International Hotel, Motel + Restaurant Show 2010 (New York, NY)

I went down to the City last weekend for the International Hotel, Motel + Restaurant Show (IHMRS). It was a short but very productive trip. I did some sightseeing, observed the most updated trends from venders, and attended two seminars about social media. I gained quite a few interesting insights from both my personal experience and the panel discussions.

Standard Hotel Lobby @ Linchi Kwok Blog

For example, I just talked about how hotels and restaurants may need to create a full time position of monitoring online comments and reviews a few days ago. On Saturday, I gained the first hand experience myself as a customer. I was sitting in the Living Room (a lobby bar) at The Standard Hotel and “check-in” at my location via Twitter (@LinchiKwok) and Facebook. I tweeted: “Enjoying tea time in a lovely afternoon (@ The Standard Hotel).” A couple minutes later, The Standard Hotel re-tweeted my statement @NY_Places. This is a perfect example of how a hotel may monitor customers’ tweets. To think deeper, I believe the hotel may further engage me in Twitter by responding me with questions for more comments or feedback.

IHMRS 2010 @ Linchi Kwok Blog (1)

In IHMRS, panels discouraged hospitality professionals to send genetic messages through different social media channels, which is somewhat contradicting to my previous discussion on how to save time when using social media. Their argument is social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Bloggers target different audience. As a result, the messages sent through these channels need to be “personalized” and be specific to the right audience. I think the panels’ comments make sense. Actually, I also set up a Ping.fm account, but I seldom used it because I often post different yet cohesive messages on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. Ping.fm does not work very well for me.

IHMRS 2010 @ Linchi Kwok Blog (2)

Recently, I often discussed social media policy in this blog. I asked the panels for their thoughts on this topic. They feel that social media policy will be a hot topic and that companies may actually need a full time position to oversee the social media policy soon.

One disappointment from this IHMRS, however, is that I was not able to identify the “mobile trend” in the exhibition hall. The panels suggested that mobile technology will become a huge deal soon. I discussed mobile trend in my blog, but I did not see it yet in IHMRS.

If you also attended this year’s IHMRS, what trend(s) did you see? What is the most intriguing observation you want to share with us?

Interested to see more pictures about my trip, please visit my Facebook album via http://on.fb.me/a6rfza

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