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COMMUNICATIONS
RESORTDEVELOPER.COM
vacation industry review
JULY – SEPTEMBER 2015
16
there’s the tendency of those who are unhappy with a product or service
to be more likely to go online and write a review.
Consider this: According to a 2013 Zendesk.com survey, 45 percent
of consumers share bad customer service experiences via social media
while 30 percent share positive experiences.
That’s the challenge that contributed to ARDA changing the name
of its Communications Council to Reputation Management Council.
“The idea was to get a broader range of expertise represented and to
spread the positive information about our industry that’s already out
there,” Roth says. “The trend is more positive than negative, but negative
tends to be louder.”
Efforts to share positive content on ARDA’s VacationBetter.com
consumer website, along with amassing a list of happy
owners who will speak about how timeshare has
added to their lives, have made the industry better
prepared, should the worst happen. When a news
network put out a Facebook query that appeared to
seek out unhappy timeshare experiences, ARDA was
ready. Working with the industry, the association directed
owners to the Facebook page, where the owners posted their genuine
stories. So far, it seems to have worked as the story faded away.
The need to do this is not unique to timeshare. “All industries have
a need for reputation management,” Wara says. “We are living in an
ever-increasingly social world, and we want our consumers to have a
great experience and to speak positively about our brand and industry.
We also want to listen to what our consumers are saying. That is what
reputation management is; it doesn’t always have to be about managing
the negative, which is necessary at all companies from time to time, but
about listening, responding to, and encouraging positive testimonials
and interactions.”
Judy Kenninger heads Kenninger Communications, which provides
creative services to the travel and vacation real estate industries.
Consider this: According to a
2013 Zendesk.com survey,
45 percent of consumers
share bad customer service
experiences via social media
while 30 percent share
positive experiences.
www.
Listening In
To know what’s being said about your company on social media,
traditional, and online media, as well as the Internet sites, you’ll
need tools to monitor postings. Here are a few mentioned by our
reputation-management experts:
•
Radian6
from the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud allows you to
track, monitor, and react to comments, questions, and com-
plaints as they happen. It includes more than 650 million sources
from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, news, and more to hear
what’s being said about your brand. ARDA uses Radian6.
•
Sprinklr
, also used by ARDA, offers software to businesses to
help manage your social media presence across different
departments and to reach out to customers via Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn, and other channels.
•
Meltwater
, used by Marriott, is a “Media Intelligence Tool,” that
allows you to monitor editorial, social media, and blogs. You can
also refine your searches using trending keyword suggestions
identified by Meltwater’s algorithms. “It’s critical to us because
we can get alerts for keywords and respond when appropriate,”
Kinney says. Meltwater offers a host of traditional PR tools,
including media lists.
•
Hootsuite
, used by Diamond Resorts, allows you to manage
several social networks at once, plan content, and have ongoing
searches for keywords. You can even schedule posts in
advance — just be sure someone is making sure it’s not obvious
that you’re doing so (for example, asking if everyone in Cabo is
having a great vacation the day after a hurricane).
•
Klout
can provide you with a Klout score that ranks your
social media influence based on responses to Facebook posts,
Tweets, and other content.
•
Social Mention
’s free search engine scours social media for
mentions of your brand, a competitor, or any keywords. You can
narrow the search to blogs, microblogs, videos, images, or even
questions. It’s not automated, however, so you have to log in
and check this tool regularly.
•
Tools from
are generally free. Google Alerts can be used
as a reputation-management tool by setting up alerts for any
search terms you want — such as your company name or
targeted phrases relevant to your niche — then specify the
types of results you want and how often. You can even get alerts
as mentions occur. Google also offers a Google My Business
page. Google Analytics can be used to see where traffic to your
site is coming from.