The 4 Pillars For Your Online Reputation Management

Editor’s Note: As we are building our SkiftEDU service for marketers and SMBs in travel, we recently launched a new initiative: our new weekly series on digital marketing tips and tricks, SkiftEDU How-Tos. These How-Tos are a series of free in-depth weekly articles around various topics in digital marketing, such as this one below. The growing popularity of social media and review sites has given birth to a whole new reality that many folks in the travel and hospitality sphere sometimes wish would go away: online reputation management, or ORM. In fact, consider these stats: TripAdvisor reaches 350 million unique visitors per month! There are more than 320 million reviews on TripAdvisor, covering 6.2 million accommodations, restaurants and attractions. Yelp, which operates mainly in North America and has a strong focus on restaurants, shows more than 102 million reviews Yet, it’s estimated that only 30% of questions, comments and reviews are answered by brands on social media For hoteliers in particular, only 36% bother responding to comments left on review sites, social media and OTA such as Expedia or Booking (Source: Revinate) During a talk at ITB in Berlin last year, a study found that ORM by hotels was expected to increase by 60% in 2015 versus 2014. That was more than other important areas such as small scale renovations (53%), marketing and advertising (51%) or even staff training (47%). And if you think online reputation management is only for hotels and accommodations, think again. While TripAdvisor estimates 77% of its users come to validate hotels, inns and different types of accommodation, it also knows that 50% of its users are searching for restaurants and 44% are there to see about attractions, things to see and do at a given destination. And these figures vary per country: for example in Italy, it’s actually 75% of TripAdvisor users that search for restaurant options! With this in mind, where should your ORM strategy even begin and where should you put your efforts? Here are the four golden rules to follow when it comes to online reputation management in travel. 1. Monitor conversations The very first step should be to seek out who is talking about you, when and on which platforms. If you are a small pop & EDM music festival in an urban setting, it’s quite possible you don’t have the same target audience as an