Cross-Channel Hotel Shopping

Over the past month I have traveled to California, New York and Chicago both for work and pleasure.  Being a lover of hotels and a hotel owner, I am obsessed with the industry.  I could literally spend days browsing through different hotel sites and brokerage sites looking for the perfect place to stay.  I am always in search of the coolest place available at the best price.  After reading through this week's material on channel conflict, I began to think about my recent booking techniques and the types of channel conflict the different sites were facing.  The world we live in is continuously evolving and new brokerage sites are popping up every day.  Interesting enough, I used a different form of booking for each trip throughout the past month.  This supports Roy Wollen's presentation that "customers don't care which channel gets credit."

I thought it would be interesting to track my cross-channel shopping habits over the past month.  Though all of the sites I used to book my hotel stays have partnerships with the actual hotels, they are still all competing with one another.  The hotels themselves must make their property available on each site, or face the risk of missing out on the opportunity to capture a new customer. My recent trip to California was a family trip booked via telephone by my father.  Though times have changed, it is funny for me to see how a lot of the older generation gets stuck in their old ways.  As I was looking to book our trip to New York, I used hotels.com, tablethotels.com, jetsetter.com and the actual hotel sites to try and find the best deal.  I ended up using tablethotels.com to book because I found the best price.  It was interesting to see how prices literally fluctuated hourly on each of these sites.  For my Chicago trip, I also browsed the above sites, but ended up using hotels.com for my stay.

Each of the sites I used to find a hotel used different techniques ranging from last-minute deals,  private membership promotions and top weekly deals.   No matter how enticing the promotions, I still felt no loyalty to any of the sites I used to book my stays.  As long as I know the product I am getting, it doesn't matter the method I use to book as long as I can find the best deal for the place I want to stay.   

In addition to the sites I used to find a hotel above, there are other booking sites that perform similar functions: Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Hotwire, Kayak and many, many more. As we learned this week, "Customers don't make a distinction between channels, they see your brand across channels." Since this is the case, hotels need to make the effort to develop partnerships with as many reliable booking sites as they can.  On the other end, booking sites face another battle.  It is up to them to develop the tools to attract and keep as many customers as possible. Though there are enticing reasons to book with sites, I have yet to find a site that has locked me in as their customer. 

@megganlea: Can you tweet to success?

As one who has been skeptical of Twitter from the beginning, and still hasn't joined the ranks , I was curious to know the effectiveness and business value of the new hip social media site. I realize it allows you to connect to your customers in a different way, but is it just a fad that has no longevity?  It even seems to almost overshadow reliable news sources and can tend to be a gossipy celebrity site that lacks validity.  Two of the top tweets this week according to billboard.com were:

	@ladygaga : lady gaga + steven klein= une Pièce de résistance. Alejandro.
	@justinbieber : ladies calm down. @kimkardashian is a friend. a very sexy friend but a friend. no need 4 threats. Let's all be friends and hang out often ;)

Interesting facts, I know. I decided to research top ways companies use Twitter to find out the effectiveness of this new popular site.  I found an interesting article on Readwriteweb.com that delivered the following findings:

1. Directly:  Businesses are using Twitter more and more as a marketing and PR channel.  Here companies "tweet" announcements, promotions, accomplishments and attach links  back to their Web page or another promotional site. Since this is the premise of our class it will be interesting to learn more about this method in the following weeks.  This way tends to be the easiest and most common. An example by Carnival Cruise lines is below:

2. Indirectly:  Some companies allow their employees to tweet.  This seems rather dangerous to me but I can also understand it could bring with it some perks.  Positive tweets by an employee about new products, services, promotions and industry developments can promote positive feelings about the company.  However, you can't control everything if you give your employees liberty to tweet freely regarding work and their company and could do negative damage.  An example by an employee of Chevrolet is below:

3.  Internally:  Some companies use Twitter to communicate internally by sharing thoughts and ideas and discuss current projects.  If information is guaranteed confidential, this could be a great tool to communicate internally with fellow employees and boost employee moral, but I see it as being rather dangerous.  If confidential information is leaked, it could be detrimental to a company.

4.  Inbound signaling: Rather than being a Twitter participant, some companies just "listen."  If you want to keep track about what people are saying about your brand, company or industry, you can use  search twitter as we learned this week in our lectures to keep track.  I personally think this use of Twitter to be the most effective.  You can't take everything you hear or see on Twitter to be reliable or truthful, but this medium could help you to learn what customers like and don't like about your product, service or company and could be an effective research tool.

The way I see it, Twitter can serve multiple purposes that hold both advantages and disadvantages. It can be a very self-serving, self-promoting site that allows someone like you and me to share irrelevant information.  It can be used by companies to promote and strengthen both customer loyalty and employee morale and it can also be a companies eyes into the world and their customers opinions.  However, each of these uses can open the door for negative criticism and PR disasters.  So I think my conclusion as of now would be: Twitter is great for some companies, and not so great for others. It is up to your company and industry to figure out which side of the argument you reside. If that is on the Twitter side, you then must decide which model is the most effective way to manage your time on the site.

The Battle of the "Time Sinkable" Sites

Social Media has definitely taken its place in today's society.  As we learned in week 1, there are many different areas that make up the "landscape" of social media.  Social networks, such as Facebook, are dominant amongst web users today and most relevant amongst our current culture.  In fact, Facebook is not only the top social network site, it recently surpassed Google as the winning site based on the amount of time spent on all over sites. In addition, Facebook announced it had over 500 million users in July and plans to double that number by reaching out to countries such as China and Germany who have not yet become part of the Facebook world. With Facebook users spending so much time on its site, this has Google extremely concerned.

What can Google do to compete with Facebook and capture more time from its users?  Does it build a social networking site similar to Facebook?  What sort of innovation should the company focus on?  Will this innovation parallel with Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful? All of these questions pop in my mind and are obviously very tough questions not only for me, but for these companies.  

As we learned in week 1, social media has evolved throughout time to be what it is today. It didn't just happen one morning. I think Google and Facebook's next steps will not only affect the evolution of social media, but change the way we use internet marketing.  As internet marketers, I believe we must stay on top of the top site's innovations and goals to be able to effectively market to our customers.  It will be interesting to follow these social media companies while taking this Internet Marketing class.  Maybe by then, I will have answers to all of my questions.

You can find the Facebook/ Google article on CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/10/facebook.google.time/index.html