Importance of Social Media Tracking and Online Reputation Management

We’ve heard it time and time again; social media is the new wave of internet marketing and it is definitely here to stay. But it seems like there is still a handful of hoteliers that are not convinced of the power of social media and why marketing through these channels is important for their online branding. It doesn’t help that social channels and networking sites come and go like seasons, and staying on top of the latest and greatest social media marketing strategy in social media technology is a full-time job in itself. Understandably, these are reasons enough why hoteliers may pull back when it comes to social media marketing. But we can’t escape the fact that having presence in social media is critical to any brand’s growth. Conversations about your brand are happening online whether you like it or not. The question is, are you listening and joining in the conversation? With that in mind, this article focuses on the importance of online reputation management and how social media can help improve your hotel’s online branding. Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the act of monitoring online conversations about your brand and executing online strategies to highlight positive, quality content while suppressing damaging content from the consumers’ view. In today’s social web, consumers social media marketing plan who used to share product information and service experiences during coffee breaks or backyard get-togethers now turn to online channels to share their thoughts and product ratings. Furthermore, search engines now consider social channels and conversations in their results listings. If a traveler performs online research on your hotel and finds that the majority of online results are negative in nature, the likelihood of this traveler booking a room at your hotel is slim to none. This is why online reputation management should be a critical part of a hotel’s revenue management/sales and marketing strategy.

The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families

Using social media Web sites is among the most common activity of today's children and adolescents. Any Web site that allows social interaction is considered a social media site, including social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter; gaming sites and virtual worlds such as Club Penguin, Second Life, and the Sims; video sites such as YouTube; and blogs. Such sites offer today's youth a portal for entertainment and communication social media marketing companies and have grown exponentially in recent years. For this reason, it is important that parents become aware of the nature of social media sites, given that not all of them are healthy environments for children and adolescents. Pediatricians are in a unique position to help families understand these sites and to encourage healthy use and urge parents to monitor for potential problems with cyberbullying, “Facebook depression,” sexting, and exposure to inappropriate content. Engaging in various forms of social media is a routine activity that research has shown to benefit children and adolescents by enhancing communication, social connection, and even technical skills.1 Social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace offer multiple daily opportunities for connecting with friends, classmates, and people with shared interests. During the last 5 years, the number of preadolescents and adolescents using such sites has increased dramatically. According to a recent poll, social media marketing services 22% of teenagers log on to their favorite social media site more than 10 times a day, and more than half of adolescents log on to a social media site more than once a day.2 Seventy-five percent of teenagers now own cell phones, and 25% use them for social media, 54% use them for texting, and 24% use them for instant messaging.3 Thus, a large part of this generation's social and emotional development is occurring while on the Internet and on cell phones.

Writing, Reading, and Social Media Literacy

These are not strictly technological questions, nor are they confined to a narrow discipline. The way today’s students will do science, politics, journalism, and business next year and a decade from now will be shaped by the skills they acquire in using social media, social media marketing university and by the knowledge they gain of the important issues of privacy, identity, community, and the role of citizen media in democracy. I started teaching social media to Berkeley and Stanford students five years ago when I realized that the answer to the question I’ve been asked by readers, critics, and scholars about my own work over the last 20 years – “are personal computers and Internet-based communications good for us as individuals, communities, democracies?” – is “it depends on what people know about how to use these tools.” Whether digital media will be beneficial or destructive in the long run doesn’t depend on the technologies, but on the literacy of those who use them. When I first faced students in a classroom, I was surprised to discover that the mythology I had believed about “digital natives” was not entirely accurate. Just because they’re on Facebook and chat online during class and can send text messages with one hand does not mean that young people are acquainted with what is social media marketing the rhetoric of blogging, understand the way wikis can be used collaboratively, or know the techniques necessary for vetting the validity of information discovered online. Just as learning the alphabet requires further education before a literate person can compose a coherent argument, learning the skills of effective social media use requires an education that today’s institutions and teachers are ill-prepared to provide.