Yaffe Tidbits

Here's How Retailers Can Make Time To Use Social Media Efficiently

Mike McClure — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:54:48 -0400

Social media can be fast and chaotic for any business owner, making it crucial not to dive in without a plan. Each month retailers are presented with a unique challenge to promote products, events and sales on limited resources and tight deadlines. Taking the time to develop a social media content calendar is a no-brainer for anyone who wants to avoid major headaches and streamline efficiency for their marketing team.

Everything starts with the strategy
Social media strategy provides clear goals and target audiences, making it a perfect document to reverence while making a calendar. The targeted messages and conversations that you want to have during the month must originate directly from your business. If you are introducing a new product next week, it’s time to hype it up and generate some buzz around it with a contest, product reviews, photos, videos or any of the other ways connect the product with the customers online. You don’t have to plan each individual tweet or Facebook posts, but the calendar should create an overall framework on how to engage with your customers.

Important elements to have
Your social media calendar should give you a bird’s eye view of the month as well as actionable steps to take each week and day. The basic break out of content is by topic, time and platform you will be posting it on. If you are not the only person running the social channels, make sure there is a clear distribution of roles.

Don’t forget to engage
This level of planning and strategy may seem very counter-intuitive to spontaneous conversation style of social media, but it will help you keep focused. Remember that an important part of any conversation is listening. When you are scheduled to talk about a certain topic or a theme, you must actively listen to the conversation going around the topic and participate whenever possible.

Retail social media marketers are increasingly bombarded with new information, stress and challenges. Taking the time to update and maintain a social media calendar will help you and your team focus on important business tasks while translating them into actionable social media steps.

Dmitri Pivtorak - crossing this blog post off my social media content calendar

Read Mitch Joel's Ctrl Alt Delete As If Your Future Depends On It

Mike McClure — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:09:28 -0400

Does your future really depend on reading Mitch Joel’s new book Ctrl Alt Delete? I’d have to say a very definite maybe. If you’re the winner of last weekend’s record-breaking $600-million Powerball jackpot, it definitely doesn’t. If you are a marketer, someone who owns a business, someone who works at a business, an entrepreneur, a recent grad or someone who’s been in the same job for 25 years – then, yeah, this book could definitely help you. And if you did win that Powerball jackpot, read it anyway. You might get some great ideas on what to do next.

First, I must admit, I’m a long-time fan of Mitch Joel. His first book, Six Pixels of Separation, was the perfect book for where I was at that time. As I worked to move myself and Yaffe into the social media and digital age – it provided the right mix of education and inspiration to help me move the ball forward. His daily blog posts and weekly podcasts have kept me informed and provided good food for thought for meeting my own goals, those of this agency and those of our clients.

His new book, Ctrl Alt Delete, is again exactly what I needed at exactly the right time. The full title of the book is Ctrl Alt Delete. Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. As the title suggests, the book is broken into two parts, one about how to take your business to the next level and the second on how to reboot your own personal life and career. In it, Mitch talks about how current technology and other factors are converging at this point in time, creating a sort of purgatory as we wait to see where this whole thing is going.

But, you can’t just stand still in this current purgatory situation. If you do, chances are your business will not adapt and grow. Chances are you will not be prepared to face a new reality in your work life. That’s the bad news. The good news is that this ever-changing climate offers plenty of opportunity to go around. And if you’re among those who grab for it first, you’re likely to not only weather the current economic storm, but to end up riding high on a new wave of success.

Mitch writes in an free-flowing style that serves up great nuggets of information in easy to understand bites. It’s a book that you could breeze through in an afternoon or spend weeks reading small chunks at a time (which is what I did). Each chapter tackles a particular issue or opportunity. At the end of the chapter, he lays out three to five lessons learned there– with new twists, so it’s not like reading the same stuff over again. This also makes it easy to go back after you’ve read it and get the highlights, as you work through your own plan on how you’re going to reboot your business and your own personal path.

Your company or your career path doesn’t need to be on the bleeding edge of technology to get a lot of value out of the insights in this book. In fact, if you haven’t done anything to get in front of this sweeping sea of change, this might be just the impetus you need to get moving. This is not to say, it’s strictly for the neophytes of the digital universe either. There are good, thought-provoking lessons for everyone at every level. That is something Mitch does so very well – he makes all this knowledge accessible to the uninitiated and still meaningful to current practitioners who are already harnessing the concepts bringing about all this change.

I recommend Ctrl Alt Delete as a good read for my clients, my contemporaries and anyone who wants to be relevant 5 years from now. Once we get there, Mitch is sure to have another book out to guide us along whatever new paths open up then. And I hope to see you all there.

Mike McClure, Rebooting my future now.

How to use Social Media for Customer Service

Mike McClure — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:41:59 -0400

The new generation of customers create a unique challenge for retailers who pride themselves on customer service. The speed, reach and transparency of social media provide the customer who wants service on their own terms with a strong voice. When brands fail to deliver, customers who feel unheard and disappointed are quick to express their frustration through social channels.

Brands have learned the hard way about the consequences of ignoring customers on social media channels, when these missteps go viral and turn into PR nightmares. Just ask United Airlines whose baggage handlers destroyed a customer’s Taylor guitar. United did not provide him with a reimbursement, so he created a YouTube video song called "United Breaks Guitars" highlighting how horrible their customer service was. The video went viral and caused an onslaught of bad PR while being viewed over 13 million times.

Segment your customers
Your customers are divided into many groups based on their habits, age and technology preference. The older crowd will still opt-in to wait on the phone line, while the more digitally savvy crowd will be more likely to send you a tweet, gripe on your Facebook page or write a bad Yelp review. This is why you should find out who is more likely to reach out to you on social channels and why. A deeper segmentation can be made based on the kind of transactions they most likely need help with. Are they contacting you because of the late delivery? Warranty? Returns? If you start seeing a trend within a certain segment, be proactive and post relevant information about the issue on your social channels to help the customer solve the problem on their own.

Be on time
The biggest mistake retailers make when providing customer service on social media is taking too long to respond. Social media moves at the speed of light and customers expect you to respond accordingly. Waiting a day on Twitter is like waiting a week in real time. Most of the digitally savvy customers expect a reply within 2 to 4 hours. Plan and train your staff to accommodate this reality.

Invest in the digital platform
Growing your social media customer service is an investment. Its success will not come overnight and will depend on how aggressive you are in letting your customers know that this channel is open. Even if you have an excellent system set in place, if nobody knows about it, it will not catch on. The success of your social customer service will depend on how happy and satisfied your customers feel after the interaction with your brand. If you failed to answer their questions and they feel like their time was wasted, their reaction will reflect those feelings. If you solved their problem and made their life easier, a retweet and word of mouth on social media will do wonders for your brand. It's a chance to turn an unhappy customer into a brand advocate.

As new digital platforms start to catch on with customers, retailers need to adopt their customer service strategy to accommodate those realities. Failure to do so will result in unhappy customers with locked and loaded negative messages about your brand ready to send out to their social networks. Remember, every digital touch point your customer experiences is a representation of your brand which has a potential to be broadcasted to thousands of people in a matter of seconds. That can be good or it can be bad. What experience will you create? And if you've already started doing digital customer service, what experiences have you had already? I'd love to hear about it.

Dmitri Pivtorak, Yaffe social team member - how can I help you?

How To Leverage Exclusivity To Boost Your Brand & Sales On Social Channels

Mike McClure — Tue, 07 May 2013 13:09:50 -0400

Exclusivity sparks excitement in the hearts of consumers. Retailers can use this concept to grow their social media followers and build loyalty within the community without increasing the price of the product. Offering exclusive content and deals to consumers on specific social channels makes the individuals feel valued and special guaranteeing that they will stick around and pay attention to your next post. It’s an idea that has worked well for our clients in our direct marketing efforts for years. This is just taking the concept into a new medium.

Exclusive Deals
The most common way to spark interest and gain followers is to offer exclusive deals for a specific social media channel. DELL did this in 2009 when they announced exclusive deals for Twitter users. Since then many retailers have followed suit. This technique can be effectively used during the holidays by small shops and large retailers. To generate engagement, these deals can be wrapped into a contest or require for a customer to perform a certain action, like Re-Tweet the status update, so it will reach more people.

New Product Announcements
Retailers can generate delight by using social channels to announce new products that are coming into their store. This is especially relevant to retailers with visually appealing products like clothing or furniture. Choose a channel that is highly visual, like Facebook or Pinterest , and give your followers the first look as to what’s coming into the store. This will generate engagement, build your community and give you an idea of what products will produce interest in store.

Behind the scenes content
Showing behind the scenes of your brand will convey transparency and a deeper relationship with the customer. It shows that you are human, and people want to buy from humans not brands. Check out this 7 second Vine post from Threadless showcasing various parts of their operations but still capturing the essence of the brand.

Exclusivity can play an important part in any retailer’s arsenal without the customer shelling out a fortune for the products or the retailer giving up huge margin hits. Exchange the price tag for their attention on social channels, and you will build a solid foundation for a profitable relationship.

Dmitri Pivtorak, giving you this Yaffe exclusive!

Your Social Media RIO May Be Better Than You Think

Mike McClure — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:33:44 -0400

This week, because of a social media campaign, I bought a car that wasn’t on my consideration list from a dealership I never would have bought from. And I’m pretty sure my purchase was never factored into their social media ROI.

Why wouldn’t my purchase of a brand new car be a factor in their ROI? Because the campaign ended last summer and my participation in it was 15 months ago. Surely, any ROI calculations have been long put to bed by now. But, that’s the problem with how we look at ROI, especially from a retailer perspective. If a sale doesn’t happen within the immediate sales cycle, does it happen at all? Probably not in the date you’re collecting.

Social media can have somewhat immediate effects, but it’s a long term game. Scott Monty, who heads up Ford’s social media has said they keep enough data that they can consistently see bumps in sales due to social media activity – but it’s always 30 or 60 days later (Sorry, Scott, I don’t remember which it was).

In my case, the social media campaign was a blogger outreach program by the Suburban Collection called #socialtestdrive. As a local blogger with some cache in the local social media scene, I was given a car to drive for a weekend, with the expectation that I tweet, Instagram, Facebook, Foursquare and blog about it. You can read about my experience in my original blog from January, 2012.

I had never heard of a Honda Insight before my social test drive, so it definitely wasn't in my consideration list. But I liked it and was impressed with the low sticker compared to other hybrid cars. So, fast forward to now, when I was suddenly in the market for a car. I remembered how much I liked the car and how well they treated me. So, I contacted their social media manager about getting the car from them.

The dealership is on the other side of the Detroit metro area from where I live and nowhere near my office either. But I was willing to drive 45 minutes across town because I assumed they’d treat me well and give me a good deal, based on my previous experience with them. I didn’t really shop around or haggle – but I felt I got a really good deal. All because of the connection I made during their social media campaign.

So, as you struggle with your social media campaign and whether it’s hitting the sales numbers you hoped to get – remember that, if you’re doing it right, some of the gains you get from it will come after the sales period you’re measuring. This is just one example from one person. And there are thousands of people out there that will be touched directly or indirectly by your campaign. Be patient, keep doing the right things and they will come. It might be tomorrow, it might be in 30 days, it might be in 15 months – but they will come.

How about you, have you had a similar experience, either from the brand side or as a consumer? I’d love to hear your story.

Mike McClure, better late than never.

5 Twitter Tips for Retailers

Mike McClure — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:01:56 -0400

Twitter is an essential tool for a retailer’s toolbox in the new age of communication. This social media platform where messages are limited to 140 characters, moves at the speed of light and reaches more than 200 million active users. Well thought out social media strategy and a savvy social team can pay major dividends for a retailer looking to increase brand awareness, get customers into the store and improve customer service.

Define what you want to accomplish
Skipping this initial step is equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot before a race. Strategy is important, and unless you have unlimited budget, time and indifferent stakeholders, you should clearly define what you want success to look like on Twitter. Are you trying to increase awareness about the new product? Improve customer support? Generate buzz around your brand? A good strategy outlines your initial goals and includes a way to measure them. As time passes, your Twitter growth and technology changes, so your strategy and goals should too. Your social media strategy, and consequently your Twitter strategy, must be an extension of your business strategy.

General Uses of Twitter for Retail Brands
The very basic set up for your Twitter strategy could be raising awareness about your brand. Topics may include company news, products, company culture and general engagement with the followers of your brand. Some examples of this are Old Navy and Converse. However, make sure you don’t always talk only about yourself.

Customer Service
Twitter is a great secondary channel for customer service if you’re willing to invest the time and resources into it. Due to its transparent nature, keep in mind that everyone will see your wins and losses, so be careful as to what you say. Some examples of excellent customer service is UPS’ support channel which is 100% dedicated to customer support.

Deals and Coupons
One of the ways to make your customers feel special is to introduce exclusive deals and contests for your followers. You will ultimately gain more followers and a deeper sense of loyalty within your existing base. A 10% discount could be given during a day or a period in time to anyone who mentions that they saw that deal on Twitter. Home Depot has a Twitter channel dedicated to deals, and so does Sears.

What not to do
While doing research for this article I stumbled upon Walmart’s twitter feed and caught one of their hiccups. There is no reason big brand name retailers shouldn’t have somebody who knows how to use their social media tools. In the screen shot below, taken on 4/30/2013, Wallmart gets called out by a follower for not knowing how to properly use Twitter to respond to their customers.

When it comes to social media, remember that it’s a double-edged sword, because of the high level of transparency and the speed at which the messages spread. Delight a customer and they may sing praises about your brand through the internet, tick them off and they could seriously damage your brand through bad reviews and word of mouth. Regardless of the channel you are communicating on, your focus should always be the customer. As it happens, your customers are on Twitter, so it’s time to speak their language.

Dmitri Pivtorak, Yaffe Social Media Team

How Listening Allows Retailers to Join the Social Media Conversation

Mike McClure — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:03:28 -0400

“Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.” - Doug Larson

Nothing ruins a good conversation like somebody who never shuts up. While traditional retail advertising in print and broadcast has been successful blasting ads across all platforms as loud as possible, the paradigm shifts when you move into the digital and social arenas. Through the power of blogs, tightly-knitted communities and transparency that internet has provided, consumers now have a voice of their own. And they speak loud and often. In this environment, it is not acceptable to talk AT your customer or to just blast out sale messages. In this new social age, it’s time to listen and join the conversation.

What should I monitor?
Retailers can leverages social media to gain key insights about customers by setting up a personalized listening strategy. One of the most obvious things to listen for is the name of your brand. Brainstorm variations of the brand and check how other users might use it or refer to it. Your brand name could be abbreviated or misspelled, and if you don’t include those terms in your search, you might miss some important insights. This is the first and easiest step in listening, as all of the posts will relate directly to you. It will help you catch both unhappy customers and raving fans, measure sentiment about your brand and monitor potential problems before they have time to damage your brand.

Capitalize on your competitor’s mistakes
Do a quick audit on your competitor’s social media channels and see what their strengths and weaknesses are. Are they pushing out content without acknowledging their fans? Is their Twitter inactive? Are they doing something you can learn from? You won’t be able to capitalize any of those mistakes unless you actively listen first.

Geo fencing
Sometimes looking at all the search results can be overwhelming and irrelevant if it doesn’t affect your store. Geo-targeting filters your search results down to a specific area, allowing you to focus on what’s important in that region. Depending on your goals it could be a zip code, a state or the area around your store. This technique works great if you’re trying to analyze the effects of your marketing campaign in a specific area or are searching for potential customers who might have a problem you or your product can solve.

Some tools to get you started
Google Alerts – Google Alerts has been a time tested tool which alerts you every time there is a mention of a specific topic or keyword.
Social Mention – Like Google Alerts but for social media.
Twitter search – One of the most useful tools to search for specific topics of interest on Twitter.
Hootsuite – a dashboard to unite all of your social channels.

Retailers who want to get the most out of social media need to stop treating it like a traditional form of advertising and communication, because that tact is an automatic path towards failure. It’s time to join the conversation by taking the first step of listening to your customer. Or course, then you have to take the next step – actually engaging in meaningful conversations with them.

Dmitri Pivtorak, - I'm listening.

5 Online Properties Every Business Should Claim Now

Mike McClure — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:29:10 -0400

If your business has a brick and mortar, physical location - that's not the only property you should be concerned about. You have online properties. And if you haven't claimed them, you could have the wrong information about you out there or worse: squatters and impostors. So, if you haven't taken the time to check some of these area's for your company's place online, you definitely should. And soon.

Google Places. In most cases, if someone wants to know the physical location of your business, they're going to Google it. And, chances are, high up in the search results is a listing of your location with a Google map of it next to it. Many people will click on that. Where they will go is your Google Places location. If you haven't claimed your Google Places location it will be put together with whatever information Google was able to glean from the internet. It is also possible that someone else has put it together for you with with good intent, if they're an employee or fan or with ill intent, if they're a competitor or just a hater.

By claiming it, you can make sure that all the information is correct and that it is connected to all your other online properties, like your website. You would be surprised at how often the info on these unclaimed Google Places is wrong. I've seen it many times. So, claim yours today and make sure people who are looking for your brand can actually find it.

Facebook. This is the 500-pound gorilla of social media. Most businesses and people are there already. You should check and see if your name is even still available on Facebook and if it is, claim it immediately. Even if you don't plan to do something with it immediately, you should grab it before someone else does. Also, you need to see if pages already exist for your brand - either run by a well-meaning employee or fan or by someone not even remotely associated with your brand.Once you've claimed your business, you can merge other pages if they exist. And if someone else has claimed your page, here's a link to a video you can watch on what to do about it.

Yelp and other review sites. Once again, you want to claim your business on Yelp and other review sites to make sure your info is correct and people searching you can find your business. But there are other reasons to claim yourself on Yelp. For one thing, you'll be able to monitor your page views, track your reviews and respond to them (but don't get defensive, be professional and helpful). Also, you will be able to offer viewers of your business's page promotions to get them to come in through the Yelp Deals program.

Foursquare and other location-based social media. Chances are if you have physical locations that a lot of people come to, someone has checked into each of them on Foursquare, Facebook Places or one of the other location-based social check-in sites. You'd be surprised how many out of the way, rural places I've found already listed in Foursquare. Often when someone tries to check in to a place and it's already listed, they will create the place's location themselves (I've done this many times). Many times those people don't have your full address or phone number so they put in approximations.Sometimes they think it's right, but they've input it wrong or just had wrong info. So you need to check every location you have and make sure it's right.

Also, with Foursquare, like Yelp, once you've claimed your sites you can set up specials for people who check in. These specials will appear whenever they check in. You can have specials designed to get them to buy more. You can set them up as rewards after so many check-ins, creating a digital loyalty program. Or you can set up rewards for your mayors, which are the best customer at each location. There are partner opportunities too, like with American Express small business program that gives customers cash back on purchases at your store if they checked in on Foursquare and bought with an AmEx card.

Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Foodspoting and other social media. We already talked about the big one, Facebook. But, you should look at claiming your name on other social media as well. Twitter is probably the next biggest in importance. But, you should also look at what social media networks are most popular within your industry. If you sell woman's fashion, look at Pinterest. if you're a restaurant, look at Foodspotting. In all cases, you'll want to see if someone's already claimed your business or name and grab up what's available. Each time a new social network becomes popular, there's a land grab from brands and people to scoop up the names before someone else does.

There are plenty of other online properties to consider, but these are the top ones in my mind. What others have you found you need to grab? What has worked for you or your company? I'd love to hear what I'm missing or what niche works for you.

Mike McClure, Online Property Owner.

Baseball, Spring, Make Now the Time to Launch Your New Business Ideas

Mike McClure — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:25:21 -0400

It's opening day in Detroit. An annual ritual of spring when everybody is a baseball fan and full of optimism. In this city, it's more than just a baseball game, it's a party - the perfect day to skip work and have a beer downtown, even if you don't have tickets.

Springtime in general is a time of rebirth. A time of growth and renewal. As we shed our winter coats and heavy clothes, there's an extra spring in our step (no pun intended). Studies have shown that people are more open to change this time of year. More open to investing (time, money, effort, brain space) more in new ideas and opportunities.

I don't bring this up just to wax poetically on how much I like spring and sunshine. I think understanding this very human condition can mean good things for your business or organization. Are you looking to raise capital? Introduce a new product. Charge your internal organization or your external brand image? Spring might be the perfect time to make a change - when people are more open to it.

Don't thing it applies? Let's look at one organization that finds it very hard to change their ways of doing things - church organizations. Churches have traditional held their stewardship campaigns in the fall to match up people's commitment to giving for the year with the traditional church fiscal calendar. Yet, there is a movement in many church organizations to move to spring campaigns, even though it will mean dividing up commitments over two fiscal years.

The reason for this move is explicitly because of the human psychology of openness to change and strong feelings of growth and renewal - as opposed to feelings of battening down the hatches and saving stores for winter in the fall. Sure we don't really need to store up for winter any more - but that kind of thinking is ingrained in our DNA.

What does that mean to your business or organization? What have you been considering doing differently? Don't put it off. Now may be the perfect time to make a change or get people invested in your growth or new idea. Hope doesn't spring eternal just for baseball fans this time of year. It goes way beyond that. So, go ahead. Launch that new idea or initiative.

Mike McClure, Springing Into Action

Is Your Brand an Honest One?

Mike McClure — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:27:33 -0400

Is your company being honest with your customers? I'm not talking about can you support your claims or are you accurate in your product descriptions. Those are important, too. But I'm talking about honesty on a deeper level. Whether you do a lot of marketing or not, does the brand persona you put forth really represent who you actually are as a brand.

Today's consumers have so much information at their fingertips. They can look you up on review sites like Yelp or industry-specific sites. They talk to their friends and acquaintances on social channels. They do online research when seeking new products and services. We've reached an age of transparency where you can't hide who you really are - so it's important that the face you put on your brand is one the customer will recognize as true.

The good news is this: customers don't expect perfection. They expect a humanness to brands these days. It's okay to make mistakes - as long as you own up to them and act to fix them. You don't have to have a pristine brand image like in the days when every piece of brand imagery was polished to a high sheen before putting it out there. People want to know the people behind the brands - or at least see a human side to the businesses they deal with. That's why being good corporate citizens and sharing what you're doing for your communities or causes has become important.

Brands are more willing to take a stance today. With this new era of brand honesty, many are more willing to take stances on controversial issues. Take gay marriage. Brands like Oreo and Levi's have unabashedly supported gay rights. Brands like Chick-fil-a (or at least their CEO) have taken an anti-gay marriage stance. Brands on both side of the issue have taken heat for their stance and have faced boycott threats. Yet, both are doing just fine. In fact, some are doing even better - thanks to ardent support from consumers that feel the same way.

But, do you know what your brand actually is? When we do brand exercises with companies, they are often better at articulating what the competition's brand is than their own. The attributes they ascribe to their own brand tend to be what they want them to be rather than what they are.

A big part of making sure you're putting the honest face of your brand out there is honestly knowing what your brand is. You can do a full on brand audit or corporate culture study to help you find out. But if you don't have the time or money for that, you can start by doing your own search. Do a Google search on your brand. Use social tools like twitter search or Social Mention. Ask your employees, customers and friends. What do you find? Are there consistent descriptions and trends? Are they different than the face you've been putting on your brand? If so, it's time to change.

Another exercise you can try is doing the six-word memoir for your business that I suggested in a previous post. So, how are you doing? Whether the brand is your company or you - does it honestly represent who you really are? Let me know. I'd be interested to hear what you find out.

Mike McClure. The hairy face of the Mike McClure brand.