Mar05
marketing, branding, value, corporate
Marriott: On The Move and Embracing New Media
http://news.marriott.com/
It’s no secret that I am a Marriott Brand loyalist. As a former employee and a family member of a current employee, my experiences with Marriott both as an associate and an guest have guided many of my customer services interactions. The organization taught me about what it means to provide “an experience”, the value of individual empowerment, and what it feels like to love your career.
In my current role I am often tasked with guiding my client partners to examples of other companies who lead in the field of interactive marketing. Marriott’s newly-launched “News Center” is very well-executed example of the marriage between corporate communications, social media, and consumer information. The difference in this type of news room verses a traditional “press” section of a corporate site is that it doesn’t make an assumption about who the user is. This style of news room treats all personas equally and allows for consumption of content in the media that the user chooses.
• Have a tech-heavy journalist visiting the site? There are digital media kits, interactive blogs, and a tag cloud to share the most current topics and help them write the story.
• Have investment banker interested in the brand? There are easy links to twitter feeds and RSS subscriptions, and information about the company’s culture and commitment to community available to keep them in the know.
• Have a mommy-blogger looking for content for her post about her dream vacation to Aruba? There are blog posts about Marriott’s top-rated hotels and links to executive chefs’ regional recipes to get her excited.
The point of approaching a news room in this manner is abandoning the assumption that visitors to this news site need advanced segmentation to ensure effectively communication. To the contrary, visitors who choose to visit the news section of a corporate site are already looking for information. Smart news and public relations marketers organize news content by topic to allow the visitor to choose their content and media type while exposing them to other topics of importance to the company. Did you know that Marriott has a Five-Point Environmental Strategy aimed at helping to protect the rainforests? Neither did I until I visited the News Center!
There is still room for improvement with Marriott’s News Center, (for example the “investor relations” link re-directs to an older design that looses the global navigation), but all-in-all I applaud Marriott for taking a big step forward in their communication efforts.
Posted by Marcelle Turner on Mar. 05, 2010