Imagine you’re sitting at a pool bar at a hotel and you take a selfie with mojito in hand and place it on Instagram, saying, “What a grand way to celebrate my birthday.”
You then return to your room and find a dark chocolate walnut cake with a card from the hotel general manager, saying, “Happy Birthday.”
Happy surprise, right? Well, if Australia-based start-up, Local Measure, has its way, hoteliers around the world will be able to produce instant surprising and delightful moments for guests during their stay.
Their solution allows them to “surface local conversations happening at a location”, said Gary Spero, who’s responsible for rolling out their one-year-old product in Asia.
Gary Spero: Social conversation in Asia “off the charts”
It works across multiple industries but the company has since found that the sweet spot is in hospitality.
The founders of Local Measure actually started their business three years ago with a mobile consumer app called Roamz. The idea was “to make sense of social media noise and to show what people nearby were saying”.
In the process, they found that “people were more interested in what the customers were saying about them”.
Given the Roamz model was hard to monetise, they changed course a year ago to the current B2B model.
“We were in love with Roamz, we had 300,000 users globally but selling that as a local ad platform was hard. The lesson we learnt – don’t get too emotionally tied to an idea,” said Spero.
“As you grow the business, you start to understand the market, and when you listen to customers, you realise what you built has value. You just have to focus on the business environment.
“It’s essentially the same platform but we rebranded and added new features and aimed it at people who are willing pay.”
Accor Hotels is one of its customers in Australia and the group is also testing it in a few properties in Asia. Spero, who moved to Singapore a couple of months ago, said it was working with three other groups in Australia and talking to two in the city state.
“By listening to the location markers, we find conversations that are relevant to the general manager,” he said. “It helps with service recovery as well creating delightful moments for the guests while they are inhouse.”
It also picks up on influencers. “For example, someone with 500 followers, we will direct their conversations to the marketing team.”
The product is available on a subscription fee, based on the number of locations.
Local Measure picks up only content that is displayed as public. “People have selected to share it and attach their location as well,” said Spero.
I posted this on Instagram when staying at Pullman Central Park Jakarta – but didn’t get a visit from Betty Poop.
The biggest silo of content is Instagram, followed by Facebook. “The heavy social and mobile usage in Singapore lends itself well to the business. The amount of social conversation in markets like Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia is off the charts compared to Australia.”
Asked if a hotel could be flooded with conversations, Spero said a typical hotel would get about 9-10 pieces of content a day while a bigger hotel may get 100 pieces.
Local Measure, which is backed by a public company in Australia and individual investors, raised its first round of funding, A$3.2 million, in 2011. The second tranche of funding, late last year, was not disclosed.
It is now expanding in Asia. It will use Singapore as its base and have a small team based in the Philippines.
The concern of course is what happens when customers catch on to this and start posting with the expectation of getting favours? Or they start saying, “If you don’t give me this, I will post it on Instagram”? Or when delightful moments become an expectation?
Oh well, that’s another problem to be dealt with when the time comes.
