By Ben Haber
Yesterday Marriott announced that they are ending their automatic free newspaper service for hotel guests, following a 25 percent drop in demand by their guests at a combine 2,500 hotels in the United States. The hotel’s announcement stated:
The company’s 30 million Marriott Rewards members will be able to update their online profiles and receive their preferred newspaper automatically. Guests who are not Rewards members will be asked for their preference at check-in. Guests will have a choice between USA TODAY, The Wall Street Journal, the local paper, or no paper.
While this isn’t a big change for hotel guests, many of whom are getting their news online, it can have a major affect on the environment and the newspapers:
- This new model can reduce carbon emissions by 10,350 tons a year (each newspaper is responsible for half pound of carbon dioxide).
- The move also reduces Gannett’s daily newspaper distribution by approximately 50,000 (a whopping 18 million newspapers every year).
The change comes after a 25-year partnership between Marriott and Gannett, where Marriott’s hotels distributed 1.3 million copies of Gannett’s newspapers daily – accounting for more than half of their 2.3 million paid circulation (as of September 2008). This is clearly a huge loss for Gannett that couldn’t come at a worse time.
April 14th, 2009
By Guest Author
A few days after I posted the succinctly titled “There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile“, B.L. Ochman posted “Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet” on the Ad Age DigitalNext blog.
Right up there at number 1:
“You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy. It’s a tactic, a tool, not a strategy.”
Now my post elicited some responses via Twitter (@sheldrake) questioning my definition of the word “strategy”. So for clarity… your social Web strategy is the long-term “how” that follows the “what” of your social Web objectives.
I also agree with number 2 on the Ad Age post… if “every tweet has to be approved by legal” then your organisation is not ready for the social Web let alone little old Twitter. (I’d also argue that you’re most likely not ready to do business in 2009!)
And at number 3, Ochman’s post picks up on the second issue teased out in my post, that of setting clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile. To paraphrase, herein lies the danger that Twitter is adopted for monologue rather than dialogue. But employed wisely as per my last post, with real people on hand to pick up on the conversation, the corporate Twitter profile can be an appropriate flag waver and conversation starter.
Of course, the social Web is about people, and not information technology. So it would be good to see Ad Age adopting so-called pretty URLs that people can understand than the incomprehensible ones they have today.
So rather than:
http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=135827
they ‘d have:
..//adage.com/digitalnext/top_10_reasons_your_company_probably_shouldnt_tweet
April 14th, 2009
