Influence scoring puts social media in context for hotel reputation management | By Josiah Mackenzie
Influence scoring is a quickly developing area of communications on the social web, with a number of startup companies building analytics systems to provide deeper insight into conversations being published online.
Chances are good you have heard about Klout recently. If you are not familiar with their product yet, the company provides metrics to measure a person’s influence on the social web. According to their website, their scores start at 1 and go up to 100, depending on the breadth and strength of a person’s sphere of influence. Over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter are used to calculate True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.
“True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on those of your followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Score is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes and comments) and is on a scale of 1 to 100. Network score indicates how influential your engage audience is and is also on a scale from 1 to 100. The Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.”
This week ReviewPro announced a collaboration with Klout, making them the first solution to incorporate influence scoring for hotel reputation management. A strong benefit of the scoring is that it gives context to the relative influence of who is saying what online.
Online reputation tools have provided hoteliers with the ability to listen to their guests and customers through social media networks and online review sites. Until now, they were missing this important element. By using such listening tools, hotel professionals can now be more efficient at sifting through all the digital conversations, and spend their time using the feedback to provide better service and improve operations.
The big noise challenge
Unfortunately, today there are still very few hotels that have implemented online reputation tracking systems. And, those that are using these solutions can feel overwhelmed by the amount of content being generated in social media. Using an online reputation tool saves time in the gathering stage of the listening process. But there is still a lot of noise, and it can be difficult to separate the important from the unimportant messages. What requires action?
Influence scoring changes the game
Influence scoring provides an additional layer of insight for social media analysis and participation. Monitoring tools combined with influence scoring can provide the context that has been missing until now.
Everything and everyone deserves to be heard, but hotels need a quick way to prioritize responses. Influence reporting can help cut through the chaos and assist with making better decisions about which conversations you want to take part in. Now, you can listen without facing the overwhelm that can lead to action paralysis.
The opportunity to identify brand advocates
Social influence scoring gives you the opportunity to identify people that could become brand advocates for you. Who do you need to reach out to and connect with? For hotels with a large number of international guests, influence scoring can help staff identify possible brand advocates among people they may not be familiar with.
Everyone deserves a response, great service
Obviously all customers and clients should be responded to and provided with extraordinary service. That is not the point of influence scoring. The value of using influence scoring measurements such as Klout when managing a social media campaign is not to provide different quality levels of service. However, it is useful to provide different kinds of service in different situations.
For example: Influence scoring is useful in determining who in your organization should be involved in the response and followup action for a given individual. Do you need to bring in the PR director or another department manager? Who needs to be involved to provide the best resolution for the consumer and your company?
It’s all about better customer knowledge
Social influence scoring is all about knowing your guests and customers better - all of them. It simply gives you an additional reference point and metric for use in each interaction.
Any hotel looking to increase their online visibility should monitor relevant metrics in planning big-picture strategy and also day-to-day actions. Influence scoring just gives us one more reference point for better decision making.
You must decide how to use this intelligence
How will you use influence scoring in a way that aligns with your values, mission, and goals? That decision is up to you.
In a ClickZ article, Klout CEO Joe Fernandez advised a pragmatic approach. “The score is meant to be a tool, a starting point. You have to do a reality check on what your business challenge is: and does this fit and does it make sense? You need to have a person making these decisions."
The fact that influence scoring is just a tool is a good thing to keep in mind. It is providing hotels with more knowledge about their guests. And you will have to decide how to use this in your responses and online communication. Strive to deliver memorable service to everyone, and simply use social influence scoring as a way to provide this in an intelligent manner.
Today ReviewPro became the first hotel reputation solution to announce integration of Klout influence scores with their social media monitoring tool. Learn more at www.reviewpro.com
Josiah Mackenzie is an industry analyst and market researcher at ReviewPro.
