The hotel chain Sheraton has caught the opportunity of using social media in their communication strategy. The Sheraton chain has launched in 2006, a new website : sheraton.com that now features Facebook connect.
Facebook users are now able to share their information and interact on sharaton.com.
In my opinion, this strategy generates a lot of advantages either for the Sheraton company itself but also for the customers.
First advantage, social media allows both the company and the customers to have a 2 way dialogue. Second advantage, which concerns customers, is that the creation of a community allows more transparency, trust and information. The members of a community can share their stories, their experience, their opinions, as well as their photos and their favorite destinations.
Finally, to my concern, the advantages for a company like Sheraton to use a social media strategy are multiple :
- It is a good way of communication and promotion for the company without making a lot of expenses as other medias require
- It permits to protect the brand image
- It gives feedback on customer's satisfaction
- It is an easier way to gain customer's loyalty
- It increases the linkability and generates traffic
- It increases the number of customers without prospecting them
For all those reasons, I find it interesting to learn more about social media, and make a short analysis of a real case study : sheraton.com.
As a conclusion, I would say that social media is really an efficient marketing tool, that I hope to use may be in my future career.
I think Sheraton here prooves its ability to adapt to an essential current trend: social networks. It's no more a useful tool for brands but an inevitable one. Sure, facebooking or twittering for a brand represents a risk but no communication is possible nowadays without it. Customers need transparency which seems to be a good thing to me. Indeed, I think this transparency leads brands to compeet on less superficial things than communications. Indeed, people twitter and Facebook their comments about brands' services; this means brands need to improve their services' quality.
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M.