jonmulholland / a tumblog

@AffiniaHotels REALLY understand how to use the web for their brand

Now this is a business that really understands how to use the modern web… Mrs M is planning a trip to New York in October, just a short break to explore a bit more of the city before it starts to get really cold. Looking for a place to stay she came across Affinia Hotels. I took a peak over her shoulder at their website and was really, really impressed.

Take a look at this page for booking a stay at Affinia’s Upper East Side NY hotel and play the video they’ve uploaded. Those two ladies could be guests, employees or actors but that 3 minute video sells the hotel better than pages and pages of HTML.

Notice the prominent link to Trip Advisor? Click on it and it shows you real comments from real guests. Of course they’re happy to showcase the positive comments but dig a little deeper, look at some of the less positive guest reviews and you can see that a member of the hotel’s management has taken the time to respond to every single negative comment. The hotel is part of the conversations it’s customers are having about it. You can also clearly see this in their presence on Twitter; where they’re actively listening for and replying to customer ideas.

Also worth checking out is Affnia’s YouTube channel. Ok - these are clearly professionally produced videos, but again they’re a great showcase and a really good way of making the chains ‘my Affnia’ feature come to life.

It’s refreshing to see a company using the web so proactively to build relationships with customers.

Social media is not online marketing; it's communication

I feel I’ve had a personal ‘euraka moment’…

We’re hurtling towards 2010, obsessed by social media, social networks, social software etc.  Blogs, Facebook and Twitter are now mainstays of everyday life - I can hardly book a hotel, go to the shops or buy a car without being invited to friend up or follow one business or the other.

Many business are hiring online community managers, I think we’ve all convinced ourselves we should see ‘social media’ as something novel, special, unusual even.  We shouldn’t.  The fact is that social media is just one more strand of the web in 2009.  It has different properties sure, but just like RSS, search, websites, email, IM, directories, forums etc it’s part of the web - the sum total of which is the largest and most effective communication tool ever built.

This may appear to be a rant against social media, but it really isn’t.  Social media is not a fad, and just like all of the other bits of the web listed above, it’s not going to go away.  I just want to make this point because in treating social media as kind of a holy grail we’ve mystified it, started to ‘professionalize’ it, and worst of all we frequently focus on it as a medium rather than the conversations it can enable.

Why is this important?  As I said, it’s because the web is a communication tool and as online evangelists we should be focusing on helping organizations, businesses, politicians etc not to formulate ‘social media strategies’ but how to communicate using the web as a whole.

And effective communication is a two way process - it requires thinking and listening as well as speaking.  That’s where we come back to good old fashioned communication planning; defining objectives, identifying audiences, selecting appropriate channels, delivering messages, listening and feeding back.  The methods stay the same, only the channels will differ.  This years hot tools are Twitter and Facebook, next years will be mobile augmented reality and location based social networks.

That’s what I’m going to make my focus from now on; helping clients to use the web - the whole web - to communicate more effectively with their customers, their employees and their suppliers.

Any thoughts?