Going beyond reviews and ratings, there's more about your property out there. — Photo by Base7booking.com

Coming from a public relations and media background, I have seen many examples of how companies listen to their stakeholders and manage their reputation online and offline. Although reviews and ratings are essential in hospitality, there are other ways to find out what's being said about your hotel.

Reviews, ratings, and more reviews. It seems like the most important reputation index is related to reviews. Hotelier tends to keep their eyes on OTAs and social media to track what guests are saying about their properties and the experiences lived around them. What would you say if we told you that there are other angles when it comes to reputation management?

What's reputation management

We all live in a social world. Therefore listening to what's said about your property and how others perceive it is extremely important. Professor Fombrun, CEO of the Reputation Institute, defines it as the collective assessment of an organisation's actions and describes the ability to deliver outcomes to stakeholders.

In other words, reputation is what individuals or other companies think of you and what you offer to them. There different types of reputation, which don't necessarily exclude each other: brand/product reputation, corporate reputation, industry reputation, and reputational capital. In this post we'll be referring mainly to corporate reputation as hotels are understood as an entity on their own, and explore the digital side.

But why should you do this?

We could list a million reasons why hoteliers should be listening and managing their online reputation management, but these three summarise best our ideas. Online monitoring allows you to track and listen what others say about your hotel and the experiences around it. Once you have identified the comments, ideas and other data, analysing will guide you to how this is affecting your hotel. In addition, hoteliers can also participate in the conversations, encourage positive voices and eliminate any potential threats and noise around the hotel.

The media monitoring tools

Right now you might be thinking this is too hard or requires a lot of work, research, and digging into the dark sides of the Internet. It could be, but with the help of some tools, it can be easy. We have selected some tools based on ease of use, prices, and channels:

In Base7booking we use Mentions, a simple and informative tool to listen what's happening around our brand in social media. Updated in real-time, Mentions is constantly looking for your keywords or phrases in multiple languages and bringing them together in one place.

A similar free tool is IceRocket, a search engine going through blog, Twitter, images, news and more. We use both and always discover new conversations, interesting influences and situations where we can add something special.

To explore news and other mentions on the web, Google Alerts has your back. Simply add your keywords and every time Google finds one of those, it will send you an email with the link and the information about it. In real time. This way hoteliers can identify trends, themes and see which audiences are reacting to your messages.

Go beyond your reviews and find what's being said about your business using simple tools. Do you have any questions related to digital reputation management? Let us know in our social media in Facebook or @Base7booking, and we'll give you great tips and advice.

Base7 Booking
Hotel technology company
Base7booking.com