The Ritz-Carlton is dedicated to inspiring life's most meaningful journeys. The memories made by our guests, and the experiences they share as they travel with us, are a real-time catalog of those memories being made.
We wanted a way to capture, and celebrate those memories. Our guests travel with us to destinations around the globe, but their experience at The Ritz-Carlton is one they always remember. Using one brand hashtag - #RCMemories - allows us to engage with guests as they share the most treasured moment from their journeys with us.
In addition to inspiring our guests to share their memories with the hashtag, we promote the call to action for hashtagged photos across print, digital & social channels.
Unifying our efforts around one branded hashtag has allowed us to craft branching strategic campaigns to further individual KPIs. For example - the Memories in 6 photo campaign showcases 6 photos taken by influencers and journalists along with a brief story which lives on ritzcarlton.com. Sharing this content on social drives clicks to website, encourages past guests to share their memories using the web portal, and provide potential new guests a glimpse into the kind of memories they can create.
Although usage of #RCMemories is directed at Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook other channels have aggregated guest moments around the hashtag such as Pinterest with hundreds of posts sharing #RCMemories from around the world.
Individual properties from The Ritz-Carlton hotel portfolio use the tag to share the unique story of their hotels and their locations, driving guest anticipation on social channels as well as engagement when they are on property.
Your #RCMemories web portal on ritzcarlton.com launched as a way to aggregate and directly share guest moments. In 2015 thousands of images have been submitted and shared.
Most notably, our brand Instagram channel for The Ritz-Carlton was launched as a collection of guest #RCMemories, celebrating travel around the globe, sharing user generated content. Over 1200 individual #RCMemories have been posted through submissions, tagged images, or through re-grams.
We began the year with the goal of ensuring that the power of stories being told using #RCMemories rested in the hands of our guests, not our own. To that end, our goal was to achieve a share of voice of roughly 20% for The Ritz-Carlton, when tracking #RCMemories content, meaning that 80% of #RCMemories content would be generated by our guests. We have exceeded that goal in 2015, with 95% of all #RCMemories being authentic, user-generated content.
Since start of 2015 the tag has generated over 500 Million Impressions across Instagram and Twitter (generated by 10K uses of the hashtag on Twitter, and 23K uses on Instagram).
Over 25% of posts centered on #RCMemories are crafted by social media users with over 10K followers.
Individual properties are encouraged to use #RCMemories in their social content to aggregate "Wow" moments, cultural experiences, and guest stories that are unique to their property.