In this episode of the Suite Spot, host Ryan Embree is joined by Vice President of Product and Technology, Jason Lee, to walk through the emergence of content marketing and the importance of strategic social media for the hotel industry. Jason and Ryan discuss social media as “the great connector” and how hoteliers can use occupancy drivers like events in content marketing for their hotels. Jason gives his advice on how to identify these local occupancy drivers and the best way to leverage them through social media posting. They also discuss how using influencer marketing and social media advertising can strengthen your hotel’s overall marketing strategy. This episode is the perfect guide on how to evolve your hotel’s social media strategy for the new decade. To learn more about how we are helping hoteliers optimize their property’s social media strategies or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot, this is Ryan Embree, as always, your host. Before we get started on today's episode, I have a very exciting announcement. Thank you all of our listeners for all of your continued support, we have just hit the 10,000 listen mark on our podcast, the Suite Spot, so thank you again for all your continued support out there. We love that you guys are listening and engaging in this type of content. It really means a lot to us. So with that being said, we have another exciting episode with a very familiar voice of the Suite Spot that is Jason Lee, he is our vice president of product development and technology. So I'll go ahead and welcome Jason in this morning, welcome Jason, back to the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Thank you Ryan. Ryan Embree: And we are going to have a really exciting discussion today. You can call it a couple things - you can call it content marketing, you can call it the evolution of Social Media - being that it's a new decade, I think this is a great time to kind of talk about, whether we've recognized it or not, Social Media has really turned a corner on what it can be and how hoteliers are leveraging Social Media. So could you just walk us through, I mean, being on the product side, developing a solution like Social Media. How has Social Media for hotels evolved over just the past maybe five years to a decade? Jason Lee: You know, I think as new generations come up - new generations of travelers, new generations of users - they've basically grown up with technology. If you are a person under 30 you've grown up with this technology, so this technology has been a part of your childhood, your teenage life, and now going into your adult life, this is no longer, so this is a utility - like Google - like other other types of utilities where I go to find information where I go to see stuff about my friends, where I go to see images, where I go to be entertained. And this is something that is different than something that says like, you know, I guess the thought of I'm wasting my time in this one area or I'm wasting my time, you know, on Facebook or on Instagram. Now it's really more about this is where branding happens, this is where influencing happens, and this is where people are going to see, "Hey is this a credible product?" What are other people saying about this? Or I'm being introduced for the very first time to this by this medium and this medium is trusted because I'm trusting the person that is showing me this through this medium. So Social Media, I has become something that is really, you know,