San Diego BusinessSocial Media Tips For Business Owners And Entrepreneurs
Facebook and Twitter are becoming marketing necessities With the speed of a wildfire, social media buzz is spreading through corporate America. While companies as large as Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. (Souplantation & Sweet Tomatoes) and as small as e-mail security start-up Sendio Inc. are embracing it to varying degrees as a new way to connect with existing and potential customers, most businesses remain on the sidelines, uncertain of how to respond. In general, the term “social media” for businesses can be reduced to defining two online programs, Facebook and Twitter. Of the other large players in the category, LinkedIn plays a role in building personal and corporate resumes while, despite negative headlines, MySpace remains a giant, particularly in the music industry. Of the quartet, consider MySpace to be the bar or club, Facebook the picnic, LinkedIn the office and Twitter akin to text messaging on steroids. To try and help entrepreneurs and business owners alike get a handle on the technology a subgroup of the region’s largest telecommunications organization, CommNeus San Diego, put on a breakfast meeting at the Del Mar Heights office of Mintz Levin. About 75 people turned out for a panel discussion moderated by Reid Carr, the president of Red Door Interactive, and featuring Ginger Anderson, the marketing manager for Garden Fresh, Tal Golan, the founder, president and chief technology officer of Sendio and Jenn Van Grove, the fast-talking detail-spewing associate editor of Mashable, a Web site overflowing with social media coverage. Redefining Breaking News At its core, social media is a new way to break news, said Van Grove, presenting a generic definition that includes near instantaneous relaying of the topic matter to a wide audience in text, video and formats still being imagined. Golan, middle-aged and old for this group, said Sendio views Twitter and Facebook as ways to stay in touch with potential customers and find new ones. The company also finds blogs “super important” and in July will introduce YouTube videos onto its blogs. “The picture really does tell 1,000 words,” he said. San Diego-based Garden Fresh is enjoying measurable success – a social media rarity of sorts -- with both Twitter and Facebook. Anderson is considering adding a blog.  Garden Fresh launched both of its efforts this year, and the surprises about where its restaurants stood in social media land were immediate. “We had no idea how many people were already talking about us,” Anderson said. The second surprise was how self-regulating the fans were when someone said something negative about the company. “It was very, very cool how many people were willing to defend the brand,” Anderson said. Van Grove, young, hip and headed later that day to get in line for a new iPhone, said when talking with companies about social media she is surprised how many people must vet information before it can be sent or posted. By the time the decision is made the information is too old, she says. Getting Your Twitter On For a business looking to streamline that process by letting multiple users have the ability to post, or “tweet” using Twitter, she recommended free software from Cotweet. Van Grove also suggested that audience members consider a download called Tweet Deck that allows users to stay in touch with their contacts across Twitter and Facebook. A unique feature of Twitter is its real-time search engine that allows companies to see what is being said about them at the moment. Van Grove said that same ability will be coming soon to Facebook and the ever-dominant Google. Users need to, she says, “keep up with the flow of information as it happens.” An hour later is too late. After speeding through a dizzying array of online social media products, or tools as she calls them – examples included Trendrr, Twist, Tweetmeme, Oneriot, Collecta, Seesmic Desktop, Wefollow, Mr.Tweet and Contexts – Van Grove discussed the use of news on her site. A link to a popular story that is sent by Twitter to followers – she has more than 5,000 followers – will be forwarded, or “retweeted,” 3,000 times. Take A Breath Witnessing the overwhelmed body language of audience members when Van Grove finished, Golan advised the group what they had just heard was a master’s-level presentation. Not to worry, he said. Go ahead and start slow. Learn while doing. “You can get involved without knowing how it is going to end,” he said. “You can definitely ease your way in.” The marketing people in the room asked about how to measure and manage results for social marketing. Golan advised them the answer is murky. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” he said. At Sendio the initial effort, and follow up tracking, were disappointing. “We were devastated about how few people were talking about us,” he said. Golan also recommended against using social media as an outlet for traditional marketing and public relations materials. “People are very sensitive about over promotion,” he said. Van Grove agreed. “You have to be conscious of the audience you are dealing with.” She suggested testing out campaigns and strategies by seeing what generates the desired response and building from there. “What am I getting comments on,” is the key, she said. Questions And Contests Contests and asking questions are ways Garden Fresh generates responses from its restaurant customers. Initially, Anderson’s bosses at Garden Fresh wanted to know how many diners the social media efforts would bring in the door. A small contest drew 800 participants, proving fans were hungry to be engaged. An online coupon at a time when Souplantation’s Facebook site had 5,000 fans ended up drawing 2,500 coupon redemptions. Even accounting for the coupons being electronically forwarded and then used by others, she said the results were “incredible.” Garden Fresh also learned first-hand about the viral nature of social media market when it ran a pucker face campaign in April as part of Lemon Month. The Facebook fan who uploaded the best pucker face won a prize. What the firm discovered is after customers uploaded their faces, those images also appeared on the customer’s personal Facebook pages where their friends in turn could see them. Those individuals then clicked over to Souplantation to learn about the fuss. To build awareness of Garden Fresh’s social media efforts, Anderson makes sure to include it in traditional advertising and in the signature lines of her e-mail. Van Grove said the next big thing will be using mobile phones to stream video to the Web live while at the same time holding a Twitter conversation about what is happening in real time. The Time Commitment The question of how much time a company or designated individual should expect to spend on a social media effort went unanswered. Anderson tries to keep her time to an hour a day, but she also employs Red Door Interactive, one of the largest new media marketing and technology firms in San Diego. Van Grove uses the technology virtually every waking moment. Golan uses it in a more methodical way and as only a small component to his company’s efforts to emerge in 2010 as a “seven-year overnight success.” In general, Twitter is the more demanding day-in day-out technology while a nicely done Facebook page will be functioning best when the conversation is almost exclusively in the hands of customers or fans. The social media phenomenon is not going away. Golan said it is only a matter of time before commercials now airing on television and featuring a Web address also will feature Facebook and Twitter information. Too New Not Much Longer All the panelists and moderator agreed social media is still in an explosive grove faze with each flavor finding its audience. But that won’t last. “We are going to reach a ceiling, a level of social media saturation,” said Golan. “All social networks begin with a big boom and then settle down into specific users,” said Carr. The key is to jump in now and start figuring it out, before your competitors figure it out. Again, however, pay attention to, and focus on, what delivers a response. An individual should get their own free Twitter and Facebook accounts before putting their business before the masses. “Seek to understand before asking to be understood,” Golan sad. “This is not going to be an overnight thing.”
 Tim McClain About the author: A working journalist (paycheck) since 1982, Tim oversaw the editorial for a 30,000 circulation business and lifestyle magazine called San Diego Metropolitan, a 15,000 circulation community newspaper called North Park News, a legal notice newspaper called Uptown-Examiner and a Website related to them all at sandiegometro.com. More by this author Subscribe to Business:
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"Speed of wildfire" is right! It has all happened so fast, it can be really hard to stay up to speed with it all. While I consider myself to be somewhat fluent in the field of social media, I still learn something new everyday! You are dead on about how businesses are utilizing social media. Also, social media is particularly helpful for small businesses, which you can read more about here: http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2...-customers
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August 05, 2009
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