Wanted: Digital Bloodhounds For The Hotel Industry

　　These days, hotels aren"t just looking to hire bellhops, concierges and housekeepers. What the industry really needs are digital bloodhounds: people who understand how to use new technologies to track — and attract — potential guests.

　　One of those newfangled workers is Greg Bodenlos. At 24, he"s just a couple of years out of Cornell University"s School of Hotel Administration. His official title is digital marketing strategist at The Mark Hotel, a luxury hotel in New York City.

　　But this profession is so fluid and new that Bodenlos had to write his own job description. Other hotels call the same position e-commerce manager, revenue manager, social media coordinator and at least five other titles.

　　A New World Of Marketing

　　Bodenlos says he knew that if he wanted to land a marketing job in hospitality right out of school, "it had to be digital, it had to be analytical. The digital marketing space in hotels — or the technology-driven space — is completely wide open," he says. "We are just figuring out how to use the tools that Google and Facebook throw at us every day."

　　Bill Carroll, one of Bodenlos" professors at Cornell, agrees the field is changing rapidly. "I tear up my syllabus every year,"Carroll says.

　　A typical traveler today might make a reservation by calling a hotel or going online to compare prices, and many now use mobile apps or Facebook.

　　This means the role of hotel marketing managers has also changed from the days when they essentially guessed whether a particular magazine or newspaper ad brought in revenue. Now they"re tracking behavior by analyzing "click streams" online.

　　In the future, Carroll says, hotel staff will know, "did you contact me through a call center, through my brand website, to a salesperson and, subsequently, did you execute a booking?"

　　By analyzing online behavior, an e-commerce manager will be able to figure out the steps by which a booking was made, and then decide where to spend advertising dollars to attract the most customers. "We"re not there yet," Carroll says, "but I believe we will be there in five years."

　　Since the hospitality industry grows at about the same pace as the U.S. economy, typically around 2 percent a year, the main task for these companies is called "shifting share," or taking business away from somebody else.

　　The Mark Hotel"s Bodenlos wants to know how many bookings the hotel is garnering from online travel agencies, "how many from a call center, how many from mobile, how many from social media, and how many bookings from what we really want: our direct website. And how can we shift that?"

　　One strategy e-commerce managers use is buying keywords on the paid portion of Google and other sites, to push their website to or near the top of a user"s search results.