Circos Brand Karma

Last week was a great week for us as we were able to connect with most of our customers and partners in Asia Pacific at Web in Travel, ITB Asia, and our 1st half-day workshop, Brand Karma Day.  We shared our thoughts on the social media phenomenon and how businesses can best leverage it to turn it into a strategic asset for their brands.  Below is a recap of the top 10 ideas that we recommend for brands in the travel industry who want to venture into social media.

1. Understand your true differentiators.  Sometimes what you’ve identified as differentiators don’t mirror what customers think.  It’s important to monitor what is being said about you and reconcile your customers’ opinions with your story so that the brand message is consistent and credible.
2. Maintain operational excellence around your differentiators.  Your brand differentiators can’t be temporary.  Unlike ads, social media has permanence.  Since what’s expressed about your brand is permanently searchable, changing the differentiators constantly will confuse your audience.
3. Set up your social network hub where your customers are.  We recommend minimally a presence on Facebook because it is the largest social network with over 300M users and is one of the top-trafficked site in many countries.  The volume and the intent (sharing, lifestyle) make it suitable for just about any consumer brand.
4. Use content about your differentiators as “landing lights.” Guide interested consumers to your hub with great content.  You want consumers (current and future customers) to be attracted to and stay loyal to your brand because of your differentiators.  If the content is timely, all the better.  Of course, point #2 above is of the utmost importance.
5. Make fans not friends.  Fans on Facebook and Followers on Twitter give users the power to opt-in to being associated with you, which is exactly what you want.  It’s low risk for your fans, and you can stay focused on sharing the great things about your brand.
6. Engage, not advertise.  The impression ads and click-through ads of the portal/search paradigms don’t work well in this channel.  Think of your fans as people who are already or will eventually be in your CRM — and use your hub to please them digitally.  Share things that would interest them, do things that would please them, reward their loyalty, and personalize whenever possible.
7. Link to allies.  Chances are, brands in other parts of the world tout the same differentiators.  Why not ally with them by cross-linking your hubs?  The narrower your niche, probably the easier it will be to find non-competitive allies that can cross-authenticate what your brand stands for.
8. Partner with brands that complete you.  Travel is a holistic experience involving many components.  In your hub, introduce the partners that best complete the guest experience.  Depending on the business your brand is in, points of interest, transportation options, accommodation choices, local eateries, and ticketing agencies are all possible partners to complete the experience your brand offers.
9. Respond immediately, and with empathy, to negative posts.  Brands, like people, show their true colors when they’re under attack, so complaints, though unpleasant, can be opportunities for you to shine.  Unless it’s a systemic problem, other fans will likely ignore the complaint, rise to defend you, or understand that the issue is between the complaining fan and you.  In all cases, they will appreciate that you did something, even if all you do is to request to address the issue offline with the complaining fan.  Doing nothing makes observing fans wonder what happened.
10. Develop a social media policy for your employees.  How many of the 300M Facebook users also work for you?  Chances are, quite a few.  Employees can be your biggest promoters… or unintentional detractors.  As you venture into social media, make sure that your employees are on the same page as you.

Recently I was trying to buy a ticket online on Tiger Airways, a budget airline that operates out of Singapore and serves Asia.  Though I knew about Tiger, I’ve never flown it.  So I did 2 searches, one on Google, and one on Twitter, both using the keywords “tiger airways.”  Here’s what I found: Google’s first search result page returned 10 results, 6 led to a booking engine, 4 to information (including wikipedia).  Twitter returned 20 results, 0 led to a booking engine, 4 tweets were positive, 3 were neutral, 2 were questions, and a whopping 11 were negative (for math lovers that’s a -35% net favorability if you consider questions to be neutral).  Below are screenshots of the top 5 results from each service (click the image to zoom in).

google v. twitter results for tiger airways, July 2009

As you can see, while Google does a sufficient job at presenting facts, Twitter is much more human with personal pet peeves for all to see.  Also, I had no idea how old the sites Google pointed me to were, but I had a pretty good idea that the tweets about Tiger were all very recent, and therefore, more relevant to me.  Finally, Google abstracts are often an incomplete description of the website, whereas Twitter posts are mostly complete thoughts.  This slight difference is the pivotal one as it relates to brands.  In this example, whereas Google invites travelers to find out more, Twitter users unabashedly present their point of view so travelers don’t have to find out more.

For a traveler deciding, let’s say, between Tiger and Air Asia (another low cost carrier), you don’t have to read a lot of tweets to quickly form an opinion for how they’re regarded by their customers.  As the tweets predicted, I encountered a problem buying my ticket on Tiger’s website, and was instructed to call customer service.  While on hold, I was reminded at least 5 times that Tiger won the Best Low-Cost Airline of the Year in 2008 from CAPA within the on-hold loop music, which ironically made me question the validity of the award.

Why?  Not because I don’t respect CAPA, but because the tweeters’ complaints were entire consistent with each other and with my booking and customer service experience.  Some were further backed by links to news reports that reported on similar incidences.  On the other hand, I had absolutely no idea who at CAPA selected the airline and under what criteria.  The tweets I read made the professional CAPA opinion and award seemingly obsolete and dated, and the award did not lessen my growing doubts about Tiger Airways.

Is my brand experience typical?  I think more and more so.  A brand’s story becomes fragmented when there’s dissonance between what it tries to portray vs. the actual customer feedback.  That “promise gap” can shred a brand and render its messaging useless if the feedback is antithetical to the brand portrayal, and the brand either ignores the feedback or insists that the opposing feedback came from outliers.  In the past, customer feedback have been exclusively behind the brand’s firewall or embedded in private conversations and emails.  Message forums led to review sites led to blogging, each made customer feedback more public.  Twitter is all of those combined, with rocket boosters, and equipped with efficient search internally and to be externally discovered (via Google).

While consumers may initially approach Twitter with high skepticism, if they consistently read tweets that mirror their own experiences, they’ll start to accept and believe in the wisdom of the tweeters.  This is why the “follow” function is so powerful.  On Twitter, you can follow anyone you trust, and stop following anyone who gives bs, which is unlike Facebook where the person you want to friend (in order to see what they have to say) has to accept your friend request.

Given the rapid growth of Twitter, learning from travelers who are otherwise inaccessible to you but who happen to know what you need will become even more pervasive in the coming days.  The operative word here being days.  Where else in the world can a traveler go to find the right micro-segment of travelers who have the exact relevant, current, and credible knowledge they need?  Not travel agencies, not brands, not travel books, not travel magazines, not CAPA, and I posit, not even their friends and family.  This, coupled with the speed and reach of Twitter discussed in part 1, are the key ingredients to a paradigm shift for brands in the travel industry.

If you want more context about why Twitter works, you can read Granovetter’s seminal work on the Strength of Weak Ties.  For a non-academic version, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point covers the main idea as well.  From Wikipedia, the central premise is,

In marketing or politics, the weak ties enable reaching populations and audiences that are not accessible via strong ties.

That, is exactly what Twitter does with amazing efficiency.

If you’re in the travel industry, or are a traveler, you can not ignore Twitter.

On the surface, Twitter may not be impressive.  You tweet (or broadcast, for the non-Twitteratis) what you want in 140 characters or less.  People who follow you receive your tweet instantly.  You can follow people whose tweets you like.  People who like your tweets can follow you.  You can do a keyword search on all the tweets.  If so inclined, you can re-tweet (RT) someone else’s tweet that you found to be particularly useful (it’s the Twitter version of email forward).  You can also embed a tag with a # in front of the tag name to denote important topics that you think (or hope) other people will follow.  For example #iranelections (vs. a keyword search on “iran elections“) or #followfriday, whose trend was analyzed by Mashable.

Twitter also has a direct message capability which is just like private messaging, but it’s really not the reason you use the service.  When I first began using Twitter, I got the feeling that the service was making public my tweets (which were like SMS or Facebook status).  But it turns out what ingenious Twitter users can do with 140 characters has made Twitter really an incredibly useful tool.

With an URL shortening service like bit.ly, which is very popular among Twitteratis, 140 characters is more than enough to express one’s brief opinion about a web page (very often, blogs).  There’s a further element of mystery added the the tweet because a typical shortened URL does not contain the web site name per se, it’s more like http://bit.ly/188bbf or http://bit.ly/12QgiZ, so the click-through rests solely on the credibility of the tweeter and the copy they used to describe the link.  Yes I used the word “copy” because I believe the tweeter is trying to recommend or sell the link to compel a click-through.  Combined that with the ability to RT, Twitter can have a profound impact quickly and virally.

Recently, an esteemed hotel chain posted agency-made videos that were meant to be viral to promote itself.  The videos were viral, but in an unintentionally negative way.  Within hours both bloggers and tweeters denounced them and the brand.  The combined forces, bloggers tweeting and tweeters retweeting with escalating commentaries quickly spread the bad idea, the impact so great that the chain pulled the videos down within 24 hours and issued an apology.

Also celebrity blogger, Perez Hilton, was assaulted recently in Toronto.  When police did not respond in a timely manner, Hilton tweeted an SOS to his over 1M followers, a good number of whom inundated the police department with calls.  When the police finally arrived Hilton had to tweet out another request asking his followers to stop calling on his behalf.

Those response times are considered to be slow.  Both the NY Times and MSNBC recently published articles about travelers receiving attention via Twitter.  In the case of the NY Times, here’s an excerpt:

Take Tony Wagner, 34, a new-media director for an academic group in Washington. When he found out he wasn’t seated next to his wife and 2-year-old daughter on a JetBlue flight to San Francisco over the Memorial Day weekend, he first called up customer service. But the agent told him to take it up at the gate. So Mr. Wagner indirectly sent JetBlue a message, by posting a plea for help on his Twitter account: “@jetblue Advice to get both parents and 2 yr old seated next to each other on flight later today? Right now only one parent. Full flight.”

Exactly 19 minutes later, JetBlue tweeted back, suggesting they correspond privately, using Twitter’s “direct message” feature: “@tonywagner Please follow us so we may DM!” After a brief exchange, JetBlue flagged his tickets as a priority concern.

And from Chris Elliott of MSNBC Travel:

“Dear Virgin Air,” she wrote. “My children have been on the tarmac for one hour with 90 more minutes to wait. I am at JFK gate b25. Pls RT.” That last request — please “RT” — is shorthand for Gottlieb’s nearly 10,000 followers to “retweet” her message, or rebroadcast it to their followers. And retweet they did. Within minutes, Virgin had phoned Gottlieb to reassure her that her kids would be fine.

“They contacted the gate agent manager and explained to us the entire weather situation,” she says. “Within 20 minutes of that conversation, the plane took off.”

Chris is a tweeter I follow.  He tweeted his article and to see RT in action, you can see how many tweeters have since retweeted his article to tell other travelers how they can use Twitter to improve their travel experience.

So if travelers are using Twitter and also being coached on how to use it (in Chris’ article he recommends 6 ways in which travelers can use social media services like Twitter to improve their travel experience), what are you doing to meet your customers on Twitter?

I was on a panel with Karthik Siva at the Asia Luxury Travel Market in Shanghai where we discussed traditional vs. “new wave” branding.  Karthik is the visionary behind Global Brand Forum.  The panel was moderated by Siew Hoon Yeoh of Web-in-Travel (aka WIT), the conference where we launched Brand Karma last year.  Though he represented traditional marketing and I represented “new wave,” I found much in common with his thinking.

One such common perspective revolves around the purpose of a brand and its importance today.  Luxury brands have long understood the need to define a unique purpose and have been fulfilling it by manifesting features to not only justify their price point, but also to retain customers.

But what about non-luxury brands?  Does price trump all?

I don’t think so.  Some of the businesses that have filed for bankruptcy actually used price as a key differentiator (e.g. Mervyns) or resorted to using price as a tool to stimulate volume (e.g. General Motors, Eddie Bauer).

Hoteliers around the world are dropping prices.  At the same time, in the eyes of travelers, hotel stay experiences have become more generic.  I hear a lot more statements like “I can’t tell the differences between these hotels,” and “the rooms are all pretty much the same.”  I also see it on the trend graphs in Brand Karma.  If customers don’t feel passion for their product, hoteliers may have to use pricing as the strategy because it typically has an immediate impact of driving volume… at least for a while.  But that’s not sustainable in the long run.  Both General Motors and Eddie Bauer created products that customers didn’t want to buy… eventually even lower prices didn’t work because both brands failed to inspire or stand for something that consumers cared to spend any money on.

Hence hoteliers, if you haven’t already done so, now might be a good time to do a quick check up on your brand purpose.  You don’t need to hire a consultant to do this.  Just answer these questions honestly:

1. Why does your brand exist?
2. How is that relevant today?
3. What are you and your staff doing to deliver on the brand promise?
4. How is what you’re doing different from what your competitors are doing?
5. Would your customers agree with your answers?

The answer to question 5 is critical, and the impact of a “no” or “I don’t know” could be devastating.  Check out AT&T’s change in its upgrade policy for the iPhone and also the site about consumer credit card rules for a sense of how things could evolve.

As a starting point, take a look at what’s been publicly expressed about your brand.  This will give you a pretty good idea, whether you agree or not, at how your guests really felt about their stay experiences.  Because their reviews are public, their words also shape potential customers’ impression of your brand when they research your brand — which has a direct impact on whether consumers book a room at your property or not.

Finally, even when not reviewing your brand, users express strong opinions about what ought to happen, echoing general consumer sentiments or raising expectations.  This may have a significant impact on the relevance of your offering.  For example, Gary Arndt recently tweeted something I’m sure many travelers think of:

• “So many places say they have ‘internet’ but do not mention if it is free or if it is just a computer in a common area”
• “I know free wifi is becoming the deal breaker for me and a lot of other people. Hotels should take note”

How influential will people like Gary Arndt be?  His tweet currently reaches over 72,000 followers.

Which would you choose?

I think most of you would select Kleenex if it were the same price as the grocery store generic.

And in that question lies the importance of brand equity in these times.  As more and more hoteliers drop rate to sustain volume, some of the sacrifices that they make come at the expense of upholding their brand promise.  The problem with this is that while the price tactic might drive volume in the short term, it may not necessarily increase the number of loyal customers if the sacrifices comes in the form of service or other features that has been associated with the brand.

Hoteliers have wonderful opportunities when deploying price cutting campaigns to win customers.  Their focus shouldn’t be just on driving volume, but attracting and developing loyal customers.  In a contracting market, to maintain the same volume the customers must come from somewhere else (e.g. your competitors).  Therefore, if you reduce price to increase volume, a portion of those customers will be new ones that came from your competitors as a result of your lower price.  What will you do to get them to come back a 2nd time … nth time in the future… and at a higher price point?

The answer lies in what is the brand promise you present when these customers come in through your doors.  You must love them to win them.  Brands that do not compromise on their brand promise in these times have the opportunity to win new loyal customers if they take the loyalty factor into account when planning their campaigns.  Just focusing on volume and not loyalty is short-sighted; this tactic makes the numbers now, but when the market recovers what the customers associate with your brand is just low price, i.e. just as it’s hard to make people pay (the good-time) Kleenex prices for generics, it will be hard for people to pay a higher price for a hotel that has lost its brand promise.

With social media and user generated content having persistence and being publicly accessible, compromises in brand promise experienced by customers will be documented and become part of the brand story –and brand marketers will have a difficult time regaining control over the story.

I just read Revenge of the Experts from Newsweek and it hit upon something that I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last few weeks.

In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. “People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information,” says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a “perfect storm of demand for expert information.”

I agree that a more reliable and bankable web is needed, but I wouldn’t have necessarily gone to expert information as the logical conclusion. I would have thought better filtering of all content, regardless of source, would have been a more logical solution.

There are a lot of things that are absolute truths (e.g. San Francisco is in the State of California, a part of the United States of America) — facts like that I’d agree should be vetted by the pros. But aside from that, there are a bunch of things that are opinion or experientially based, and their “truth” is relative to the perspective of the person consuming that piece of information. This is where user generated content has a huge role to play.

The road to a bankable and reliable web isn’t to swing the pendulum one way or another between experts and average Joes. The example in the article of “Paris hotels” returning the Top 7 from “experts” actually shows why the expert approach alone may not work: what experts take into consideration for a Top anything may be different from what I’d take into consideration as my Top 7, criteria that ultimately determine where I choose to stay.

The approach that makes sense to me is to leverage the best of both experts and Joes and put the seeker of information in the driver’s seat to determine the quality and sources of the content they want to see, or not. Towards this mean, I think Google has the right approach, albeit too comprehensive — I don’t know anyone who sifts through millions of pages of results; the experts probably don’t even do this.