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Often, we think of our offline lives as distinct from our online presence, but social media is real life. Look no further than the hotels you stay in, the restaurants where you dine, the airlines you fly on and the theme parks you take your family to for proof. More often than not, there’s a Twitter and Facebook account — possibly even a Foursquare presence — behind the venue in question.

Because social media is a platform for the customer’s voice — and that voice can be heard by anyone in the world — the hospitality industry as a whole has embraced social media in a huge way.

Hospitality businesses of all sizes — from the biggest hotel chain to the little neighborhood cafe — have found their own unique way to harness the power of Facebook and the distribution possibilities made available via Twitter.

Personalizing Customer Service

Customer service is the most obvious way for the hospitality industry to use social media, and Twitter is the perfect vehicle for resolving customer issues or making a guest’s day with a simple “thanks for visiting” tweet.

But the best in the business are going above and beyond in the customer service arena. For example, the Wynn Las Vegas and Encore hotels use social media sites like Twitter and Foursquare to improve their customer service efforts and better meet the needs of their guests.

As the E-strategy Development Manger for the hotels, Jade Bailey makes sure that her team greets and caters to guests who check in there on Foursquare or tweet about being somewhere on the property, both on social sites and in person. The team has also seeded Foursquare with numerous tips inside the hotel, enlightening guests on the fascinating stories behind some of the more lustrous decorative embellishments.

Smaller businesses are going the extra mile as well. CoffeeGroundz — an independent coffee shop in Houston, Texas — uses Twitter as a way to make its customer service more personalized than its bigger competitors.

The store’s general manager is credited with making CoffeeGroundz one of the first businesses to take to-go orders via Twitter, an effort that began in October 2008. In addition to to-go orders, the boutique coffee spot now also accepts table and event reservations via direct message on Twitter.

Storytelling

At the Roger Smith Hotel in New York, social media has become immersed within the hotel’s unique culture. At its core, the Roger Smith Hotel is about storytelling — with a focus on art and people — and social media has become the way in which the hotel can share these stories and create new ones.

In fact, Brian Simpson, the hotel’s director of hospitality, says that while the hotel certainly attempts to connect the dots between social media and sales, ROI is not the focus of the team’s social endeavors. “We’re less concerned about how many rooms are booked because of social media, and more focused on telling stories and connecting people … you can’t pay a marketing firm to make those connections.”

It’s this type of open thinking that keeps The Roger Smith at the forefront of the social media curve.

Simpson primarily relies on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the hotel blog to distribute and collect stories, but also recognizes the value of location-centric social networks like Foursquare and Pegshot. He approaches each social site with a different strategy, saying, “We take all of these stories and figure out which social media networks support them best.”

Simpson points to an event back in 2009 as a catalyst for some of its creativity. The artsy hotel then hosted a Social Media Breakfast, which led to interest from other social media and web groups, and ultimately inspired Simpson to actively immerse himself in the social media culture.

Because The Roger Smith is independent, Simpson found ways to bend the rules for groups and startups, making the hotel inviting to all types of social media event organizers. For Simpson, exposure is key and hosting these events helps get the hotel’s name out there. Today, the hotel is essentially the social media-friendly hotel of New York; events are booked for each night of the week and its become the official hotel of many a New York web conference.

“We’ve made social media a part of the hotel,” says Simpson. “If we stopped doing social media, the culture wouldn’t change, but the stories that get told about us would change, and that would change the perception of the hotel.”

With storytelling at the center of everything the Roger Smith does online and off, Simpson is also looking for the next great way to engage current and potential guests. He says, “now that everyone’s on Twitter, and everyone has a Facebook Page, our objective is to find out what’s next and stay ahead of the curve.”

The hotel is also being extremely avant garde with its approach to installation art. They’ve commandeered an art studio on Lexington Avenue outside the hotel and turned it into an experimental space where art meets social media. The space is dubbed the RS Pop-Up Shop, or RS POP, and it’s open to up-and-coming designers and artists who want to showcase their work with social media flair.

Each selected RS POP participant is heavily supported with social media exposure, so artists and designers are featured both in the art studio and online via the hotel’s social media channels.

Disclosure: The Roger Smith Hotel has hosted Mashable events.

Making Good with Mom

Mom is a very important person in the hospitality space. She books the hotels, makes travel arrangements and handles most of the money matters. Mom is often the decision maker for the family.

As the former Vice President, Public Relations/New Media at Universal Orlando Resort, Cynthia Gordon developed The Universal Mom Squad to make Mom’s experience at the park second to none.

Gordon says, “Hands down the best way to reach moms is online and through mom bloggers. Let’s face it, mom bloggers are a full-fledged Internet phenomenon. You have 42 million women online, with nearly half of those visiting blogs to get advice and recommendations. Mom bloggers have powerful voices and their opinions are valued by their readers.”

She credits Disney for its social media outreach efforts saying it “took the lead in courting mom bloggers and inviting them to experience their parks’ new attractions and services.”

Gordon is referencing the Walt Disney World Moms Panel — 43 hand-picked moms, and a few dads in the mix — who serve as online advisers and help answer park-related questions on behalf of Walt Disney World. The moms answer submitted questions and the inquisitive can browse through topics, search for answers, submit their own question or learn more about the panel. The program started in 2008 and new moms are added to the group each year.

Another hospitality brand catering to moms is the Royal Caribbean International cruise line. The company recently took the opportunity to invite a group of moms participating in the weekly hashtag Twitter event #gno (Girls Night Out) aboard its Oasis of the Seas cruise ship to host one of its Twitter parties while at sea.

The moms aboard the ship engaged with other moms the world round, spreading the message that cruise vacations are ideal for fun, family travel — there’s no cooking, cleaning or child care concerns to worry about. As the host, Royal Caribbean was a part of the thousands of tweets generated during the two-hour Twitter party.

Employee Education

Often, social media is siloed to an individual department. This situation sets the customer up for failure. Imagine an eager customer — aware of a company’s social media presence — who ventures out in the real-world and encounters employees with zero knowledge of their own company’s Twitter account or Facebook Page. The end result defeats the entire purpose of social media.

If social media is on the menu, then everyone from the doorman and the bartender to the CEO should know about it. Those in the know should make it a point to educate staff on their own social media presence and promotions, as well as encourage employees to embrace social technologies for their own personal use.

Simpson says this is what helps set the Roger Smith Hotel apart from its bigger competitors. He works with his social media partner Adam Wallace to maintain the Roger Smith accounts, but the two of them have also prioritized educating the hotel’s 100+ member staff. Together, they’ve inspired nearly a quarter of the team to take up tweeting by teaching them that it’s just about conversation.

As such, one of the hotel’s bartenders has developed his own following on Twitter. Simpson says that often the bartender will tweet while working his shift and even offer to pick up a drink for the first few patrons who stop by.

In connecting the dots between social media, management and staff, the hotel can ensure that guests’ expectations are superseded, and not deflated, when they walk in the door.

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Tags: business, coffeegroundz, disney, facebook, foursquare, MARKETING, real results, roger smith hotel, royal caribbean, small business, social media, social media marketing, twitter

Rick Burnes leads the content production team at HubSpot, a marketing software firm that produces the Inbound Marketing Blog and Inbound Marketing University.

Chances are, most of the businesses you interact with as a consumer are on social media. Your local restaurant is blogging, your grocery store is on Twitter — even your favorite candy is on Facebook. Companies in mainstream, consumer-facing industries are all over social media.

But how about other businesses? Manufacturers? B2B service providers? Equine dentists? Are they experimenting with social media?

You bet. Here are five examples, all at different stages of their experiments, and all indicating the breadth of business use of social media. 

1. Equine Dentist Builds Relationships With Facebook

How do you turn a regional service business into an international destination for industry thought leadership?

Facebook.

At least that’s what worked for Geoff Tucker, an equine dentist based in Palm City, FL.

In a business driven by relationships, Geoff says that Facebook allows him to build new ones. “People do business with people who they’re friends with. Period,” he says. “And Facebook is a great way to get to know people. It allows people to see that I’m a person.”

As he builds these relationships using social media, Geoff is also expanding his company’s reach. He says it was his blog, his Twitter feed, and his Facebook account that helped him win appearances on Horse Talk Radio and HorseGirl.tv.

So what’s this done for his business? Geoff says that over the last year, Facebook alone has generated about 100 leads and 10-to-15 customers.

2. Steel Building Manufacturer Taps New Verticals

As a manufacturer of prefabricated steel buildings, SteelMaster was initially hesitant to get involved in social media.

“It’s steel buildings,” explains Michelle Wickum, director of marketing for the Norfolk, VA company. “How is that going to tie to Facebook? It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but when we looked at the growth in Facebook and social media, we felt we had to get our arms around it.”

About a year ago, SteelMaster put its first toe into the social media water. The company discovered two important applications for their business. First, they found that Facebook is an excellent way to post pictures of customers’ steel buildings. Not only do the pictures engage existing customers — they also demonstrate to prospective customers the range of uses for SteelMaster buildings. “Photography for us is the hook,” Michelle explains.

Perhaps more importantly, SteelMaster found that social networks like Twitter and Facebook gives it exposure to and create demand in specific verticals where it previously had little traction. Chicken farmers and woodworkers don’t typically think to use steel buildings, but when friends and colleagues share pictures of their SteelMaster buildings on Twitter and Facebook, the farmers and woodworkers become interested.

3. Full Social Media Integration for Marketing Paint

Idea Paint is a Boston-area startup that sells paint that turns surfaces into dry-erase boards. The company uses social media throughout its sales and marketing process.

The company blog, where employees publish videos, images and stories of product installations, is the hub of Idea Paint’s social media activity. The company uses Twitter and Facebook to share content published on the blog — then to listen to, respond to, and interact with the community that content engages.

Marcus Wilson, Idea Paint’s head of marketing, says this system gives the company a level of customer intimacy and global reach and that was unheard of 10 years ago.

What’s this mean in terms of business results? Social media is now one of Idea Paint’s largest sources of leads and traffic — and it is growing steadily. Meanwhile, the company’s Twitter and Facebook reach grew 70% in Q1 2010, and is expected to grow an order of magnitude in Q2.

Idea Paint produced this video on their social media strategy, exclusively for Mashable readers:

4. Integrating Twitter Into the Paper Selling Process

One year ago, the marketing team at Neenah Paper, a manufacturer of high-quality paper products, confronted a growing problem: It was becoming harder and harder to reach new potential customers. Their traditional channels — phone conversations and in-person meetings — were not working as well. Prospects were tuning them out.

Jamie Saunders, Neenah’s marketing communications manager, noted that most of the company’s potential customers — designers, graphic artists and printers — were spending their time in front of their computers, and that social media could be a way to better engage them.

So Neenah took a step into the social media world. While the experiment started with Neenah’s marketing team, its sales team was one of the biggest beneficiaries. They discovered they could do prospecting and nurturing via Twitter. Today the company has 10 sales representatives across the country using their personal Twitter accounts on behalf of Neenah to close new business.  

Jamie says these sales reps are finding that social media is simply a more effective way of engaging with their prospects. “It’s an invitation to have a conversation. You’re getting permission to have a conversation — a conversation that used to happen in person.”

5. Leading the Online Aviation Maintenance Discussion

In November 2008, a handful of auto executives flew their private planes to Washington, DC to testify before Congress in support of federal aid for their industry. This perception of corporate excess created an outcry, and the private aviation industry’s image was damaged.

At that time, aircraft maintenance and support company Duncan Aviation had just started using social media. The company discovered that the new medium could be a way to positively shape the conversation — to add its perspective and improve the industry’s damaged reputation.

Beth Humble, now Duncan’s social media lead, explains that while social media is an important part of Duncan’s strategy, the company doesn’t aspire to create a Comcast- or Coke-like presence on the social web. Instead, the goal is simply to influence the right people.

“There are a lot of industry people that we network with that are on Twitter: Journalists, other aviation bloggers, and industry and media outlets,” Beth explains. “If you connect with the right few people, you can really get in there and connect with thousands of people.”

More business resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Market Your Small Business With No Budget
- 13 Essential Tips for Landing a Job on LinkedIn
- How Venture Capitalists are Using Social Media for Real Results
- Why Co-Working Makes Sense for Small Businesses
- What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, FANDER09

Tags: business, facebook, List, Lists, small business, social media, social media marketing, trending, twitter

Leyl Master Black is a Managing Director at Sparkpr, one of the world’s top independent PR agencies. Leyl has more than 15 years experience driving high-impact communications programs for emerging technology companies.

A couple of months ago, we talked about ways to engage your fan base on Facebook. Several readers asked how B2B companies could take advantage of the tips we shared, and I know that some organizations are still wondering if it even makes sense to try to reach a business audience on Facebook.

In my view, Facebook presents a unique opportunity to connect with and educate your target market in a way that your website and even your blog can’t match. The trick is coming up with meaningful content that people will want to share, and that brings them back again and again.

Here are some tips for creating a powerful presence on Facebook that will engage a business audience.

1. Become an Industry Resource

Whatever business you’re in, chances are that you’re keeping up with industry news and maybe even writing about it on your blog. You’re likely running educational webinars or speaking at industry conferences. You’re also engaging with customers, helping to solve their business problems and maybe even documenting the process with case studies. This means that you probably already have a large number of resources to share. Why not funnel this content onto Facebook and make your Page the go-to place for insights and information on your particular industry?

A good example of this approach is 360i, an award-winning digital marketing agency. Tapping the deep expertise of its team, 360i keeps its Facebook Page updated with industry insights on topics that matter to the brand marketing audience, such as how businesses are taking advantage of Google Places or new trends with Foursquare.

The 360i team showcases industry research and reviews cool new technologies that marketers can use in their programs. They post a weekly summary of all the important industry news, and provide readers with astute commentary that puts the news into context. In short, they’ve positioned themselves as experts in digital marketing and become a valuable resource for their target audience on Facebook.

2. Engage the Community

In the past, your customers may have had little interaction with each other, and the outside world could only see a list of customers on your website (if you put them there). As a marketer, you wouldn’t know what all your customers were doing with your products, or even how to reach them.

Now, you can use Facebook to engage directly with your customers and make them part of your marketing efforts. For example, you can ask customers to share their successes on your wall and get feedback on new product features. You can encourage them to recognize great service people and reward them for their input with a discount or other promotion. You can also solicit customer references for case studies and media opportunities and find out who’s doing something innovative with your product.

BigCommerce, a company that offers e-commerce shopping cart software, routinely reaches out to its Facebook fan base to identify reference customers and uncover interesting use cases for the media. For example, when the company wanted to promote the success of its recently launched Facebook shopping application, they simply posted a query on their page asking which customers had seen a boost in sales from the application and who would be willing to talk to the media. Within 24 hours, the company had generated fifteen new customer references and were able to immediately turn this information into media coverage.

3. Expand Beyond Your Wall

There are now a host of different applications for Facebook that let you do more than post on your wall. If you’re selling B2B products online, you can set up a shopping tab on your page to drive traffic to your e-commerce site and encourage viral sharing of your products. Get Satisfaction, a popular social CRM and customer support platform, recently launched a Facebook version of its application so your customers can ask questions and get support right on your Facebook Page.

You can also set up a promotions tab using Fan Appz to offer special deals to your Facebook fans and even use these deals to support lead generation programs. For example, if you sell software licenses, you could offer a 20% discount on the annual fee for people who enter the promotion code at an upcoming webinar or bring the coupon to your booth at a conference.

4. Lighten Up

While many of us use Facebook in our day-to-day business, the vast majority are usually there to have fun and engage with friends. So no matter how serious your product is, inject some humor and levity into your page.

For example, if you’re selling enterprise security software, why not do a poll where people rate the most evil tech baddies in films like Hackers and The Terminator? If you’re a marketing agency, you could do a “Which Mad Men Character Are You?” quiz that assigns users an identity based on their answers, which can then be shared with their friends. Just keep it relevant to your industry and safe-for-work.

And even if your website needs to stay “all business,” Facebook is where you can give a face and personality to the company. You could do an “employee of the month” feature on the page where you profile someone who’s making a big difference at the company or who achieved a significant milestone. Include photos or even a short video.

You can highlight what the company or employees are doing in the community or in support of a particular cause, which has the added benefit of putting the weight of your fan base behind these efforts. You can also consider posting behind-the-scenes photos of engineers hard at work on the next product release, or a smiling customer service rep on the phone with a client. All of these ideas will help your fans make a stronger and more personal connection with your company.

These are just a few examples of how companies can use Facebook to engage with B2B customers, and I’m sure there are many more out there. If you’re using Facebook to market to other businesses, I’d love to hear what else has worked for you!

More business resources from Mashable:

- 10 Essential Social Media Tools for B2B Marketers
- 13 Essential Social Media Lessons for B2B Marketers from the Masters
- How Venture Capitalists are Using Social Media for Real Results
- Why Co-Working Makes Sense for Small Businesses
- What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business

Tags: b2b, business, facebook, List, Lists, MARKETING, small business, social media marketing

Ocean Lakes is an example of a good way to leverage a brand’s Facebook Fan Page fans: with a weekend apreciation event. Of course, it helps that Ocean Lakes is one of the largest East Coast family campgrounds, so they have the venue down, though the sentiment is brilliant.

What better way to increase your brand value with Facebook Fan Page fans than by throwing them an “appreciation” event that leverages your assests. That’s what Ocean Lakes, a family campground in Myrtle Beach, S.C., is doing, just in time for spring break. The campground is thanking their fans by holding a weekend long event that starts this Friday, Apr 16th, and runs through Sunday.

The event is also a celebration of the campground’s first anniversary of creating their Facebook Fan Page, which now has over 13,000 fans. Ocean Lakes’ PR person, Barb Krumm, points out that “[c]ampers are very social people,” and they love to form new friendships. As she further points out, that’s rather fitting for camping event based around social media. The event will be live-streamed on video, and pictures and polls will be posted as well. Non-attendee fans will still be included in prize drawings, and can vote on videos and photos of the event.

Have you used Facebook to promote your business in similar way? Let us know in the comments.

Social media marketing platform company Vitrue has determined that the average value of a Facebook ‘fan’ is about $3.60 in equivalent media each year. This calculation is based on having one million Fan Page fans, and is not weighted for brand recognition.

In some figures published in AdWeek, Vitrue revealed how they determined this per-fan value. They made their findings based on the aggregated fans of their client base for their Wall Apps Facebook applications, which is part of their SRM (Social Relationship Manager) software suite. Collectively, Vitrue’s clients have 41M Facebook Fan Page fans. Their study results show that companies with a fan base of 1M find an average return of $3.60 per fan in the form of “equivalent media,” spread out over a year.

The numbers work like this. If a brand posts to their Facebook Fan Page twice a day and have a million fans, that’s 60M impressions per month in the collective “news feed”. Vitrue used a figure of $5 CPM (Cost per Mille, aka Cost per thousand impressions), so 60M impressions would result in $300K/month of media value. I.e., what the brand might have to spend elsewhere to get the same eyeballs. That $300K /month is $3.6M/ year, meaning that with 1M fans, the average value is $3.6 per fan.

These numbers are just averages, but the general statistic is important to those who need to measure social media metrics. Brand notoriety seems to play a part in whether all companies realize the $3.60/ Facebook fan value, or go above or beyond. E.g., a popular brand might get additional impressions from the Facebook news feed, partly because of fans sharing information with friends.

If you want to learn more about Facebook Page-related promotion opportunities, have a listen to our sister site MediaBistro’s podcast interview with Vitrue CEO Reggie Bradford, from early Mar 2010.