Marriott International has launched M Live, the company’s real-time marketing command centre, in South Florida.
This is the third M Live location to open in the last year, following the opening of M Live at Marriott International headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland and M Live Hong Kong, with further global expansion planned to Europe and the Middle East.
The M Live studio empowers Marriott to engage travellers in more personalized ways by participating in one-to-one conversations with consumers, on the social platforms where they are already active and engaged.
By taking an omni-channel approach to tracking conversations, trends, global performance, marketing campaigns and brand reputation across social platforms, M Live identifies opportunities to authentically integrate Marriott International’s 19 brands and nearly 4,500 properties worldwide.
“Our marketing aims to be relevant to the lives of next-generation travellers and connect with them immediately and authentically,” said David Beebe, Vice President, Creative and Content Marketing at Marriott International.
“M Live helps us do this on a global scale. We can track and respond to conversations that are either directly related to our brands, or that are trending among travellers where we see an opportunity to integrate in real-time. Through these interactions, we can create a deeper level of engagement with our guests.”
For example, the M Live team identifies trending social stories around the world on a daily basis and quickly executes relevant creative content to organically participate in pop culture conversations—everything from trending articles around food and culture, to chatter around #GrilledCheeseDay, to a trending conversation that happened around the rare occurrence of five planets simultaneously visible to the naked eye.
On a more individualized level, when a traveller recently posted on Twitter asking for a hotel recommendation for a Nashville girls weekend, M Live took notice and quickly acted, offering not only relevant hotel recommendations, but also sharing content about local nightlife to enhance her Nashville experience beyond just the hotel stay. Just 13 minutes later, the traveller shared on Twitter that she had booked a stay with Marriott.
The M Live location in Florida will serve as the company’s epicenter for real-time social engagement with customers in the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) region. The CALA regional hub features localized and in-language content, in Spanish and Portuguese, to connect with the consumer in a relevant way, all powered by live data and metrics. For example, M Live CALA might track conversations around Carnival celebrations happening in Colombia, Aruba, and Brazil, spring break in Mexico, the Caribbean Copa America games, and hotel grand openings in the region. M Live will enable Marriott to engage in those conversations, and deliver relevant creative and content to travelers.
“With the opening of M Live CALA, we’re leveraging the power of global marketing and making it relevant for travellers in the region,” said Diana Plazas, Vice President of Brand, Marketing, and Digital – CALA, Marriott International.
“With in-region engagement and in-language capabilities, we’re connecting with travelers in more culturally meaningful ways.”
To date, M Live has created a number of successful real-time marketing efforts that have driven consumer engagement. Most recently in the CALA region, M Live leveraged the built-in audience of the JW Marriott brand’s social channels to maximize reach for the opening of the JW Marriott Los Cabos in Mexico, resulting in almost 1 million total reached on Twitter, while also using geo-fencing technology to discover untagged social conversations happening on-property that Marriott identified as opportunities to deliver a better guest experience at the hotel.