earThere’s a lot of talk these days about the importance of listening to what’s being said about you as a company.  The rise of social media has given individuals a voice and those voices are incredibly powerful.  Surely you haven’t forgotten the guy whose guitar was smashed by American Airlines.   Now more than ever, companies, especially those in the b-to-c space, have to make sure they are providing great customer service.  And just as importantly, they have to listen to what’s being said about them.  But is Hilton Hotels doing that? 

Barry Diamond, a colleague of mine, works in business development and, as such, travels quite a bit.  Earlier this week he was attempting to book a hotel stay at a Hilton somewhere and when he entered his Hilton Honors points, he received a message that the number was invalid.  He tried again but had no luck so he called to determine the problem.  After being told by the customer service agent that Hilton deactivated his account (effectively blowing away his 70,000 points) for not using it frequently enough and insinuating that he was not intelligent, Barry did what any good, social media savvy consumer should do:  he blogged about it.  And tweeted about it.  And posted to Facebook about it.  He even debated singing a song about it — OK, not really.

We’ll see if Hilton is monitoring the conversation about their brand.  Now Barry is just one of millions of Hilton customers (Barry’s now an ex-customer) but that’s exactly the point; it only takes one.  So Hilton, are you listening?