Two years ago, I wrote a blog post, title very much tongue in cheek http://www.metamend.com/blog/2005/07/12/hiltons-perverted-bedding-initiative/ Hilton’s perverted bedding initiative”. You’ll need to read the post to understand the joke, but really, it had less to do with Paris Hilton in particular than about Hilton Hotels, and online brand strategy and awareness. The web traffic in response to varied keyword combinations that people used to arrive at that post was interesting. I wrote a little bit about some of those combinations in a follow-up post. There’s been lots of other combinations since, such as “hilton vision”, “hilton vision statement”, and “hilton statement”.
Today, I received a call from a journalist wanting information about Paris Hilton’s web traffic. I took at look at the traffic to this blog on the matter. Unsurprisingly, there’s been an obvious uptick in Hilton related traffic since Paris was sent to jail.
Also, unsurprisingly, none of the queries had phrases like “paris hilton jail”, “hilton jail”, “paris jail”, “paris hilton gets out of jail”, “paris sent to jail”, “paris hilton” or “hilton prison” sent any traffic to this blog. I say unsurprisingly because I never wrote anything about “jail” or “prison” in my postings. Why would I? I was writing about branding. Of course, now, in the context of the young lady going to jail, that becomes a different question, as of course the words Paris+hilton+jail are forever linked on umpteen web postings. Who knows, perhaps this site will start getting “jail bedding” traffic as a result?
In that post a couple of years ago, I originally started off by writing how Hilton Hotels needed to incorporate a way to capture all the Hilton related traffic which was relevant to their branding. Amazingly, when you type Hotel into Google, Hilton Hotels itself still not in the top 10. At the same time, Paris Hilton was (and remains) a marketing juggernaut. She got it. Hilton Hotels didn’t. They didn’t need to be tied together, but Hilton Hotels had to do something to raise their own brand visibility.
Branding is a key element in any marketing strategy. For many organizations, such as Hilton Hotels, their association with the Hilton family is a marketers dream. Some in marketing say there’s no such thing as bad press. Yes, there is the downside to all the media attention to Paris Hilton, and no, she may not be the ideal spokesperson. But she’s not their spokesperson at all, and while there’s a downside to Paris Hilton’s media attention, that downside brings a broader awareness of the Hilton brand.
I’ve had calls over the years from people wanting to optimize their web site to “get rid” of bad press and / or negative commentary. I’m not sure that Hilton Hotel needs to worry about that, but with Hilton Hotel’s impressive branding footprint, it’s surprising that they have not acted to improve their overall Internet visibility. The first thing people say when they hear the word “Hilton” should not be “Paris”, it should be “hotel” (and comfort, sleep, clean, value, etc..).
On that note, two of the phrases that brought a visitor to this blog recently was “paris hilton’s brand impact” and “paris hilton’s brand impact on hilton hotels”
p.s. I rarely blog here anymore, for a few reasons. 1) I’m focused on Enquisite; 2) I’ve got another http://www.enquisite.com/blog/>blog there (which I need to post to more often); 3) Everything at Enquisite is tightly focused on the upcoming release of our first revenue product. 4) I just figured that since I blogged about Paris Hilton here before, it was only appropriate that I do the follow up here as well.
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