Twitter is being used to predict the future box office takings of films courtesy of researchers at Hewlett Packard. They have studied 3 million tweets about 25 different movies, including Avatar. (is there no privacy??) Apparently the rate at which messages are produced can be used to forecast box office visits before opening. The faster people tweet about a film, the more likely they are to go and see it. They say its “tapping into collective intelligence” and word of mouth builds audience. Their analysis predicted that the zombie film “The Crazies” would take $16.8 in its first weekend and it actually took $16.06m. The forecast for “Dear John” was $30.7 and it took $30.5.

These guys have developed algorithms to analyse tweets in the run-up to a film launch measuring the rate at which they were produced….”Get a life” springs to mind.

Avatar which actually took $232.2m on opening weekend, will showing in Hotels using Acentic systems.

Recently spotted in a hotel bedroom: An alarm clock with the following instructions written on the top:
 
1. Press and hold the “Alarm 1” or “Alarm 2” button until the “Alarm time” appears on the display. Press the “settings” knob and the “alarm hour “ will blink
2. Rotate the “settings” knob to change the hour and press to set
3. Rotate the “settings” knob to change the minutes and press to set
4. Rotate the “settings” knob until “source” appears on the display and press to select I-pod, buzzer, AM or FM and press to set
5. Rotate the “settings” knob until “exit” appears on the display and press to exit

Honestly, after all that would you be confident that your alarm will go off at the right time? Just use the TV system…it’s much more simple!

In 1783, a volcano in Iceland erupted over an eight month period during the hottest summer on record. Because of an unusual weather pattern, southerly winds blew the cloud over the UK and mainland Europe -- sound familiar? During that episode, it killed 25% of the Icelandic population and more than 20,000 people in the UK. It caused fog so thick that boats couldn’t navigate and the sun was a blood red colour for months. Everything heated up causing thunderstorms with hailstones that were big enough to kill cattle. In France, the ensuing poverty and famine that the weather caused partly led to the triggering of the French Revolution in 1789!

So we can consider ourselves lucky, as we sit back, stranded in our hotels across Europe, because now we have time to catch up on that latest film showing on Acentic’s in-house movie system. I was considering a volcano kind of joke, but that would be insensitive.
We need to let the dust settle.

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.

We have opened our Middle East office. We have 17 new colleagues at the headquarters and 50 colleagues total spread across the affiliated regions. We are pleased to welcome the Middle East office and its co-workers under the direction of Rene Mieritz and Prem Kumar to the Acentic team.

The Acentic Middle East team are now being trained on Acentic technology at company headquarters in Cologne, Germany in order to launch the our new Panorama IP In-room Hotel Entertainment Platform dedicated to the Middle East by Q2, 2010. Currently we are bringing these new colleagues into the company and helping them to learn Acentic’s business, technology as well as the 20 rules for success.  This new team is already easily exemplifying Rule #9: Know and live the Acentic brand story.  The new addition to our company fully responds to our expectations of system sales and especially the personalised after sales service, as this is one main aspect of what differentiates us in the market.

Through this joint venture we plan to extend the success of Panorama HD and IP to hotels across the Middle East. The new office will be led by Rene Mieritz and Prem Kumar, Directors of Acentic Middle East, providing corporate and commercial expertise with over two decades of business experience in the hotel industry in the Middle East. For the Acentic Management team and myself, this is a new defining exciting chapter in the evolution of Acentic, the leading provider of HD TV to Hotels in EMEA.

I have been leaving things in hotel rooms for 25 years and my experience is, that unless you go back straight away, you never ever get them back. However, my sincere thanks goes to the Holiday Inn on the Cromwell Road London who had my 3 ties and tie wallet two days after I left the hotel. I phoned the hotel and when put through to security, I was met with a voicemail service. My heart sunk as I left my message because I knew, just like every other time, that was the end of my ties!
Shock horror but within an hour the head of security phoned me and said that he had the ties and I should call him before coming to the hotel and he would meet me in reception with them. And that is exactly what happened. Great service! I have told a dozen people this story and if I ever leave something in a hotel again, it will be the Holiday Inn on the Cromwell Road.

But it’s not just me. A recent survey carried out amongst 30 Novotel Hotels revealed that guests leave very unusual things in hotel rooms (as well as ending up naked in corridors on a regular basis). Items found by housekeeping were fake limbs, a snake, arrest warrants, false teeth, (you wouldn’t go back would you!) a baby (was reclaimed) a two metre high statue and a riding crop under the pillow…really. http://tinyurl.com/smh-hotelroom

In the same survey, women were found to be the messiest, watch more adult movies than 10 years ago and chocolate remains their number one minibar item…hmmm. One Novotel reported a story of a guest calling reception to ask the duty manager to help get his vegetables out of the microwave. As the hotel doesn’t have microwaves the duty manager went to find the vegetables locked in the safe…I love this business!

And finally…it’s all about Holiday Inn this week. In today’s news they have announced a “Human Bed Warming Service“. So before you tuck in for the night, a member of staff attends the room with a full body fleece and lies in your bed to get it to 20-24 degrees, the appropriate temperature in which to doze off according to the sleep consultant…I’ve applied for a Saturday job! http://tinyurl.com/HumanBedWarming 

Acentic has just celebrated its sixth Christmas as a company and this year's present from Santa was by far, the best yet. Two days before Christmas a delivery arrived in the form of a binding offer to buy a controlling stake in Acentic from ISM Communications Corporation (ISM) and Philweb Communications (WEB).

These two public companies listed on the Philippine Stock Exchange have joined with Niantic Holding, a German company controlled by Dr. Andreas Jacobs, to invest in Acentic to further extend our technology offering throughout EMEA and launch Acentic Asia to serve the Asia and MiddleEast markets.

According to Lodging Economics’ latest Asia Pacific Pipeline Report http://tinyurl.com/China-India-HotelConstruction the Asia Pacific hotel pipeline is the second largest in the world and this region has two of the fastest growing economies in the World, China and India, with more than 208,847 hotel rooms in the pipeline in China alone.

We are very excited about our new owners as they have vast experience in our field. Not only are they the previous founders and owners of one of World's largest hotel technology providers but clearly can also spot talent (hee-hee) and their current businesses are in the field of IT and gaming.

Our current product offering of Digital TV services, High Speed Connectivity and Worldwide media and content is currently in Hotels belonging to virtually all of the major global brands and now having the opportunity to support their needs further afield is very exciting indeed.

We’re looking forward to the changes and growth this new dynamic brings to the Acentic family in 2010 and beyond. As a company that has always been dedicated to customer service and quality products, we are still dedicated to keeping our hotels happy and helping them deliver the best in room services possible to their guests.

We have just come out of the noughties, so what is this decade called? The teenies? The booming teens…. (let’s be positive) the twenty tens?

Whatever. There is much to look forward to: We have the football World Cup, always good for anyone’s business, the Winter Olympics, the Ryder Cup, Andy Murray is going to win his first major and Scotland will win the six nations. You don’t get much more positive than that to me.

There are some great films to look forward too as well. Wall Street 2 (as mentioned in a previous blog), Up in the Air with George Clooney, Robin Hood with Russell Crowe (yawn!), the final books of Harry Potter and Gulliver’s Travels with Billy Connolly….yeehaaa.

It’s at this time of year that I, and I suppose many other managers in my position, need to galvanize our teams and launch them into the new year with confidence, optimism and a sense of fun. My first award of the year and “Cool Friend of Acentic” goes to Emily Somers. Emily works for the Glove division of Medline and created, choreographed and directed the attached film, which was created to promote awareness for breast cancer in a hospital in Portland, Oregon. When the site gets a million hits, Medline will give a large contribution to the hospital and free mammograms to the community.

To persuade everyday people do extraordinary things is inspiring. I invite you to do the Pink Glove Dance and be inspired.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEdVfyt-mLw