Week 6: It is important to harness online opportunities to gather feedback and to address that feedback professionally

BEFORE A recent trip to the beautiful Ice House Hotel in Co Mayo, I had a quick glance at the reviews posted on www.tripadvisor.com.

What was most impressive was not that the experiences shared by recent guests at the hotel were overwhelmingly positive – although they were – but that each review had been painstakingly and politely responded to by management. And not just the good reviews. Every criticism, no matter how minor, was addressed.

Clearly the managers had recognised how valuable it is to get honest feedback, and to address that feedback professionally.

Customers often shy away from making face-to-face complaints, but don’t hold back in relaying negative experiences to their acquaintances. By engaging with customers through sites such as TripAdvisor, hotels and restaurants can finally find out exactly what they’re doing right and, more importantly, where they could improve.

It’s not just the hospitality industry that can benefit from modern forms of communicating with existing and potential customers.

All businesses regardless of size and from pretty much every sector can reap rewards from social-media marketing, whether by blogging, building up a fanbase on Facebook, gaining a following on Twitter . . . or, indeed, all of the above.

“My mission is to digitise the nation,” says Joan Mulvihill of the Irish Internet Association, which runs regular training seminars for businesses.

“The digital economy is not just for a small group of people in jeans and T-shirts in the Digital Hub. I think the big challenge is to get lots of traditional businesses using these media very effectively.”

The simplest way for businesses to build up Facebook fans and Twitter followers is by adding links on their homepage to their Facebook and Twitter accounts, she advises.

Although Facebook is primarily a personal social-networking site, many businesses are now using it as a means of communicating with, and getting feedback from, customers.

Blogging is also “hugely important”, she says. It is essentially a lengthy version of a tweet, which is limited to 140 characters. The latest trend is to use tweets to let your followers know about your most recent blog.

“Good bloggers get huge followings,” she says.

However, writing good-quality blogs is the real challenge.

While social-networking marketing can be very effective, Mulvihill warns that businesses must be aware of how they manage their brand online, and must learn how to use these new channels of communication most effectively.

For example, although “interruption-based” marketing is now considered more effective than “passive” techniques, a brand can be damaged by annoying people through overtweeting on Twitter.

Instead, only send tweets that are genuinely interesting or useful to your customers, Mulvihill says, for example flagging a really good article or blog that you came across, or informing them of a special offer that you’re running.

On the other hand, if a business decides to market itself through social networking, it must be prepared to commit a certain amount of time to doing it properly.

“Once you go down the social-media route, you’re opening the doors to feedback,” she says.

This means that someone within the organisation must take responsibility for responding to this feedback, but in a way that does not drain too much time.

Apart from this allocation of resources, social media offers an extremely cheap method of marketing.

Once the company has internet access, signing up for accounts with the most popular social-networking sites is free.

One company that has successfully embraced social-media marketing techniques is Cromleach Lodge Country House Hotel in Co Sligo.

Its website (www.cromleach.com) is teeming with subtle but effective marketing features to draw in prospective guests, from the live webcam image and cookery video clips to TripAdvisor reviews and links to Twitter, Facebook and the Hotel Reviews Ireland website.

Interestingly, Cromleach Lodge has noticed that the profile of its customer base has changed as a result of technological advances.

According to Mulvihill, the hotel is now attracting younger people whose first instinct is to google hotels or check reviews on TripAdvisor before booking a trip.

In the past, customers would have been more likely to look up hotels in the Blue Book or similar listings.

Of course, there are many business owners out there resisting these technological advances simply because they feel overwhelmed by the prospect of tweeting and blogging.

However, Mulvihill makes the point that these same businesspeople think nothing of setting a security alarm every evening even though they have no idea how that alarm actually works.

Similarly, they don’t need to understand the inner workings of Facebook or Twitter to get up and running on them.

Daunting as they may be to technophobes, the craze for these new forms of social media offers unlimited potential to those businesses willing to take the plunge.

Watch Triona Campbell of CR Entertainment discuss online business opportunities at irishtimes.com/business/education or on eoy.tv, the dedicated website for the series

Next week: The use of sustainable resources