New York Hotels and Twitter ROI

Does Twitter Have a Good ROI for New York hotel marketing? (And what would that mean, anyway?)

In prior times, I have made the audacious claim that Twitter has a poor ROI in terms of marketing. Lately I have been arguing that we should reconceptualize "ROI" for social media, perhaps renaming the acronym "Return on Information" or "Return on Influence." Such skepticism of Twitter reflects current debate among our marketing team as we struggle to understand relative strengths and weaknesses of social media with respect to hotel marketing.

Internet Marketing for New York Hotels

Marketing for New York hotels is a tricky business. This is due in part because of the sheer level of competition in Manhattan and the Greater NY area. It can be a daunting task to brand a hotel in this city and to offer affordable, yet competitive rates for guests. In addition, getting search engine visibility here in New York is extremely difficult without serious dollars and a powerhouse PR or advertising firm.  It's just the nature of the region; New York is a world city, a friend of mine says. and New York hotels have to adapt to this in many ways that are unnecessary in other regions.

But Twitter may yet have the potential to help level the playing field. Recent trends of our hotel Twitter feed I manage have caused me to recant on my earlier claim that social media delivers poor ROI.

Creating Buzz with Twitter

Yesterday, several things came together for me in a weird sort of serendipity. A New York hotel I work for is about to publish a new holiday product, and I started a conversation about the product on his Twitter feed. Immediately I got several responses from enthusiastic, interested followers. "Sounds awesome!", "How can I get in on that!", and "You're on a roll today!" were just a few of the responses.

So, in an almost Taoist go-with-the-flow sort of way, carried away by the energy of the moment, I put together a quick, online marketing promotion. It was roughshod, spur of the moment, not planned or thought out - more of an experiment than anything. I told our followers that if they download the hotel's toolbar, they would be the first to know about the special - via their desktop. (The toolbar has a Java API that enables me to send a desktop alert.)

"The next group to receive the news will be our Facebook fans," I continued "So, if you miss the toolbar update, you might wanna go ahead and start following us on Facebook because this will be the next round of updates."

The third group to be updated would be our Twitter followers, I explained. "After that, it'll be open to the general public and it's anybody's game."

Twitter and CRM

All this promoting (marketing?) happened before I sent the deal out to our email subscriber list.

Interestingly enough, the "buzz" of this not-planned out, spur of the moment, "promotion" was pretty good. Engagement and response levels increased. New Twitterers came to follow the hotel, to get in on the action. There was a dense air of expectancy that caused me to pause, seriously, to think about what had just happened.

And all this occurred in the timespan of 10 minutes, at the most! Could Twitter become the next industry standard Customer Relationship Management application?

The Takeaway

A colleague of mine who is a PR manager is sold on Twitter marketing. She believes that Twitter will become the next big search engine and will revolutionize news production. She has been researching everything Twitter and is composing a position paper on the subject, the first draft of which I have reviewed. Her thesis is that Twitter mastery will be the next big thing in SEO best practices. I, on the other hand, am not yet sold on this.

But yesterday's exchange has caused me to step back from previous positions I've held. It is obvious that there is tremendous opportunity to use Twitter for hotel marketing. In a span of literally minutes we generated some decent "buzz" and garnered a few new followers on our Twitter and Facebook profile and business pages.

The takeaway here is that there is a return on investment here; it is undeniable. I think a lot of the hype we hear out there surrounding social media marketing sometimes serves to cloud the issue and create skeptics. Precisely quantifying that ROI may be impossible, but you can "feel" that it is there and that it is valuable, in a marketing sense. Intuitively, one can sense that a step forward for marketing and customer relations management took place.

And perhaps we've finally figured out how to "put it all together" with social media? I'm not sure, but I think we're getting closer. At any rate, I think now I am compelled to rescind my former comments on the poor ROI of social media!