Today we’re proud to share with you the opening episode of our Guest Engage Podcast.  Use the player below to listen to it here on your browser, or download the MP3 to your desktop and listen to it at your own leisure.

[podcast]http://www.pithandpower.com/guestengage/wp-content/uploads/2010/GE-Podcast-1.mp3[/podcast]

Enjoy!

I’ll get to the connection with Social Media in a second, but stay with me.

Because our garden is so small I have to assess the value of every little veggie I plant.  I need to know if it will grow and, if it does, whether we’ll eat it. Some things like tomatoes and peppers are home runs.  Things like watermelons, not so much.

Sorry about the cheesy metaphor comparing business to a garden, but the comparison has merit. Business owners need to know if their strategies are peppers or watermelons– especially when it comes to Social Media. They need to know if their efforts are bearing fruit.

I use a simple equation to determine the effectiveness of my efforts:

Value = B – (2T + C)

I’ll break down the variables below, but here’s a quick key.

B = Benefits

T = Time In

C = Cost

B = Benefits

In other words, the value of an activity, whether in my garden or my restaurant, is equal to the benefits reaped minus the sum of the cost and time invested.

Think about this equation vis-a-vis your Social Media activities. Think about the interactions you’ve had with your guests using social media. What is the net sentiment of those interactions?  Is it a positive or a negative?

Are you managing your online reputation effectively?  If so, the answer should be “positive”.

Regarding the above equation, you should count an insane amount of positive sentiment as +100 benefits (B), and tons of negative interaction as -100 benefits (B).

What other criteria should you be using to measure the B portion of the equation?

I wouldn’t use fan and follower numbers on Facebook and Twitter as benefit criteria.  These numbers are important in many ways, but they represent potential benefits, not current benefits.

Things like media click through rates (CTR), and CTR from sites like Yelp are a better guage of how effective your various marketing campaigns are.

To measure these, subtract the previous month’s numbers from the current month’s numbers and divide by the previous month’s numbers — in other words, calculate the percent growth/decline in CTR this month. Now throw away the % symbol and add it to the number you had from “sentiment.”

My number for this month is +150.

T = Time In

You’ll notice in the equation that I’ve double the importance of “time in.”  In reality I feel like this should be a factor of 4 or 5.  You need to determine what your time factor is.  The bigger the number, the less likely you’ll want to invest your time in the activity.

Be honest about the time you’ve invested in your social media campaigns.  Don’t throw out things like sales calls or account setup. These may be one time events, but they will give you valuable insight into how much more efficient you can be with your time.

Remember the one thing you have the most control over in this equation is T.  You will improve your skills, and become more efficient with practice.  You may decide to hire out some aspects of your campaigns.  You may use talent within your organization for various aspects of your social media strategy.

Whatever the case, T is how you control the equation.  If, at the end of this exercise you find you self with negative Value as a reward for your efforts then you should look to adjust T accordingly.

Take the number of hours worked and plug it directly into the equation. You can compare this to your hours worked from last month, but for this exercise I recommend just using the absolute value.

My number for the month is 15.

C = Cost

Cost is the total amount of dollars you spent over the course of the month on social media marketing and outreach.

Take this a percentage as compared to your cost from the previous month.  Drop the percentage and plug it into the equation.

My number for the month is 90.

Calculating Value

So using my numbers from above.

150 – (30 +90) = Value

Value = +30

So my social media strategy is producing positive results! Which is great, but I will probably return to the Time portion of the equation and tweak things a little bit, to squeeze out some more time for me!

These are not numbers you are going to present to your board.  But they provide a way for you to measure your efforts and help you to revise your strategy.

We hope you are able to do the same. Continue to track this number every month an you will have a great tracking tool for the effectiveness of your social media strategy.

Also be sure to check out our Ebook “Six Steps to Improving Your Online Reputation” for some awesome tips on improving your social media effectiveness.

Before I give you my play by play, let me make an admission. I’m not an avid user of Foursquare, Loopt or any other geo-location apps. Two things have driven my disinterest:

1. I don’t want people to know where I am all the time
2. I didn’t understand the payoff until now.

Now some of you may point out that you can get free stuff if you’re the Mayor or Duke or Emperor of your local spot. And the value-added there for a service business is straight forward. But for the average user, the act of checking in is not going to become habitual unless it’s prompted and there’s value added for each check in. Facebook Places could solve both of these issues.

Facebook Places for the iPhone is simple enough to use.  We found that we had to add most the Places we checked into. And it wasn’t exactly apparent whether the available locations had come from other user check-ins or another source.

Either way the process was easy and basic. We were celebrating a birthday and spent the day out at various restaurants, bars and concerts.

Facebook also gives you the option to check your friends in at venues, and to see anyone else who has checked in. The concert we saw had about 40 other people checked in when we arrived.

The initial announcement included an invitation from Facebook to other geo-location players to participate in their game.   In other words, user check-ins on Foursquare, Gowalla and other services will post on a Facebook news feeds.

What we haven’t seen yet is how Facebook will tie Places into your business page. Ideally the Places function will automatically post any check-in at your business in the relevant user news feeds.

Facebook seems to be super focused on the development of Places right now. Changes are happening daily, and we will do our best to keep you up to date.

Cheers,

Chuck

Facebook on CNN

Facebook’s upcoming foray in to geolocation will have a profound effect on how you interact with your guest.

Details of features have yet to emerge, and when they do, we will be talking about it.

What we do know is this.  There are 500 million Facebook users.  Services like Gowalla, Loopt, and Foursquare barley have 10 million.  That’s .02%.  That is tidal.

Facebook is about to introduce geolocation to the masses.  If it is easy and fun to use then the potential for growth is limited only to the number of Facebook users.

Every one of your Facebook fans just became much more valuable.

Imagine being able to set your Facebook page to alert your mobile every time one of your fans checked in to your place of business.

Imagine being able to extend offers and discounts to guests while their are in your establishment.

This is  a loyalty program that runs itself – simply set the parameters and away you go.

There are many other applications that we can think of…what about you?

Hootsuite is part of a broad range of web based applications know loosely as twitter clients.  These apps generally have a wider use though.  They can typically be used to post status updates across a wide variety of social media sites.

I can’t stress this enough…If you are managing multiple social media accounts, a twitter client that lets you post and edit across all those accounts is essential. Your twitter client is going to be the command center of your social media operations.

I’ve used a variety of these applications, and all of them have strengths and weaknesses.  Hootsuite is far and away the best free application available for businesses in the service industry for the following reasons.

1. Its Free

2. UI is webased; you only need a supported browser and your login information

3. Awesome Mobile App; Easy to use on your supported phone

4. Supports Multiple Contributors; You can invite multiple contributors with varying levels of access.

The UI is a bit intimidating when you first log in to the website.  As you get familiar with the features it will become less daunting.  All in all a great way to manage your ever expanding list of Social Media sites in an effective and efficient way.

Check out Hootsuite and let us know what you think.

Cheers,

Ty

Let’s be honest: one of the best ways to win at the Yelp game is to ignore some of Yelp’s general recommendations… and to bend some of their rules.  This is especially true when it comes to responding to positive customer reviews using their public response option.  Yelp generally discourages it.  We don’t.

It always sucks to get a bad review.  And it sucks to see a bad review in a prominent position, no matter how long ago the review was written.  Just remember this: reviews are a volume game.  If you focus more on generating positive reviews than regretting negative ones, your overall ratio of positive-to-negative will likely improve… which is really the only thing that matters.

We talk a lot about how to deal with negative reviews in our ebook Six Easy Steps to Improving Your Online Reputation.  You can download this ebook by filling in the form to your right and pressing the button.  There’s a whole chapter in there on responding to bad reviews.  Today I’d like to talk about something different:  responding to positive reviews… and doing so in an attempt to generate more positive reviews.

On to it then…

These are the steps you should take in responding to positive reviews on Yelp:

Step 1: Log into your Yelp Business Owner’s Account and find the most recent four or five positive reviews.  Start with the review from the user with the most followers.

Step 2: Private message the Yelper with a thank you and ask them if you may respond to their review publicly. If they say yes then move on to step 3.

Step 3: Respond to their review publicly… with something simple like:  ”Thank you so much for the great review, Mr. Smith. We love it when people love us on Yelp”…  or something equally cheesy.

Step 4: Return to Step 1 every time a review without a public response from you is visible at the top of your first page of reviews.

Follow these steps and you’re sure to see an increase in the volume of your positive reviews.  And if you want to accelerate the positive feedback loop even more, then use in-store promotions to encourage your best customers to “yelp” about you too.

So that’s it.  Now… why not head over to your Yelp account and get started today?

https://biz.yelp.com/

Cheers,

Chuck

The discussion centered on an exercise being planned by the Department of Homeland Security in San Diego called Exercise 24.

The specific focus of Exercise 24 was to find and test ways in which open source software, social media and new technology can be used to help make disaster relief more efficient and effective.

So let me set the scene. Phd’s and Four Star Generals not included, there were some 30 people in the room, most of them visibly smarter than me. Seriously. Now you may be asking yourself “What the hell does a restaurant manager have to contribute to that kind of discussion?”

I was asking myself the same thing when they went around the room to ask us what we had to contribute.

Uhhh….

The group included officials from the CDC & the Dept. of Health, and was rounded out by a Three Star Admiral and the Captain of the Security Police for the State of Baja Mexico.

Uhhhh…

So the great thing about having worked in a restaurant is you get really good at wingin’ it. My response was simple and to the point. I was there because I understood how social media and open source technology had the potential to influence communication, and I wanted to contribute that knowledge to disaster relief.

Everyone smiled at me and nodded in agreement, probably wondering at the same time who invited the “special” kid to their MENSA meeting.

Regardless, this group had been created because academics and governments realize how tidal the influence of new media is for human communication. I think the reach of this communication revolution is so broad that anybody that uses it has something to contribute.

So how is this relevant to the service industry? Well this group of highly educated and influential people thought the kind of social media techniques the service industry is using was relevant to them.

Still think Social Media is a fad?

Cheers,

Ty

You can read the exact stats from the Pew survey here “Older Adults & Social Media“. But the real question is, what does this mean for you as a business owner in the service industry?

Our take on this is simple. More people on Facebook and other Social Media sites means more exposure to potential revenue dollars for businesses that choose to leverage those sites.

If you look at the numbers, the amount of Americans on Facebook between 50 and 64 has more than doubled in the last 6 months.

How those individuals choose to use Social Media is another question all together. In many ways it is the more important one.

It’s great that Mom uses Facebook to say hi to her kids, but will it influence her purchasing decisions? Big corporations are betting that it will. What do you think?

We all know how important it is to track promotional campaigns, including coupons.  One of the major problems with paper coupons is that we know how many we put out and we know how many we get back, but we can’t track demographics.

The “Coupons for Fan Pages” app, developed by Wildfire Social Media, takes a stab at solving this problem. Just sign up for a Wildfire account and give it a shot. You can find a tutorial on starting your first campaign here:

Wildfire Coupon Tutorial

There is a cost for running a promotion on the app– basic packages start at around $30.  But the analytics Wildfire provides leave no doubt about whether the campaign is profitable or not.  Of course, it’s much more likely to be so if you’ve already established a significant Facebook fan base.

I’d suggest starting your first campaign with a promotion that mirrors something you’ve already done offline.  Then you compare the two promotions side by side– online vs. offline– to see which was more effective.  I started with a $10 off promotion and modified my campaigns from there.

You should also define a short period for the campaign and use unique tracking codes to for your coupons.  You’ll need to upload an Excel database of the codes you want to use, but this is well worth the 5-10 minutes it takes.

So… here are the 5 steps to getting your first campaign underway:

Step 1. Go to www.wildfireapp.com and sign up for an account.

Step 2 Craft your add campaign.  It helps if you have a banner.jpg template to use.

Step 3 Follow wildfire’s free tutorials to add the app to your Facebook fan page.

Step 4 Add a promotions tab on your Facebook fan page.

Step 5 Advertise your page to your fan base.

That’s it!

Good luck with your first campaign… and as always, send us a message if you need any help.

Cheers,

Ty