Sanjana Chappalli

Last month, we hosted a Social Media State of the Union webinar that focused on the rapid emergence of three newer social platforms: Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest. While each of these channels has certainly sequestered significant industry buzz throughout 2012, the major of hospitality marketers are still testing the waters to figure out how each platform can contribute to a more engaged, integrated social media plan. Over the next few weeks, we will take a more in-depth look at each of these channels and provide some tips and insights as to how to best manage your hotel or restaurant’s presence on each channel. First up: Instagram.

When operating a hotel, you are bound to face guest complaints. It's an inherently obvious truth of the business: no matter how high your property's star rating or sterling your current reputation - you will be faced with innumerable challenges, whether service or product-related, that can immediately turn your customer into your biggest advocate or disgruntled reviewer upon checking-out.From a post-stay perspective this paradigm is all too familiar, as your now enthusiastic evangelist or infuriated invitee [...]

Proclaimed by CEO & Co-Founder Joe Fernandez to be the “most comprehensive and accurate model they’ve ever released”, the Klout platform has quadrupled the number of signals it measures (now over 400) across seven networks (including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare) and has – for the first time – integrates Wikipedia data to assess a person’s offline influence.

Today, Revinate, the leading provider of cloud-based enterprise software for the hospitality industry has raised $14.5 million in Series A financing from leading venture capital firms Benchmark Capital and Formation 8. The funding will be used to accelerate Revinate’s international expansion and for product development. Revinate, which recently celebrated its third anniversary, has well over 10,000 hotel and restaurant customers worldwide using its software platform to manage online reputation and connect with guests in today’s [...]

Last month, Google announced the launch of Google+ Local, a new way to search for and share your favorite restaurants, local hot spots and pretty much ever other business you can think of. The launch is the first step in integration with review site Zagat since the acquisition of the company by Google in September 2011. Although this integrations is still in its early stages, we wanted to outline the major effects it will have on hotels and restaurants.

The commissions paid to Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) are often viewed as just “the cost of doing business” in the hospitality industry.  According to a recent L2 report, hotels forfeited $2.5 Billion to OTAs in 2010 which begs the question- are there ways to limit this expense?  In the Facebook Factor I talked about how fans and advocates are more likely to book directly with hotels.  This can reduce the influence of review sites and [...]