3 Things to Learn From the World's First "Twitter Hotel"
Last week, Fast Company released an article about the world’s first “Twitter Hotel,” Sol Wave House. It’s a new experience where you can get service simply by tweeting about it, see who is sitting/staying where, and even get invited to private parties through their hashtag system.
Here’s their promotional video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaD1wHrLhns]
Will it work? I don’t know. But it’s a very good idea, especially if they can deliver on the user and customer experience side of things. Either way, it’s a brilliant idea and it can teach you a few things about how you can use social media in your everyday business:
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Social Media Should Be...Social: If you have social media channels but aren’t using them to engage with your audience (or better yet, have them engage with one another), then it’s really more of a broadcast system than an online community. If you want more people to get involved, you have to help drive the conversation and give them incentives for participating.
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Deliver the Digital Experience with In-Person Experiences: While it might be overkill to use hashtags for room service or decorated everywhere you turn, you can certainly use hashtags to deliver certain information or bring people together at events. For example, you could host a raffle drawing or scavenger hunt via Twitter, communicating messages and announcing winners.Another idea is to use a live twitter wall or social media projection in a communal area of your organization so that your audience can participate with each other. This is great for conferences and networking events.
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Social Media is Everyone's Job: Sol Wave House has multiple members of their staff managing their social media channels to deliver instantaneous service to their customers. That means customers not only get more than one “voice,” they get immediate responses to their questions/comments.Social media should not be the job of one person, it should have the participation of multiple members of the team. Your team should be cross trained. You wouldn’t have one person handling every phone call 24 hours a day, would you? Chances are, multiple people in your organization are capable of answer the phone even if it is the primary responsibility of one person.
While you might not be using Twitter as the exclusive channel to deliver services at your organization yet (there are some issues with that), chances are, you could stand to get some ideas from someone who is. Who knows? Maybe you can convince your boss to send you to this resort in Spain in order to do some in person research.