My feedback from the Webinar Influencers vs Advocates

1. Influencers VS Advocates
Webinar Online Session
Louis Villeroy de Galhau MBA 2A

2. Key new concepts learned from the Webinar Materials ?
Through this Webinar, the key concepts I learned are:
-Advocates: A guest who supports or promotes the interests of a specific hotel or
the experience they lived there. They are loyal to your brand, they trust you to the
point they recommend you. In other words, they are free marketing agents.
-Influencers: One level below the advocates, they still share their experience on the web
and therefore are perceived as Individuals who have the power to affect purchase
decisions of others because of their previous experience. The difference is that they are not as attached as the
advocates to the hotel and therefore their impact is more a “short term” impact.
-Guest Love: In order to understand what do the guests love, the hotel have a large panel of options. Between the
Marketing strategy, the different technologies to boost the guest experiences and the digital tools to get more
feedbacks. It is very important to analyze what the guests love in order to find the best way to please them and turn
them from Influencers to Advocates. The numbers of possibilities to reach this is huge but the reason is the key to
success.

3. How much does it impact the Hotel and the Sector?
It is really important for the hotel to keep this in mind because the benefits are real and fast to get. Here is a small list
of how much it can benefits on hotel:
-Improving the revenue generated from happy guests
-Improving the visibility and therefore the range of customers
-Getting more DATA about the guests and therefore
-Boost the guests experience by understanding them better
-Turn more guests loyal / beating the competitors
The process is so important for the sector that once one start analyzing it, the others will have to adapt and do the
same otherwise one hotel will outstand the others. The first reason is simple but sufficient, a hotel is a business and
the main goal of one business is to extend it’s profit and revenue. Having advocates generates more revenue than
just influencers customers.

4. Improving the quality of Guest’s experience ?
From the Webinar, we analyzed different advices for the hotels to get customers talking and shaping the hotel’s
E-reputation. One of the main purpose of this is to attract as much as people as possible on the first hand and then
slowly but surely switching them from influencers to advocates. But at first, the influencers are still better than
nothing. If the hotel is focus into attracting those customers, the one who are active online, the hotel can then :
-Understand better the essential needs from its customer in order to make those information more visible if needed
-Encourage the guests to express themselves, therefore adapting to the worldwide trend of communication
-Avoid the guest’s frustration if they can express themselves
-Improve the communication between influencers & advocates so that one can become the other
-Boost the image & reputation of the hotel
-Taking this opportunity to promote the hotel in its all

5. For new resources
The new ressources is from the website “Convince&convert” in an article named “Social Media Influencers versus
Brand Advocates Infographic”.
It’s a website about the customer service and that analyze the impact of the different strategies between the different
types of guests.
One quote I really like and that summarized it all is “The biggest
issue is that we tend to confuse audience with influence.
Having a lot of Twitter followers doesn’t give you the power
to drive action, it gives you the power to drive awareness.
Those are different abilities with unequal degrees of
usefulness, just like the power to fly (Superman) is better
than the power to swim fast and talk to fish (Aquaman).”