Social Media Marketing is all about making connections. Making connections with potential clients, current clients and clients after the fact. We recently had a social media success turn into a failure on the part of the hotel. On one of our hotel marketing Facebook pages, we had a future guest reach out to the hotel by saying that they tried to contact the hotel by phone to try and get a nice gift basket put in a room for the bride and groom that were getting married at the property. The phone conversation efforts seemed to fall short with little to no response by the front desk team. The first failure on the part of the hotel.

The person then reached out with a Facebook page comment looking for some help. We saw the message and within and hour sent this to the sales team and had a reply to the person within two hours. The guest was very appreciative and full of praise for the response and the quick action that was to be taken to satisfy the guest’s request. The sales person gave their name and assurance that this request would be handled personally beyond satisfaction.

I am sure you can see where this is going. The big days comes and the request was not followed through with by the sales person. The displeasure of the guest was completely justified as were the remarks posted on the Facebook page and Tripadvisor.

When you get the opportunity to exceed guests expectations, you simply can not fall short in the guest service industry. In today’s social media world, it became a public failure. 237 people saw the post before we were asked to take it down.

How could we as the social media marketing company helped the situation? We could have marked this down on our own calendars and reminded ourselves and the sales person that the request needs to be completed. We ourselves could have gone above and beyond to ensure guest satisfaction. It is all about making the final connection.