MindComet

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.

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Posted by Marcelle Turner on Mar. 05, 2010

Nailed It

Ask me what I think about my career and you’ll probably want to gag. I love my job, my team, my customers and my profession. (Sick, right?) I’d never go as far to say that I don’t have days that I want to lock the front door and move to The Netherlands to sell cheese, but it doesn’t take much to remind me why the tough days at work build character. This video is one example.

One of the most awesome aspects of working in marketing and advertising is the abundance of creativity and humor our industry produces for each other. Lawyers, doctors and used car salesmen all have their own inside jokes and so do we! The difference with peer-to-peer comedy in marketing, however, is that we have the tools, the technology and the copywriters to express ourselves at a whole different level.

I love this video for it’s honesty, especially the line about “taking it in house.“ And, as painfully truthful as these scenarios are, hard core business development wouldn’t be exciting if each opportunity didn’t come with a little negotiation and a few, “are you serious?“ moments! The next time I want to start brushing up on my Dutch, I’ll find a little humor like this and remind myself that we’re all in this together, and that $12 tacos will never replace our premium filets.

Video Source: PR Squared, a marketing and PR firm from Texas.