Karoline Mayr, Deltek (5Q Interview)

Incorporating social media into a travel program doesn't have to cost a lot of money, take inordinate amounts of time or challenge a travel manager, Deltek global travel procurement director Karoline Mayr told the Association of Corporate Travel Executives Minneapolis Executive Forum last week. Mayr explained how she is using Microsoft SharePointcollaboration technology to open a more transparent means of communication with and between Deltek's 700 travelers--400 of whom are frequent. Travel is the first department at the company, which makes enterprise software, to embrace social media. "The CEO has started a blog, but ours is more popular," she said. An excerpt of other comments follows.

How are you using social media in your travel program?

We built a blog internally and use it through SharePoint. We use the blog to create some transparency in our program. We wanted to have an outlet to communicate all kinds of information about the program as well as allow people to comment to help us better manage the program; we wanted to increase our employee satisfaction and reduce our expenditures--those were the goals. One of our biggest challenges is that we were always doing this push marketing in email communications, and we really wanted to move to pull marketing where, if you're interested, you could sign up for an RSS feed or have [the site] send you an email when anything is updated. We didn't spend a lot of time or money on it, and that's one of the things we want to share--this doesn't have to be a massive project that takes a year to create. We launched this in February of this year.

What is the response from your travelers?

In the beginning, we were definitely afraid that people would come on and say all kinds of crazy things and have massive numbers of people jumping on the site. But that's not what happened at all. To date, we haven't had anybody go on and write something extremely negative or anything we deemed inappropriate. Keeping in mind it's a professional environment, people behave in a professional way. When they're making these comments online, everybody can see them [and the real names of authors]. The comments and things they put on there were completely appropriate and exactly what we were looking for to make the program a success. We have engaged in a lot of activities promoting it and will continue to do so through the end of the year. We held a vendor appreciation day, where we had some of our corporate travel vendors come in. We had drawings for free hotels or travel. To enter the drawings, you had to go to the blog and create a post or comment. We didn't care what they posted, we just wanted them to go through the process because we initially had some feedback that users didn't know how to post. It really was as simple as "create a new post, click here." But once they went through the process, people started writing about how easy it was and that created more traffic.

So is your travel policy still on another site, or did you move that to the new blog?

Previously, [policy and travel content] were on the intranet and you had to be on our virtual private network to access the travel policy. Most of the travelers on the road--about 70 percent of our program--are consultants, and they are on the road 90 percent of the time. Depending on where they are, they can't always get on the VPN. SharePoint doesn't require VPN access to log on. We've moved the entire site to SharePoint. It's not just the blog. That's in the middle [of the site page]; on the left side are the hotel program, travel policy, credit card program, and on the right side are links to online booking tools in each country, phone numbers and contact information. You can do neat stuff, like key performance indicators, so we include three KPIs like booking seven days in advance or something simple that they could understand in red-yellow-green lights. It's not very fancy or as pleasing to the eye like the Internet site was, as that was run by marketing and was definitely more flashy and nice. But it does the job. It gets the information out there and allows us to shoot out messages that we normally wouldn't put in an email communication. Now I can put little things out there. Suppliers have enjoyed it as well because we're able to assist them in their efforts. Recently our top hotel in the program contacted me to tell me that inventory was really tight in September and October and asked us to write a quick note, so we did. In the previous era, we would have had to figure out if that was an email we would push out. If so, it would have to be approved and [corporate] communications would have been involved. Instead, it was a one-minute process.

Were you able to identify who booked as a result?

There's the rub. You don't know how many people signed up for the RSS feeds. The only way you can see if people are paying attention or involved is if they're actually blogging, commenting or someone says something to you. There are surveys you can do online, and we've used those. I used surveys to promote and try to get people to log on. If they link from the survey, you can see who logs onto the blog.

How much staffing does all this take?

It's just me. I've heard from some of my peers who were leery about opening one up that it would take all this time and people would write all these things. That just hasn't been the case. In all honestly, it was my job responsibility to begin with to do the intranet site so all I did was move it and now there's a blog in the middle. I thought it was a really great way to open communications. Yes, it's an additional thing I'm doing, but I couldn't really put a percentage on it.