Customers aren’t waiting until they get home to air their grievances anymore. The mobile web is becoming more and more popular, especially among travelers. The destination for most of this web traffic is social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook or location-based sites like Foursquare and GoWalla.
Customers are talking…are you listening?
What are they talking about? You guessed it, everything from check-in lines and the coffee they grabbed at the airport to their experience with the front desk at the hotel. That’s just the nature of today’s world. Everyone is a social exhibitionist, they don’t mind telling the world what their doing. The problem for brands, particularly in the travel industry comes when these travelers are unhappy. How do you handle someone telling the world about their experience while at the table waiting for the check, or sitting in your hotel lobby waiting for their room to be ready?
Real-Time Monitoring with Sentiment
In order to stop damaging comments about your brand from reaching a larger audience, you need know about the problem and handle it as soon as possible. If your social media monitoring campaign has you on a two-hour lag, that’s way too long. If you’re not getting real-time sentiment, you have no way to quickly identify threats and it makes real-time irrelevant. Still, all tweets are not made equal, and that’s a fact of life, so how do you identify who is a higher priority in social media? Look at their influence.
The Social Influence factor
No one wants to say that any customer is more important than another, but in social media that’s a reality. For example, someone with 20 twitter followers doesn’t hold the same weight as a Kevin Smith. Does that mean they should be treated differently? Absolutely not. Does that mean there should be a different way the issue is handled in social media? Absolutely.
If your current social media monitoring method doesn’t accurately give an accurate indication of influence, then you have no idea what a particular customer’s social reach may be. One bashing of your brand could cause a PR nightmare as was the case Kevin Smith and Southwest Air.
The solution
The solution for the travel easy. The brands in the travel and hospitality industries need to be monitoring in real-time with accurate sentiment and influence detection. As smartphones, mobile web, and social media become more widely adopted by users across the demographic spectrum, the challenge of monitoring your brand will only get greater. Get on board with a quality social media monitoring solution now, and start engaging your customers.
