Over the years I’ve posted quite a few video tutorials on here and on other sites. The problem is that they were scattered all over — many on here, quite a few on Google Earth Blog, various ones on my Google+ account, etc. Recently I set out to get all of those organized, and the result seems to be pretty good.
With the help of Ali Green, we’ve put together a new site called A Brighter Web. On the site we have over 60 video tutorials on topics such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and WordPress. We’re adding a few new videos every day, and we’ll be expanding our range of topics over time.
With that in mind, what would you like to see on a site like that? More social platforms, like FourSquare and LinkedIn? Or perhaps software tutorials, like Photoshop? Leave a comment and let us know what you’d like to see, and we’ll certainly take your ideas into consideration moving foward.
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?
A few days ago, I shared the story of a recent visit to Marlow’s Tavern. In that post, I referenced a post from Scott Stratten where a simple apology from a hotel made a big difference in how he felt about things. It reminded me of a recent stay I had in a hotel, and how a simple blame shift made the hotel look really bad.
On the way to Michigan for my grandmother’s funeral, we stopped at a Country Inn & Suites, where we’ve had enjoyable visits in the past. It was really just a minor issue at the hotel, too; the tub was full of water when we arrived, and apparently had been for days, because the shower floor was really slick when you stood up in it. We didn’t complain or anything, but I mentioned it in the email survey they sent a few days later.
Their response?
Wow! It wasn’t a big issue before, but now they made me feel pretty stupid. Did I imagine the problem? I replied back that I was pleased to have received a response at all, but to belittle my issue was a pretty insensitive move. If they had simply apologized for the issue I would have been good with it, but their questioning whether or not it was even a problem was pretty weak.
Applebee’s
It reminds me of a visit my wife and I made to Applebee’s years ago when we lived in Dothan, AL. We tried to go there one night for dinner, but the place was full of smoke. It was awful. We emailed them to let them know about it. A few days later, a manager called. Which of the following did he say?
A – Sorry about that, one of our waitresses just had a baby and we all lit up cigars to celebrate. B – Sorry about that, our ventilation system was having issues and the air in the smoking section wasn’t getting refreshed properly. C – No it wasn’t.
It wasn’t a long phone call, but he insisted repeatedly that it wasn’t smoky in there. Period. Very odd. Had he apologized and explained the situation, perhaps we would have tried going there again in the future. With his actual response, we never went in the doors again.
You’re a human, and that’s ok
Your business is run by humans. We know that. When mistakes occur, which will certainly happen, how will you respond? Will you respond like Chrylser did when a bad Tweet went out, and fire everyone in sight? Or respond like the Red Cross did when a similar bad tweet went out, by apologizing and turning it into a win-win for everyone?
MythBusters
Another good example of a solid apology is with the MythBusters cannonball incident. If you haven’t seen it yet, the MythBusters had a cannonball go way off course, through a neighborhood, through a house (!), across a six-lane road, and then end up inside of a minivan. It was very fortunate that no one was hurt.
How did they respond to it? The hosts of the show, Jamie and Adam, went to the neighborhood and held a brief press conference. No lawyers making sure they said the “right thing”, just them giving a sincere statement. Then they met the homeowners to see the damage, and will be paying to repair all of the damage (include hotel stays, if necessary). In addition, they’ve vowed to investigate to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again. It’s exactly how they should handle it, but so many companies don’t.
When you’ve witnessed a company making a mistake, how did they handle it for you?
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.
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?
Late last year I performed a few simply Twitter tests for churches. I found 36 churches that had their Twitter account listed on their home page, and sent them a simple message to see how many would respond. Out of the 36, only four of them replied — just 11%. If you missed those posts, here is the test with the first 11 churches, and here is the test with the other 25.
I recently sent a tweet to my car dealer to see about coming in for an oil change, but they never replied. Despite the big dollars that car dealerships throw at TV and radio commercials, I began to think that they were likely ignoring Twitter as well.
I did the same kind of test that I did with the churches. I found 20 local dealerships that promoted their Twitter account on their home page and sent them all a simple tweet — “What time is your showroom open this Sunday?“. As before, I wanted to keep the question simple as to not waste much of their time. The tweet was sent around 8:05 on Wednesday evening, giving them plenty of time (and two full business days) to respond. As with the church example, all 20 tweets were sent from different accounts so we wouldn’t look too obvious.
The results? Almost identical to the churches, with just 2 out of 20 replying — 10%.
The Good
Two dealerships replied. @MariettaToyota wrote back to say “Marietta Toyota is open from 1 pm to 6 pm on Sundays! Is there something special you’re looking for?“. Perfect! @LandmarkDodge was the other that replied, by saying “11am, hope to see you!“. Very solid. They both took about 24 hours to respond which is a bit slow, but certainly acceptable.
The Lazy
Nine dealerships simply haven’t tweeted since we did the test, much less replied to us. A few notable ones:
@SandySpgsToyota — Just a dump from their Facebook account, but it’s been over two weeks since they’ve said anything.
@RickCaseMazda — No updates at all since last November, but they have 252 followers.
@GeorgiaFord — Just dumping everything via Ping.fm. Ping is a fine service, but you can’t just post info and never follow up on it.
@HennessyHonda — No updates in over a year, with the last update saying “The dealership is closed now…“. Given the context of no updates in a year, I thought perhaps it meant they were closed for good. That doesn’t seem to be the case, but this stream is quite a mess in a number of ways.
@CobbCountyKiaGA — Using some service called “ReachCast” for their service, but they haven’t tweeted in a month. Perhaps someone needs to build “ListenCast” instead?
The Bullhorns
Nine other dealerships posted at least one new update since our inquiry, but (unknowingly, I hope) completely ignored us. Some highlights from there:
@GPHonda — Everything is either an autopost from Facebook or from their blog.
@ToyOfMcDonough — Focused almost entirely on driving people from Twitter over to their Facebook page, rather than engaging with them on Twitter. Oddly enough, they replied to me when I mentioned that to them, but never replied to the test account about their Sunday hours.
@CherokeeFord — A combination of a Facebook feed and HootSuite, but no listening.
About Facebook
Most of these dealerships do a fine job with Facebook, and that’s certainly a great thing. Facebook is an excellent tool to help keep your brand front of mind, introduce new products, answer questions, etc. It just seems silly to have Twitter plastered all over the site and then just ignore people when they try to engage with them.
The other thing that I’m seeing more of lately is people simply using their Twitter account to drive people to their Facebook Page. Someone has chosen to follow you on Twitter and hear what you have to say, and you simply push them to your Facebook Page instead of engaging with them? That’s so foolish.
What’s the solution?
It’s pretty simple — listen. Use a tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite and start paying attention.
If you don’t have time to monitor these social outlets yourself, then hire a company to do it for you. In most cases, it costs far less than even a part-time employee, and you’ll be able to keep things monitored 24/7. There are tons of companies out there that can help you with it; just be sure to check them out carefully to make sure they really know their stuff. You can start by asking these five questions, check out their Klout score and find out how long they’ve been on Twitter (“experts” didn’t just join last year).
What do you think?
Is it worth the time/effort for these dealers to get more involved on Twitter? It looks bad to say things like “socialize with us” (like this one) or “connect” (like this one) when they’re clearly not doing either of those.
Are they dropping the ball, or am I being too critical?
Three years ago I wrote up a list of my favorite plug-ins, and decided that it was well past time to give the list a fresh look. While many of them have stayed the same, I’ve got a few additions and a few deletions.
The ones that stayed the same
These plug-ins have certainly been updated in the past few years, but remain part of every blog I manage:
FeedBurner Feedsmith – I still run all of my blog RSS feeds through FeedBurner, and this is a great plug-in to quietly redirect visitors over there.
Google XML Sitemaps – A simple way to generate an XML sitemap and automatically notify search engines of your new posts.
Highlight Author Comments – Make your replies stand out when you reply to comments on a post of yours.
Subscribe to Comments – Allow users to get email notifications of new posts after they leave one. I love when blogs have this, so I can be notified if someone replies to my comment and then we can continue the conversation.
The ones that I’ve moved away from
Here are the plug-ins that I no longer use regularly, for one reason or another:
All in One SEO Pack -Most of the themes that I use (typically from StudioPress) have great SEO baked right in and this is less important.
I’ve dropped some plug-ins, but also added some new ones over the past few years such as:
Canonical URL’s – A very simple plug-in to add the canonical tag to your pages. Not overly helpful in many cases, but can be excellent for your SEO sometimes. (What is the canonical tag?)
PuSHPress – This enabled PuSubHubbub support for your blog. In short, it makes sure that RSS readers and others will get your posts instantly, rather than the next time they check in a few hours. (more about the PuSHPress plugin)
RSS Footer – This adds a line of text (with a few links) the bottom of each post in your RSS feed. The basic idea is that if someone is scraping your site and posting it as their own, you’ll at least still get some free links back to your site!
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?
I’m down in Fort Morgan, AL this week for a little vacation with the family, and I’m shocked at how lazy the realtors are around here. Like most beachfront communities, most of the homes are either for sale or rent, yet many of the sale/rent signs are broken, every “take info” box is empty, and I’ve only seen one house that has a unique URL on it. 90% have no web link, and the rest simply link back to the main site for that company. QR codes aren’t even being considered. If you’re a hard worker and want to live at the beach, move down here — you’d be a hero!
For a wider look at the Real Estate industry, check out the infographic below, created by Mashable. It illustrates some very interesting numbers regarding how the Real Estate industry is using social media.
A few things that jumped out at me:
84% of real estate professionals are now using social media. That’s it? I would have expected that number to be in the mid-90′s. Granted, many aren’t using it effectively, but that 84% includes those people. 16% apparently aren’t doing anything with social media yet.
73% of homeowners are more likely to list with a realtor that is willing to do video, but only 12% of the real estate industry current has a YouTube account.
The real estate industry uses Facebook more than other small businesses, but they’re way behind in Twitter usage.
Anyhow, check out the infographic below. Anything else jump out at you?
On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey posted the world’s first tweet with the very exciting news that is quite similar to most people’s first tweet when he said “just setting up my twttr“.
(it was called “twttr” for a while before they added some vowels and made it “twitter”)
Some of the history of Twitter:
2006
March 21: First Tweet
July 15: Public launch, but quiet for a while
2007
March: Launched for real at SXSW and starts to take off.
Over the years I’ve posted quite a few video tutorials on here and on other sites. The problem is that they were scattered all over — many on here, quite a few on Google Earth Blog, various ones on my Google+ account, etc. Recently I set out to get all of those organized, and the result seems to be pretty good.
It reminds me of a visit my wife and I made to Applebee’s years ago when we lived in Dothan, AL. We tried to go there one night for dinner, but the place was full of smoke. It was awful. We emailed them to let them know about it. A few days later, a manager called. Which of the following did he say?
Twitter
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 
On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey posted the world’s first tweet with the very exciting news that is quite similar to most people’s first tweet when he said “
+