Kerry Morrison's Personal Playground | KMore.net

So I was on a plane for 5hrs earlier this week and without an internet connection I had to actually generate content myself. A client of mine asked if I wanted to contribute some thoughts to a pitch and in typical kerry fashion i went hogwild with it. Wanted to post it as an example of how my mind works and how I try to derive value for my clients. So here it is, pardon the informal tone.

What would be a defining new way to market a hotel online?

Clearly the traditional value adds of the hotel still exist ( amenities, restaurant, comfy beds, wifi ), but what if everyone has essentially the same thing. The boutique hotels have certainly taken styling and comfort to new levels but at the end of the day most upper end hotels offer the same old thing.

If we take the idea of selling more, without ignoring the typical offerings, you’d be the one hotel doing something to standout.

An easy first though is to create our new wave of content focused websites. Adding content layers like restaurants around the hotel, directions to the local tailor, barber or yoga studio would add all sorts of value to guests. But lets go further.

Another easy to suggest option are digital city guides - small, branded, iphone or web apps that visitors can use to find nearest items of interest. Cost could be offset by lining up partners in the local community, certainly in the cost of creating content ( motivation is there to showoff your local yoga studio with photos and videos ). Internal hotel webpage most certainly should be an intranet / wiki type site..where by signing in you get local weather ( you’ll need an umbrella today mr. morrison ), pre-order your wakeup call, dry-cleaning pick up, local news, suggested sites and trips…..what would be awesome would be digital video greetings from the concierge and front desk staff..tied to shifts. Can you imagine watching a video of the front desk guy, currently working downstairs, giving you a quick video greeting, making sure you know his name and that you can ask him personally if you need anything. We also let the users start to create content, provide suggestions, write reviews, tell stories, upload their trip photos / videos / local reviews and finds. Essentially giving a hotel branded blog to every single customer upon checkin…all automated of course and all branded and filled with pre-populated offers.

Why not in a couple of months have a pre-populated iPad full of custom web apps that give you access to all sorts of information or services. Something to take with you in your travels through a strange new city ( encased in a protective shell of course ). In a perfect world we’d offer an option to pre-buy an iPad, full of relevant data and the hotel would take an affiliate percentage of the sale ( stretch yes, but in these trying economic times incremental revenue is key / I suppose alternate solution would be to partner with the local apple store or reseller and work out an arrangement ).

Would it be too much to turn the hotel almost into a mini ad network.? We’re talking hundreds of possible advertisers so the process of managing wouldn’t be insane, a great task for a marketing assistant working at the hotel. Going round in say a 10 block radius, offering premiere ad spots on the hotel guests blogs / home screens. Local businesses would certainly be motivated and at a low to medium price point it would be accessible to almost anyone. Hotel gets a small revenue stream it didn’t have previously and as the hotel guests get listings for all sorts of goods and service.

It’s time to move to an all digital billing system as well, why are we still printing out receipts? An online billing system tied to whatever internal POS or checkout system already in place could not be that hard to implement. Emails for all receipts, or details can be found on your personalized hybrid blog / account page. How awesome would it be if the visitor to the hotel had access to this page forever more. Talk about creating value. Not to mention that the marketing angle around being the frontline of aggressive eco-friendly initiatives.

How about this as an idea. We tie in say the Gowalla or Foursquare API to hotel iphone / web app or rip the geolocation data from the photos / videos themselves…then we create custom Google Maps of the trips guests take, all with embedded photo, video and Google local imagery. When they’re home they can show off to family and friends, revisit at their leisure, etc. etc.

Oh another random idea. We tie this internal website into a third party product like local Vancouver company Music Direction and offer a massive library of music to guests during their stay. They’re currently doing a pilot project at the Opus where for $12/day guests get access to a set series of playlists to suit the mood and style of the hotel. I’d argue it would add more value to offer as many songs as possible and let the user decide, but it’s open to debate. Again a shared revenue opportunity for the hotel.

While we’re throwing out crazy ideas, how about this. Super basic iPhone / Android app for more rapid checkins. User launches the app upon arriving in new city, it uses GPS polling and tracking to following the soon to be guest and when they’re minutes away from the hotel a notification is sent to the front desk to prep check-in materials. User walks in, could likely be greeted by name…ushered into rapid checkin and is up to their room in short order. In a perfect world they wouldn’t even need to check in manually. They could checkin on the cab ride to the hotel, then use the phone to check in to the room they’re automatically assigned, using the iPhone to lock and unlock the door. Sound crazy? Well you can use your iPhone to unlock the doors to Zip Cars, no way this would be more difficult…longer term anyway.

It’s worth repeating that every one of these ideas of course surrounded by hotel branding and offers and also worth mentioning is the secondary affect all this user generated content would have on Organic Search results. Travel and hotel Adwords is unbelievably competitive and this would shortcut all that cost and power this site up through the rankings.

One last thing. I mention a fair amount above the idea of apps and while very technically what I am often referring to our dedicated app ideas, it’s really time for us all, myself included to start thinking of all these channels as simply data with different wrappers. Sure the iPhone requires App Store approved apps to be wrapped in a shell of application code. But all of the things above can and should be built more in the style of websites or mini-sites and then tweaked to run on a multitude of platforms. What i’m really getting at is availability and that can not be underestimated. The missing link between something being a tool and something changing our behaviour is its availability. Because availability is the thing that shifts it from being a tool to becoming a service, from being a tool to becoming something that changes our behaviour and in that behavioural change is a massive opportunity to market to current and potential customers.

I’m attaching an image I actual found today that sort of sparked this whole rant, one that wasn’t really asked for by anyone, but that I got rolling with and thought i’d share.