Last month we bemoaned the way some marketers offer cash or other rewards in return for lying to one's friends, while other dodgy companies sell bundles of 10,000 Twitter followers to help a particular brand look well loved, among other funny business.
However, the ongoing collision of marketing and social networks doesn't necessarily have to involve trickery or deception.
Picture this: You're sitting next to the pool at a Vegas resort, when you decide to tweet a picture of where you are to your friends at their fluorescent-lit day jobs, just to, you know, assault their sanity. A few minutes later, a waiter shows up with an ice-cold beverage on the house, explaining, "thanks for the tweet."
Guess what your next tweet will be about? Staying at the BEST HOTEL EVAR!!
That's more-or-less the scenario proposed by Marc Heyneker, co-founder and of Revinate, part of a new generation of tools that help companies monitor what people are saying about them on social networks and review sites in detail. Revinate bundles it all into a simple cloud-based dashboard that lets one employee do the work of five or so, when it comes to monitoring a given company's reputation.
Tools similar to this are commonplace, and typically pick up on keywords on Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and so on, but Revinate is different in that it specializes in a single vertical market: the hotel industry. Individual hotels and chains can sign up in order to see how they stack up to their competition in all sorts of ways, and respond to individual or overall-trending gripes and praise.
Heyneker says the hotel industry has been "sitting on the sidelines" as their business has been disrupted by the double-edged sword of online travel agents and the reviews sites people check before booking -- but hotels are often "clueless" as to how to deal with the new landscape. According to ComScore, online reviews influence a full 87 percent of people looking to book hotel rooms. This isn't just about feelings, it's about dollars -- lots of them. (And it's not just about hotels either, of course.)
The clean, tightly-designed Revinate dashboard lets subscribing hotels and chains easily see, for example, if lots of people are mentioning their swimming pool in negative reviews, tend to talk a lot about their restaurant in positive reviews, and things like that, in addition to pulling in just about everything people are saying about the place in the usual online forums. And, it displays the same information for a hotel's competition, so you can see if customers like your pool more or less than the other guy's.
Heyneker, a former sales exec at Akamai, said the web-based Revinate typically pays for itself if it results in one extra booking per month, and that it's relatively easy to sell to hotels -- especially if their data is already showing up in the system, which could mean one of their direct competitors is tracking them already. If your competitors see this stuff, Heyneker's pitch goes, why shouldn't you?
All of the information that Revinate gathers from the web and various sites' APIs is freely available to the public, but crunching that data into optimal form and omitting irrelevant details without missing important ones, so that it's easy to react to as fast as it needs to be reacted to these days, is no small feat. Heyneker says the problem can only be solved for individual verticals, because each has different needs. Focusing only on the hotel vertical makes it slightly easier, and it doesn't hurt that some of the technology underneath Revinate was designed by Facebook director of engineering Jay Parikh.
Revinate rolled out a beta program in September consisting of 40 hotels, and all of them elected to start paying once the beta test ended. In its first seven months, the service has signed up 491 hotels, including smaller individual hotels, Vegas resorts and popular hotel chains.
But it's not the only game in town. This approach will likely spread to many other markets, and soon, most verticals will have tools like this. Revinate is still expanding its international hotel footprint, it plans to take on the restaurant biz next.
Medimix's ScanBuzz applies a similar approach to help the medical industry listen in on what people are saying about hundreds of pharmaceutical products and brands, and can be filtered by illness. For instance, a company looking to market strong antibiotics to fight Lyme disease could monitor the social web to research how many misdiagnoses are made and try to educate the relevant doctors and hospitals about the disease's symptoms.
Meanwhile, Radian6 tackles the same job for the consumer packaged goods, technology and other verticals, although it takes a more general approach that's more widely-applicable than Revinate's hotel or Medimix's medical industry dashboards.
Nowhere in these marketing schemes are people paid to lie to their friends, because businesses use them purely in a reactive way. And all of the information it accesses is sitting in plain sight right there on the open web, so any privacy concerns should be minimal (unless you're silly enough to think that nobody pays attention to what you post online).
"This is huge for [our clients], because even though that data has been publicly available for them to go look at, it's all these independent sites -- and they don't even have time to go look at all their own sites," said Heyneker. "Basically, the entire industry hasn't been paying attention or using any of this information to compete. Now for the first time, they can say, 'Okay, cool -- I have all my competitive data in one place.'"
But the open nature of that data also means that competition will be fierce in this market. As Heyneker put it, "there's no protectable IP," so another company can always come along and repackage the same data in a slicker or more powerful way -- another factor that could push these companies into specializing in particular types of companies.
In the end, all that this socially-reactive marketing does is make businesses more responsive to what their customers are saying about them, and it's hard to see how that could be a bad thing. Maybe Bill Hicks was wrong about marketers (NSFW language), because this variety doesn't appear to have a downside for anyone.
Of course, a company can have every tool at its disposal and still fail spectacularly. But by reacting quickly and appropriately to what people are saying about them in conversations on the public web, they have a better chance of thriving in the unforgiving and increasingly powerful court of public opinion.
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