I spent the better part of yesterday evening on the phone with a precocious, eager young man in another major east coast city. The person had contacted me via my website with a professional email asking for some of my time. They wanted to discover if there was a business future in doing social media strategy for the hospitality business. I think the conversation is worth going over here because some of the things I articulated caught me by surprise, even though I think about this stuff all the time.
The first thing I said to this person was yes there is a future in doing social media strategy for the hospitality business. But as soon as I said it out loud, I found myself wondering if that is what I truly believed. While X (the name I’ve now given this person to make this blog post a lot easier to write from a pronoun POV) was talking, and while indeed I was listening, I found my mind racing over many of the fears I have hypothesized.
- What if social media is a short-lived fad?
- What if once hospitality businesses, once they make the commitment to learning social media, learn far quicker and more comprehensively than previously imagined?
- What if PR companies, both large and small, dedicate more time and resources to social media marketing?
- What if the financial scalability of social media marketing collapses?
- What if the ROI doesn’t materialize?
You can imagine my frustrations as I am listening to these several conversations at once. The one that X is provoking as well as the one going on in my head.
But that frustration quickly gave way to an overarching desire to be helpful. After letting X finish their initial questions, I found myself going over X’s points one by one and in doing so, became much more comfortable with helping X out.
X actually had some great ideas; I’ll probably end up stealing a few of them, which I promptly informed X of. We both got a chuckle out of that. But X also brought up some major issues that I feel he/she did not adequately think through. Working in the hospitality business means adapting to a time schedule and overall flexibility that suits the client. As restaurants, in particular, have hectic schedules its almost like being on call. You never quite know when the crises are going to manifest. And you’ve got to be available at inopportune times.
X wanted to know if they could do social media marketing on the side. I said no way. Businesses and brands want to meet when it is convenient for them, and in the hospitality sector that means at the quiet times of the day and week. The last thing a restaurant wants to do is to meet at 5pm on a Saturday night just as they are getting ready to serve 250 people over the next 5 hours.
Furthermore, there was some discussion about costs, something I’ve written extensively about lately. Lumped into that cost question is the fundamental issue of WHO is going to do the social media work. X wanted to know if they should offer to be the one implementing the strategy. X knew, from reading my blog and following me on Twitter, that the choice I made was not to be the implementer. My perspective is that strategy is more important than the implementation and that it works best when clients do it themselves, with clear direction and with someone looking over their shoulder for awhile. Clients do learn quickly and with someone doing the heavy lifting of consolidating metrics, watching tweet and blog post flow, managing a foursquare account, etc, clients’ time is freed up to creating content, engaging in conversation and building the community.
There are all sorts of problems present for social media marketers right now. At the same time that I think it wise for marketers to focus on specific industries I do have legitimate and lasting concerns that certain industries are going to take time to mature when it comes to social media marketing. The best piece of advice that I could give X last night was simply to start experimenting with different cost and time structures. I told X to make a bunch of mistakes, then make better ones, to write about it, to chronicle their progress for the world to see. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have to steal some ideas from them again. Or simply hire X!
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