Hotel Seven Paris features 28
individually-designed rooms, including the 007 Suite pictured below
his company, World Independent Hotel Promotion (WIHP), used Facebook to drum up business for new lux- ury Hotel Seven Paris. In January 2010 hotelier Philippe
P
R consultant Martin Soler explains how
CASE STUDY THREE HOTEL
SEVEN PARIS
guests of the hotel. We launched the campaign on several channels – all social media-related. Facebook turned out to be the most productive channel so the efforts concentrated around that platform. Facebook
Vaurs presented us with his project – a luxury hotel in Paris with lots of gadg- ets and hi-tech facilities. We went over the sketches of the hotel and could see it was going to be something pretty special. Vaurs came to see us with one idea in mind – having a full hotel at the time of launch. After meeting with the hotel’s PR agency it was clear that getting lots of media for an unknown hotel still under construction was not going to work. The solution was clear – social media. WIHP already had experience in this
fi eld, as we’d worked on campaigns for other independent hotels such as the four star Hotel de l’Abbaye, also in Paris, and we put together a campaign to generate interest in Hotel Seven. The advantage of social media is
that we get to talk directly to the future ISSUE 2 2011 © cybertrek 2011
worked because we could create a community of fans. We could keep them updated with the progress of the hotel as it took shape and give them the inside information on the project. We treated them as privileged potential guests and made sure that whatever we did, they knew about it fi rst. Our main challenge was getting more people to the Facebook page. At fi rst the community was made up of our friends, and then friend of friends. It took a while to build it up, but because of the nature of the project and because we kept the page updated all the time, it started to work. We spoke about the hotel on blogs
and with hotel professionals. Each time we directed people to the Facebook page as a priority, then to the hotel’s webpage. After seven months of work we had 7,000 followers. Being market-
ers and hoteliers, we knew there was only one thing that counted at the end of the day though – hotel bookings. So we monitored the bookings and the number of people interested enough to visit the site. These statistics were vital, but because we were working with social media, the project required patience and the ability to listen to fol- lowers. We tracked that almost 25 per cent of the people booking on the hotel’s website had visited the Facebook page, and an average of one booking a day came from Facebook. Due to the increasing number of fol- lowers of Hotel Seven, the mainstream media started getting interested. We didn’t do any press releases ahead of the opening, but instead used the Facebook page as the only source of information about the hotel. Several media articles ran on the opening, which came directly from the Facebook page. Throughout, we ensured our fans were top priority for news. The hotel’s soft launch was in
August 2010 – which is very low sea- son in Paris – and it had 80 per cent occupancy. It nows runs at around 90 per cent occupancy.
www.wihphotel.com
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