market research company.

Travel spending by these younger travelers rose 20 percent in 2010, making them the fastest-growing age segment, according to American Express Business Insights, though they still lag the baby boom generation in overall spending.

Hotels that ignore these younger travelers, said Mark Woodworth, president of Colliers PKF Hospitality Research, will be at “a very severe competitive disadvantage.”

About a decade ago, the hotel industry was concentrating much of its effort on luring people who are now mostly in their 50s and 60s. The changes involved higher-quality beds, brighter lighting and bigger work spaces. And those travelers were loyal to brands that offered reliable, comfortable services.

Today, the Millennials, or Generation Y, seem to be seeking the opposite: the innovative and the off-the-wall attract their attention and their wallets.

“Interesting is more important than comfort,” said Bjorn Hanson, divisional dean of the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University. “It’s the reverse for baby boomers.”

Mr. Hanson said wall-to-wall — and free — Wi-Fi service was not only demanded but expected. “High-speed Internet is almost like air to Millennials,” he added, with most considering it as essential as beds and towels.

Hotel owners are also installing power consoles in rooms and public areas so that charging all those cellphones and laptops is easy and accessible.

“Gen Y’ers don’t want to have to unplug lamps or crawl under the bed to get their laptops and P.D.A.’s plugged in,” Ms. Klauda said.

The Plaza Hotel in New York has gone one step further, placing iPads in every hotel room. Guests can use the device to control the lighting, adjust the air-conditioning, order room service and read the morning paper.

Marketing and communicating through social networks are also important among hoteliers. When young travelers have a problem at a hotel, they are less inclined to complain to the hotel manager, as their predecessors generally do; they go online and post on Twitter about it. In early 2010, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide responded by setting up a team of about 20 people whose sole job is to monitor and respond to online complaints and comments.

Probably the biggest physical change has been to the hotels’ lobbies. Executives are retrofitting lobbies with comfortable sofas and Art Deco furnishings.

“If Millennials are wearing shorts, a T-shirt, a baseball cap and athletic shoes, a lobby that has mahogany paneling, English hunting scenes and Oriental rugs doesn’t connect as well,” Mr. Hanson said.

Young travelers also tend to spend far more time socializing and working in the lobby than they spend in their hotel rooms. “We coined the phrase ‘isolated togetherness,’ because if you watch them in the lobby, a lot of them are texting — but they’re texting each other in the lobby,” Ms. Klauda said.

Older travelers, on the other hand, often prefer solitude at the end of the day. They “like the face-to-face interaction during the day, but at the end of the day, we’re done — bring us our room service and leave us alone,” said David Loeb, a senior research analyst at Robert W. Baird & Company, a wealth management firm.

Younger travelers also tend to visit three or four different restaurants and bars a night, so some hotels are opening up multiple bars and lounges with different themes at different times of the day to keep them in the hotel. Many also offer free daily events, including tea tastings, yoga sessions and wine tastings, said Raj Chandnani, vice president for strategy at WATG, an architectural design firm for the lodging industry.

The hotelier Ian Schrager, a founder of the Studio 54 nightclub, was a pioneer in creating designer hotels with hip nightclubs, like the Paramount, Royalton and Hudson hotels in Manhattan in the 1980s and ’90s.

Starwood followed with its W hotels in the late 1990s and the debut of its Aloft brand in 2005. Other major brands have since jumped in, among them the InterContinental Hotels Group’s Indigo brand, Hyatt Hotels Corporation’s Andaz and Hyatt Place brands, and Marriott International’s concept to turn its lobbies into so-called great rooms.

Gerard Greene, a former hotel analyst, said he felt so strongly about the need for designer hotels at affordable prices that he quit his job, sold his home in London and used cash from the sale to finance his dream.

Now, 10 years later, his brand, Yotel, has four hotels, including one in Midtown Manhattan that some guests have described as futuristic. That hotel has an airportlike check-in kiosk (there is no registration desk); social public spaces; Wi-Fi access, power consoles and entertainment systems that devices can plug into; giant Monsoon shower heads; and compact 200-square-foot rooms, which were inspired by airline cabins, that have floor-to-ceiling windows.

Yotel’s other hotels are at the Gatwick and Heathrow airports in London and at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, and it is planning on new ones in Miami, San Francisco, Paris, Hong Kong and New York, at Kennedy Airport.

But could all of this be a passing fad that will fade as the travelers get older?

Mr. Greene said he was not concerned, comparing it with the Apple phenomenon.

“Younger people were the first to adopt the iPods, iPads and so forth, and now my mom has an iPhone, as do much older people,” he said. “But the people who got it first were the younger people.”

Similarly, he said he believed that older travelers would follow the young in hotel trends.

“My sense is most people think there’s been a change,” said John Fox, a senior vice president at PKF Consulting, “and it’s a permanent change.”

I thought this was fascinating stuff. I have a son aged 16. More than ever before I have noticed now the huge divergence in his thought process and behaviour compared to not only mine when I was his age, but even more than ever, compared to mine now.  Sometimes, indeed a lot of the time, it fazes me and frustrates me, especially when my thoughts are met with the comment, ‘well dad times have changed since your day’ – well it still is my day, and frankly I think they’ve (times) changed for the worse.

A key challenge for me, is the young person’s lack of social skills. ‘Social media’ is a huge blameworthy factor in this, and yes i believe it deserves blame, not credit. Coincide this with the de-personalisaton of the hotel product, and you have the recipe for the Citizen M hotel. Dressed up as ‘citizen mobile’ – it could more appropriately be deemed ‘citizen moron’. Lets please resist this depersona;lisation and dehumanisation of the hotel product, its total corruption, it flies in the fac of any decent meaning of the word ‘hospitality’ – and it will turn our overseas visitors off.  Going back to the issue of the young generation in 2020 – - – -

The not-so-brief Research Brief – ‘the Impact of Hyperconnectivity’, is a fascinating and must read introduction to The Future of the Internet as seen through a series of eight separate reports from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. This publication is part of a Pew Research Center series that captures people’s expectations for the future of the internet, in the process presenting a snapshot of current attitudes.

This first 36 page not-to-be-missed report, looking at expectations of the impact of today’s digital society in the year 2020, is excerpted here only to acquaint my readers with the context of the study. A complete reading of the source material is encouraged if it appears to provide groundwork for today’s communications challenges as well as for future planning.

For a shortcut to access to the complete PDF file of the first release, please visit here… or read along for “flavor” before committing:

In this survey about the future of the internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020. They said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.

At the same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, a loss of patience, and a lack of deep-thinking ability due to what one referred to as “fast-twitch wiring.”

The survey question about younger users was inspired by speculation over the past several years about the potential impact of technology on them. They were asked to read two statements and select the one they believe that is most likely to be true and then explain their answers. 55% agreed with the statement:

• In 2020 the brains of multitasking teens and young adults are “wired” differently from those over age 35 and overall it yields helpful results. They do not suffer notable cognitive shortcomings as they multitask and cycle quickly through personal- and work-related tasks. Rather, they are learning more and they are more adept at finding answers to deep questions, in part because they can search effectively and access collective intelligence via the internet. In sum, the changes in learning behavior and cognition among the young generally produce positive outcomes.

And, 42% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited:

• In 2020, the brains of multitasking teens and young adults are “wired” differently from those over age 35 and overall it yields baleful results. They do not retain information; they spend most of their energy sharing short social messages, being entertained, and being distracted away from deep engagement with people and knowledge. They lack deep-thinking capabilities; they lack face-to-face social skills; they depend in unhealthy ways on the internet and mobile devices to function. In sum, the changes in behavior and cognition among the young are generally negative outcomes.

What statement do you agree with? Let me know. I’m afraid i’m one of the 42% – probably loosely defined as ‘old fashioned’ – which has become a throwaway remark these days. back to my son, he denies everything in that 42%, yet he manifests that behaviour more every day. This is a huge issue. Yes we are now breeding a society of morons.

While 55% agreed with the statement that the future for the hyperconnected will generally be positive, many who chose that view noted that it is more their hope than their best guess, and a number of people said the true outcome will be a combination of both scenarios. The research result here is really probably more like a 50-50 outcome than the 55-42 split recorded through survey takers’ votes. Respondents were asked to select the positive or the negative, with no middle-ground choice, in order to encourage a spirited and deeply considered written elaboration about the potential future of hyperconnected people.

Analysts generally believe many young people growing up in today’s networked world and counting on the internet as their external brain will be nimble analysts and decision-makers who will do well, says the report. An excerpt here from just one of the hundreds of respondents offers an insight into not only the generation under consideration, but the tenor of the complete report as well.

David Ellis, director of communications studies at York University in Toronto, has a front-row seat to observe how hyperconnectivity seems to be influencing young adults, says the report. He said it makes them less productive and adds that most of them do not understand the new digital tools or how to use them effectively. “The idea that Millennials have a cognitive advantage over their elders is based on myths about multitasking, the skill-sets of digital natives, and 24/7 connectedness,” he commented. “Far from having an edge in learning, I see Millennials as increasingly trapped by the imperatives of online socializing and the opportunities offered by their smartphones to communicate from any place, any time,” Ellis said.

Ellis continued, “I can see this in the living experiment that takes place every week in the computer lab where I teach internet technologies to fourth-year communication studies majors. Students everywhere have become relentless in their use of mobile devices for personal messaging. Even good students delude themselves into thinking they can text friends continuously while listening to a lecture and taking notes and, in the process, retain information and participate in discussions. But good research has shown that even especially bright kids are less productive when multitasking, a finding resisted by plenty of grown-ups as well.

Our fondness for thinking positively about multitasking, especially among the young, gets a lot of reinforcement from two other assumptions:

• that Millennials have a special aptitude for digital media because they’ve grown up digital
• and that ubiquitous, seamless connectivity is a positive social force.”

The first assumption is baloney, says Ellis. The second is fraught with contextual problems. Of the hundreds of liberal arts students I’ve taught, notes Ellis, not one in ten has come into my class with the slightest clue about how their digital devices work, how they differ from analog devices, how big their hard drive is, what Mbps measures. In other words, they’re just like people who haven’t grown up digital.

And of course the immersive nature of 24/7 connectedness creates the illusion that Millennials can somehow tap into a form of collective intelligence just by being online, while looking impatiently for messages every three minutes.

Ellis continues, “I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad or anti-social about smartphones, laptops, or any other technology. I do, however, believe we are entering an era in which young adults are placing an inordinately high priority on being unfailingly responsive and dedicated participants in the web of personal messaging that surrounds them in their daily lives. For now, it seems, addictive responses to peer pressure, boredom, and social anxiety are playing a much bigger role in wiring Millennial brains than problem-solving or deep thinking.”

The publication is part of a Pew Research Center series that captures people’s expectations for the future of the internet, in the process presenting a snapshot of current attitudes. Please access the full report here.

The article is entitled Dedicated to Social Media, Part I: citizenM Hotels

The preamble says - In this three-part series I interview the individuals leading social media efforts with these companies to gain insight into how they’re taming the social media beast and staying true to brand. Whether you’re a B&B, boutique or big box, there are ideas and inspiration to be drawn from all three models. Today we kick things off with Diego Sartori of citizenM.

You really need to read this, then go stay at a Citizen M hotel. I have, and so have a number of my friends. So i posted a comment on Daniel’s website, which didn’t seem to pass the spam filters (that i didn’t particularly like, but there goes, I have been called many things but not a spammer! – it will probably get thro’ the security eventually) – anyway here’s the nub of what I said – - – -

“Daniel, some of the observations in this article just amaze me. But I guess nothing in the social media space surprises me. i and some friends also, have stayed in the CitizenM hotel in Glasgow and we all find it one of the most bizarre and dehumanising hotel experiences of all time. No personality, virtually no customer ‘experience’, no wonder they’ere cheap, they’ve replaced virtually every human contact point with technology. Next time (there won’t probably be one) I expect to be welcomed by a robot, or even Dr Who. Are they serious when they say they are customer centric? i’ll never stay in one again.”

I think social media is an adjunct of the laws of physic s – for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction!

Have you a Citizen M hospitality experience you’d like to share?

According to a recent conducted in-depth study on the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations by The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, the Inc. 500 (the fastest-growing private U.S. companies compiled annually by Inc. Magazine) was outpacing the revenue based Fortune 500 in their use of social media.

In 2007, research showed that 8% of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared to 19% of the Inc. 500. This trend continued in 2008, 2009 and 2010 with half of the Inc. 500 blogging and only 23% of the Fortune 500 in 2010. The new data shows adoption of blogging is declining for the first time since 2007 among the Inc. 500 companies, and may have peaked as a primary social media tool in the US business world.

The study finds the incorporation of new platforms and tools including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, texting, downloadable mobile apps and Foursquare while noting the reduction in use of blogging, message boards, video blogging, podcasting and MySpace.

Some of the tools marketers are abandoning, however, are still reported to be highly effective. Message and bulletin boards, along with blogging, got the highest success ratings of any tools, among companies that use them for marketing. While a strong majority of respondents indicated they were having success with Twitter (86%) and Facebook (82%), this was lower than several other, less-popular services.

The original 2007 questions probed the familiarity of respondents with six prominent social media tools. As familiarity became almost ubiquitous, studies began to focus more on adoption.

Changes over the years include dropping wikis (used more as a collaboration tool than a communications/engagement tool) and changing the social networking category into more specific platforms including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Foursquare. In the 2011 survey, the use of LinkedIn, YouTube, corporate texting along with the use of discount sites like Groupon and downloadable mobile apps were all investigated.

Findings highlighted in the study include:

• Companies in the Advertising/Marketing industry are most likely to blog while companies in Government Services and Construction make very little use of this tool. This decline mirrors a trend in other sectors as this mature tool evolves into other forms or is replaced by communication through Facebook or Twitter
• The platform most utilized by the 2011 Inc. 500 is Facebook, virtually tied with the professional network, LinkedIn.  One fourth of the respondents report that Facebook or LinkedIn is the single most effective social networking platform they use. There is clearly a shift in how the companies studied are communicating, says the report. Fewer are using blogging, message/bulletin boards, online video, podcasting and MySpace.  More companies are using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, downloadable mobile apps, texting and Foursquare
• Ninety percent of responding executives report that social media tools are important for brand awareness and company reputation.  88% percent see these tools as important for generating web traffic while 81% find them important for lead generation.  73% percent say that social media tools are important for customer support programs
• The 2011 study indicates that the Inc. 500 appears to have plateaued in their monitoring activity, which will have important consequences should they increase their investment in the social media area, concludes the report.  Regardless of how they choose to converse with their constituents online, they will need to be aware of conversation about their company, their products and their brands

For additional information about the study and additional charts and graphs, please visit the UMass site here.