@Spirocks

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Seeking Bottlenecks and Hurdles

I seek the problems in your path, the obstacles to overcome, and encourage you to race at them.

BoulderYou run a business, there are fifty things that you could do today, fifty ways to make progress and move your business forward.

The problem is there are going to be fifty tomorrow too, and on to infinity after that if you simply operate like a kid at a whack a mole game. To truly move ahead I suggest you seek the things that truly need your greatness, your ability.

Every business has a bottle neck, a singular issue that trumps all others and until it is solved it will hold back the potential of the organization. Your organization.

You are the owner, the one responsible for the loss and the biggest beneficiary of the gains that your business can create.

Define your Success and Attack the Hurdles before you.

If you shrug them off and do not face them, nobody else will. Thats the story. The leaking faucet, and the flickering lightbulb are issues that need attention, but the fact that you are losing custoemrs at the last second because your transaction mechanism is clunky, or the process is attractive to techies but not foodies needs your attention first.

Do you know how your product will be received by those that will buy it or another in massive numbers? How will your service facilitate the transactions it was designed to deliver?

All day today I met with clients and networked with companies, I asked them what their hurdles were.

That is when the true conversations happened. If you bring me in I am going to look for your organizations problems, operationally and marketing wise. I am going to poke at those sore spots and I am going to work to make them better, until they become a strength.

My favorite type of meeting is one like I had with the crew of getprivy.com today, bright honest people working to see their dream become a reality. It is a great idea that they are tweaking to try and go mainstream and big-time. I agreed with so much of what they said and believed and also was able to attack some of their hurdles with ideas and suggestions that I truly think were received with open minds. Check them out if you are in a retail space that wants to do some cutting edge online marketing.

My second favorite kind of meeting is where I ask about weaknesses, hurdles, and bottlenecks and the answers I get are ‘run arounds’ all they want to focus on their vision, not what is holding it back. I live in reality sorry people, I don’t live in dreamland. I like that type of meeting because I can make them short, and I can go back to helping the clients who are ready to find solutions to their operations and marketing issues.

Who is ready? I am. Think we can work together? Let me Know here. Just want to chat? find me  @spirocks on twitter.

Keep up with my writing here:

Social Media Monitoring for Marketing

Where are you when your potential customers are talking?

Social media provides a chance to hear things you would never hear before, find customers you would never find before, and make connections that lead to sales you would never make before. The key is to be there to capitalize on the thought, comment, mention that your customer makes, when they make it. You have to have the system in place to make it possible, your finger has to be on the shutter to capture the moment.

Are companies really doing that? Yes.

Here is an example from today that will illuminate the way companies are using social media monitoring to build brand awareness and make connections with proven customers. Earlier I stopped by Whole Foods to pick up some Burrata Mozzarella, a creamy fresh mozzarella that is one of a kind. While there I checked in with Foursquare and tweeted my checkin as shown here:

What Followed that Tweet was a Retweet by the brand that I bought. Notice I never mentioned a brand name, just the variety of the mozzarella. So how did the company know it was theirs? I uploaded a photo of the package with my checkin. That means the company was monitoring twitter for mentions of Burrata (they didn’t follow me prior to this) and were aware of my tweet and the fact that it was their product, they then re-tweeted my post. That all happened in 40 minutes. Not bad.

As you can see a subsequent conversation took place about their product and who knows how many people noticed and didn’t comment.

Social Monitoring used in marketing

 So how do you do this cost effectively?

You need to use tools that monitor the mentions for you. You can’t spend all day watching, and you can’t pay someone either, unless you are GM or Verizon etc. I use Spoke Social which I am involved in developing. Here is an example of the monitoring screen that Spoke has for setting up the keywords and other parameters:

Spoke Monitoring Set-Up Page

As you can see I set it up to monitor for mentions of Brunch or Sunday Brunch, within 25 miles of my restaurant Evenfall, as I am going to be starting brunch there in October. So now each time someone mentions that term within 25 miles of Evenfall I will be notified and able to message them an invitation. Will they all come? No. Will they have an interest in brunch? Likely. Will it cost me much time, money, or anguish to do it. Definitely not.

This is the type of Marketing Use that monitoring tools can have.  They are most often used as a customer service tool to make sure that any disgruntled customer taking to social media and venting about your brand can be contacted and the situation rectified.

If ideas and examples like this interest you, you can subscribe for free here: (It would make me happy too.)

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What do you think? Is monitoring interesting? It is not expensive, in fact it is one of 40 features that spoke has for $15 a month. I am here to answer questions for you, @spirocks on twitter or in comments below. 

Getting the most from your Blog?

Thoughts from the Beach…

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Whether a small business or a professional your blog is not only a part of your online marketing efforts, it should be your lynchpin that holds it all together. Now since you are creating posts that share valuable and interesting information and offers on a regular basis it is time to make sure that you are getting the most from this library of content you have created.

Have you heard of Evergreen Content?

That is a term that refers to blog posts that contain information that si not date specific and still of value to the reader months or even years after it is written. Just because it is buried thirty posts ago doesn’t mean it is done and gone forever. Google search will have them indexed and send visitors too your pages when they are relevant to search terms. That is one of the primary reasons we write blogs, to create content about the business we are marketing, and allow customers to find us via search. You may have heard of inbound marketing and this is a founding principle of that method.

But we want to Turbo Charge Inbound Marketing

Search is amazingly easy, and it currently sends upwards of 20% of the traffic to this blog, but we want more, faster. Sharing via social networks and email is the obvious answer, but how you do it will determine success or failure. At GuestFeed we pay careful attention to the frequency of messages we send out for ourselves and for our customers, I created the EFT Ratio to aid us in maintaining a helpful non-intrusive vibe with our followers. I believe it is one of the primary reasons that our clients and our own followings have increased so rapidly.

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We made a tool to Help

So we spent a lot of time creating great content, most of it evergreen, and tried to determine how to best share it. The over riding principle is that no matter what we don’t want to come across as a spammer, or annoying, or repetitive. But we want to share our evergreen posts more than once, especially on twitter. That is how Spoke Social was born, we wanted to create a tool that both our clients and us could use to help automate some of the sharing. How we do it:

  • We write a great post first.
  • Next we share it immediately on all our networks.
  • Then we schedule it to be reposted with Spoke on twitter at a specific interval, like every 15 days, for a specific timeframe, like until August 25th.
  • Then we monitor the click throughs and page views for all our pages. When one of them is clearly a STUD post with great interaction numbers we share it again on Facebook a month later with a comment along the lines of ‘In case you missed it the first time check out our most popular post of the past month.’

Isn’t automation Evil?

The answer is yes and no. Yes if your feed is a robot driven non-human inconsiderate self serving stream of boringness. No if you automate a very small percentage of what you send out, and if it is sincerely helpful things you are sharing. Check my twitter feed for an idea of what I mean: @spirocks

Keep in mind that EFT ratio idea from earlier, on twitter it is highly unlikely that a large percentage of your following will see a particular tweet. It is just the way it is with twitters real time stream of tweets pushing your last one out of view quickly. So with that understanding the second or third time that you share a post may be the first time that it is seen by a follower. That means that was their only opportunity to see what you are sharing and decide if it was of interest to them.

Take a look at this screenshot, see the spikes?  Those are re-shares on twitter. What this tells me is that there were a bunch of people who were seeing this for the first time even three months after the post was written.

Repeat Posts Traffic Graph

So why do we need a tool to help us automate the Re-Posts? Well creating content is time consuming and time is short when you are running a business. Spoke allows us to schedule posts out as long as we want with exact frequency in a matter of 10 seconds. That single feature would make it worth using for us, of course we use more of Spoke’s capabilities but scheduling recurring messages alone is the key one for us. Of course you can manually schedule posts with Hootsuite, we tried that and found that we were just not doing it as much because it was cumbersome and repetitive.

The bottom line is that you should do it, it is proven to drive more traffic to your blog, which means more potential customers are exposed to the fantastic things you are doing.

That is successful marketing defined.

If you like explanations and ideas like this please subscribe to receive new posts delivered to your email inbox here: SUBSCRIBE

 

What Do Only You Do?

Its crazy but business owners often forget WHY customers come to them. Chances are you are one of them, I think about things like this all the time and occasionally I catch myself doing exactly that too. It is weird, and it is costly.

Why do customers choose you?

Location
Is Your Location One of a Kind? Use it!

Is it your location, a skill that only you have, a recipe, a willingness to do things others are too lazy to do? Are you the most dedicated, do you always smile? Is there a single thing that you can point to that brings in customers that none of your competitors can claim?

Chance are there are more than one, but even if it is just one thing, all is not lost. You have that one thing. Ask Google if that worked for them.

Leverage the Hell out of it.

Take that one advantage and figure out a way to make sure as many people as heavenly possible know that about you or your business. If you perform 100 services that mimic other companies, but two that only you do, talk about those two.

If you have a restaurant that grows its own basil to infuse vodka with, and your basil lemon gimlet is amazing, you should talk about that as opposed to the $2 Bud Light Drafts. Sure $2 is a great deal but are you differentiating yourself? Are your marketing pitches interesting or the same as every other going through the motions marketer?

Do me a favor, I know you want to make more money by bringing in more customers. That we agree on, but can we agree on what marketing is and is not?

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. – American Marketing Association

That seems about right, the key being that you are communicating offers that have value for your audience. That VALUE is the key, and that is why I am asking you to think about what only you do. The things that only you do are where your intrinsic value lies to the customer you seek.

Find it, Embrace it, Share it, and Build On it.

Thanks for checking this out, if you are marketing yourself or your business, or are doing marketing for others, I would love to help you. With the software tools and experience we have at our disposal at GuestFeed let us know what your challenge is and I will personally offer you a plan of attack.

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Using Spoke Social to Aid in Booking Events and Private Parties

I have been talking about Spoke Social Dashboard because I use it and I think people who need a professional social dashboard should consider it. It occurred to me that I had been doing a lousy job, basically just telling people they should try it, or offering them a free trial month.

So today I start the week by breaking in a new direction, I am going to show you how Spoke can be a great aid in the process of booking a date specific event or private party. In the Restaurant Industry there is a constant supply of private parties (baby showers, birthday parties, rehearsal dinners) that need to be booked over the course of time. People will touch base (increasingly via a web form or email) with a restaurant and request information about the menu options, room availability, fees, and so on. From there the manager needs to reply, follow up, and then get the details from the customer in the time frame required. These parties are vital chunks of revenue to a restaurant and losing one can mean thousands of dollars of sales gone and irreplaceable. But it is also a game of voicemails, emails, and waiting.

Here is how Spoke Social can be used to help get more leads and ease the booking process:

Lead generation:

Spoke allows you to send scheduled posts, with links to specific information pages, that raise awareness that you host them. Imagine you are in charge of your sister’s baby shower, and a restaurant that is well known in your area posts a link to their ‘baby shower info page’. Don’t you agree that there is a high likely hood you are going to click it and check out what they are doing. If it looks good you are likely to request more info from their conveniently placed web form. YOU BECAME A LEAD [Read more…] about Using Spoke Social to Aid in Booking Events and Private Parties

Meet GuestFeed

I would like to introduce you…

GuestFeed is a content creation and social media marketing company I started to help small business owners who want their online presence to match their offline stature in the community. GuestFeed is focused on consistency  in creating compelling content like video, photography, blog posts, vibrant email newsletters, and web design. That consistency allows for our clients to provide a compelling social media presence to their customers, both potential and realized.

This is Professional Marketing and PR

GuestFeed is run by professionals with lifetime experience in marketing, design, videography, photography, and the use of web based tools in the promotion of small businesses. With custom built applications, such as our Social Market Facebook application and our proprietary social media distribution and monitoring dashboard, GuestFeed is situated to deliver a unified online marketing package which is built on the rock solid foundation of professionally created content.

Brand Building in an Online World

With the explosive growth of social networks and internet connected devices, an intersection has developed. One where pre-purchase online research has exploded and met with the online relationships built between individuals and brands alike. It is there that purchasing decisions are being influenced in a new yet very powerful way. To thrive in this new space your business must do more than merely be present, a neglected or stale presence will do the same as a dirty uncared for storefront. This is a new responsibility for business owners, and it is also a new opportunity for the best to differentiate themselves from their competition.

Enter GuestFeed

Consistent, Professional, Affordable.  GuestFeed social media content creation, delivery, management, and monitoring for your brand. For less than the cost of a monthly ad in a direct mail publication you can have a dedicated marketing agency creating compelling content for your business. An agency that will strategically deliver that content to the customers you want, and report back the results with easy to understand analytical reports. We also have our Social Media Dashboard software that allows you to log in and see the pipeline of content as it is que-ed up for delivery, monitor your brand online, and make adjustments as you see fit.

Visit GuestFeed Online, email me Spiro@GuestFeed.com, or call the Office: 1.617.379.3015 to see what we can do for you. I am on twitter too @spirocks…

Restaurant Servers, Get Social Now.

I have long wanted to write about this, but just always wished I didn’t have to. Since my wishes have gone unanswered I have given in to the temptation. A friendly order for restaurant servers everywhere. Take it from me, a restaurant owner and marketer.

RESTAURANT SERVERS YOU NEED TO GET SOCIAL NOW

To my favorite restaurant servers everywhere, you should be using your networks on facebook and twitter to do more than to try and get the attention of the girl/guy behind the counter at Starbucks. Use them to make money, so you know, you can buy a coffee at Starbucks everyday.

Sure promoting the restaurant is promoting a business that someone else owns, but truthfully you own it too. Put it this way, a restaurant owner would be thrilled to make 20% on his/her sales. She likely invested all of her money, some of her families money, and has a few investors to answer to. She has to find and manage all the employees, deal with nitwit reviews on Yelp, file and pay taxes every month, fix the toilet that a patron flushed a napkin down, worry about the local cops sending in an underage kid right when it is slammed, pay the snow plow guy, etc etc…

You? Well you get to come in at 4pm to start your shift, make some coffee, check that your section is neat and tidy, and serve your customers (some of whom may be nasty), you have to deal with the chef if he/she is testy over a slightly over cooked steak, and you have to be there to make money. But really, if you do a good job with a smile you will end up with 15-20% of your sales in your pocket. Done.

So you should be promoting the restaurant with your social networks. If you are working that night you should be sharing. You should be encouraging friends, family, and followers to come in and ask for you. You should be tweeting out the night’s special, and pictures of the blackberry mint martini. Sooner or later, money will be in your pocket because of it. Not to mention the social clout associated with working at a happening place, its yours to be had.

So own it, and do the right thing for you, your co-workers, and yes the restaurant owner too. I bet he/she will find a way to hook you up for it as well.

At GuestFeed we work with the employees of the restuarants we promote to educate, encourage, and reward their social efforts. Could we help you?

Don’t Forget The Game

A quick post today… major snowstorm here in Boston has got me busy.Washington Sq. P.

Remember the game you are playing: If you are marketing your restaurant, the same things appeal to people now as they always have, good food, social interaction, not having to cook, do the dishes, or all eat the same thing. People respond to many factors including your location, cuisine, price point, and philosophy. You are spreading the word about what you are doing. That is marketing. It doesn’t matter that you are using twitter and not a guy with a sandwich board on the corner. The tools have changed, the game hasn’t.

The guys in this picture are playing chess in Washington square park in 1969… if you and I started a chess game tomorrow we would play by the same rules. Just because you are in Toronto and I am in Boston, and I am playing on an iPad and you are on a MacBook Air doesn’t mean that we are playing a different game. It is chess. It is Marketing.

What you need to do is get the same reaction, by marketing the same things, using today’s tools. Sure tactics change based on the medium (A post on this) but there are countless new tactics introduced to chess from the Sicilian Defense Taimanov System to the Classical Kings Indian to the Spanish Gambits… new tactics have been introduced to chess over the ages. It is still the same game, remember that. It is Marketing.

So you may need to brush up on the new technicalities of moving your pieces, and communicating your move to your audience, but you are moving them for the same reasons.

You must be Human, Identifiable, Yourself. Any notion that Social Media Marketing has changed the need to be any of those things is fools gold. If you are anonymous nobody listens, if you are too polished nobody feels you, if you are a corporate name you are seen as a seller only.

This is what we do for our clients at GuestFeed, we use modern communication vehicles to express their humanity, to distribute their uniqueness, and to do it better, faster, cheaper than older methods. If you want a free suggestion of what we would do for you contact me here, or via @spirocks, or spiro@guestfeed.com…

Otherwise have an amazing time tonight, I will be shoveling myself out of 3 feet of snow here… yikes.

Update 6/2011 I just came across this intelligent and eloquent article that I believe gets asimilar point. Removing Technology