The Tech - Savvy hotelier #21 - Who should own social media? it depends.

I think one of the really important questions to answer is - who ultimately owns responsibility for the newer channels like social media channels and this is an area that comes up time and time again when hotels are engaging in cyber hospitality and the key question that they put to us is who should own this? Who is responsible for doing this? How do we structure to be successful with these prolific channels, these emerging channels, and it really varies depending on which type of organization you are talking to and I am not even sure that we know the right answer at this point in time because if you're using your social media channels for servicing, are you going to empower your own property reservations teams to address those servicing inquiries in real time like the airlines are doing. If you are using social media for marketing and press related messages, are you going to rely on your public relations department to wholly own that channel and if you are using it as a booking channel for converting traffic and business - are you going to handover ownership and accountability to your director of distributional revenue and it is amazing how many hotels will say, well press or media or marketing are responsible for social media because they consider it real time engagement. The reality is that the consumer is not using it in the same way we think they are using it and if the consumer is using it for servicing, then don't we have to step up and respond to them at a pace and service them in real time just as we would if they call our hotels. So I think that is probably one of the harder questions to ask right now. I am not sure that we have the answer in its entirety but I think that we are going to see some results very, very soon. We are a number of different brands trying some very, very innovative things and what they are doing is they are revisiting their existing results on property. Looking at where they may have the skill sets so they have young millennial coming in to the work place perhaps more adept at working with some of these channels. Typically coming in to those servicing roles and they are also thinking about how they can take some of the more senior members of their team and their sales organization and move them into real time engagement roles. So what we are starting to see is hotels revaluating some of the traditional disciplines and how they use existing skill sets to be more effective in handling these emerging channels.