Business and Blogging

Starwood Hotels and Resorts: A Visit To theLobby.com

by Laura Spencer on February 21st, 2008

This is another in our ongoing series of corporate blogs. Previously, we’ve taken a look at the Kodak blogs and the General Motors blog.

Liz outlined our criteria for reviewing blogs on her post, Business Blogs: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Today, we’re going to examine theLobby.com, which is the blog for the Starwood Hotels & Resorts chain. The purpose of theLobby.com, as stated in the blog’s sidebar, is in part: To help keep Starwood Preferred Guests updated on the latest travel trends…“

This blog boasts an impressive team of over 14 different writers.

The one thing that I noticed right away when I visited theLobby.com is that the readers don’t seem to participate here. Although there was at least one post for each business day, when I went back and looked at an entire month’s worth of posts I didn’t see a single comment. The lack of comments made me wonder if anyone even reads this blog.

If the blog isn’t attracting readers, one reason might be because it’s fairly difficult to find. I went to the Starwood Hotels corporate web page and couldn’t find a single link to their blog. Nor is there a link to the blog from Starwood’s reservations site. To be fair, if you type “Starwood Hotels blog” into Google, this blog is the first result that you get. So, if you knew in advance that the company had a blog, then you might have a chance at finding it. Otherwise, you’d probably never know about it.

I could be wrong, but this looks to me like a blog that has been created by a marketing department in typical marketing style. The posts read a bit like snippets from a travel brochure, rather than like a usual blog post. In addition, the posts are organized in an unusual fashion for a blog - topically rather than in reverse chronological order. I did find a calendar archive that allowed me to look at all of the blog posts in the current month (February), but I couldn’t find a way to go back and look at a specific date’s post from a prior month.

BusinessandBlogging rates theLobby.com in the Fair category. The Breakdown is below.

On a scale of 1-10

• Ease of Finding: 5 - The blog isn’t impossible to find, but you’d almost have to know that it existed before you could find it.

• Frequency: 9 - theLobby.com bloggers post at least once on every business day.

• Engaging Writing: 8 - These posts read like pages from a travel brochure. While they are well-written, there’s no sense of personality here.

• Relevant: 8 - Again, there seems to be a lack of the “inside scoop” about travel that one would expect to find on a travel blog.

• Focused: 8 - theLobby.com never deviates from talking about travel.

• Honest: 8 - It’s difficult to make this determination, but the information presented seemed to be accurate.

• Interactive: 5 - There’s no interaction here. This blog needs a community. I did award a few points because they have their comments open.

• Responsive: 5 - Since there were no comments, there was no opportunity for theLobby.com to demonstrate how responsive it is to its readers.

We’ve also given theLobby.com an extra 5 bonus points for their integration of YouTube videos into their blog posts.

Overall, the Starwood Hotels & Resorts blog, theLobby.com, scored a total of 61 out of 80 possible points.

Personally I think building a community would greatly help this blog. With a huge team of writers, there’s obviously a lot of effort that goes into this blog. Now they need to get it in front of their intended audience. One way to do this would be to start with links from the corporate site and to include the blog URL on their communications with customers.

I do, however, want to give Starwood a nod for recognizing the importance of business blogs and for dedicating so many resources to theirs. Just by having a blog, they are already ahead of those companies which have yet to adopt blogging as part of their corporate strategy.

For another opinion about theLobby.com, you can read this piece from Joe Lichtenberg, which includes theLobby.com in its look at travel industry participation in social media.

If you were going to give advice to theLobby.com blog, what would it be? How would you have rated this particular corporate blog?

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POSTED IN: Corporate, Reviews