Insights gleaned from the data show that guests share a desire for recognition and a wish for special, personalized treatment. Other analysis reinforced knowledge that guests increasingly turn to the social web to seek immediate problem resolution while others only hope to alleviate safety concerns.

Through their geo-fencing tech, we communicate with guests, instead of at them. Having undergone the Herculean effort of geo-fencing all 6,030 hotels, we could capture the information and then engage in real-time with guests posting about a myriad of things like weddings, birthdays, meetings, vacation or first-time stays. The team identifies and then elevates guest experiences at hotels with “surprise-and-delight” moments. A surprise and delight can be a quick “like” or “comment” on social posts or, more complex, responding with relevant surprises such as sending complimentary bottles of champagne or delivering personally monogrammed towels.

Data collection begins in the geo-fencing platform and includes native channel metrics from social networks, and guests’ social content feeds. Data is combined with user info and integrated with location, sentiment, and creative elements and then displayed for analysis and interpretation in a simple, visual way through the M Live platform’s proprietary UI which is presented across series of monitors. Geo-fencing data spans almost 20sq.ft. of monitor space.

By implementing their geo-fencing technology, along with various other data gathering tools, the M Live team is able to pinpoint key results for all stakeholders involved. For example, when the woman staying at the JW Marriott in Mumbai took notice how quick the hotel was able to teach her how to fold towels into lovable animals, she started following not only the property, but also the brand Instagram channel.

100% of the reactions from Marriott’s guests to real-time activations have been positive. 82% of engaged guests make an effort to follow Marriott on social media, to post at them again, or comment mentioning them.

This was exemplified again when M Live identified an influential NFL sportswriter who was enjoying his honeymoon at an Autograph Collection property in Greece. The influencer tweeted his positive feelings for Marriott Rewards and the beauty of the property. M Live immediately contacted the property to provide a surprising and delightful moment for the guest to entice additional social sharing, garnering an additional 60,000 potential earned impressions.

The M Live platform has created over 43,000 total engagements with our guests on Instagram, Twitter and Weibo. This number includes where M Live and the guests exchanged more than 11,800 comments plus the 1,355 guests who followed Brands after commenting.

Through the platform, M Live has made more than 3,000 UGC requests with more than 11,000 comments on guests posts with a total of more than 43,000 engagements

We pinpoint actionable guest posts at individual properties, delivering surprising and delightful moments. When a guest was staying at the JW Marriott Mumbai and posted to her Instagram channel praising the charmingly-folded towel animals the cleaning staff left behind, expressing the interest in learning how to create them herself. M Live took notice. The team reached out the the JW Brand team and let the property know of the guest who then quickly responded on the social post commenting how they’ll set up a special training just for her. This resulted in the guest commenting several more times and posting a new picture with her own towel animals.

There was an untapped aspect of hospitality created by social media: leveraging data collected via location-based social media posts, versus hashtags and copy, to surprise-and-delight guests through personalized communication, service, and creative acts of generosity.

To truly access the opportunity hidden in publicly-available social data, Marriott International developed the M Live platform to create a method to collect, filter, and engage with guests at scale through surprise and delight moments. The team partnered with Silicon Valley tech start-up, “HYP3R,” to create and implement a location-based social technology across all 30 of Marriott’s brands, worldwide.

Marriott would embark on an objective to create surprising, delightful moments which would last forever in their guests’ memories. To do it, we developed a proprietary technology to engage guests directly on the platforms they use with pin-pointed accuracy.