Handling social media customer care may seem frightening - public posts with angry comments about your business are hard to control and can feel like a personal attack. Consider this - those customers will be online complaining about you, no matter what you do or whether you have a social media page on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. What matters is how you respond to change their experience and perception of your business.
5 Steps of Customer Care
1. Check In
Do this once daily during office hours. Set a time when you drink your morning coffee to check for any new messages or notifications. Make your goal to respond within 24 hours of a business day. If you make a habit of morning responses, this will be easy! Facebook...
Online marketing is forever evolving. Four years ago we would frequently give advice to accommodation providers on how to increase their bookings by optimising listings on online travel agents (OTAs) like Booking.com. These days our conversations revolve around how to increase direct bookings to their own websites, partly to avoid paying the OTAs commission.
Ultimately, the best way to do this is not by changing anything on your OTA listings, but by taking a look at everything else you are doing online. Here are five ways to help achieve this.
Take a good look at your website
Open up your website and imagine you are a first-time visitor who has never seen your business before. Ask yourself, can you immediately understand from your homepage what you are selling and why you...
We’re just a few short months away from professional virtual reality (VR) headsets to hit the consumer market in a storm of holiday promotions, and the future is here.
Google Cardboard - Free Consumer VR
Google Cardboard, an approximately $20 box frame with plastic lenses, went on sale this year as a proving ground for this new technology and it’s been a wild success. Google brings the concept to anyone who wants to explore the new tech, with free designs for the cardboard headset also available on their website. Reminiscent of the red plastic View-Masters of the late 1980’s, these cardboard boxes have a simple slot for a cell phone. All you have to do is download a VR app to a smartphone and the world of virtual reality is in your hands.
Today it’s easy to have your attention captured by noise and sparkly things – distractions surround us. It’s also easy to mistake that noise as representing frivolity. Yes, your neighbour posts funny cat photos and your nephew won’t stop checking the game stats during family dinners, but social media is a powerful tool reaching a global audience of billions and you CHOOSE how to wield it.
Sort through the noise and understand how to leverage this tool to support your business and build brand awareness. Otherwise your competitors will be out there making a better, more professional and exciting impression on the public.
“My kids are on Twitter, I should just have them run everything!”
Social media IS media, and marketing is a complex structure. Algorithms (programs)...
Yes, yes, we know: we are living at a time when 'things' are changing faster than ever. We are reminded of this every time we buy the latest phone, tablet or computer only to be told six months later (when we have finally learned how to use it!) that it is now “the old” model.
And the point is truly highlighted when considering the fact that 60% of the jobs available in ten years don’t even exist yet.
As individual tourism businesses, organisations and an industry as a whole, it is imperative that we are keeping up with changes, and not just surviving but actually thriving. Thinking differently is required by all of us, as what has worked in the past may not work in the future.
“Trendlines not Headlines”
Stealing a quote from Bill Clinton, “consider trendlines not...
