Exercise 1: Red Lion Hotels and Web 2.0

For Exercise 1, I decided to investigate Red Lion Hotels' use of social networking technologies.  I worked for this company for a time, and I know that they were beginning to encourage more customer feedback through the use of online surveys during my time there.  I also know that the company was having some other issues, and I was curious to see whether or not they had addressed these issues publicly, and whether they had continued their attempt to be more customer-friendly.

The first and most helpful technology I used was Social Mention.  There were many websites that mentioned the company, though not as many as there could have been.  They seemed to be mostly content created by the company itself, or by business directories and the like.  Red Lion Hotels updates Twitter and YouTube, but the posts seem to be aimed at employees for the most part, rather than at customers.

However, there was some user-generated content to see.  Most interesting was a former guest who had photo documented a sub-standard room at http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v459/jimmybobob79/Red%20Lion%20Hotel%20at%20the%20Park/.  There were also reviews on Yelp!, Trip Adviser, and other hotel and business review sites.

As far as I can tell, Red Lion Hotels has not attempted to respond to any of these user-generated complaints or compliments.  The company's Twitter account contains internal chatter, with a few promotional tweets thrown in.  It's Facebook page is practically nonexistent.  That is, it has a page, but the only information it contains is the Wikipedia description entry.  There are no posts, no discussions, and no apparent communication through that venue.

In my opinion, this company has not done particularly well in communicating with its customers.  A Google search does come up with mostly Red Lion promotional websites, but there is no apparent interaction with customers through these sites either.  If they want to improve their communication with customers, they should continue what they started with the surveys by gathering feedback through their social networking sites.