A while ago I was inspired to download some mind mapping software, as I’ve heard it can be great for helping to think through new ideas. While I haven’t used it nearly as much as I thought I would, I found one great use for it — tracking client referrals.
I’m using Blumind to do this, primarily because it has a “portable” version that I can install in Dropbox and keep things synced across computers. It works quite well.
As our client base at Green Mellen has grown, we’ve often asked “do you remember how xx person found us?” and have to dig through emails to recall the trail. I thought it’d be neat to map them all out, and Blumind has been great for that. I simply add clients as sub-topics to the client that referred them to us and the tree slowly branches out. Below is a look at a large chunk of it (not all clients are in there yet), with the names blacked out for privacy reasons.
As you can see, there are two clients in the upper left portion that have sent us a ton of referrals. From a business perspective we work hard to stay fresh in their minds and keep them happy, and from a personal perspective we often thank them for what they’ve done and work hard to send appropriate referrals back in their direction when possible.
This has been a fun little tool to use. It’s neat to be able to see where your clients are coming from. In our case, it’s humbling to realize just how many are coming from word-of-mouth; it shows that clients are very happy with the work we’ve done, but it also helps to keep us working extra hard to make sure everyone is satisfied with the results the’re getting.
Have you ever built a visualization of your client list before? How did it work out for you?
Last week I had the opportunity to meet with a few groups of United Methodist Church leaders near Washington, DC to discuss how the church can best use their websites and social media tools to reach people more effectively.
My social media presentation was largely focused on the fact that Twitter and Facebook are no longer tools for churches to be “playing with”; they’ve become legitimate communication tools. While most churches are doing fairly well with Facebook, Twitter remains a problem. I’m hoping the tools I shared with them will help get things rolling.
Google+
Even though the sessions were only a week ago, my thoughts on Google+ have changed. At the time, I said something like “You need to focus hard on Facebook and Twitter, and start playing with Google+ because you’ll need to be active there later this year“. As it turns out, “later this year” is now. The reason for the sudden shift is Google’s release of “Search, plus Your World”, which adds heavy Google+ integration into the search results. Here’s a quick video showing how that works:
That alone should be enough to encourage you to get your organization on Google+. But it goes further. Try searching for “music” or “cars” and you’ll get a result similar to the shot below. Notice the area that I outlined in red.
Notice that the red box is for Google+ profiles only; no Twitter or Facebook found there. That is seen by some as anti-competitive, and perhaps it is, but that’s simply how it works right now. Britney Spears trails a variety of artists on Twitter (Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, etc), but none of them are on Google+ yet. As a result, she’s suddenly getting a lot more free promotion when someone performs a search.
For now, that area doesn’t matter much for your business, but it will soon. For local searches, Google will almost certainly start showing businesses in your area instead of just generic industry-related results. If you wait until that happens before you join Google+, you’ll be way behind. Suppose Katy Perry sees those results and joins Google+ to get back in the game. While she may catch up to Spears eventually, she’s already behind by 1.3 million followers. How far ahead do you want your competition to get before you join the game?
Faces in the main results
Not only is that side bar relevant, but the main search results (in both personal and non-personal mode) are already full of results from Google+. In many cases, those results show the face of the author of the post even if the post was made on their own blog. For example, the below search for “google earth imagery january” shows my face next to the second result, because it knows that I wrote that article and it connects to my Google+ profile; and this is the non-personal results!
Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket
As much as I love Google+, I’m certainly not advising you to bail on Facebook or Twitter. As I said at the beginning, those are legit communications platforms and your organization needs to be active on both of them. For now, at least, all three are very important to your organization.
If you want to dabble in social media, there are places to do that. Play with Pinterest (connect with me), play with Path, or play with any of the other new services popping up. Pinterest may become more serious this year, but for now you can just poke the tires a bit.
I don’t have time
I hear it a lot — “not another service to keep up with!”, but it’s all about your mind set. Instead of worrying about how you’ll have time for three separate services, just look at it from the positive side. Now you have another way to connect with your customers, and this one will help you show up more frequently in the search results too. It’s a win-win!
Once you get things set up, simply take 10-15 minutes/day to post your latest thoughts and respond to people that are talking to you. It doesn’t have to be a huge deal. If it takes longer than that to respond to everything coming your way, then your business is likely doing well and you can afford to spend more time working with those people (or hire someone to help you out).
Do you think any other services are worthy of the full attention of your business right now? I can see LinkedIn being one for a few organizations, but that’s about it. Agree?
Last week, I saw a speech that Gary Vaynerchuk gave to a bunch of RE/MAX realtors on the topic of social media engagement and it was quite awesome. Here’s the video if you care to watch it:
Watching it inspired me to pick up Gary’s latest book, “The Thank You Economy“. Awesome book, highly recommended. The folks at Marlow’s Tavern really need to read it.
As a general rule, we enjoy Marlow’s. They have a few locations near us, good food, and solid service. Tonight we took our babysitter out there for her birthday, but the evening had a few minor issues, and I think they could really benefit from having more of a “Thank You” approach to business.
No birthday desserts
We made sure to mention that today was our babysitter’s birthday, because we knew that Marlow’s did the little free cupcake dessert like most restaurants. Nope, not anymore. ”Some people lie about it being their birthday, so we can’t do that anymore.” Uh-oh. Really? Did that surprise them? Of course some people will lie about it — that’s why you give them a cheap cupcake and not a free steak. We had three adults and two kids, with a total bill of $78, and they’re concerned that they might give away a $3 dessert that isn’t legit?
While you certainly need to watch out for people taking advantage of you, this just seemed really shallow. Companies that do customer service the right away (like Zappos) just focus on treating their customers like rock stars, and don’t worry so much about potentially giving up $3 every now and then.
My food was SLOW
It was remarkable. The other four people in our party got their food fairly quickly, but I didn’t. So I waited. And waited. And waited. We’re guessing it was 10-12 minutes before my food arrived, which is crazy for a place like that, but things happen. However, I still don’t know what happened. I got a quick “sorry ’bout that” when they brought it, and that was it. It was clear they didn’t care about the issue a single bit. A much better approach would have been like what Scott Stratten had happen at a hotel a few years ago; he had a very bad breakfast, but they apologized and explained the problem and he was much happier as a result. Here’s his full write-up of that experience.
I decided not to press the the issue with them, just to see how they’d handle it. Simply put, they didn’t. No apology from anyone, no deduction on our bill.
(Speaking of the bill – $2.50 each for kid’s drinks? Wow!)
Twitter
With those in mind, I did a little digging when I got home. They’re pretty solid on Twitter (@MarlowsTavern), so I poked around for a while. The content they push out is solid, but their conversation skills are weak. They reply to some comments, but it appears to be at random. Just in the past week:
Jennifer asked whether a dish at Marlow’s was gluten free. A few days later, she got a reply from them — yes! Excellent. So she replied back asking if they had a gluten free menu, or how they should request gluten free products. Crickets…
Robbie tweeted that he was taking his wife to Marlow’s for her birthday. A quick “congrats” would have been nice, but they simply let it go without comment…
Another user tweeted to rave about their Sunday buffet. Again, no reply.
Seriously, businesses need to build true fans to be successful and here are people actively telling their world about your restaurant — and you ignore them?
Google Place Pages
How about their Google Place pages? They have a handful of locations, so I just checked out a few of them. I found these two gems rather quickly:
The response from Marlow’s, as expected, was silence.
Google+
Needless to say, they’re not on Google+ yet. Not that I can really fault them for that (it’s new, smaller than Facebook/Twitter, etc), but people are already talking about them on there…
Website
Since they’ll probably be reading this, I’ll toss in a few suggested website tweaks as a bonus. Their website is really pretty solid (many restaurants have dreadfully awful sites), but it could use some adjustments:
On your front page, you have a link to your “to-go” menu. Seems like people might often be in the car when they call for that. And the menu is a PDF?
“Follow us on Facebook”. Don’t you “follow” people on Twitter and “like” them on Facebook? People get confused enough, so don’t switch them up for no good reason. I’ve never liked the words “follow us” anyhow, because it implies that “you should follow us and we’ll send you a bunch of crap”. I’m glad the Twitter widget (which you have on your site) says “Join the conversation” instead, as that sounds much better.
Your Entertainment page encourages people to visit you on MySpace, which you haven’t updated in about two years. Can’t blame you for the lack of updates, but you should probably remove that link.
It just takes time
Social media can be difficult for some businesses. If you sell toilet plungers, it’ll take some work to come up with a creative campaign. For restaurants, though, it’s dead simple. Just put in the effort, connect with your patrons, and prove that you really care about them. I should also mention that their Facebook pages (like this one) seem to be managed quite well, so they’re not totally ignoring everyone.
At the end of the day, these weren’t killer problems for Marlow’s. We certainly think less of them, no doubt, but we’ll be back eventually — they’ll just be a little bit lower on the list.
Google has finally launched their business pages feature, and it’s open for everyone to sign up. You can read more about it on the Google Blog, or watch the video below for a quick overview of how it works.
Business pages work very similarly to personal profiles, with a few notes:
You cannot create an account for a business page; you create it via your personal profile (similar to Facebook).
You can create multiple pages from a single profile.
Each business page can only be managed by the profile that created it, so choose carefully the right person in your organization to create the page. Support for multiple admins is “coming soon”.
Pages cannot add users to a circle unless the user adds them first. This is an awesome anti-spam move by Google.
There aren’t any vanity URLs yet (like plus.google.com/pepsi), but those are presumably coming in the future.
Direct Connect
Tied to this release is a new feature called “Direct Connect”. If you begin your Google search with a +, it’ll show brand pages that match the query in the auto-complete results, as shown here:
Over time, it’s possible that this could become a trendy thing to promote. I can image someone like Pepsi having something like “Google +Pepsi” for more at the end of a TV ad. If it does take off, it’ll be important to get your page listed there. But how?
Badges
Today, Google released “badges” for business pages. These allow you to add nifty widgets to your page, and people can add your brand to their circles directly from your website! It’s pretty slick.
Even more important is the snippet of code that they have you put in the <head> section of your site. This is there to prove that the page in question is really yours and will qualify you to show up as a Direct Connect option. No word on how soon those will start appearing, but it’d be wise to get yours connected so you can show up in Direct Connect as soon as possible. You can learn more about badges from this Google blog post.
Have you built a page yet?
Have you built a page for your company yet? Leave a link to it in the comments and show us your work!
No matter what line of business you’re in, you can often get inspiration and ideas by checking out your competition. You can see what kind of stuff they’re putting on their website, how they’re using social media, what new products they’re stocking, etc. However, you ultimately need to trust yourself. Here are a few examples.
Using music to set the tone
I was recently talking to a client about her site, and suggested we take the background music off. After a brief discussion, she agreed. When I asked why she put it up there in the first place, she said that a lot of her competition did that and she was trying to match them. Being a brand-new business, emulating some of the established sites is certainly a great idea. Now that she’s removed the music and they haven’t, she’s a step ahead!
Facebook “welcome tabs”
I have a lot of clients asking for “welcome tabs” on their Facebook Page. While it’s certainly appropriate in a few situations, it seems that most people are doing it simply because everyone else is doing it, and no one is really thinking it through. Most users come to your Facebook page for the content — information, specials, etc. Why put an extra page in their way?
It feels a lot to me like the “splash pages” everyone had in the late 90′s — simply an unnecessary step between your user and the content they want. We all eventually realized how stupid those were, so how are Facebook welcome tabs any different? (Honestly — leave a comment and convince me how they’re a good thing for everyone. I’m certainly open to changing my mind if someone can supply a solid argument.)
Copying the church down the road
One church I worked at was obsessed with the other big church just down the road. We’d often spend thousands of dollars copying activities that they did, even if we didn’t need them. It was quite sad. There were essentially two ways that our leadership viewed things:
If they’re doing x, and we’re not, we need to start.
If we’re doing x, and they’re not, we need to stop wasting time on it.
This was especially problematic during the rise of social media, because the “other church” was slow to adopt it. Therefore, it was tough for us to convince our church leadership that it was worthwhile. The “other church” is a wonderful place, but they have made some very poor technological choices over the past few years; very dumb things with their website, very little social media, etc. Copying them in those areas would have been a foolish mistake.
Stylish restaurant websites
Have you ever tried to pull up a restaurant website on your phone? It’s almost always brutal. Slate recently had an article about this, and I agree completely. Not only are they often unusable on a phone (especially an Apple device, with no hope of loading their cute Flash menus), but they’re equally frustrating from a normal browser.
My thought is that it’s the restaurant owners and their desire for a particular ambience that cause most of the issues. While you certainly want the actual restaurant to have that feel, putting cheesy background music being a painfully “creative” navigation bar isn’t the way to do it on the website.
Part of this comes back to the problem of the University website. Universities think that we want to read about the school’s philosophy and press releases, and that idea is validated by other universities posting the same junk on their home page. This is very similar to churches that post a big link to their denomination’s website, rather than providing decent driving directions.
Check them out, but be smart
I’m certainly not saying you shouldn’t see what your competition is doing. As I said at the beginning, you can often get some good ideas from them. Just be smart, and always view things through the eyes of your customers. Ask yourself, “if I was a customer, why would I visit the site and what would I be looking for?” If the answer is “cheesy music and a mission statement”, find someone to help you think through it a bit further.
Over the years, I’ve discussed a lot of ideas to help your business flourish online and today I’m going to show you what it looks like when it all comes together.
The East Cobber is a free local magazine in Marietta, GA that was created back in 1993, and they’ve had an online presence for nearly a decade. However, with the ongoing shift from print to digital, they realized the the site could do so much more. Last year they enlisted the help of Green Mellen Media, and the results have been amazing. Here is a chart showing their growth since the new site launched last fall.
The beginning of that chart is October, 2010, when they had 1,509 visitors. Last month they had a total of 16,498. For a year over year comparison, they had 1,691 visitors in May 2010, and then the 16,498 in May 2011 — an increase of 875% in a single year! Even better, this wasn’t from a brand new site; this was a very well-established site from a popular magazine. So what made the difference? There were quite a few things, but here are some of the big ones.
WordPress
We moved the entire site over to WordPress, which helped with quite a few things. It not only made it easier for them to publish articles, but WordPress has excellent Search Engine Optimization by design. Using a StudioPress-powered theme helped even more, as they add some additional SEO tweaks to the mix. Here is their incoming traffic from search engines over the past eight months:
Content
This is the big key. Rather than posting a few articles each month when the new issue came out, they’re posting multiple stories every day to keep the community informed of local news and events. They’ve published over 2,900 entries since the new site went live, making them a true hub in the community.
Social
I recently pointed out how you can’t fake your way to social media success, and they’re an example of social media done right. Their Facebook page auto-posts some new items from the site, but they’re quick to respond to comments and often run contents to give away prizes from area businesses. They’ve gone from just a few hundred likes on the page to well over 1,000 and it continues to grow quickly.
The key here is that they work hard at it. People are always looking for shortcuts, but the East Cobber folks simply got to work and are engaging with the community daily. We’ve given them some tools to help make it easier, but there is no substitute for actually diving in and connecting with people.
They post a new photo of the day on their home page every day to keep things fresh.
They trusted us and we trusted them. When we assured them that a feature or idea wouldn’t work, they believed us. When they told us that their readers were interested in certain topics, we believed them.
We use Google Analytics (which generated the charts above) see what content people read the most, what needs to be improved, etc.
The magic solution
People are often looking for the magic solution to put their online business on autopilot, but things just don’t work that way. A properly configured site, using a solid platform, with lots of hard work put into building content and the community, can lead to a very successful site.
Traffic is continuing to grow for them, and I expect it will for some time. Congratulations to Cynthia and her team for such great success over the past year!
While talking over a potential site redesign with a client, the subject turned to blogging. We both agreed that they should have a blog for their site, as it would make perfect sense for their market and they have tons of great content to write about. However, they are convinced they don’t have time for it and wouldn’t be able to be active enough on it. I agreed that having no blog is better than having a dead blog, and I’m glad we made that decision.
However, I’m finding more and more companies that (apparently) don’t have time for social media so they decide to fake it instead. A prime example would be the 18 car dealers that aren’t listening on Twitter. Despite not listening and not actually doing much on Twitter, I’m sure they’re proud of how “hip” there are to be on there.
Fake Followers
Another local company that I’ve worked with in the past has nearly 10,000 followers on Twitter, but they were all purchased through shady means (buying Twitter followers isn’t difficult). It’s rather amusing when they pose a question to their 10,000 “followers” and get zero responses. It’s worthless. Much better to have 100 real followers than 10,000 fake ones.
Fake Foursquare Deals
All of that said, what inspired this post was a “deal” that Great Clips offers on Foursquare. Some restaurants offer fun specials on Foursquare (like free chips & salsa every time you check-in at Chili’s), though most businesses don’t. Great Clips decided to try for the best of both worlds by posting a “special” that doesn’t require them to actually give anything away. What is their special? Every time you check-in, you unlock the following special:
Visit greatclips.com/foursquare and register to win FREE haircuts for a year! (link)
What? That’s awful! Every other deal I’ve seen has been legit — free chips, free drink, etc. This doesn’t have anything to do with you visiting their location; they just want the orange button next to their listings. This seems to have been a corporate decision, because every Great Clips on Foursquare is running the same “deal”. When questioned about it, the very personal “Customer Service” gave me a very carefully crafted generic response:
Thank you for your feedback. We will foward your comments on to the approrpiate people. Customer feedback is important to Great Clips as we diligently work to keep our promise of serving our customers with the highest level of quality. We apologize for any inconvenience that you were caused.
Sincerely, Customer Service
Sincerely?
One last funny bit was the closing of their email. First they say “sincerely” (meaning genuine, earnest, real) and then don’t even put their name. At least write “Sincerely, Jill” or “Sincerely, Bob”. At no point in the various interactions I had with them did they do anything to try to seem human. Such a shame.
Social means social
Never forget the “social” in social media. If you’re trying to fake it, or figure out a way to automate it like you did your radio commercials for years, you’re in the wrong game. Be human, get to know your customers, and it’ll take you a long way.
My wife and I are fans of Tim McGraw; we’ve seen him in concert a few times, and we’ll likely see him again in the future. However, his “fan club” is such a disaster that I had to share this here.
We joined his fan club earlier this year because we knew he was coming to Atlanta and we know that fan clubs get early access to tickets. I kept an eye on my inbox, and got all kinds of stuff from them — “tickets now available in Nashville!”, and Seattle, and Miami, etc. I thought it was silly that they were sending me that junk, since they know where I live, but it’s not a big deal.
Later, my wife happened to hear on the radio that the station was having a pre-sale starting the next day. What about the fan club presale? Yeah, it started a few days prior. Of all of the emails I got, that wasn’t one of them…
Waste of Time
So the fan club was a waste of time. Perhaps the email got lost, marked as spam, etc, but I still wanted to leave the club. No need for it anymore. This proved to be interesting.
Contact form?
First I tried their contact form. You can fill it out, but it doesn’t actually submit properly. It just takes you to a blank page.
Twitter?
The link on their home page to their Twitter account doesn’t work. Fortunately, their MySpace account is still humming along…
E-mail?
I tried replying to one of their newsletters, but I never heard back.
Unsubscribe
Ok, since I obviously can’t contact, I figured I’d just use the unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of the email. Ok. Click the link, enter my email address in the box, get an “unsubscribe verification” in my email. I clicked the link in there to verify my unsubscription and got a 404 error. Wow!
This isn’t new
All of this happened back in early March — more than three months ago — and it’s all still broken. The contact form is still broken, Twitter link is still broken and I just tried to unsubscribe again and got the same issue.
Tim is a great performer, but his fan club is such a huge mess.
Pay Attention
Always remember to pay close attention to your site. None of these issues were intentional (except for failing to respond to my email), and they simply became issues over time. Since the management of the site isn’t likely to be using the contact form or trying to unsubscribe from the emails, they don’t know the problems exist.
I’ve been guilty of this in the past as well; a feature on a site of mine will go down, and I’ll be unaware of it for a few days until a member lets me know about it. Now I try to spend more time going through things and making sure everything is running smoothly.
Have you ever been “trapped” by a site like this, with no good way to contact them or unsubscribe?
While I’m certainly not a big fan of the phone, I still use it quite often. As you’ve probably noticed, while businesses love their fancy programs and mission statements, their front line workers define who they are. Here’s two quick examples:
The unhelpful church
A few months back, Ali and I were giving a social media presentation to a group of local businesses. There was a mix-up about who was bringing the projector, and it looked for a little while that it might be a big problem. We knew there was a church right next door, and most churches have projectors around. Being mid-day on Tuesday, it seemed likely to be available.
I know some people that attend there, but had never had any interaction with the church before. I knew it’d be interesting to see what happened when we called.
We were hoping for the best, but felt it would be understandable if they had said “no”. We would have been willing to put up collateral, but it’s still a tricky thing to loan out valuable equipment to a stranger. But we didn’t get a “no” — we basically got a “we don’t care”. The precise response was something like “no one is here to take care of that now, we can’t call them, they might show up later or they might not. Good-bye”. Blech. Fortunately, we were able to get a projector in time, and I’ve since purchased my own to avoid that kind of problem in the future.
I now have one experience with that church, and it isn’t great.
The awesome dentist
A few weeks back, I had to have my wisdom teeth pulled. My dentist doesn’t do that kind of work, so he gave me four local oral surgeons to call. I called them all.
The winner, quiet easily, was East Cobb Oral Surgery. The other three places sounded very annoyed that I called. Not downright rude, but you could tell they didn’t want to be on the phone.
When I called ECOS, the woman was very friendly, very polite and very patient. The call only lasted about 45 seconds, but she was MINE for those 45 seconds. It made all the difference in the world. One receptionist spent 45 seconds being helpful, and the company earned $1300. Not a bad return on the time she invested with me.
ROI?
People often want to know the ROI of being on Twitter or Facebook, and it’s quite difficult to measure. It’s similar to the ROI of answering the phone, since it’s all about connecting with people. That receptionist earned ECOS $1300 in 45 seconds, which is on pace for nearly $100,000/hour. Is that her value? Obviously not.
When it comes to social media, don’t worry too much about trying to calculate ROI. Build relationships and the return will come.
Thanks?
One weird thing, though. After the surgery, which went very well, I emailed my primary dentist and ECOS to express my thanks for their quality work. Neither ever replied. Not a big deal, but kinda weak.
Have you ever had a similar experience, where a single interaction (phone, Twitter, etc) created/lost a lot of income for a business?
Below are three of my favorite videos of all time. They’re all quite long (averaging just under an hour each), but I re-watch all of them from time to time to stay fresh on the ideas presented in them.
Scott Stratten: The Biz Media Sessions
Scott (@unmarketing) puts out a bunch of great info on how to use social media, and this video is a great overview of some of his ideas.
David Allen: Getting Things Done
I’m a big fan of GTD, and it’s greatly changed how I’ve organized my life over the past few years. David Allen is the man behind the system, and this was a talk he gave at Google a few years ago. Lots of great tips in there.
Merlin Mann: Inbox Zero
A major aspect of GTD, at least for me, is keeping my inbox completely clean. Merlin offers some great advice in this video on how to actually make it happen.
Any other great videos out there that should be on this list?
Twitter
Using music to set the tone
While talking over a potential site redesign with a client, the subject turned to blogging. We both agreed that they should have a blog for their site, as it would make perfect sense for their market and they have tons of great content to write about. However, they are convinced they don’t have time for it and wouldn’t be able to be active enough on it. I agreed that having no blog is better than having a dead blog, and I’m glad we made that decision.
My wife and I are fans of Tim McGraw; we’ve seen him in concert a few times, and we’ll likely see him again in the future. However, his “
While I’m certainly 
+