Drilling Down: Small Businesses and Location -Based Marketing

Great article in the New York Times featuring my past intern, Brian Honigman. We have come so far!

In this week’s Dashboard roundup of small-business news, we quoted from a blog post in which Brian Honigman, a digital marketing manager for Marc Ecko Enterprises, offers advice on using location-based networks. We went back to Mr. Honigman to dig deeper into how small businesses can use these services. A condensed version of the conversation follows.

Q.

Please explain what a location-based network does.

A.

A location-based network is a social media platform that allows you to share your location with your friends and the public in a variety of ways. Facebook and Twitter allow you to share your location associated with a status or a tweet, while a more heavily location-focused platform like Foursquare or Scvngr allows users to perform a few different tasks with their location, like earn rewards for check-ins or leave tips about their location.

Read the full article here...

Does your Company PASS or FAIL? Test Your Social Media Response

We all know we WANT comments and interaction from our viewers/fans on social media, but how exactly to do respond to their comments? What if it’s a NEGATIVE response?

Social media response can be critical and damaging for a business especially when neglected. In light of the Susan G Komen response disaster, there are great lessons to be learned out there —Test your social media response:

#1 – Do you clearly have posted what your policies are and what is acceptable? Does your company have an internal social media policy that details what employees can or cannot comment or state opinion when representing your company? (If you don’t SMG actually WRITES and customizes social media policies, email me at stephanie@socialmindedmediagroup.com for more information).

#2 – TROLL or RAGER Comments – Don’t “feed” them. If the comment is completely off the wall, a rant, ridiculous in nature and irrelevant, disgrard and DELETE.

#3 – UNHAPPY CUSTOMER or ON TOPIC Comments – Difficult to respond to usually because they may hurt your feelings, but you must remove all emotion and respond respectfully and thoughtfully. DO NOT DELETE. This will in light be a positive turn as your credibility will SOAR with the transparency. You will recover.

#4 – Unfortunately, you will take a small plumet. But YOU WILL RECOVER. Learn the lesson from Komen who deleted thousands of comments that were on-topic basically because they “didn’t want to hear it.” You don’t need me to explain to you how this was a sad, PR FAIL.

***Great model provided by Scribd.com (click image to view full site)

Simplify Your Life: first step to social media – one email address

I was on vacation in Central America this past week (try not to be too jealous and yes I do have a point…) While working on the beach frivolously tweeting and emailing and cursing my iPad, iPod, and iPhone for not being more adaptable to my needs, I had an epiphany—It wasn’t my technology that needed upgraded, it was me.

I have gotten so accustomed to Google docs that when I needed my cheat sheet of client log ins, I was lost trying to toggle between everything and logging in. As I became more mad with the Google docs app (I prefer and actually highly recommend iMailG), I realized it could all be fixed efficiently with TaDa! Simplicity.

So I’ve come to Rule #1: When Starting a Social Media Campaign: Keep it Simple!

Designate one specific email address for all your logins.

(tip: make sure your email is a legit website and not a google email, such as marketing@socialmindedmediagroup.com because some sites such as LinkedIn require this for verification). This way you can also designate this email to anyone else monitoring your marketing accounts so it is not a cluster of google docs and logins.

(NOTE: I am not saying to use the same passwords! Make sure these are still encrypted. I like to coin a phrase, such as “IloveGoogleDocstoomuch” and use ILGD2M as my password.)

This is also nice because social media loves to overload your inbox with notifications of new friend requests, retweets, comments and more. Having one designated email will allocate all of these to one lonely place, and keep your regular inbox clean and tidy.

Warning! Customer Service is Making a Comeback! 5 Ways to Survive

Let’s just jump right into today’s topic, Customer Service.

I am still not sure when the decline of customer service happened, but for me, I am pretty sure the end of civilization as I know it ended when I moved to NYC. If you want a wake-up call in some of the worst of it, move to New York for a few months. Upon living here, I have experienced overbearing brokers and fees to get into an apartment that I could ironically never get a hold of again after I paid them (in cash). Then there was setting up my cable, that actually called me 1 minute before their scheduled arrival time, and when I didn’t answer, said they would have to RESCHEDULE since I “missed my appointment”—for three weeks later. And getting new furniture delivered? Forget it… I hope you don’t need a couch for at least 6-8 weeks and can take off a full day of work for them to deliver within their “desired delivery time of 9am- 3 pm, weekdays only.” Don’t even get me started about the locksmith who showed up for one price, then demanded $100 more, and when I said I don’t want it anymore for that new price, demanded a $12 “show-up fee”. When I said I wasn’t paying that, he told me he was calling the cops. I didn’t sleep well that night thinking he was going to key-in and well… shudders.

So, when did it become so hard to be a consumer? It’s our money, and shouldn’t we be able to have some sort of say in how our services are handled? And is it too much to ask that you just “deliver what you promise.” That has been the hardest realization for me to swallow. I never ask for above and beyond—if you say you’re bringing me a hot dog, and bring just the bun, it’s only natural that I am going to ask, “well, what happened to the hot dog?” Only to be accosted and attacked for even asking like some sort of raging rabid animal. Come again?

As a business owner, I realize this opens up a WAVE of opportunity for me, just by being nice. If everyone else is going to yell and demean their clients, I am going to treat them like gold—as they SHOULD be. Simply by communicating with them in a reasonable amount a time (I always say within 24 hours unless limited access to devices), delivering to them what I promised, and acknowledging issues and mistakes and fixing them accordingly.

5 Ways Businesses can Improve and/or “Social Monitor” Customer Service with Social Media:

1. Social Media is your best friend or enemy when it comes to customer service. Why not stay friends?

There is an infinite number of review sites out there, and many are specific to your type of service. Sadly, consumers are more inclined to write about a bad review, that a great one, so why give them any more incentive? Encourage your clients to write good reviews through a referral program, and ALWAYS address negative comments and reviews. Responding always gives you the hand to correct the issue. Have you not read about McDonalds massive #McFail?

2. Stay Ahead of the Game.

Google provides you this awesome little gadget called “alerts.” You can customize it to send you an email immediately (recommended), daily or weekly on search results for your chosen key words (such as your company name, your name, or your field of business). TIP: Make sure you enclose the key words in parenthesis ex. “Stephanie Barnhart” instead of Stephanie Barnhart, so it will find results for the words together and not just with “Stephanie” or “Barnhart” in the results. No matter who or what in the world is talking about you online—good or bad—you’ll know about it.

3. Communication.

I can’t stress this enough. Nothing frustrates me more than someone who cannot respond to your phone calls or emails. It’s a simple, expected characteristic of the job! If you don’t have time to respond to your customers, you need to hire an assistant (or me!) to do it for you. Nothing gets Tweeted/Facebooked about more than a company who cannot return a phone call/email to a disgruntled customer. You know you’ve seen them—don’t become one!

4. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Corporations refer to it as churn—the ratio of clients you gain to the clients you lose a year. Don’t LOSE clients due to bad customer service! If you find yourself falling behind, get help. Media consultants, such as myself, are here to monitor your presence online, and keep up with your clients so you have time to do what it is you do best! Don’t let your business fail because you think you need to hire a full-time marketing staff for your small business. There are options in the middle!

5. Be Yourself.

Don’t promise the world and then drop off the face of the earth. The best business owners on Twitter are seen for their transparency and humbleness. People want to connect with other people. They want to see that you are a person and not a robot, so show them that. If your business is cupcakes, give them cupcakes! Show them you get up 3 am to get the dough ready! Snap a photo of the process, admit that they came out banana walnut instead of banana vanilla and you’re selling them as a “new taste test” for half price! People will, literally, eat it up. (Now don’t become one of those people who has to tweet their every activities – no one wants to know about your bathroom breaks! Be realistic!)

Start with the basics, and you will keep your customers happy! Happy customers = more money, more customers! Brilliant!

Facebook, and Twitter and YouTube oh MY!

When you think social media, your mind over-floods. I know mine does. It’s okay you can admit it.

Take a deep breath.

Technology is designed to update and change at the speed of light. That’s what makes it so intriguing and “undomesticated,” if you will. It’s the pure beauty of the raw opportunity it can provide you. IF….. you can tame it a little, you say. Literally, it is a jungle out there.

So consider yourself lucky to have stumbled upon my blog! I will walk you step-by-step on navigating this jungle. Congrats! You just found your own personal Indiana Jones of the cyber world! And, after having a te

aser, if you still don’t want to take it on yourself, you can hire my company to do it for you. Problem solved!

But for today – lets start with Tip#1: Love what you do.

Because if you don’t, who will? If you don’t love what you do, stop right now and go back to your dark, windowless cubicle at your corporate office where no one cares if you even sneeze to say god bless you. People aren’t rocks – they can actually TELL when you are passionate about what you are offering.

So you love being a dentist? Great! There’s an audience for that….

So you love taking pictures of cats in weird positions in pizza boxes? GREAT! There’s an audience for that too…. (seriously)

So think of it this way… you need a new dress/suit. You wouldn’t walk into a store in a back alley that is dirty, has old garbage laying around, and smells. No one talks to you, they ignore you, and are rude, like you are interrupting their day. Now, you go to a designer super store. They have music pumping, hand you champagne, and can’t stop cat calling and drooling over you in that outfit as they parade you down a mock runway in the center of the store. Sold! In fact, charged to an almost maxed-out credit card because you can’t afford the price, but you know it’s worth it because they told you so.

Have this mentality about your own online branding. No one’s interested in an boring, old, smelly website.

So you can say you love what you do? Good! Now we can get started….tomorrow.

Now go back to doing what you love.

Cheers!

Stephanie