you’re going to throw them into a web model, where I can foresee them having divergent views,and of course legal and cultural differences, and resources. It goes back to justifying spending.So what we’ve done at Hilton is created a corporate review, a strategy board to really have aglobal viewpoint on what you should do, and I think this is a model, this is a Forester researchmodel, and we found that this is effective, so you might want to consider something along theselines. You need to have senior level support, your VP’s in Marketing need to be involved, or perhaps you need to go above them, but you also need support from the regions, so if you havean Asian region or a European region, you need to make sure that they’re involved with dedicatedplayers, and we also need obviously need IT specialists. What we recommend doing, or thinkabout doing, is that you have to figure out how to put your toe in the water because in terms of spending, unless you’re Microsoft, you might want to go at this a little bit slower than your US site,you know as our Microsoft or our other friends out there have lots of money to spend. You mightwant to figure out what’s going to work, what’s your measurement, what can you realisticallyexpect from a population of 5 million users, 4/5million users in the UK. So if you don’t haverealistic expectations going in you will be vastly disappointed. I think what you really need to doright now, is you need competency models – what works in your organisation, how do you getyour global work flow down. We do approvals on our web-site in terms of new content and copyliterally within hours, as soon as you start doing this in multiple languages, how do you geteveryone to agree, what do the attorneys have to do, this is not a big priority in people’s livesright at the moment.And then there’s, do you have regional or do you have country specific, so I mean can marketpan-European now with the Eurodollar , an interesting thought, perhaps it’s time to market to thatregion as similar to the United States, I personally don’t think so, but you could certainly argue inthat vein. Asia as well, do you have an Asian strategy, or do you need a country specific strategy,and I think at this point it’s country specific, and guess what, that means more money.Now in our experience, we’ve been advocating from the US that we should be early adapters andwe should have multiple web-sites around the world that have different languages, and we weretalking to our Asian counterparts, and European counterparts, and we really weren’t gettinganywhere because from the US side we didn’t want to put more dollars into the web-site, we’respending enough – all we can – on focusing on the US market. We got a phone-call one day fromour Asian division saying we’re going to launch a web-site in two weeks, and I said great news,what are you going to do, they said we’re going to put up three hotels, and I said well what aboutthe other 400 or so hotels we have, what are you going to do about those, oh, we didn’t thinkabout that. And I said, ok, is it going to look like the web-site we have now, or is it going to looklike something new, and they said it’s going to look like something new and different because welike it, and I go ok. So we had that conversation and we got the senior level person involved, andwe asked them a series of questions like that, like what are you going to do for branding, aregoing to follow the branding, and they said they didn’t think about that either. And what we wereable to do, was that we caught them in time, and were able to break them down and say youreally need to follow corporate standards, so what we decided to do was an RFP, and we createdan RFP literally within days, and we sent it out to our developers, and a couple of US developers,and the Japanese developer that they had already hired, and we got prices back. Well we gotprices back from the United States at ridiculous money, it was like hundreds and thousands of dollars, and the web developers from Japan came back with a price tag of like $10,000, so wehired the local Japanese developer. It’s interesting having conference calls with a web developer who speaks no English, with our guys who speak reasonably good English, and we’re trying totranslate all the parties at 10 or 11 o’clock at night, you know specific time one o’clock in themorning in Dallas where my web developers are, so it made for some interesting evenings. Buteffectively we did find a strategy, we did find an organisation, we had time-lines, we had budgets,we had everything we needed to launch a successful site. What we really wanted to do was tolaunch our local Japanese hotels, which we’re doing, and we have direct reservations back to our local res office all by telephone, not my ideal choice, but last time I checked my res enginedoesn’t speak Japanese.
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