Friday 4 May 2012
Thursday 5 April 2012
Hotel Digital Marketing: MBA Group B Contest Winner
Hotel Digital Marketing: MBA Group B Contest Winner: Congratulations to Alexandra + Sanjarbek - your peers voted Easy Lift as the most imaginative app!!
Wednesday 21 March 2012
Wednesday 14 March 2012
Tuesday 6 March 2012
Comments on the article Generation Flux: it’s not about Age, it’s about Attitude.
How do I relate to Generation Flux? How will it affect my career success?
I found
this article extremely interesting and even empowering. As sometimes we live
our lives wasting time trying to plan things 5 years ahead, and when our plans wouldn’t
work out we get upset.. But probably the author is right and we have just to accept
the Chaos theory, that suggests that sometimes it’s useless to predict things..
What’s important is to identify when the things are chaotic and when they are
not.
One of the participants
of the interview who used to work as a researcher on weather patterns says: There
are some times, when you can predict weather well for the next 15 days. Other
times, you can only really forecast a couple of days. Sometimes you can't
predict the next two hours. According to the author of the article, the
business climate is a lot like the weather. And we have entered a
next-two-hours era.
The speed
of change in our economy and our culture is getting faster, fueled by global implementation
of social media, mobile, and other new technologies, and our visibility about
the future is declining. It is getting real hard to predict what will happen
next. When we increase speed it is logic
that we have less time to think what is waiting for us ahead, but we should be
fast in our reaction in respond to the change and be skillful ‘drivers’.
Reading
this article was for me like reading about my personal and career experiences
and I have been always longing for the change and growth on my way. The article
says that not everyone will enter the GenFlux, but those who enter should learn
how to be successful. And it is hard as we have been always taught ‘a liner’ way
to live our lives: school, university, work, work, work, staying at the single
industry, and then retire. GenFlux is
all the opposite of it. They are individuals who crave novelty constantly;
therefore the most important here is the ability to acquire new skills.
“Every time I update my resume, I see the path
that I didn't know would be.”
"I'm a collection of many things. I'm not
one thing."
What
defines GenFlux is a state of mind that embraces instability, which not only tolerates
it, but enjoys it, changing careers and business models. The important thing is
not to be afraid of the change and of the future, and to welcome each change
like a new possibility, not a loss. That is the way I look at my future carrier,
too. If one thing doesn’t work out for me I won’t dwell on it, I will change
it, find something else and fast. Another attitude that I have adopted already
but will have to remember in the future, that in order to be successful in our
fast-changing society, I will have to constantly be learning new things, as I
would have to be well-informed about what is happening around, be curious, in
order to stay on the edge and in-sync with the fast-changing business evolution.
For the
companies this fast change in business means they would need to be adoptable to
change, flexible, fast-moving, prioritize the team building and working in
groups for faster pace. If we learn something new and stop, we would be hit by
the next train of innovation. The reason the Facebook is so successful is
because it is changing constantly. It is also imperative to be future-focused. If
ambiguity is high and adaptability is required, then you simply can't afford to
be sentimental about the past, as past mistakes make us vulnerable.
Monday 5 March 2012
Saturday 21 January 2012
Sunday 15 January 2012
Reputation Management Seminar
 |
In today’s web dominated world the role of an online
Reputation Manager is crucial as the clients, nowadays, are more comfortable
with sharing their opinion openly on the Internet. Moreover, according to the
statistics the clients’ buying decisions are influenced to a great extend by
the opinion of the people they know and generally by other consumers’ opinions.
The public opinion can easily spoil or alter the Hotels Reputation. Unless the clients’ comments are monitored and
tracked in a structured and professional manner the Hotel brand image can be
seriously damaged or even ruined. Therefore the skills that an excellent Reputation Manager should possess in my opinion are as following.
An online Reputation Manager should be in full control
of the Hotel’s branding and Reputation by monitoring and analyzing the consumer
opinion, therefore he should be extremely hard-working and organized. He should fully understand the nature of the
opinion expressed and how to respond positively.
Reputation manager is an advanced tool that searches
the Web for positive and negative comments on selected criteria. This enables a Reputation Manager to continuously monitor and track your brand perception on Internet sites
and Social Media Networks. Therefore he should have an ease using social
networking. An understanding of the social web,
including blogs, forums, social networks, micro blogs, photo/video sharing,
ratings and reviews, RSS etc.
He should be ‘everywhere’, energetic, self-starting,
dynamic, and able to develop and edit high quality written materials, ideally
with Public Relation experience.
The Reputation Manager should have detail-oriented, excellent
critical thinking, writing, editing and presentation skills. Proven ability to
develop compelling proposals and present them effectively and persuasively.
Sometimes the response to the negative opinion should
be found and written as soon as possible; therefore the ideal Reputation Manger
should have the ability to meet deadlines without sacrificing quality.
To summarize, here are some basic skills and traits a person should
have to do the job well:
- An ability to manage several
social media profiles (an organized person)
- Exceptional communication
skills, fluent in English with proper grammar and spelling
- Someone who comes across as
pleasant, positive and polite in online communications
- Attention to detail
- An understanding of search
engines, or someone who can learn new software quickly
- A curious person who keeps up
with all the Internet marketing and social media blogs on a daily basis,
and thinks outside the box
The
main difference in my opinion between the Reputation Manager and the regular
manager is that the Reputation Manager has to be passionate about the Web and
quick-minded. He is supposed to be in Sync with the new technology much more
than a regular manager, he has to be extremely sociable and to express himself
in a professional and polite manner, a real diplomat he should know what the
clients would like to hear in order to feel that their opinion is important
even if its negative. Reputation Management should work closely with to
Social Media Marketing management or even the Reputation Management should
include the Social Media Management as we cannot separate them. I also think that Reputation Manager should be
in constant communication with all the other departments of the hotel in order
to quickly transmit the message left by the customer. For example, if the guest
was not satisfied with the Restaurant service, the idea is that Reputation
Manager should pass the information over to the Food & Beverage department or
Restaurant Manager, the person in charge, in order to rapidly find a solution
to the problem. On the whole, the Reputation Manager should play an important
role in the hotel organization assuring a successful operation.
How the hotel should
measure if the Reputation Management is a success? It is obvious that in order
to receive pleasant reviews from customers the hotel should first of all assure
an excellent service! And the Reputation
Management should contribute in the constant process of maintaining the
high-quality services by transmitting the message from the customers. Excellent
service will encourage people to talk about the hotel in a good way and
therefore will assure the strong positive reputation and will bring more customers.
And the Reputation Management is out there to protect this reputation. By protecting your business name, you are also
protecting your business success. If anything should go wrong, if there is a crisis
because of the extremely bad review or public opinion, the Reputation
Management should rapidly propose different solutions in order to save the
hotels reputation. Timing is crucial and is one of the most important criteria
to judge the Reputation Management efficiency.
Wednesday 11 January 2012
Key Achievements in Digital Marketing class
First of
all I would like to stress out the fact that this course was one of the most
interesting and useful for me. I have understood the importance of a thoughtful
Online Marketing Strategy for a Hotel or a Luxury Brand, as the whole world
goes digital. Digital Marketing is becoming an essential part of the General
Marketing Strategy for a Company, as important as In-store, Press and TV
advertising, PR and publicity.
The IQ
reports were the excellent sources of information in order to provide the
company I would work in the future with the appropriate Online Marketing
Strategy and Marketing Tools. I have realized the importance of Social Media,
such as Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc, as a part of Digital Marketing
Strategy. Before I was only thinking about them as a mean to chat and connect
with my friends, and now I know how to use it to the company’s benefit, as Social
Media could be a powerful tool to interact with customers and influence their
buying decisions. On the whole, to the great extent the Web should be used in
order to interact with the clients and alter the company’s reputation, and most
of these tools are free, which is great!
I will look
in a different way on Google too from now on. Not only it is the most popular
searching engine but also a helpful guide to a successful Marketing Strategy as
it created some user-friendly and extremely useful applications such as
Google Maps, Webmaster Tools, Google Places, Adwords, etc. And finally I learnt how to create my own
blog, use Issue, Slideshare and Prezi! Digital Marketing made me even more passionate about Marketing than I was
before as I realized that we have a new field to play on, the one that gives us
an endless opportunity to be creative without limits – The WEB.
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