@HiltonSuggests and the Power of Real-Time Youtility

Excerpt from Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype

by Jay Baer

Chapter 3 

Friend-of-mine Awareness

@HiltonSuggests and the Power of Real-Time Youtility

Hilton Worldwide (the parent company of Hilton Hotels and their sister brands like Doubletree Hotels) has a program on Twitter called Hilton Suggests. In 2012, @LTHouston wrote on Twitter, “Good places to eat near the Magnolia Hotel in Downtown Dallas for Saturday?”

@HiltonSuggests answered back, “@LTHouston, Wild Salsa on Main or Campisi’s on Elm are awesome, both within walking distance of your hotel in Dallas, enjoy. VAC.” (VAC are the initials of the @HiltonSuggests team member who sent the reply.)

Useful and kind, right? But here’s the difference-maker: The Magnolia Hotel in Dallas isn’t a Hilton property. Hilton Worldwide is going out of their way to provide real-time restaurant recommendations to a person who isn’t a current customer.

But someday, @LTHouston is going to be in a different city, and she’s going to need a hotel, and she’s going to remember the help that @HiltonSuggests provided.

Nearly two weeks earlier, in a different city, Melanie J. aka @RockstarExtreme wrote on Twitter, “Anybody know who’s hiring in Orlando for professional positions at this time? It seems like it’s at a standstill.”

@HiltonSuggests answered back, “@RockstarExtreme, Check out OrlandoJobs.com for a comprehensive list in Orlando.”

Now, if I were @HiltonSuggests, I would have said, “Hey, Melanie J., maybe one of your problems is that your Twitter handle is @RockstarExtreme, and perhaps that’s not sending the best signal to potential employers.” But that’s why I’m not in customer service.

But, if Melanie J. manages to get a job and has money to travel, and she’s going to stay in a hotel, where do you think she’s going to reserve a room? Hilton.

The @HiltonSuggests program is currently a pilot initiative in approximately twenty-five cities worldwide with high levels of leisure travel. In each, Vanessa Sain-Dieguez, the social media director for Hilton Worldwide, worked with local hotel managers to find employees who wanted to listen and help on Twitter. The tweeters aren’t all professional question answerers, either. In fact, few of the @HiltonSuggests team are from the concierge desks of the participating hotels. Perhaps even more unexpectedly, many of them had no prior experience on Twitter. They’re just hotel employees who love their city and want to help visitors better enjoy it.

And there’s no question Hilton understands and is thinking about the long-term benefits of Youtility, especially unexpectedly. “I think that’s actually our biggest opportunity, when we reach out to someone who’s staying at a competitor’s property or not staying with Hilton,” Sain-Dieguez says. “That’s where we can make a difference, because they’re not experiencing our hospitality within the hotel, and if you’re not in the hotel, you may not be getting the same service, and we could win you over.” But that takes time, she acknowledges. “We’re not looking to win your stay on this trip. We’re looking to make a real, authentic connection with you and hopefully gain a customer for life.”

One of the most critical elements of this program is the way it combines Youtility and a human touch. Twitter is a personal channel, and Hilton is essentially eavesdropping strategically. That could be misinterpreted if the payoff was more robotic and less deft. Most travel and hospitality organizations would think about a program like this and then try to jump into conversations on Twitter with an exhortation to download an official visitors’ guide or mobile application. To not do so was a very specific choice made by Hilton.

“The whole idea there is, you might say, ‘I’m looking for a restaurant,’ and I could give you twenty options. But they may not fit what you’re looking for, and you have to sort through those options,” Sain-Dieguez explains. “So we teach the team to ask questions about specifics like, ‘Are you with your spouse? Are you looking for kid friendly? Do you want to go somewhere inexpensive?’ Then, based on their feedback, we can make a real recommendation.”

This isn’t just a hospitality program, either. While of course the @HiltonSuggests team provides traveler recommendations most often, they are taught to help wherever they can. Perhaps the best example of this ethos came in the early days of the initiative, when a Memphis resident tweeted that his dog was sick, and he didn’t know where to take it for care. The @HiltonSuggests representative in Memphis saw the tweet, knew a vet that he liked, and supplied the vet’s name and address. Everything worked out fine, and the dog owner tweeted afterward how amazed he was that Hilton would take the time to recommend a vet to him. That’s friend-of-mine awareness with real staying power.

“It’s funny,” says Sain-Dieguez. “When you help someone and they come back and say thank you, it kind of sets off endorphins or something. The team gets really energized by it, so I think it almost makes them even more eager to look a little more broadly beyond travel, and see where they can help. It’s really worked out very well.”

She recognizes that the economic impact of @HiltonSuggests is small in comparison to the company’s overall marketing efforts. But she believes Youtility pays long-term dividends.

“It’s a huge value to the consumer to know, ‘No matter where I am, no matter what brand I’m staying at, I can still ask @HiltonSuggests because they helped me in the last five cities I was in.’ That’s tremendous.”

Tremendous, indeed.