Social Media, Online Communities and Technology in Hospitality

Social Media, Online Communities and Technology

Albert BarraAugust 12, 2018 · 3 min read

THE IDEA

Hospitality businesses should define their goals before launching a digital platform. Whether the right choice is a blog, social media channel or online community depends on how they want to communicate, engage audiences and encourage interaction. Success requires planning, active community management and clear objectives—not technology alone.

It is hardly surprising that many tourism businesses opt to launch platforms that enable them to pursue certain objectives. One would expect those objectives to have been defined in advance, and the decision to create one platform or another to have been assessed, agreed upon and carefully analysed. To do so, I believe it is essential to know what we intend to achieve by launching such a platform. It is clear that:

If we want to communicate with our audience, convey our message and also interact with them through comments, the choice should be a blog or existing social media channels.
If our interest lies in creating a community where interaction is not limited to that between our organisation and the audience, but where we want users to interact with one another, with our role taking a back seat, then it is clear that our decision should be different.
If we have assessed creating a community as an alternative and want to go a little further, where interaction extends to the establishment of emotional ties and the exchange of information goes beyond simple comments, then we are undoubtedly opting for something far more serious.

Creating platforms—and I mean good platforms—in any format, or participating actively without any planning at all, can even be free; the software is within everyone’s reach, and managing it does not require extensive IT knowledge. Activating these platforms is somewhat more complex. It is very naïve to think that simply by creating our own little social setup, hundreds or thousands of happy users will come along to invest their time and effort in providing it with content. Of course, there is always the option of posting fake content under various identities and hoping everyone else takes the bait, but even then the road to engagement is long and complex. Besides, users are difficult to fool; they are usually smarter than we are. Despite everything, I believe that once the engagement phase of one of these platforms has been overcome, the most difficult thing is none other than the actual achievement of the objectives it was intended to deliver. Why?:

Once properly activated, the platform becomes a living organism; it takes on a life of its own and heads wherever the community wants it to go.
It is logical to think that it is easier to steer a blog in the direction you want than a social network, since a blog is managed by oneself and, ultimately, one is free to publish whatever content one considers appropriate. However, that content may not be of interest to readers, and the blog may end up dying. In the end, anyone who claims to write a blog without looking at traffic statistics is most likely lying.

That said, I believe that the mistakes of “2.0-isation” essentially lie in:

Placing excessive emphasis on technology.
Choosing an environment that is unsuitable for the desired flow of communication.
Poorly defined objectives.
A lack of dynamism.
Failing to steer the platform towards its objectives, or failing to redefine those objectives based on the direction the platform takes.

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