How The Hotel Collection reaches leisure and family travellers with digital and social media
Social Media Portal (SMP): What is your name and what do you do there for The Hotel Collection?
Sookie Shuen: I?m Sookie Shuen, social media executive for
The Hotel Collection. My day-to-day duties include looking after all online and digital activities for inbound marketing purposes. I support everyone within the digital and online community within The Hotel Collection, making sure that they have the support they need to actively engage with customers and audiences across a wide range of platforms and social media channels. I also help to manage the website on a day-to-day basis, ensuring that guests have a memorable pre and post stay experience.
SMP: Briefly, tell us about The Hotel Collection (for those that don?t know), what is it and what does company do?Sookie Shuen: The Hotel Collection is made up of 21 luxury hotels around the United Kingdom with locations ranging from historic towns and seaside resorts, to modern cities. With more than 2,800 en suite bedrooms, 220 meeting rooms that can hold groups from six to 650, The Hotel Collection venues are firm favourites for events of all kinds including conferences and weddings.
SMP: Who are your target audience and why?
Sookie Shuen: Leisure travellers who are seeking travel inspiration. This can lean more towards the family travel audience.
SMP: What were you doing before you joined The Hotel Collection and how did you get your current job?
Sookie Shuen: Originally I started as an intern with a marketing agency based in Birmingham. This evolved into a full time position as a marketing assistant to a community manager. My experience in a mixture of both B2B and B2C clients helped me to snag my role, as I was able to bring with me in-depth knowledge of best practice and tips on new social media technology advancements.
SMP: What makes it a great job?
Sookie Shuen: I have always had a passion for social media; so working within the industry is really exciting for me. My interest in social media started in 2007 when no one was really understood just how big an impact it would have on the approach.
Specifically within The Hotel Collection, I like ensuring that guests are kept up to date and am happy with the information we provide them with.
SMP: How did you initially attract users to site, social channels et al and how do you do it now?
Sookie Shuen: With the proliferation of more and more social platforms, the path from brand awareness to sales is not linear. Upon hearing about your brand, the typical social consumer would not be in a hurry to proceed to a purchase. Instead, they are likely to read through relevant forums looking for opinions about your products, click on your Facebook fan page, search for a branded channel of yours on YouTube, or scan the web for company related news. Thus, by creating and leveraging multiple social media touch points, you will increase the possibility to engage with your potential customers wherever they congregate.
SMP: What are the challenges that you?ve encountered and how are you overcoming them in what you have been doing so far at The Hotel Collection?
Sookie Shuen: As The Hotel Collection has recently been rebranded from Puma Hotels since June 2014, it?s about reassuring guests that nothing has changed and the new name reflects on our desire to build upon our successful strategy to focus on the strengths of the individual hotels, many of which are iconic properties, well known in the market in their own right.
SMP: What are the high moments of what you have been doing so far?
Sookie Shuen: For me, it is being involved in The Hotel Collection?s integrated digital campaigns. With social media becoming and important part of today's marketing mix, few marketers would dispute the benefits of managing their brand presence in real time and at no cost across many social media networks. It is great to be able to be involved in this side of things for The Hotel Collection.
SMP: What are the main social channels are you using, why and which are the most effective for The Hotel Collection?Sookie Shuen: Comparing all of our social media platforms across
Facebook, Twitter
@HotelsCo,
Google+,
Instagram,
Pinterest,
LinkedIn and
Foursquare, we found that Facebook drove a median seven per cent increase in both subscriber numbers and engagements per month over the course of the year.
SMP: What are your top five predictions for social media for the next 12 to 18-months?
Sookie Shuen replies with:
- Social media is one of the factors Google takes into consideration when ranking a website in the SERPs. With that in mind, it isn?t by a stretch of the imagination to believe that Google might be planning an algorithm update around bad social media practices. As social media is becoming an ever-increasing factor in rankings, we could see something put in place by 2015 to stop businesses buying Facebook ?likes? and ?shares? to increase their social profile.
- As more cultures dive onto the online world, we could see social platforms change the way users interact based on laws and preferences in different counties. As the big social media platforms become more and more popular around the world we could start to see different services appearing that could provide ?greater? social interactions.
- By 2015 social users could be given more access to their preferences, not only within their news feeds or social groups but with themes, features and apps, giving them the power to add personal touches to their accounts.
- The ability to craft visual stories that inspire emotion will help companies get noticed and amplify their message throughout those communities. There will be more visual appealing features. When Facebook will start accepting GIF images?
- Digital marketing will converge with digital selling in a meaningful way. Marketing (one to many) and sales (one to one) are beginning to use the same techniques of content creation and real-time engagement.
SMP: What are your top overall five social media tips for the hotel / hospitality sector?Sookie Shuen replies with:
- Update frequently
- Keep guests entertained and engaged
- Manage your online reputation
- Use user generated content ? thank them for sharing it
- Incentivise fans/followers, competitions get the job done
SMP: Best way to contact you and The Hotel Collection? Sookie Shuen replies with:
Email: stay @ thehotelcollection.co.uk
Telephone: 0800 808 9596 - Freephone from a landline
Telephone: 0044 1455 898580 - from outside the UK
Now some questions for fun
SMP: What did you have for breakfast / lunch?Sookie Shuen: Bananas and my protein shake!
SMP: What?s the last good thing that you did for someone?Sookie Shuen: Donated blood. Apparently B- is a rare blood type.
SMP: If you weren?t working at The Hotel Collection what would you be doing?Sookie Shuen: Opening my own clothing boutique or even a dog hotel!
SMP: When / where did you go on your last holiday and why? Sookie Shuen: Turkey. I went to 15 states starting from Istanbul for over 12 days. It was amazing and I love the country so much!
SMP: What?s the first thing you do when you get into the office of a morning? Sookie Shuen: Fix myself a cup of coffee. I consider myself as a caffeine addict.
SMP: If you had a superpower what would it be and why? Sookie Shuen: Read people?s minds and have the ability to be able to give psychic readings (only when necessary of course).