It’s 2010 – Is your business social?

Do you need help figuring out how to best use social media marketing for your business? Do you want to understand how to use word-of-mouth online to compliment your traditional and online marketing efforts. Are you new to social media? Do you need justification for yourself or to your boss that social media is not just playing on Facebook? Do you think social media is some type of black magic and only young people really get it? Do you know how to deal with a social media crisis or prevent one? Do you have a social media policy for your employees? A social media strategy? Proof of return-on-investment?

I’ll try to answer all of these questions and more at the interactive 3 hour workshop at Parasol Tahoe Community Foundation, Incline Village, Lake Tahoe on Oct 7th. Book your calendar, save $10 from not buying a coffee at Starbucks for 3 days, and come hear real life case stories, learn from successful small Lake Tahoe businesses, and best of all learn from each other on how to use social media to your advantage.

Word of mouth is the best marketing tool in your tool box. Social media just helps spreading word of mouth by making it viral. Are you taking advantage of it? Can you afford not to?

It’s hard to speak in public.  It takes time to prepare a presentation. I promise you I will do my best to not bore you for one minute. We are going to have a lot of fun! Get ready for this high energy, 3 hour session. Bring your questions. Bring your friends. Bring your Starbucks coffee. But be there!!! I know I can count on you! All proceeds go to Parasol. I make nothing from this event except for the pure enjoyment of spending time with you and sharing information and knowledge.

Click on the link below to see the flyer with more information about the event. Post it on your wall. Mark your calendar. Please, RSVP to Parasol directly, the gracious organizer of this event.

Social Marketing Workshop Flyer

Photo credit: PeterSpain.com

This is one of two posts on how small businesses can use social media to their advantage. I got particularly interested in paddleboarding and decided to track the entire process of how social media is affecting the bottom line of a small business.

Adrift Tahoe is located in Kings Beach, Lake Tahoe, CA and they offer rentals, sales, fun special events and merchandise. It’s all about paddleboarding and surfing with very friendly staff.

My interest in paddleboarding started with a Facebook post by a friend – sharing her excitement about this addictive and fun sport. I decided to check it out for myself. It is a great sport, an excellent full body work out and a phenomenal way to spend summer time on the water in Tahoe.

I offered to create a short video about the shop and the sport and post it on YouTube. See it below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So far, I know that I have hooked a few friends and family members on the sport. They are interested in getting more involved, would like to purchase paddleboards and continue to spread their passion about paddleboarding in Lake Tahoe.

The second blog post will tell you how a Facebook update and a You Tube video delivered real dollars for this business. Interested? Stay tuned. Whether you are a small business or a big one, are you able to identify dollars from your social media efforts?

Have you tried paddleboarding yet?

Photo credit: Stephen Oachs

How do you measure social media? There are many ways to measure your efforts. How much time do you have?

There are free and paid ways to measure your social media marketing.

Here’s a good post on the topic from OptimizeThis who lists some valuable tools. What do you think? How do you measure your social media efforts?

Have you decided to cut on efforts in other areas? For example, I pulled out of trade shows. And you? Where are you finding the extra time?

Are 5 lines blogs the next step to our attention problem?

1. Talkers – Who will talk about you to their friends? Who are the talkers, the people that like to share their experiences with everyone. People sometimes refer to them as the “influentials”. These are your loyal customers and people who like you. They are your regular customers, people who you interact with on a daily basis. They need something worthy to talk about with your friends.  They need a topic of conversation.
2. Topics – give people a reason to talk about you. Special sale, new program, special event. Something easy that people can remember and discuss with friends.
3. Tools- help spread the message. Refer a friend, Send to a friend, Share This button, these are all ways to help spread the message. Your task is to make sharing easy and obvious.
4. Taking part in the conversation – You need to take part in the conversation. Answer questions. Respond to feedback. State the facts when someone reports false information. Be nice. Lead the conversation.
5. Tracking – use online listening tools to hear what people are saying about you. Tracking will also facilitate the engagement process. Every comment, every blog post, every tweet can now be tracked. You just need to dedicate the time and resources to listen to the conversation. The benefit is consumer research, engagement and feedback that will ultimately lead you to improve your business and create more honest and smarter marketing. Marketing that works.

Simple, right? I’m sure you can find a way to implement this in your marketing strategy. What do you think?

If you want to read the entire book, which I highly recommend, just click below to purchase it directly from Amazon. Happy reading!

So, how do you measure social media? Is that such a thing as ROI, whether that’s Return on Investment or Return on Interaction? Should we measure ROE – Return on Engagement?

Olivier Blanchard developed a very nice presentation on how to measure social media efforts. It’s one of the best I’ve seen so far:

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

A survey by Deloitte, Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research states that  there is a “significant gaps between community goals (such as generating word of mouth, customer loyalty and brand awareness) and how success is being measured.

The top two analytics for measuring success are the number of active users (34%) and how often people post/comment (32%), which indicates that participation is still considered to be the biggest measure of success.”

A few more examples of how some people/businesses measure their social media efforts:

1. Scott Gould, founder of Like Minds, put on a conference that was strictly promoted via social media. His conference produced sales of 5,800 British pounds with 0 marketing budget.
2. The Huffington Post reported Facebook referrals increase of 48% through their Facebook Connect feature which has accounted for 3.5 million visits.
3. Pure Michigan soared to 20,000 Facebook Fans. In a previous post I wrote I referenced Gammet Interactive and Dave Serino’s study of how social each US state is. Michigan at the time of the study came up to Number 7 in the country in terms of how well they utilize social media.

In my opinion, before you struggle to find ways to measure social media, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why are you engaging on social media? What is your purpose and business objectives? This will lead to what’s important to you to measure.
2. How do you currently measure your marketing efforts? There are many similar measures that you can use in measuring social media.
3. How do you currently measure your PR efforts? There are metrics that you could implement for your social media efforts as well.
4. How do you measure your customer service? A simple metric like Net Promoter Score could be used as a benchmark prior to your social media efforts and after you get involved.
5. What website analytics are you using? There are various services that implement social media measurements with your website reports to provide a global view and give you a really good idea of what’s working best.

The measurement tools exist. My challenge to you is to think about social media more in terms of a two-way dialogue and less in terms on dollar signs. If you are transparent and authentic, bring value to people, answer their questions and give them information they seek, they will remember you when it’s time to purchase your product/service. Your bottom line will improve.

What do you think? Do you currently use social media? Are you measuring it? If so, how?

Based on our Google Analytics reports, Facebook surpassed traffic from Google and from our own domain name in the past one month. How did we accomplish this success? I can’t give you all the details, as the information is confidential but I can tell you that traffic from Facebook surpassed traffic from online places where we actually spend money promoting the resort. I should also add that we purchased pay per click advertising on Facebook for our season pass sale yet the total amount doesn’t even come close to the overall advertising budget we have allocated to promote our season pass sale. Considering it’s season pass sale time and we actually invested marketing dollars to promote it,  I consider the incredible amount of traffic from Facebook as a proof that social media really works. Some of the important elements that went into creating this successful campaign were:

1. Social Media Strategy – We spent time creating a social media strategy based on our business and marketing objectives. And I don’t just mean spend a day. We spent months creating our social media strategy. We didn’t just create a Facebook page for the sake of using this new tool. We actually thought about it first,  created a strategy with our objectives in mind and executed it well.

2. Staff involvement – social media is free but it takes time. You will need to find people on your staff who can help with the content. You can’t do everything on your own. Teamwork is important when it comes to continuing the conversation on social media.I have to thank my team for seeing the value in social media, putting in the hours to really understand it and staying on top of it. You guys are great!

Diamond Pete on Ellis Peak

3. Engaging content – we ran a contest on Facebook for a month with “Where is Diamond Pete“, the mascot for the resort. Pete went to different places, such as Hawaii, West Shore of Lake Tahoe, the Reno Air Races,  all along North Shore and various places in Incline Village and Diamond Peak. We took photos of Pete and posted them on Facebook. People guessed where the photo was taken and the winner of the day received a small gift of appreciation from Diamond Peak. At the end of the month (the contest is not over yet), we are going to pull one winner – the person who had the most correct guesses each day and was the first to identify the location. This person is going to win a Holiday Pass to Diamond Peak and a season locker to their favorite ski resort.

4. Giveaways – although they are not mandatory for engaging content, people love getting swag. As there is a chance to win something much bigger at the end of the month, there is even more motivation to participate every day.

5. Follow up – On a daily basis we log in and engage with our followers. Our followers have increased dramatically since we started running the contest and they engage with Diamond Peak daily. It doesn’t take much time to monitor the contest and respond to people. It shows that you are actively engaged and excited about the contest.

We have planned some excellent contests for the near future. Become a fan of Diamond Peak on Facebook today so you don’t miss out.

Let’s discuss social media measurements. You can measure many things in this example: number of fans on Facebook, number of people who participated in the contest, traffic to the website, and by using the Facebook insights you can get a lot more hard data on your visitors. I’m not sure how to put hard numbers behind people’s engagement with Diamond Peak in Sep. It’s still summer and besides our season pass sale, there is not much else going on right now on the mountain except for the busy work that goes into making sure the mountain is ready to open. We are keeping in touch with our customers, listening to their suggestions and getting them excited about the ski season. We are creating relationships and strengthening existing ones. That’s why it’s called Social Media – Social.Media.

What do you think about this contest? Have you heard about any other fun contests on Facebook or on social media that have been successful? How do you measure your efforts?

Social media is more popular than porn. Is social media a revolution? An evolution? Here to stay? Let me know what you think.

A friend of mine sent me this video on YouTube and I can’t get the song out of my head. If you need to see a summary of statistics as to why social media is so powerful in combination with a really cool song, go ahead. I promise you will get it in 4:22 min. Just one caution. It’s addictive. You’ve been warned.

1. Google Alerts for Tourism – http://www.google.com/alerts – Google alerts are emailor RSS updates based on the “keywords” you have set up to monitor. It only takes a few seconds to set up Google Alerts. You can track your name, your company name, your competitors or specific keywords of interest to you. You need to set up this tool!
2. Blogsearch for Tourism – http://blogsearch.google.com – This is the Google engine to search the blogosphere. You can set it up using the advanced search option. The best way to set this up is with RSS to your iGoogle account. I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser and it takes seconds to set this listening tool. On a daily basis you can check your results. You can always modify your keywords if you are not getting enough noise or too many blogs.
3. Technorati for Recreation- http://technorati.com – another popular blog search engine. You can search blogs, videos, latest chatter on Twitter or on blogs. They also have a cool tool called Twittorati which allows you to follow latest tweets, top links, top blogs and latest photos – if you have the time and interest to do so!
4. TweetBeep for Travel- http://tweetbeep.com – Just like Google Alerts but for Twitter. You need to have a Twitter account to sign up for this service. It will monitor Twitter and send you emails when your “travel keyword” is being mentioned. Pretty cool! You won’t miss the next time someone mentions you on Twitter.
5. Search Twitter for Tourism- http://search.twitter.com – you can search all tweets for specific tourism keywords and subscribe to the conversation with an RSS feed. You will see everything mentioned about your brand or a “keyword” that interests you.

Here are 5 easy and free tourism monitoring tools that you can implement today and never miss a conversation again. It will take you less than an hour to set them up. You will gain a lot by understanding what people say about you.

What tools have you found useful?

1. Certified Site Traffic Measurement from Quantcast.com
2. Presence of Social Media icons and links on the website home page
3. State keyword search in Google
4. Facebook Presence
5. Twitter Presence
6. MySpace Presence
7. Flickr Presence
8. Panoramio Presence
9. YouTube Presence
10. Content sharing via a social media tool like Add This or Share This
11. Blog Presence
12. User Generated Content/ Review Site

I’m pleased to see that Nevada ranked top 5 among all 50 states with http://www.travelnevada.com. California ranked 39th with http://visitcalifornia.com. I’m actually surprised to see that the state of California is ranking so low in the category of social media engagement for tourism with all the money they recently spent on trying to attract tourism to the state. In California’s current economic situation, I would think that social media is a good solution to engage with people online and continue their brand while saving money. To see the entire report and see all 50 rankings click here.

Kudos to Nevada for being so active in social media. You can learn what’s important for a business in the tourism and travel categories from this report and apply the lessons learned to your businesses. Please, let me know what you think of this survey and if you have run across similar studies.