By SARAH NASSAUER

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"I Hate My Room." The traveler tweeted. Ka-Boom! An upgrade!

You might think that the only ones following your online musings are your mom and college pals. But if they include a gripe about a hotel, the front-desk clerk at the offending property may be listening, too.

Hotels and resorts are amassing a growing army of sleuths whose job it is to monitor what is said about them online—and protect the hotels' reputations. These employees search social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter for unhappy guests and address complaints. They write groveling apologies in response to negative reviews on TripAdvisor. And they keep tabs on future guests who post about upcoming stays—and sometimes offer them extra perks or personalized attention at check in.

How to Get Heard at Hotels

Jason Greene for The Wall Street Journal

With more properties paying attention to social media outlets, here's how to use them to snare better service:

• Find out how to reach your hotel online. Search Twitter and Facebook to see if it has an account.
• If there's no account for the individual hotel, search for the company that owns the brand. For a Westin, search for Starwood. For a Courtyard, look for Marriott.
• Before you check-in: Post a comment on the hotel's Facebook page or send a tweet saying you're looking forward to your stay. A savvy hotel will put you on its radar and may dole out perks or give specialized service.
• When tweeting a complaint, be specific. Don't say "I hate my hotel," say "I hate X hotel for Y reason."
• Use the hotel's specific "handle," or Twitter name in your message, like @StarwoodBuzz for a Starwood property
• Use your real name so a hotel can find you in their reservation system. You can't get your complaint addressed or extra perks if you can't be tracked down.
• Have a lot of online friends or followers. Hotels will pay more attention to your requests.
• Don't be unreasonable. If the hotel senses you're a lost cause, it may spend less time trying to fix the problem.

For travelers, the upshot is that if you use social media, your complaints could have more power. In years past, guests unhappy about a lumpy bed, grimy bathroom or an awful view had to take their frustrations to the front desk or hotel manager and hope for some restitution. Now, with some guests having hundreds—and even thousands—of followers on Twitter and Facebook, complaints can have a big audience. It's like every guest has a virtual megaphone.

If you want to increase the odds that your complaint will be heard, include the full name of the hotel and your real name. Those moves got Paul Horan upgraded from a room with a view of air conditioning ducts to one overlooking the pool at the Orlando World Center Marriott Resort in Florida.

Mr. Horan, a 47-year-old who works in sales at a software company, tweeted, "At the Orlando Marriott World Center for RIM WES 2010 [a technology conference]. But I have the crappiest room in the hotel." Front-desk employee Zachary Long saw Mr. Horan's comments while searching Twitter and went into damage-control mode. Mr. Long had a note of apology for the "current room situation" slipped under Mr. Horan's door and offered to move him to a pool-view room the next day.

"It was on Twitter, so it could spread," Mr. Long says.

"It was a complete shock" that Marriott saw the message and reacted, Mr. Horan says.

Guests that reach out to hotels through social media channels may find themselves getting freebies and better service. Mr. Long, along with his colleague Sarah Pribila, have handed out wine, milk and cookies, and better rooms to guests they know are coming because they interacted with them on Twitter in advance. "No doubt we do go out of our way a little bit for Twitter and Facebook" commenters, says Mr. Long, in part because it's only a small number of people. For now, only about 1% of their guests are active on Twitter, Mr. Long says.

During a recent technology conference at the hotel, an attendee who moderates and edits an influential website about BlackBerry news mused about his desire for a cold beer over Twitter. Already identified by Mr. Long and Ms. Pribila as an active blogger with more than 1,000 Twitter followers, the hotel responded over Twitter, "Can I buy you a beer? Stop by the "actual" Front Desk and ask for Sarah!"

The recipient, 29-year-old Chris Parsons from Halifax, Nova Scotia says, it "kind of took me by surprise. I've never had that kind of customer service—just out of the blue." The hotel bought him a bucket of 10 Coronas to share with friends on the hotel's outdoor patio.

Sometimes using social media to lodge a complaint or request can be more effective than calling the front desk. In March, a guest at the Atlantis, Paradise Island in the Bahamas needed a roll-away bed and some extra towels. It was a "high, high occupancy time for us," and the guest had called around for help to no avail, said Dean Sullivan, vice president of digital marketing at Kerzner International Holdings Limited, which owns and operates hotels including the Atlantis, Paradise Island, a 3,414 room resort. The guest posted about it on the hotel's Facebook page. "We got in touch with the GM [general manager] and handled it within the hour," said Mr. Sullivan.

Savvy hotels are using social media to boost their ratings on TripAdvisor. Earlier this year, front desk employees at the Roger Smith Hotel, a 130-room boutique hotel in midtown Manhattan, started mentioning TripAdvisor to guests checking out. And sometimes employees will send guests a link to TripAdvisor over Twitter or email, encouraging them to leave a review.

Since the beginning of last year, the hotel jumped about 100 places in New York City hotel rankings on the review site, says Brian Simpson, director of social hospitality for the hotel.

Hotels know that many travelers now use the Web—and specifically the reviews, blog posts and other online missives of past guests—to decide where to stay. About 41% of leisure travelers and 50% of business travelers say user reviews influence their travel decisions, according to a survey from comScore Inc., a firm that tracks online traffic, and Google Inc.