TWITTER AND THE IRON HORSE

Earlier this week, I attended a conference in Milwaukee focusing on economic development for Indian tribes. It was a great session, and small enough so that participants had ample opportunity to ask questions and chat with the various speakers.

Most of us were housed at the Iron Horse, a terrific little boutique hotel (100 rooms) in the city's warehouse district. For the record, the Iron Horse is not my client and I'm not a shareholder, so I have no vested interest in promoting the place, but I'm going to anyway because I LOVED it! Very industrial-loft old-warehouse, but yet warm and cozy, very chic but still comfortable. And the food in the hotel restaurant ("Smyth") was absolutely excellent.

I was surprised to see that the hotel's owner and marketing guru were the final speakers at the conference. The owner had some interesting insights on financing development in disadvantaged areas, but it was the marketing guru who really got my attention.

Her name is Brigette Breitenbach, and she's the principal of Company B, a marketing and PR firm in the Brew City. The marketing program she designed for the Iron Horse relies very heavily on online communications and social media.

When the Iron Horse opened in September 2008, Brigette said her goal was to have 25% of all reservations come directly to the hotel. She wanted to avoid using sites like Travelocity and Expedia, which apparently take 30% of the revenue from the reservations they generate. So she began using Twitter and Facebook to drive traffic to the hotel's website, www.theironhorsehotel.com.

Now, a year later, nearly 75% of the hotel's reservations are coming directly to the hotel, either through the website or the hotel's call center, which means that the business gets 100% of the revenue from every room it sells. The Iron Horse now has 2,717 followers on Twitter and 1,566 Facebook fans. The hotel asks its friends and followers to post a review on Tripadvisor.com, one of the top websites for travelers. It gets consistently terrific reviews, and has emerged as the #1 most popular hotel in Milwaukee.

Brigette supplemented her online campaign with direct outreach to major travel publications such as Conde Naste Traveler, which has added the Iron Horse to its "hot list" of exceptional new properties. Since the hotel is located across the street from a new Harley-Davidson Museum, she also contacted motorcycle publications and reached out to motorcycle fans online through social networking. The "hogs" are very much a part of the hotel's interior design, so bike groups feel as welcome as business execs there.

The bottom line: after only one year of operation, the Iron Horse is operating in the black (unlike most new hotels), has gained a national reputation for excellence, and is regularly featured on international lists of the top boutique hotels in the world.

There's a cool irony here--the Iron Horse, of course, was the Indian way of describing trains, which were "cutting edge" technology 150 years ago. Now Milwaukee's Iron Horse is benefiting from a different kind of technology--one that the first passengers on those early steam trains never could have imagined. I love that.