Langham Place Goes Social With New Mobile and Pinterest Platforms
Hong Kong's Langham Place is reportedly the first brand to create short films produced on the iPhone 4S.
Hong Kong's Langham Place is reportedly the first brand to create short films produced on the iPhone 4S.
Innovation can come from anywhere, not just the United States. Hong Kong’s Langham Place is reportedly the first brand to create short films produced on the iPhone 4S leveraging social media and mobile platforms aimed at artistic and creative tech savvy professionals.
The campaign, My Way My Place, went live on Wednesday following a film premiere attended by reporters and bloggers. Attendees were given a movie ticket at the entrance of the event, featuring a QR code to scan and visit the new iOS mobile site of the short films via their smartphones.
In addition to a dedicated campaign site, Langham connected with its consumers on a variety of social channels from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and China’s Youku, Weibo, as well as the up and coming visual site Pinterest.
Sean Seah, VP e-business, loyalty and partner marketing at Langham Hospitality Group said the key challenge of the campaign was to create a global campaign in a non-traditional short film format that was filmed on a brand new mobile platform using non-traditional social media platforms.
“The combination of all these elements have made the project challenging and yet exciting to work on and work through to completion,” he added.
So how does he benchmark success for this campaign?
Awareness, connection, and conversion – this relates to how many people hear about Langham through the campaign, how many connect with the brand by watching the films and sharing them, and finally how many choose to stay at their hotels as a result.
Although the former Zuji exec joined Langham Place in 2009, it is only recently that the hospitality group rolled out a viral video campaign. No thanks to being known in the market for doing it badly previously.
Below is a Q&A with Seah about how his team received buy-in from management to launch the current My Way My Place campaign.
Sean Seah: Process. We learned that to succeed in social media we needed to change the creative process by which we used to develop the films. We made sure that in this current project we were able to secure the buy-in of as many of the key stakeholders as possible.
Power. We learned that social media is a powerful platform that we must pro-actively manage to ensure success online.
Persevere. We learned that even though you make mistakes, we must learn to persevere and learn and improve and do better the next time.
ClickZ.asia: How do you balance performance-based conversions and branding efforts on the social platforms?
Seah: For a growing brand like Langham, it is very important to invest in brand awareness to ensure that we are on the customers’ shopping list. Social media is a big part of growing our brand and when we win the top of mind awareness, then the following flow onto conversion often comes much more easily.
ClickZ.asia: There’s always something new in the market, from Instagram, Pinterest to Google Plus but limited resources to dip on all these platforms. As a hotel brand, any tips on how to choose smartly?
Seah: We recommend brands to adopt a test and measure approach.
It is very important to conduct experiments on new channels to see if your customers are on that platform. With strong, measurable objectives and smart initiatives, it is a great testing ground to try out new ideas.
See a video link on how they film it on the iPhone 4S.