Teenagers have always had social networks in some form or another. The one thing they all had in common was that they didn’t want their parents anywhere near it which is evidenced by my kids not allowing me anywhere near their Facebook page. I had the same with my parents whilst growing up in the 1970s when the only medium was the telephone.
In my house, you couldn’t get on the phone because my two older brothers hogged it all the time talking to their mates. I can hear my mother now asking and exclaiming, “What on earth do you find to talk about all the time when you have been with them all day at school!” She would get livid with me because I would carry out a pitiful attempt at homework whilst on the phone to mates planning the weekend. Early multi-tasking.

I personally didn’t, but I had lots of male and female friends who would write intimate letters to complete strangers called “pen-pals”, random people in various countries who you didn’t know. The exercise, promoted by schools, was to actually get to know someone by learning about what they liked and disliked and forming friendships based on common threads, today we know this as crowd sourcing or in the social media world, friend sourcing. 

Every generation of parents have had a difficult time understanding their children’s methods of socializing since it wasn’t the way it was done when they were kids. I have an annual school re-union golf event of about 20 or so good mates, some of which I won’t see until the next event, but if anyone of them were in difficulty, I would be off in a heartbeat to help. It’s because we meet, play, talk, eat, drink and reminisce together that builds this sort of bond. My daughter, on the other hand, has ditched Facebook every since a complete stranger came up to her at a party who knew a lot about her through her open Facebook page.

For all the millions of people socially networking across the planet, relationships may be wider, far-reaching, but with less depth. Perhaps there is way to take today’s social networking technology and combine it with a little of that old-fashioned networking to make our lives richer through our connections. That is what social networking should be about.

We were recently reading a story in HotelChatter (http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2009/1/14/114310/100/hotels/Hotels_That_Twitter_and_Twitter_Well) about hotels that use twitter, and use it well. It got us thinking about all the different ways social media is being used in the hotel industry and made us really think about our own social media strategy. Ever since we’ve jumped on the Twitter/Blog/Social Media train, we’ve seen many of our colleagues, friends, customers join and every day we are connecting with more people. 

We don’t only blog every week because we love the opportunity to rant a little, we blog because our audience wants something new to read each week. We try to keep the information relevant and useful. Just like our Rule #20 of Selling, “Keep your Bloody PowerPoint Slides simple”, it’s important to us to keep our twitter account and blog active, relevant and interesting.  

According to an article on HospitalityNet (http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4045836.html), Social media can have a dramatic impact on your brand's reputation. 34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog and 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs. We’ve had excellent feedback from partners, customers and even some from competitors that tell us they like reading our blog, so we’re not going to stop anytime soon. A blog/twitter account is an excellent way to go direct to people who are badmouthing or complaining about your product or service and engage them. Go meet them head on and you can often end the problem. We use our blog a lot to praise cool friends we met from the industry or talk about issues that we think are pretty dumb or very interesting, but sometimes you just need to use your blog to stand up for your brand.

At Acentic, we are always about engaging people. We want hotel guests to have an engaging stay at the hotel of their choice, with all the entertainment amenities they could ever dream of. In the social media world, we want to hear feedback from those guests, hotels, and anyone else that may be reading. We want to know what our customers, partners, media, friends and competitors think.

We’re still asking ourselves what the best way to communication via social media is. It is a learning process, but in the meantime, if you’re not already getting in on the action, the real question is Why aren’t you? We aim to be part of the group that HotelChatter says is doing a “Killer job of utilizing the micro blog platform.”

Last week I visited the International Hotel Investment Forum in Berlin where this year’s theme was "Charting the course for intelligent growth"… Splendid!

I attended sessions that discussed the value of the brand and process and offering standardization…(We do like processes when things are tough … “that’s why it’s all gone wrong. You didn’t stick to the processes”). I met with members of the finance community who thought that the “hotel industry just isn’t appealing enough for our money at the moment.” (their money?).

In the hope of seeing for myself the course for intelligent growth, I attended the session entitled “Best practice to survive the downturn and take advantage of the upturn” which I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed. One of the panellists had some wise words. He stated that the Hotel industry has never been a three to five-year cycle in which to make returns, it has always been a long-term business in which you need to hold over two cycles lasting about 15 years and the industry needs to find lenders who will stick around! Very true, I thought, but good luck with that one!

It was in this session that it struck me that any current successes lie in process improvement, refinancing, cutting costs, outsourcing, etc. But there was not one mention of PEOPLE.
When we are all growing at a zillion miles per hour, it’s because we have the best people. Here is what you hear: “It’s our people that make the difference“. ”We put people first”. “You buy our products, you buy our people”. But when it all goes belly up, it’s the market, the recession, the bankers, the last thing we are going to do is spend a penny on those costly employees.

“It’s only about people in the good times”. That must change, it must always be about the people in the good times or bad times.

I was having a discussion with some former colleagues all currently working in the consumer PayTV industry. One of the major recurring themes in interactive TV architecture is how best to be future proof. Going back a number of years, (all the way back to 1999) I remember one of the first IPTV STBs that was actually some kind of egg timer to keep the viewer occupied whilst the TV switched channels. There was also a HTML user interface which tended to load in blocks. However back then this was revolutionary technology which was going to allow telecom operators to fight off the threat of cable who were already offering high speed internet, TV and voice. The market was still seeking innovative services seeing the television as the main multimedia device in the home.

There were endless arguments on the processing power that would be needed to run all these applications. The debate is still open today, and within the hotel world we often still see slow channel changing and chunky HTML interfaces from systems which claim to be cutting edge but haven’t been able to evolve. Within Acentic not only do we always ensure that our architecture provides sufficient processing power, but we have invested in the expertise to fully leverage it. With a dedicated team of five graphical user interface designers we also ensure that the interface evolves over time accompanying the hotel in its brand evolution and reflecting the latest in the digital lifestyle. Whilst the average mobile phone lasts two years and the average consumer STB is in your living room for three years, hotel systems are in place the longest, for five years. The ability to evolve is therefore key.

At Mobile World Congress this year in Barcelona, there were many new ideas centered around making your mobile life better. Some of them had the cool factor, from an interface from Swedish TAT which lets you identify a person’s face via your phone camera and deliver not only profile information about that person but also show you their latest status updates, to green mobile technology such as MyFC which makes fuels cells and chargers so you can charge any mobile or laptop, extending the battery life of your portable device.

Then we saw it. The lifestyle technology that we knew we would see in hotel rooms next. We know we will see it because for the past decade, hoteliers have been transforming their hotel rooms into more of what the guest is used to at home. From the way we search for content on TV and surf for movies, to the lighting around the bed versus the lighting around the work spaces – hotels have been creating a lifestyle experience. You see companies like Philips creating a new dynamic around mood lighting in hotel rooms, TV’s that feel like they belong in our living rooms, and Acentic which creates the technology giving you access to programming and content that parallels how we interact with our computer.

So what is this new discovery that  completes the lifestyle experience of the guest? The furniture. Now if you combine the furniture with our busy mobile lifestyles and the hectic pace of the business traveller then the lifestyle technology we saw at Mobile World Congress is just what hoteliers will be doing next. A Finnish company, Powerkiss www.powerkiss.com has said goodbye to the cables that go along with charging your portable devices including mobile phones. Their solution – work with furniture manufacturers and imbed a charging device into the furniture. All the guest has to do is attach  a pin into the device and place it on the furniture with the device built in and the mobile phone charges automatically. No more need for cables or for adaptors that don’t work anyway.

Technology has moved away from just code and software to practical applications that make your life better in a more direct way when you are away from home. 

 Guest blogger: Jennifer Hicks, Founder , ink Communications, marketing consultant, Acentic