Digital engagement is about connecting with people on the digital channels that they are using anyway. In this TV show Lennert De Jong of CitizenM discusses using social media as a platform for better customer relations.

Digital engagement VS call centres

First of all, we don’t see really social media as a thing it’s a reflection of how well you do. It’s a channel. You know people can pick up the telephone or they put it on Twitter, I do it myself every day. If I want to communicate with my cable company at home I need to wait for a call centre, 29 people in front of me, I go on Twitter, because I don’t first of all need to wait, and they come back to me and take it a bit more serious. So we realise we always perform with the curtains open and that’s what Social Media is about. It’s a channel so you need to listen to it, you need to take it serious and it’s not just, you know, we don’t have PR people dealing with social media, we have real people dealing with real people through different channels.

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Hospitality careers are more varied now than they were 20 years ago, as Michael Devereux of Starwood Hotels & Resorts discusses in this TV show.

Hospitality careers now include design, technology and PR

The industry has become a lot more evolved as far as being a hotelier is concerned. You know in the days of being a hotelier where you become either a chef or a front office manager or a food and beverage manager, those were the three key fundamental sort of ladder positions that you could climb in the industry. Looking at the global market now there are jobs within the industry that are so exciting from a marketing perspective, PR, feasibility for instance. I mean you have universities in the world that are training guys in feasibility aspects to become real business leaders from a financial point of view in the industry and not just your chef and your front office type of manager. So it was either a rooms division path that you followed or you followed a food and beverage path. Nowadays there are so many more aspects to where you can get involved, technology is a huge part. Design, you know, there’s universities in America that are teaching youngsters how to design hotels. So it’s not just the operational, it’s how to set a, asset management is another one. It’s one thing opening a hotel but to manage that asset for the benefit of either the owner or the operator, that makes it cost effective, that’s a huge task. And they’re teaching youngsters in the world now how to do that. The Hospitality Channel will continue to follow discussions about the joys and challenges of hospitality careers.