Stock­holm’s Nordic Light Hotel have set a new dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing prece­dent in the hotel sec­tor. Social media influ­encers are being offered a sub­stan­tial dis­count, or in some cas­es a com­plete­ly free stay at the hotel, at the cost of a few mere sta­tus updates. In exchange, the hotel hopes to cre­ate aware­ness with the help of these influ­encers while adding loy­al cus­tomers.

As out­lined on the lux­u­ry hotel’s web­site, pop­u­lar indi­vid­u­als with 500 or more Face­book friends can receive a 5 per­cent dis­count on their book­ing, and super-savvy social media influ­encers with over 100,000 fol­low­ers on Face­book or Insta­gram can stay at the hotel com­plete­ly free!

With stays in the lux­u­ry hotel usu­al­ly cost­ing $360 per night, evi­dent­ly, there is clear val­ue for the hotel in attract­ing influ­encers to pro­mote their brand. As report­ed by UPI: Nordic Light Hotel CEO Mar­cus Majew­s­ki believes the pro­mo­tion­al ben­e­fits far out­weigh the cost of giv­ing away hotel rooms.

While dig­i­tal mar­keters already are ful­ly aware of the pow­er of social media influ­ence in pro­mot­ing brands or prod­ucts, the use of social media fol­low­ings as a direct from of cur­ren­cy (or dis­counts) by hotel brands is still rel­a­tive­ly unadopt­ed.

Brands Accepting Social Currency

Could such uses of social cur­ren­cy gain wide­spread adop­tion? In the­o­ry, social cur­ren­cy could be valu­able to many brands, and there have been instances of oth­er brands reward­ing social influ­encers in return for pro­mot­ing a prod­uct or ser­vice to their net­works.

Ear­li­er this year, Marc Jacobs opened a ‘Tweet Shop’ dur­ing New York Fash­ion Week that enabled shop­pers to pur­chase any­thing from per­fume sam­ples to high­er val­ue items like sun­glass­es and hand­bags, in return for shar­ing images with the hash­tag #MJDaisy­Chain.

In a mod­ern Warhol-esque recre­ation of the noto­ri­ous ‘Fac­to­ry’, Sour Patch Kids have estab­lished ‘the Patch’. A house where musi­cians can stay free of charge in return for doing what they love best – mak­ing music and occa­sion­al con­tent for shar­ing via social media plat­forms.

An imple­men­ta­tion of social cur­ren­cy in ecom­merce can be found in Door­man, a San Fran­cis­co-based start­up offer­ing an app for con­sumers to place order for ship­ments. While the ser­vice costs $7, Door­man deliv­ers for free to any cus­tomer post­ing a tweet on Twit­ter or sta­tus update to Face­book. Cofounder and CEO Zan­der Adell believes this sim­ple exchange helps spread the company’s brand mes­sage while rein­forc­ing loy­al cus­tomers.

The devel­op­ment of social media pro­mo­tion as an exchange between con­sumers and brands rec­og­nizes the grow­ing impor­tance of the chan­nel as a means of rais­ing aware­ness and reach­ing new cus­tomers.

In trav­el, for exam­ple, where a per­son­al rec­om­men­da­tion from a friend often has a con­sid­er­able impact on a con­sumers choice of des­ti­na­tion or hotel, a pow­er­ful social media influ­ence can have a very pos­i­tive impact on hotel book­ings. The Nordic Light Hotel are act­ing as pio­neers, in a move how­ev­er that makes a great deal of sense.