With so many social media options available, it can be very hard to keep track of your hotel's online presence. A software tool can make the process simpler and more effective, and Radian6 is among the industry leaders.

I recently met some of their team at Blog World Expo, and asked Tom Hasselman a few questions:

Can you tell us what you do and what the benefits would be for an individual hotel property?

Basically it's going to give that individual hotel property manager or community evangelist an idea of what people are saying about them across all the media channels that are out there. Traditionally they would not ignore a phone call,  a suggestion in the suggestion box, so naturally they should not  ignore people who are talking about their properties across the blogosphere or the 420 video sharing sites, Twitter, forums, and mainstream news comments. Our tool tracks images — somebody can take a picture of a property and say it's really nasty and dirty or this was a beautiful spot that I recommend: hotels need to be aware of this consumer driven content

We also track micro media such as Twitter and FriendFeed. It's very common for people to post quick updates to share their experience at a property.  For example while I was at Bog World, I stayed at the Las Vegas Hilton, had excellent service the moment I walked into the lobby, checked in to a beautiful room so I decided to Tweet about it.  Within about 30 minutes, @LasVegasHilton followed me on Twitter and thanked me – I thought it was a nice touch.

So that's a good example of one-on-one marketing, one-on-one sales, and really building a relationship.

The tool we have essentially allows "brands" to tune into all those conversations and make sense of it, find out where the most relevant ones are happening. Which one has the most comments, and identify viral trends –  positive or negative.

As a hotel marketing manager, why should I use your product instead of going to Twitter search (for example)?

We bring everything together in one place. So what happened before, is someone would have Twitter searches, use Google alerts, they'd have an RSS feed up on their desktop, and they'd be searching through you to manually. That works, but it's an incredibly cumbersome and time-consuming approach.   Not to mention Twitter search covers, well, Twitter which is a great place to start but one would be limiting oneself to Twitter, Blogs, Forums, Images, Social Bookmarking Sites, Facebook discussion groups are equally important to tap into.

So, what we do is bring all this information together in one dashboard. So instead of going from platform to platform to platform, you can just make sense of all this data in one dashboard. And the beauty of it — and one of the reasons companies chose Radian6  — is that we are a real-time monitoring  service, customers can listen-measure-engage in social media.

As content is published, the end user knows about it immediately. Some of the free tools won't update for up to 24 hours — so you won't know about a blog post until sitting out there for 24 hours. We know that 90% of the activity on a blog post happens within the first 24 hours, it's essential for you to be there instantly and to react to whatever is published or at least be aware of its presence.

So how do you gather this data? Do you crawl the web?

We crawl the social web with our own proprietary crawlers. We also attach ourselves to RSS feeds and APIs.

Is there anything else we should know about your tool?

We have some unique integration abilities such as being able to tie into web-analytics such as Web-trends and CRM packages like salesforce.com

Thank you for your time, Tom.

Original article: www.hotelmarketingstrategies.com/radian6-social-media

About the author
This blog is written by Josiah Mackenzie, who enjoys exploring the relationship between emerging technology and the hospitality industry. 

www.hotelmarketingstrategies.com