BLOG: My trip to London pt. 6 (final) - ‘How social is changing our trip completely'

Monday, 9AM, time for the business purpose of my trip to London. After the one-minute touch-screen checkout at CitizenM I am walking to the ManpowerGroup Office in London City. Today I will meet with my Northern European colleagues for a two-day session on how social media is impacting our business, and how we can leverage our combined strength to use the huge potential of social for our candidate branding and engagement. While walking, I am thinking on how social influenced my trip so far.

First of all I came across the CitizenM Hotel-concept while reading slides on Business Model Innovation on the social sharing platform for presentations: www.slideshare.net. As I got interested, I looked up the hotel on TripAdvisor. This travel website has become thé review portal for all hotels, apartments, flights and restaurants. A great business model by the way, where almost all content is user generated (reviews and photo’s of travelers) and the money is earned with advertising. I filtered the reviews on ‘traveling alone’, and got 126 ratings that averaged 4.5 stars. Sounded good! Also the photographs matched the atmosphere that CitizenM where displaying themselves on their Facebook and Pinterest pages. On my way to the airport, I visited the Twitter account of EasyJet to check with a tweet what the extra costs were for taking an extra bag with me, and swiftly got a reply from their webcare team. 

Once in London, I used Yelp to find a nice restaurant in the neighborhood. This social review site lists all types of bars, restaurants and clubs. Search on the map, using your GPS location, filter on the amount you want to spend and the average rating of the restaurant’s guests. When I found a nice place, I could easily reserve it online with the ‘opentable.com’ connection, where I had reregistered for former trips already by connecting my Facebook-profile. When talking to a freelance writer during dinner in the hotel, I looked up her profile on LinkedIn and made a connection to see on what accounts she had been working on. After sharing my run on Sunday morning around the Battersea Power Station on Runkeeper, I received a couple of ‘hearts’ from my fellow-runners to motivate me. And in the evening, while writing my blogs, I shared my stories on our internal Google+ network. The comments and ‘+’es’ I was receiving, motivated me to continue writing and sharing with you. 

So if I am to point out the two most critical impacts that social has on today’s world, it would be these:

1. Traditional organizational hierarchy is soon history*

(* from a great Wall Street Journal article on ‘the end of management’)

Before we had the internet and social media, organizations needed a clear hierarchy and managers to organize people and allocate resources. Now we are online and social connected anywhere, anytime, any device. The internal ManpowerGroup Google+ is proving more and more to enable collaboration without the need of hierarchy. And guess what: the pace of creativity, collaboration and innovation is only increasing because of it. Employees no longer only need to make themselves valuable through what they know, they can develop more knowledge by collaborating in a much more fluid format. 

2. Reputation is the new cash

What became very clear of my social media influenced trip to London, is that reputation is key to succes for business in the future. Social media is bringing transparency. Via websites like TripAdvisor, it becomes transparent what the hotels’ value propositions are. Do they live up to it? And their own customers decide if the service, food, location and wifi is up-to-standard by rating it with 1 to 5 stars. The same is happening in a lot of industries. Uber is bringing ratings to taxi drivers. Would you order a cab with a driver that was rated with 2 stars by 24 people? And the Holiday Inn that I ‘rated’ in my blog. Would you book it?

And there is Glassdoor, a US website where employees and former employees anonymously review companies and their management. You could say: the TripAdvisor of the work-related part of business. It's already quite big in the US, and it will be coming over to Europe as well. Our services, operations, candidates, communication and style of doing business will be more and more rated by growing crowds of customers, candidates, employees. 

BLOG: My Trip to London pt. 5 - 'Battersea Power Station and Digital Pink Floyd Music'

It was Sunday morning 9AM, the last day of my personal time in London. With my running shoes on I stepped out of the Tube at Sloane Square and started running. With my Runkeeper App activated to track the route, I ran over the Chelsea-bridge across the Thames and entered the Battersea Park. Lot’s of fellow runners here and families taking a walk or playing cricket on this chilly Sunday morning. Probably few had the same goal as I had. Above the trees at the horizon I already saw them: the famous chimneys of Battersea Power Station. This typical Industrial Brick Cathedral was build in the 1930’s. With the passing of time, the building is now neglected and has been out-of-service for over 30 years. 

In my early 20’s I discovered Pink Floyd music. One of their famous old albums, the 1977 ‘Animals', has the Battersea Power Station on its cover. Back than record companies were the empires in that industry that had the power over this ‘information’ (music). Granting access to this music would cost consumers a lot of money. Distribution was done only via record companies, and you as a customer where obliged to go to that store between 9 and 5 if you wanted some.

How disruptive was (and is) the digitization of information. The fact that records became data (MP3 files) meant that the whole record distribution model was superfluous overnight. I remember the first time I downloaded a Pink Floyd song using Napster, it was a miracle. Bits and bytes just streaming into my computer! Sony owned a lot of record companies and already had invented the WalkMan as a portable music player. A disruptive power out of a completely different industry however took over the music business: Apple with the launch of iPod (’10,000 songs in your pocket’) and the iTunes store.

And here I am running with my earplugs in, streaming the Animals album via Spotify over 4G wireless connection, paying € 8 a month for an ‘all-you-can-eat’ music business model 24/7. Sony is nowhere, EMI (the record company of Pink Floyd) has been diminished and was sold in 2011, record stores are closed. The Battersea Power Station looks like an old record company, disrupted by modern power supply and the roll-out of the ‘smart energy grid’. 

Has the digitization of information been disruptive for the staffing industry? Yes, of course. A vacancy is nothing more than a piece of information holding value for our candidates. For decades we made money out of that information, by distributing it via our own ‘record stores’, the branch offices. Having said that, the comparison falls short as we offer a lot more value than only distributing jobs. That’s why the upcoming of the job boards a decade ago proved to be not a threat but an opportunity. Now leading to completely centralized and digitized sourcing and recruiting.

Back to my running: it was time to stop my Runkeeper tracking. Enough about Pink Floyd for now. I’m heading back to the CitizenM to write the final blog in this series!

BLOG: My Trip to London pt. 4 - citizenM says: Death to the Trouser Press

The sun is setting in London, time to head to my hotel for the coming nights: citizenM. The ‘M’ stands for ‘Mobile’. People they are targeting are not tourists, but Mobile Citizen. So I entered the Hotel in Southwark London at 6 PM. Right next to the entrance, 6 touch screen computers are awaiting me. I pick one and enter my last name. It automatically finds my booking, asks me to pick a citizenM card, hold it in front of the detector et voilá. The checkin is done! With the same card I can use the elevator, buy my coffee or beer at the bar, and checkout in 10 seconds. 

Contrary to the traditional hotels, the lounge is buzzing with people and conversations. And ‘lounge’ is not the appropriate name for it. The whole ground flour is one living room, subtly divided in colour and style into three area’s. The ‘citizen’ are working, plugging in their laptops in the numerous connection points, using the very fast and free WiFi Internet, sharing presentations on several large TV’s that are nicely build into bookcases decorating the walls, or reading the free newspapers on the tables. In the middle is the hotel bar, and in the corner large tables with connection points as co-working space. 

I selected this hotel on purpose as its concept triggered me. In a (very) traditional industry, this new Dutch based hotel chain has created a successful innovative service operation, business model innovation and a concept where the value proposition for the customer has been leading in every decision. Starting in 2008 in Amsterdam, the chain has now 7 hotels. On the website I read a “absolutely no trouser presses, bellboys, or stupid pillow chocolates.” To be honest, my decision to book citizenM was already made at that instant. 

Their value proposition? What does a hotel guest really, and I mean really, want?

• an XL king-sized super-comfy bed
• a powerful rain shower
• free movies on a wide-screen television
• free and fast WiFi internet
• international plug system
• a tablet to control temperature, lights, television and the alarm clock

That’s it. No stupid seats that you never use, no desk that you never sit behind, no bibles in the drawer, no lights that you have to get out of bed for to turn them off. They took away my pain points as a customer (waiting for checking in and out, paying for Wifi and/or having a bad internet connection, no guest interaction), and brought a smile on my face with a nice warm atmosphere, a hotel bar buzzing with activity and opportunities to co-work.

After my day in London, I took a meal (self service, card swipe and paid), a beer, and sat in one of the living rooms. Lounge music was playing, the whole hotel bar was crowded and buzzing. A freelance architect sat next to me and offered me a drink and we were eating some nuts while discussing the CitizenM concept.

CitizenM says: luxury isn't a packet of nuts in a minibar, it’s a 24 hour real-bar