2.
4 Social Media Contribution to Stakeholder Goals
“There are currently more than 1.5 billion people around the globe with access to
internet. With this forecast to increase by 50 per cent by 2015, operators need to
embrace the world online and ensure they delivertheir brand through multiple (and
ever-‐changing) channels” (Deloitte, 2010). Considering such an increase in the use of
social media in the tourism and hospitality industry, advantages and disadvantages
should always be taken into consideration.
A good way to start a social media marketing strategy is to “clearly layout your goals
and your success metrics before launching” and to “know your social media audience
and tailor content appropriately” (Raphael, 2013). The author considers also that by
putting into action and measuring a social campaign, numerous goals can be
achieved:
• Expanding the social footprint and reward existing fans,
• Drive traffic for brand websites,
• Amplify brand awareness,
• Increase newsstand buzz and single copy sales.
Social media has to be transparent to achieve higher credibility for the brand, but this
might also highlight what the brand is claiming to offer is inconsistent with the actual
service offered. For example, Trip Advisor is one of the first websites customers go to
before deciding between a wide range of products. Brand owners should take great
care of these kinds of websites as bad word-‐of-‐mouth may arise, but they should
also take it as an opportunity to offer feedback to unsatisfied
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customers and therefore improve their brand image. Levinson and Gibson (2010)
consider it vital to “clearly define goals, markets and target prospects” and to create
a “strong brand and presence by carefully concentrating on the right content”.
A study done by Global Web Index on the third quartile of 2013, which can be seen in
Figure 4, shows the usage of the top 10 social media platforms according to different
regions. The study is based on 170,000 responses from 32 countries around the
world. China is excluded due to the restriction of somesocial media platforms in the
country. The results show that Facebook is at the first place with 43% active usage in
Europe. Twitter, Google+ and Youtube are used 16-‐18% in Europe and the other
platforms under 6%.
The same study has compared the development of the top 20 platforms between the
second and the third quartile of 2013. Interestingly, the results show that Instagram
has seen an increase of 23% registrations compared to the previous quartile,
whereas Twitter an increase of only 2%, Google+ of 6%,LinkedIn of 9%. Facebook
revealed a decrease of 3% (Lunden, 2014). The findings of these figures will
eventually be compared with the results of the empirical research.
Figure 4 -‐ Usage of Top 10 Social Platforms by Region (Lunden, 2014)
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Figure 5 -‐ Changes in Active Usage of Top 20 Social Media Platforms (Lunden, 2014)
A study done by Joshi, Ma, Rand and Raschid (2013) shows that social media has a
positive influence on consumer engagement and sales. The study emphasizes on
differentiating between the various roles of the message content, whether it is
emotional or informational and mentions the difference between new and existent
brands. All these factors influence the level of consumer engagement, and
consequently of sales. The authors remark that it is a challenge to create engagement
between customers. For existing brands, despite a moderate level of customer
engagement, it can still be correlated to positive sales. Therefore, it can be concluded
that new brands might have a hard time dealing with customer engagement and
leading it to sales.
2.5 Social Media Tools
There are various tools for social media marketing – which can be seen in Appendix 2
– but is it actually worth using all of them?This could prove to be time consuming and
evidently increase costs for companies. Depending on the company’s goals and
focus, some of the relevant tools may be used; consequentially differentiating one
company’s objectives from another. A very good illustration of how to classify these
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tools was made by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas, in the “Conversation Prism”.Figure 6
is a “map for the social landscape”. The first one was sketched in 2008 and changed
significantly across the following years due to the development ofthe social media.
The goal of the map was to “observe, analyze, dissect, and present the dynamics of
conversation, and how and where they transpired; it was driven by necessity”, based
on the authors work “with many emerging and established brands looking to engage
in the social web […] The social map presented an organized view of social networks
and communities categorized by usage, intent and capabilities” (Solis, 2011).
Figure 6 -‐ Conversation Prism (Solis, 2013)
Limitations in the research of social media measurement can occur due to various
reasons. Verma and McGill (2011) have addressed this in their research and
according to their findings only 35% of accommodation firms handle online media
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marketing and advertising, whereas the rest outsource it to one or multiple agencies.
This can create limitations to the current research if the interviewed hotels are within
the 65% of the companies that do not handle social media marketing strategies
internally.
The same research shows that most of the accommodation firms spend less than
10% for social media marketing as indicated in the graph below. This confirms that
the use of social media is not yet as well developed as it should be and explains the
need for outsourcing.
Figure 7 -‐ Percentage of investment in Social Media Marketing (Verma & McGill, 2011)
The concern is as follows: are these social media tools helpful or not? Is social media
the panacea to a company’s problem? Social media tools can help a business have
greater outreach to their customers, but on the other hand reduces face-‐to-‐face
interaction. It can facilitate communication but sometimes it can also be
overwhelming due to the high amount of information available out there. In the
following section, measures for identifying social media’s influence will be discussed
in detail and will lead to a potential answer to the questions mentioned above.
2.6 Measuring Social Media Influences
There are countless tools that can be used to measure socialmedia influences on the
hospitality industry. But are these tools effective in reaching the company’s goals?
The following section is concerned with explaining and segmenting these tools into
sections and analyzing their importance.
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It is important to mention, as Raphael (2013) considers, that “Measuring social traffic
should not be confused with engagement—driving a reader to a website is a long
way from having them actually interact in a meaningful way with a brand’s content.”
Although a lot of marketers assume that measuring the social media Return On
Investment (ROI) is impossible or not necessary, Levinson and Gibson (2010) do not
agree with the assumption. They “measure success by the amount of net profit or
net results they generate from their marketing activities” and consider that when
measured, results of individual sources as well as collective sources, can always be
improved. A simple way of calculating the ROI is by subtracting the costs from the
gross profit and then divide the result by costs. Conversely from a marketing point of
view, there are various types of ROI: reputation, risk reduction, client retention,
efficiency, business intelligence, differentiation, brand association, public relations
and exposure, immediate revenue, long term revenue, supplier capacity building,
perception shifting, more and better recruits, innovation, client education, staff
capacity building, network growth, opportunity creation, job satisfaction and trust
building.
Hawthorne (2014) mentions in the Response Magazine that “few organizations are
able to comprehensively gauge the results of their social media efforts […] 25 percent
of companies are measuring the results of their social media content marketing
programs down to the individual piece of content”. He also states that measurements
are mostly related to how engaged customers are on the social media platforms and
not on the revenue these bring: “just 42 percent are beginning to tie social media
content success directly to business gains using direct responses or downloads, while
31 percent make connection to sales and revenues”. It is crucial to measure the
success of social media because it delivers you information about the audience you
are targeting and their purchasing behavior. Consequently, he states, “The true
success of social media can be determined by the engagement that you can see”.
Paine (2011) agrees with the statements mentioned above and considers that the
former definition of ROI – “profitability measure that evaluates the performance of a
business by dividing net profit by net worth” should be revised by the current needs
of a company – “engagement, influence, inspiration, awareness, reach, friends,
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followers, hits or retweets”. S/he emphasizes on the idea that relationship and
reputation, which are both mostly gained through social medianowadays, should be
taken more into account when talking about ROI.
Sterne (2010), Brown (2010) and Solis (2011) agree on the fact that there are various
stages in measuring social media and for almost each of them there are different
tools used for measurement. As mentioned and explained in detail in Section 2.3,
goal setting is the first step. The second step is reaching your audience and getting
the attention. “Awareness is the first step on the path to a ongl and profitable
customer experience” (Sterne, 2010). Making a brand visible and attractive to
customers is a key stage in reaching goals. This can be possible by using the various
tools mentioned in Section 2.5, for example, own website, blogs, Facebook page,
Twitter account, podcasts, video or photo sharing websites.Nevertheless, this might
not be sufficient to see if the platforms used are effective or not. Therefore, KPI like:
share of voice (total number of company and competitors mentions), share of
conversation (total number of industry keyword mentions), total number of visitors,
average daily feed subscribers, monthly blog readership should be measured.
Some tools suggested by Sterne (2010) are Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, Post
Rank, Tweetbeep, and FeedBurner. Raphael (2013) believes that “Google Analytics
provides the best month-‐over-‐month and year-‐over-‐year referral reports […] So
far, it’s the most accurate for page view reporting, visits and pages per visit.” On the
other hand, Blowers (2012) considers that “there are a lot of third-‐party tools that
you can use to gather additional analytics about your Facebook presence, but
Facebook’s own Insights is the most cost-‐effective and perhaps the easiest tool […]
The graphical interface provides an overview of engagement measures such as total
likes, what people are talking about (posts they comment on and/or share) as well as
details about your most popular posts”.
The following step is to identify the influence and get the respect of the customers. It
is commonly stated that in life it is all about connections, “social networks make it
clear that what you know is important, but whom you know is critical” (Sterne, 2010).
Solis (2011) agrees that “influence is not popularity and popularity is not influence.
Influence is the ability to effect action.” He also references some of the tools that can
be used to identify your influencers: CoTweet, PeopleBrowser,
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Seesmic, Blogged, BackType, Linkfluence, HowSociable, BuzzMetrics, and
BoardTracker. Finally, Brown (2010) considers that “It’s about finding the right
individual who will spread the message across all of the different subgroups within a
network.”
It is indeed not enough to reach an audience and identify the influencers, without
recognizing what they feel about the product or service one is selling. Tools in this
regard are Twitter Sentiment, Social Mention, Attensity, and Sentiment Metrics.
However, there are difficulties in recognizing the sentiment customers have only with
software. “Sarcasm, irony, idioms, slang and the common language that crops and
fades away are all nemeses of a programmatic algorithm designed to classify
emotion”(Sterne, 2010). All the above-‐mentioned points refer to the polarity of a
comment. Unfortunately, this is not the only problem; the intensity of a message can
not always be interpreted either; it is about “something a person can pick up pretty
quick in person, but makes communicating by e-‐mail trickier – hence emoticons”
(Sterne, 2010).
As soon as sentiment is recognized, it is crucial to engage the audience by getting
response from the customers. “The process of identifying influencers and monitoring
relevant conversations is only as valuable as the steps we take to engage in ways that
inspire desirable actions. […] Engaging people and enticing not only their interest, but
ultimately establishing an association and earning allegiances takes far more than
interpersonal adeptness and a budget with which we purchase friendships” (Solis,
2011). Social engagement can be measured through different measures: Digg, Reditt,
Stumbleupon, Friendfeed, Facebook Friends, Retweet, and Yahoo Buzz Up. A good
illustration of the steps of customer engagement can be seen in the Food
Engagement Chain below. Raphael (2013) suggests the Social Business Index as a
useful engagement measurement, which is “a big data approach to brand
performance in social […] It’s the best look at engagement at scale and provides a
better look at social reach across multiple platforms as well as a better ookl against
relevant competitors.”
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Figure 8 -‐ Engagement Food Chain (Sterne, 2010)
He also mentions that the tool “allows publishers to establish an engagement ratio by
comparing the number of unique conversation participants versus the total number
of subscribers in a brand’s ecosystem. Unique conversation participants are the total
number of individuals across all conversations involving a brand or company”.
Before getting to the final business outcome, listening and engaging with the prospect
customers is fundamental for increasing the positive outcome of a brand. What has to
be monitored in this phase are the searches, the ratings, the reviews, the
recommendations and the complaints of your customers. Bad word of mouth,
especially when it is online where everyone can read it, can be seen as a constructive
criticism and an opportunity to fix problems and eventually make even unsatisfied
customers happy. Methods that can be used in this case are ForSee, OpinionLap,
iPerceptions, Google Alert and Twelpforce. It should be kept in mind the fact that
customers like to be heard, like to contribute if they are asked to and finally like to
receive feedback. Two good examples are mystarbucksidea.com, initiated by
Starbucks and ideastorm.com, by Dell.
All these steps mentioned above lead to an outcome – getting the results wanted and
reaching the goals planned in the beginning, by respecting every stage of the
measuring process. The business outcomes a company wishes to attain are for
example, awareness, survey completions, subscriptions, registrations, blog
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comments and posts, leads and purchases (Sterne, 2010). All these serve as KPIs and lead
to achieving the 3 goals mentioned in Section 2.3 -‐ (1) increased revenue, (2) lowered
costs and (3) improved customer satisfaction and to be able to compare themselves with
their competitors.
Considering all factors mentioned above, it might seem that social media has had a
relevant influence on the hospitality industry, taking into consideration the advantages as
well as the disadvantages it brings. It is essential to declare that measuring social media
has a crucial role in the industry, in order to keep it under control and take more
advantage of the positive influence it has. Every company should reflect on the myriad of
social media tools they have at their disposal and the measurement techniques they can
use, but not before setting goals and realizing which of these tools and techniques are
helping them achieve their goals. The following section will provide empirical research to
support the statements in the literature review.
