Perhaps you could try again, though for Silver there isn't much of a point. Marriott has reset Silver as the giveaway level - meaning Stay 1 will earn you 15pts/$ provided you use the credit card - with the first real "earned" level at 50 nights.

Don't ask me...I'm not sure why they set it up this way. Seems to me like they'd want to stick another level in there instead of making everybody grind it out to 50 before somebody throws 'em a bone.

HH also has Silver as their giveaway, but they set up plenty of backdoors into Gold. As we've already covered here, some like that and some don't.

SPG has Preferred Plus as their giveaway, and nobody really knows what the heck that means.