Yesterday we wrote about Ritz Carlton’s adoption of Foursquare as a means for sharing concierge tips. Their commitment to adding content to the social platform is a strong example of the increasing importance of branded content as a means for reaching consumers, but as more brands go social it’s integration that will separate the winners from the laggards.
The problem of integration exists today across all platforms amongst a surprising number of luxury brands. In a surprising number of cases, brands neglect even the simplest points of social integration, including creating links from brand sites to social media profiles. The time has come for marketers to get these simple points of integration right, and the next step in social for business will have more to do with innovation.
In this first generation of social media integration for business, Ritz Carlton is succeeding through the compelling creation of content on social platforms like Foursquare. Their new World Concierge service is a perfect example of this, but the next generation of integration will take the data on social platforms and replicate it in the luxury space.
Imagine the strength of a spinning globe that lives on the Ritz Carlton site and tracks Foursquare followers as they check in to concierge recommended spots across the world. Every featured check in would showcase the popularity of concierge recommendations, but above all, this kind of integration could effectively filter all the right data to pull prestige away from their fear of off-brand communications so that content exists both on social platforms and in luxury ecosystems.
Developers have spent the last couple years laying the pipeline for social interaction but in the next generation the most successful marketers will figure out how to take this engagement and data to the next step and carry it into our environments of luxury.