The room had a basket with clearly marked dividers where guests can dispose of plastic/paper/cans/other items.  The room also has a purification system that ionizes the stale air and protects against allergies.

Later I read on their website that the Saunders Hotel Group, which owns the Lenox, has a history of environmental “firsts” that span over two decades, along with a long list of sustainability and green awards. 

There are several hotel chains who have begun green programs in recent years, and I guess my question is: have we reached a point where green is no longer a fad and a cutting edge story angle?  Has it reached the point of a “must have” in hotels regardless of the opportunities of obtaining great press?

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1) Pick the right social network to have a healthy presence.  Most hotels have a Facebook page and many have Twitter pages, some might be active on YouTube and Ning.  Just set your goals clearly on what you are looking to obtain from a social media strategy, and pick the right network for your property.  Remember, you don’t have to be on every network.  Quality definitely precedes quantity here.

2)  Post often.  This depends again on the network.  If you post 10 updates on Facebook per day, that may be too much, but 10 tweets are about the average.  Determine the needs of each network and understand the dynamic, so you can participate actively.

3)  Engage.  You can’t force people to engage just by friending them or getting them to join your page or follow you.  Writing posts that are relevant and quirky, tuck in a really cool special deal, mention something out of the ordinary that happened at your hotel, post a photo of a fun event, send off an inpiring quote from the GM.  Write things fans and followers want to read as it relates to you.  Get into your audience’s virtual mind!

4)  Measure success.  As with any campaign, you should set timeframes for everything to see where you stand.  Facebook allows you to explore metrics to understand your post’s quality, number of subscribers, demographics, etc.  With Twitter, you can find out a lot from the number of mentions, RTs, real DMs (not auto DMs!) and increasing number of followers.  Once you add meaning to the numbers over time, you can make the right adjustments along the way to improve your social media presence.

5)  To blog or not to blog?  I get this question a lot as it relates to hotels.  I am all for blogging, but only if you can commit to doing it right.  If you can’t, then don’t do it, it’s not worth your time and it won’t be an effective PR and Marketing tool for your business.  Hotel blogs are tricky; they have to be written with the guest in mind.  For example, posting bland press releases about a appointing a new staff member is not necessarily appropriate for a hotel blog.  On the other hand, blogging about a renovation and what that will mean to guests in the future would be a good post.  Drafting quality blog topics will determine if it makes sense for a hotel to have one in the first place.

My final thought on social media:  if it becomes a chore and you get lazy, it will show in your writing.

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Relationships are evolving in quantity, and perhaps even in quality, but following up on a good story idea is a crucial part to strategic public relations.  Reporters are still out the to get the best stories because those are their livelihood.  Staying in touch with reporters and writers is necessary to keeping your network alive, but also provides an ongoing opportunity for follow-up.  Maybe a story idea was good, but wasn’t the right fit for a particular issue or section.  It might be a great fit down the line, or you might have to sharpen the pitch a little.  Follow-up takes time, patience, lots of writing and calling, and a tons of persistence.  In the end, the effort is worth it!

On a totally unrelated note:  My mind lately has been on the deadly earthquakes both in Haiti and now in Chile, and having grown up in a very earthquake prone country, I still can’t imagine the pain hundreds of thousands people are going through.

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That whole debacle with the Tonight Show was unbelievable from a media perspective.  Yes, we know it’s all about ratings for stations.  That’s why it is so sad.

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Assuming you have someone in-house, or an independent PR pro who is dedicated to monitoring, updating and overseeing your social media accounts, you should ask yourself: is that enough?

Posting one update a day may be consistent, but probably not enough to start truly engaging conversations.  Determine what your goals are from your presence on social media.  Then, find what makes your guests talk… if it is your restaurant’s specials, talk about them.  If it is a seasonal drink at the bar, or an exciting amenity (yoga comes to mind!) reach out and get some feedback.  The more you think in terms of your fans and followers, the higher the post quality on your pages.

Good pages inspire fans to create new social media groups to continue and carry on the conversation, to make it as viral as possible.  Invest in the right professional to oversee your social media campaign, and have your finger on the pulse to evaluate its success.

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Several times throughout my career as a PR practitioner I have received inquiries from prospective clients wanting to hire me on a pay-per-placement arrangement.  In such a project, the PR person and the client develop a wish list of media to land a story/mention/feature in, and depending on the success of securing that placement, PR gets paid. 

The downfall is that your effort could be for nothing… you could be trying to land a story in the NY Times and the editor just won’t bite, because it’s not the right fit (even though your client thinks it is!).  Or, worst -this has happened to me- the story gets pulled out at layout because of lack of space.   So, you’ve wasted weeks of effort, and you’re not getting paid for your time, or your frustration.  Hmm, no thank you.

I tried that approach when I first started out on my own, and stopped accepting such ridiculous projects.  I work with a continuous strategy in mind, not a piecemeal messaging approach.   Indeed, companies should see results from retainer-based PR professionals.  However, if I’m spending 25 hours a week thinking about a business, coming up with angles, ideas, new ways to approach a message, or making shifts in the communications strategy, why on earth would I do that for free? 

Perhaps there some cases where pay-for-press might make sense (e.g., a very specific type of product of service), but even those can backfire.  Suppose you land the story in Newsweek as expected.  Now, the client has to pay you, say, 15K for the placement.  What now?  What’s the next step in the PR process?  How do you take that placement and move forward with the PR strategy now that it’s reached a new level?  Oh, that’s right, you’re not getting paid to think about that.  On the other hand, you could have been on retainer for six months with that 15K, and earned not only the Newsweek story, but lots of other placements - big or small.  You could have created momentum for your client, not a one hit wonder.  Not to mention, you’d have a PR plan to follow… and a predictable payment schedule.

It’s not a case of “are you a pro, or an amateur?’  It’s how you approach your business as a PR person and how you value your own effort when you service a client.  And clients who pay-for-placement in many cases have high expectations (as they should), but very low budgets. 

PR is a process and an important communications investment, and best not ordered à la carte.  

Respect our profession.  Build your own menu carefully with thought as a chef would, don’t just prep a dish.

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Enter Michelle Higgins’ fabulous New York Times article on hotels offering yoga as an amenity for guests.  First, it was wi-fi, then free DVD libraries, and fitness salons.  Now, yoga is a sought-after amenity in hotels.  Most of us who travel look up places near where we are staying so we can plan our yoga practice.  However, that’s not always very conducive, so hotels have picked up on that need and are offering classes on property as part of their spa services.  Of course, you can’t be particularly picky about the style of yoga offered (I can’t expect to find the hot yoga I practice in hotels), so a typical flow yoga class would fulfill the guests’ need.

There’s a big PR opportunity here for hotels to act on this emerging amenity trend.  Whether it’s the frequency of the yoga classes, or the type of yoga, or even if its offered complimentary for the business traveler (I’d take yoga over free breakfast!), there is a conversation going on that hotels can successfully moderate to their advantage.

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Just under a year later, I’m finding that social media take about 50% of my time, on average, versus traditional media relations.  Since social media are so versatile they are used for other functions of IMC, such as advertising, online marketing, and other marcomm areas.  Depending on the client, monitoring and working on social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs) have become more than just part of my checklist.  They are a priority since social media networks make messages viral, and it has come to PR pros to not only understand the functions of various social media, but how to work with them effectively.  But, the spectrum is evolving daily.  What worked a couple of months ago, won’t be as popular soon on FB.  Discussions grow or are quickly abandoned on Twitter.  Driving good website traffic is challenging with so much “garbage” posted out there.  And now I’ve been reading more and more about Ning, www.ning.com.  Hold that thought for a couple of months… perhaps this will be the new network to be on.  Though I’ve been reading that Ning is not competing with FB at all. 

Regardless, all of these networks are tireless monsters that must be fed often several times a day.  As PR people, we constantly need to be alert and on our toes and keeping up with social media chew up a lot of time.  In that effort, we’re also learning when to shy from information, and when to share it.

Sometimes I just miss writing a press release… and I fondly think of my BU professors, who kept reminding us of how many spaces we should have between the sub-headline and the main body.  Wait, that was less than decade ago…so much in PR and publishing has changed since then.

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After following some experienced tweeters, mostly media like the WSJ, NYTimes, CNN, some self-proclaimed experts, and other business publications, I gradually figured out that Twitter is what you make of it.  Just like at a party or at work, the quality the conversation you follow or engage in is really up to you.  But on Twitter, you can choose to follow these conversations, or walk away from them without feeling embarrassed.

A year later, I still come across the annoying tweets about who had what for breakfast and why someone chose cinnamon coffee over hazelnut.  That’s not why I stay current on Twitter.  I’m noticing that the garbage tweets (as I call them) are still out there, but deteriorating.  I also think the network has become more of a news forum, or, at the very least least, it provides an opportunity to share info quickly and efficiently.  I find out about many headlines on Twitter before I open www.nytimes.com some days.  It’s fascinating.

On the other hand, there is etiquette that users should follow… For instance, those who link to other Twitter pages and not the actual article is just mean.  It’s an instant reason to unfollow or never retweet anything by that user.  Other etiquette includes friendly DMs without the constant sales push.  Saying “thanks for the RT” is also very polite.

My prediction is that Twitter may start becoming a little more personal in 2010, as it continues to evolve.  I’m not sure how much more Twitter can grow, but perhaps growing should not be the focus right now, but instead evaluating the quality of its content should be what’s important this year.  And to make Twitter credible and full of  accurate, interesting information will depend on how its users share it.

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We all sometimes get carried away with becoming overly eager to stand out in a message-cluttered environment.  Is there danger to developing news items that are just too innovative… to the point of disgust?

I came across this article about strange jobsin hotels on Consumerist, and there  are apparently Holiday Inns in the UK that employ professional snugglers to pre-warm a guest’s bed!  Just take a look at all the negative comments to taking such a bold step of doing PR around such an invasive amenity!  While I don’t know, I am assuming Holiday Inn was looking for a quirky, personalized amenity to satisfy guests while obtaining PR in the process.

Who wants pre-warmed beds with a strangers’ smell or hair on their pillow?  

I have not verified this odd amenity with Holiday Inn, but this article has gone viral - I found it through a friend on Facebook. 

I guess this raises the question… when does innovative become just too much?  And do you really think that there is no such thing as bad publicity??

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