@Spirocks

social media for business

The Social Feed and Employees

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How does your social feed embrace your employees? Does it at all?

These are the questions you should ask yourself. Are you tagging employees in pictures of the product of their labors, are you recognizing the fact that many hands are involved in creating what your business accomplishes? Do you thank, mention, and acknowledge in your social feeds?

Here are some reasons you should: 

  1. People who love doing a good job, like to know it is appreciated. And keeping great employees is the first step at keeping customers coming back. Be the leader they want to work for, one that gives them love.
  2. Social Media is public, and employees of other businesses in your area are watching. They will be more likely to want to work for you if they see you building your team up.
  3. Your employees have friends and family that want to see there work life celebrated too, these are not only sources of positive reinforcement but also potential customers who are looking to embrace those that support their loved ones.
  4. These employees are the faces of the story of your business that the community will want to embrace, a cocktail without a bartender is not the same experience. Celebrate your story, and the characters that make it unique.

There are tens of thousands of reasons to involve your Social Feed and Employees. These are just a few. Above you can see Mike, Spencer, and I having some fun at Sauce. If you wore your Jorts in that Thursday you got a free hand cut french fry… see those Jorts are worth something!

The Only Way to Put Your Business in the Center of Attention

The time to deny it, IS OVER, mobile internet rules the day.

If you question this, do the following:

  •  Look at any child with your iPhone or iPad.
  • Look at your spouse across the table from you.
  • See what people are doing on the train.
  • Check out what gets the attention of people in line at Starbucks.
  • what was the driver of that car that swerved at you on the highway today doing?

Ignore it at your own peril, the future is in the pockets of all of your customers. Is your marketing online? Do you give it the credit it deserves? Is your website usable on mobile devices?

If you are using flash, do not have a mobile ready site, or spend your time and dollars on offline marketing only, the answer is no, and you are losing out regardless of whether you feel it or not.

Mobile is an Opportunity not a Threat.

Can you deliver more than your competitors via online content, mobile access, and social integration? Are you ready to allow your customer to know you, the real you? If you are you will be the new king of your market before long, as the customers you seek will be found here.

Where is Here?

Here is everywhere now. Here is where ever they are when they think they need what you sell. Here is on the toilet. Here is on top of the Empire State Building. Here is in an airplane. Here is in a Doctor’s Office waiting room.

People buy diapers on Amazon from a bar at 1Am, and you don’t think they are going to search for an eyeglass shop while they wait for their coffee in the morning?

Ask yourself if you have done enough to put your business where people are looking for you. THEN DO MORE.

Find Me @spirocks on Twitter, I hope you enjoyed this pep talk.

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. 

Business Communications with Google Plus

Google Plus for Company Communications

I thought I would share an example of the way that I am using Google Plus to strive for better communication with the employees of one of my restaurants. I created a circle in Google Plus and added all of the employee emails that I knew (I am hunting the rest as we speak), and set out to use that circle as a way to connect with everyone. When something new is added to the menu, when we run into and issue during service that needs to be addressed, when I decide to open or close for a holiday, and any other time that I want to contact the staff this will be the method. Of course I will still be managing verbally while I am present at the restaurant, but this is not a business where everyone is there from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday.

Some Employees work two shifts a week, and it has been up to me and a few managers to convey all the changes to each member of the staff when they came in. Until now.

Google Plus employee communications

This is the first message I sent to the staff to introduce them to the fact that I am going to be using this tool to communicate with them. It is my hope that I will be able to create learning moments from any snag we hit during service by bringing it to everyone’s attention as it happens with the hope that I can prevent the rest from stumbling over the same issue before it is resolved.

With access to this circle via my mobile and desktop I will be able to communicate with the entire staff when the need or solution arises, and that convenience is something that I believe will allow me to be better at what I do. With two restaurants and a growing marketing company my time is in demand and having the ability to communicate like this is a godsend.

Why Google Plus?

Well the greatest reason is that I can create the circle with just their email addresses and whether or not they are using Google Plus already I can contact them. It simply emails the contents of my messages to them if they are not G+ users already. You can’t do that with the friend request format of Facebook, and though I love Twitter it’s short messages and lack of a true group messaging function eliminates that as well. So Google Plus races to the forefront. The ease of setting up a circle is very key as well.

In the future I anticipate the ability to incorporate other Google properties such as: (Google Calendar – Scheduling and Google Documents – Training Materials) With Photos and Youtube there really is little limitation to where you can go with this.

Waiting for an Invite? Here You Go

If you would like to receive updates to this process and other thoughts on driving your business into the future all you have to do is:

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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.

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Google Plus – Business Ideas

 

By now you have heard about Google+, its a brand new social network that seems to have a ton of potential. I am not going to go over what its features are, as there are a thousand such articles already. What I am going to do is give you a few reasons to check it out, and hopefully reveal a few opportunities it presents.

Google+ and Your Business

By uniting the functionality of the Facebook style stream, the Twitter style update, the Foursquare Check-In, the Flickr photo video curation, the contact collection that is in your gmail contact list, and the power of multiple best in class Google properties from Youtube to Maps, Google+ is a legitimate titan in the making.

Google+ has one major Hurdle to Clear

In order for it to succeed Google Plus for business will have to answer one major question: Will enough people decide to invest time and energy into a new social platform? Who will right away: people like me, who have businesses that rely heavily on their web presence. The reason is, despite Bing’s progress, Google owns search. To ignore the potential for increased search rankings from interactions and content on Google+ would be foolish. Please don’t forget with every Gmail user there is also a built in head start as well… true that didn’t work out so well for Buzz. but Buzz sucked, it felt like an intrusive clone, and nobody likes that.

Google+ is different, it is intuitive and it is a hybrid of features from successful networks that have been improved and tied into very very robust Google properties.

Privacy is Weapon #1 for Google+

How many people have had an issue arise from something posted on Facebook? How many people have grown frustrated by the obvious push by Facebook to make it hard to keep things private?  Sure it does make sense that you should not share things on Facebook that you would not want public. But those making that argument are missing the point. PEOPLE WANT TO SHARE THOSE THINGS. They just want to be able to choose with whom. With circles Google has the best answer to date. You can share items specifically with the people you want to, and creating a circle is incredibly easy and the granularity of the process is as transparent as I can imagine. I highly suggest that you take your time at the beginning and try to think of the ideal structure for your circles. Work, Friends, Family may be too general to really get the benefit. Think: Potential Customers, VIP customers, company bosses, employees who report to me, CBS fantasy league, college guy friends, Mom’s side of the family, cute girls (if you are looking for that), etc. You can always select to share something with everyone, or you can drill down to the groups you are trying to reach.

Video Meeting via Google+

Having an active Google+ profile and well defined groups means that you will be able to selectively manage the promising video meeting feature of Google plus for business. That could mean proactively jumping into a customers Google+ hangout and striking up a convo and asking if you can do anything for them. But most incredibly you can be face to face with a  customer who needs help with your company immediately and for free. Yes it starts to sound like a Skype killer here.There are a ton of possibilities here, including remote meetings with co-workers. Imagine for a moment. Google plus for business and for personal use, under one hood.

Google+ is Uncluttered

Time will tell if it stays this way but the clutter of Facebook is not here. There are no mafia invitations, or applications that ask you to answer juvenile questions about your friends. It is pure and that is refreshing. I don’t have to tell you about the annoyances with Facebook applications, they are the Myspacification of that platform in my eyes. Combined with the lack of control over privacy, the black screen of death when viewing photos, and the general feel of a meat market Facebook has lost some of its appeal to me. The big draw? Everyone is on it… but you know what everyone I knew was on Myspace too, and I can remember the day I fell for Facebook and then the day some time later that I somewhat sadly deleted my Myspace page. Things change and in the world of internet empires, pretty f’in quickly.

In summary here is why you should give a chance to Google Plus for business:

  1. Google+ is a legit, full featured, and well thought out social network.
  2. Google+ makes Privacy a core feature, highlighting the shortcomings of Facebook in that department.
  3. It has the strength of many Google properties driving it. (Youtube, Maps, Places, Picasa)
  4. Google owns search and will be tying data from Google+ into search results.
  5. The Video feature has a ton of possibilities, and it is free on Google+
  6. Google+ is a more grown up social network, uncluttered by childish games and the meat market feel of Facebook.

Want an invite? Email me your gmail address and I will send you one. (spirocks@gmail.com or @spirocks on Twitter)

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This is my initial post on how to use Google Plus for Business, and ideas about the feature of Google plus for business.

Run your own Group Buying Promotion. I am.

Who needs Groupon?

Keep all the revenue and stir up some serious business along the way. In this post I am going to explain how with an example I just put together for Evenfall Restaurant, it’s a home grown group buying marketing campaign. It’s Mojito Time.

Mojito
Evenfall's Famous Mojito

The Hook: The more people that buy the cheaper it gets.

Evenfall is well known for having the best Mojitos in the area, with elbow grease, fresh muddled mint and lime, and some silver rum they serve them in pint glasses and they serve them often in the summer months. So for this promotion we decided to lower the price every week that at least 100 mojitos were sold. We started by reducing the price from $8 to $5 for the first ten day run. The every week until mid August the price will be reduced by 50 cents until it reaches $1 a Mojito.

I created a page on the restaurants blog dedicated to the promotion, you can see that here: (Make My Mojito Cheaper) and shared it via Twitter, Facebook, and a soon to be released email blast.

As the promotion progresses the deal gets more and more enticing, it is timed to coincide with the slowest season of the year for the restaurant and designed to drive businesses during the dog days of summer with ridiculously cheap mojitos. Read on to see the consideration I took, and why it makes sense for the restaurant…

[Read more…] about Run your own Group Buying Promotion. I am.

What Can Followers Do for Your Business?

Skeptics of social media marketing have a lot of excuses for why they don’t do it, why they don’t have time for it, and why ‘their customers’ don’t really use it. But what they really are asking is:

How can a strong twitter and facebook following help me solve business problems my restaurant faces and make real money?

They are your Fans, and they are a resource that adds strength.

Here is a real world example of how GuestFeed did just that this past week for one of our restaurant clients. I was talking to the manager of a successful restaurant that has a private dining room for functions like rehearsal dinners, corporate meetings, and holiday parties. GuestFeed has been very successful building website solutions, and marketing the private dining opportunities for the restaurant, and as we spoke he said, “The holiday season is almost completely booked, imagine if we could book the room for some Monday and Tuesday parties.” I thought that would be incredible if their private room was completely booked for December, and I asked him what he thought it would take. He told me that if he knew he would do it.

So I said lets ask your restaurant’s twitter followers and GuestFeed’s followers and see what they come up with. So I ran a simple “What would it take to encourage your company to have their Holiday party on a Mon or Tues?” message out there. We got seven responses in the first 30 minutes, and some of them were actually within or control (what is not: tell my boss to give us wed off).  We were able to put together a dinner menu and limited open bar, with a fixed per person price that came in below the restaurant’s typical price point. It resulted in two bookings in the first week worth $2800 in sales.

Money invested: $0 Time invested: Two tweets: 45 seconds, Menu creation: 15 minutes.

Your social following can be a sounding board for business ideas, a source of suggestions, and a window through which you can see your customer’s perspective.  Clearly you need to dedicate yourself to the building of your followers, facebook friends, and email list for this approach to be very effective. Your results would surely not be the same if you only had 54 followers compared to my 4400+ @Spirocks account and 2347+ @GuestFeed account… but as you do that, your results get better incrementally.

This kind of interactive marketing is what we do at Guestfeed, and what every restaurant should be doing to work towards turning a period of weakness into a strength. Your connections may not all ever visit your restaurant, but via activity like feedback or bringing attention to your content they may lead others through your door. There is real value there you just have to ask for it.

Feel free to ask me any related questions you have, I mean it,  I love to connect.