A few weeks ago I did a radio interview with Jeffrey Summers of Hospitality 101 on this topic, which you can listen to while reading this if you like – it will open in a new window: Blog Talk Radio: Building a Better Restaurant Business 7/27

I had an experience, just that day on the way to a lunch meeting that has to be a common occurrence for others, I’d imagine. On the way to Gordon Biersch, running slightly late, I needed to look up my meal in advance so Lisa could order for me, so I looked up the restaurant on my smartphone. They did not have a mobile version, so I navigated best I could, but had to put in a zip code or find my state to try to get to the menu. (A better way? Do a mobile app that picks up the smartphone’s geo-location and shoot them to the right menu/map/location information instantly.) I finally got the menu for lunch pulled up, and it was a PDF of course – restaurants seem never to have heard of HTML when it comes to menu’s online) and some of the PDF was dark and colored so it was very difficult to find what I needed to look at. I finally gave up, and since the one white page of the PDF had salads and appetizers on it, decided to pick a salad to eat. Sigh… oh well.

This is SO typical. Type in any major city into Google: “restaurants Chicago” for example, and go to the first sites that come up. Ask yourself this:

• Do they have their menu chunked into sections so you have to click back and forth to see what having a whole meal there would be like?
• Do they only offer their menu as PDF’s you have to download to view?
• Do they have pertinent information about how to reserve for big parties, catering info, delivery info, business meeting capabilities, and things beyond the typical that you might be seeking information about?
• Do they offer convenient links to Driving Directions so you can pull that up without having to do the work yourself to get them?
• Do they link to reviews for you so you can get a sense of the restaurant’s quality from unbiased sources?
• Do they solicit your feedback, either personally via email or social network invitation, or through poll questions or short surveys? Do they make it easy for you to ask questions?
• Do they have large, detailed photographs, video of the space and imagery that immerses you in the experience of what the restaurant would be like if you visited?

Sadly, many restaurants fall short in the areas above. And those are just basic needs: find a menu, get a sense of the restaurant itself, get driving directions to it, communicate with someone to give them feedback, a complaint or ask a question.

What about more advanced stuff? We aren’t even getting close to doing what technology and the social web enables us to do, like:

• A mobile site that is particularly geared towards the needs of mobile users and anticipates their actions to make the experience both efficient and pleasant.
• Real-time content, currently spread around the internet at sites like Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, Foodspotting and many more, being aggregated into your site.
• User experience on-the-cheap, because people are willing (and sometimes you can’t stop them) from sharing their experiences online. Polls, quick surveys, soliciting feedback on social networks, making it easy for people to give anonymous feedback… this is something every hospitality business should be using the internet for today. Listening, talking, and seeking information about what you’re doing right, what’s wrong and how you can improve.
• Real relationships – beyond simply interacting. Jeffery has long been a proponent of serving customers a bit more like they do in Europe, which is to get involved in their lives. Some of my favorite places where I do business get to know me personally over time, as I am a regular customer, and go the extra mile to help me get done what I need to: become more polished at the nail salon, cut off my nappy hair and make me look more presentable, clean my clothes so I can make a good impression at a meeting, or nourish me with some delicious food that I may be craving.

Jeffrey, a seasoned restaurant & hospitality consultant, says they’ve found that 88% of people visit the website of the restaurant that they will be going to later. So people ARE seeing your sites, whether you think they are and are watching the analytics or not. They’re visiting via their mobile phones (dumb and smart), on laptops, desktops and via links sent by friends. They’re visiting after randomly catching a picture of your food on Foodspotting, or a checkin from a friend on Foursquare or Gowalla. They’re coming to you from Yelp and other review sites, or even a random Google mention. What do they see when they get there???

This is what I want to see… I had wanted to make this a pretty diagram in Illustrator but only had time to whip out a fast sketch, so apologies for the low-fidelity image here:

Bottom line: this is what I need. This is what your site users, mobile users, customers and prospects need. Feel free to let me know what I missed in the comments!

We need you to have a website of your own, first and foremost. You are not in the Facebook business, though you may use that site for marketing and communications. Don’t rely on Google and Yelp and other directories to list your information – they’re not going to do your selling for you! I get so frustrated when I type in a restaurant and city name and cannot seem to locate ANYTHING except third-party sources of information. (NoRTH in Kansas City, I’m talking to you. I’ve seen a site before but think it was linked from your parent company, because searches don’t bring back anything relevant that is owned by you. You make enough to have a unique domain name, surely. Sigh… also, this name – it may sound fancy schmancy, but it is virtually impossible to find relevant tweets about you, because “north kansas city” or “north overland park” doesn’t bring up what you should hope it does on Twitter.)

We need to see FULL menu options, to read it fast or envision an entire meal, without hopping around all over your site, trying to piece together the big picture. Help me get enrolled by tempting me with the whole enchilada.

We need shareable menu content, down to a single item and for the whole menu. Use PDF’s for what they were primarily designed for – to print from and to send! Have your menu as a normal web page or pages so people can copy/paste and share this content with others. I have a design for this we’ve never implemented yet, that involves showing the shareable bits if the user wants to, with one click. The technology is there today – utilize it!

We need to see macro shots of your delicious dishes to make our mouths water, and large scale, panoramic shots of your space. We want to see happy customers at the bar, your waitstaff, chefs cooking, the front door staff, (and please tell me you have nice, sufficient waiting room!) Hire a great photographer, and bring the ambiance to your site – it’s the next best thing to being there!

We want to see your recent press. If you’ve been written up in the newspaper, a restaurant guide or even a blog post, please link to it for us and let us read about you from others. If the press mentions contain both good and bad, even better. It makes it seem like a more realistic, honest assessment in the reader’s mind.

We’d love to see some interactive elements like video taken in your space (from a low-rent Flip cam or a professional production, either one.) We’d love to see a virtual tour like real estate folks offer, so you can walk through the space without being there. Even better? An interactive tour with a friendly, appealing tour guide (like a hostess, business owner or your top chef.) Make us WANT to come and see for ourselves. Make photos in a virtual tour LARGE to immerse people in your space a few moments.

We want to read reviews from folks who have eaten there. Point to Yelp and other review sites. Link to Foodspotting. Ask for more reviews! Respond where you can, to negative reviews with the honest truth. Give people the 360 degree perspective about your restaurant and fix what’s broken.

We don’t just want a Facebook icon and Twitter icon in the footer of your site. That’s okay, but optimally, bring in social feeds, and aggregate this real-time content in your own site. People are talking about your place, you are hopefully sharing specials and information on Facebook and Twitter. Bring this all together in the ultimate hub of information. Keep an eye on your universe. Use Foursquare’s API to show who has visited you recently. Be a connector of people who love sushi, wine, barbecue, french food, tex-mex, etc. Get involved with them in conversations online and translate that into real-world sales. (Contact Jeffrey to learn more about that!)

We need directions. Make it easy – Google has given you all the keys you need to post a map, link to driving directions, or send directions to another person who might be meeting you. Take advantage of the technology that’s available and make it pleasant for users to utilize your site. This leads to goodwill, and goodwill leads to good customers and better sales.

We want to know how long you’ve been in business and what your credibility is. Give us visually rich, verbally descriptive images that tell the story of your history, your particular philosophy, your owners or chef’s background, your funny customer stories. Help us know you’re credible and engage us mentally, so we’ll want to be part of your world.

We want to know what others have said about you, so give us testimonials and link to or replicate positive reviews so we can quickly understand what other people like about your service, your food or your catering abilities for big parties.

We need a custom mobile site. There are inexpensive-to-expensive ways to accomplish this. We can help you understand all your options in the mobile realm. Beyond simply having a neat site, our friends at Meers Advertising are doing some amazing, fun stuff with mobile SMS text campaigns. Fun stuff to consider? Text “steak” and get back the special of the day, or text RSVP to reserve a table for tonight. Text “save” and get a coupon delivered you can either print, or show the waiter on your phone to use the coupon of the day.

We have a slew of other ideas for using social networks and content created by yourself and users to drive traffic to your site, but that’s a topic for another post. What to do if you’re a restaurant and feel overwhelmed by all the options, issues and choices? Here are some ideas:

• Contact Jeffrey Summers at RestaurantWorx about a restaurant consultation
• Add the RestaurantWorx blog to your reader or subscribe by email
• Contact us at Fresh ID about your restaurant site
• Listen to Hospitality 101 radio shows – they are chock FULL of helpful tips!

I.      Current Use/Statistics (7/6/10)
II.     Organization/Legal Issues/Fears/Questions (7/8/10)
III.   Doctor-Patient Relationship (7/13/10)
IV.    Recap/Look into the Future (7/15/10)

As I mentioned in the previous post, a lot of this information is drawn from a social media panel discussion hosted by Meers Advertising at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, MO.  If you haven’t already watched the recorded video of the event, you should definitely take a look here.  There is a lot of information to get through in four posts, so I figured we would keep it somewhat simple with the first post. The goal today is to paint a picture of how social media is currently being used in healthcare. The plan is to stay away from a lot of analysis or predicting, and really just get a feel for what’s being done in the field.  This is going to require looking at a lot of statistics, but please hang with me… having a better understanding of the status quo is extremely important in understanding why or why not social media will work for healthcare professionals and how it can best be used.

When I first started researching this topic for the social media panel discussion, I watched a short YouTube video called, “Social Media in Healthcare” that had some pretty interesting facts (you can view this video at the bottom of the page).  The original video is somewhat dated, but it has been updated with some new numbers.  I’ll sum up some of the key points below:

• 60 million consumers interact and discuss their health-care online
• Roughly 1,200 Facebook pages advocate finding a cure for an illness
• 72% of patients say they researched their symptoms before visiting their doctor
• 93% of e-patients say internet provided them with health care information they needed
• 80% of internet users have looked online for health information

Source: Q1 Productions

These statistics highlight a very important point.  Whenever I speak with a prospective client, I’m usually asked, “Why does it matter if I participate in social media?”  I always try to help those who ask this question realized one thing:  Your brand, your product, your service is already a part of social media.  The question those people should be asking isn’t why they should participate, but whether or not they are willing to allow others to lead the discussion regarding their brand, product, or service. Most of the time, that answer is “no”, and it’s clear from the above statistics that the same situation holds true in healthcare, even though the goals may be different from a for-profit business. Even if healthcare professionals don’t use social media, 60 million consumers make sure the conversation continues to take place online.

I also came across a great presentation put together by Carolyn Grisko & Associates, Inc. called “Healthcare & Social Media: 2009 Trends and Strategy” (You can view this presentation at the bottom of the page).  The entire presentation is great, but the information presented on slides 5-7 is key.  Look at these statistics regarding how Americans search the internet:

• 36% want to see what other consumers think about medication or treatment
• 34% use social media
• 46% use health care portals

Source:”How America Searches: Health and Wellness“- survey by Opinion Research Corp.

These two sets of statistics clearly show that people are using social media to get their hands on healthcare information.  But how have hospitals, doctors, etc. responded to these facts?  I stumbled across a great blog post on Top Rank Online Marketing Blog called, “5 Examples of Social Media in Healthcare Marketing”.

The 5 examples mentioned are:

• Live Procedures (This is something that we have been contacted about.  A hospital wanted to use our Intefy product to allow medical students to watch a live surgery and ask an observing doctor questions via Twitter or chat)
• Train Medical Personnel
• Reach Mainstream Media That Use Social Media
• Communicate in Times of Crisis
• Provide Accurate Information to Patients (With With such a large amount of health information available on the web, it may be hard to determine the accuracy or trustworthiness of a source)

There has also been a growth in Twitter accounts, blogs, forums, and networks focused on healthcare. It is clear that social media is becoming more and more important for healthcare providers. There are resources available at the end of this post.

Now that we have a little better mental picture and understanding of how social media is used by healthcare professionals, we can look forward to understanding how these professionals go about organizing a social media strategy and what sort of legal and regulatory issues must be considered by the healthcare field in regards to the use of social media.  Look for that post to be available on Thursday, July 8.

Matt

Healthcare & Social Media: 2009 Trends & Strategy

Blogs

• Diabetes Mine Blog
• Health Matters Blog
• NYT Health Blog

Twitter

• @livestrong
• @stupidcancer
• @backusHospital
• @healthsocmed- hosts an online discussion regarding social media in healthcare (#hcsm) Sundays at 8pm CST

Social Networking

• OrganizedWisdom
• Patients Like Me
• Nurses Recommend Doctors

Podcasts

• Johns Hopkins Medicine Podcasts
• Mayo Clinic

Forums

• Revolution Health Groups
• Google Health Group

Meers Advertising has put together a great panel of local industry leaders for the event including:

• Ben Dillon (@benatgeo), eHealth Evangelist and Co-Owner at Geonetric, a web software solutions company out of Cedar Rapids, IA that focuses on healthcare
• Lisa Qualls (@lqualls4444), CEO for Fresh ID, a Kansas City, MO company focused on experience design and helping businesses integrate technology to expand their brand and improve operational processes and customer communications
• Mike Lundgren (@mglundgren), Partner and Director of Innovation Strategy at VML, a full-service digital marketing agency out of Kansas City, MO
• Mike McCamon (@mccamon), Chief Community Officer at Water.org, a Kansas City, MO based nonprofit organization dedicated to providing access to safe water and sanitation for communities in Africa, South Asia and Latin America.

Sam Meers (@meerskc) is responsible for organizing the event and will also be participating in the panel discussion.  Sam is President of Meers Advertising, a local Kansas City, MO agency dedicated to helping their clients grow and maintain competitiveness in the ever changing field of advertising.  A strong proponent of advertising and Web strategy to build a brand, Sam has developed his marketing communications beliefs through experience. Founding Meers Advertising in 1993, he brings over 25 years of consumer and business-to-business experience to the company.

Meers Advertising has worked with clients such as National Beef, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, Kansas and Oklahoma, Multi Service Corporation, Axcet HR Solutions, McCownGordon Construction, Human Factors International, Weight Loss Surgical Centers, WageWorks, Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics, TransforMED and Geonetric.  The Meers agency was recently mentioned in Target Marketing Magazine for its work with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City.

The event will also be available live, online using our own product, Twitterface.  Those wishing to watch the discussion online can do so from twitterface.com/meersadv and join in the discussion!

Lisa began this practice while at LightThread using a variety of paid and free online PR channels and trackingresults. She experienced the best results from prlog.org, obtaining front page search results within 24 hours of release and months later continuing to get front page search results. Prlog also makes it easy to link on your Facebook profile in addition to bookmarking through Delicious.

The benefits of doing this are:

• Backlinks to your site helps SEO with search engines. You will get linked to from the press release sites and anyone who picks up the story and posts about it from their site.
• People find you and your offer that might not have, otherwise… we’ve seen pretty significant results with this about the Chip Foose-John Deere event we did (they are a big brand after all so that helped) but with every release we’ve sent out, we’ve been surprised at the number of blogs and sites that have found it and posted the information or linked to the release or our site from theirs.
• It formalizes your operations. Last week Lisa zipped off a list to our team of all we have accomplished in the last 8 weeks. It is surprising how far we have come in only the past 2 months since she came on board. These press releases help us see our progress over time and give us a list of “News” items we can refer back to each year to see some of the highlights of what we’ve done.
• It’s free, save a little bit of time writing the release and posting it to the press release sites. Though we will do more formal and traditional paid announcements at various times, using this approach we’re only spending the time it takes to write and polish the release, and it’s well worth it.
• It adds credibility to your small business. Let’s face it… times are tough. Capturing quotes from happy customers and tooting your own horn in a non-pushy way can only help your efforts to sell products or services in a buyer’s market. Every little bit of promotion helps add to the overall number of people who hear about what you’re doing!

In fairness, we have not tried prweb or prleap so do not have comparative results to share. Additional sites that produced front page results upon release were pressreleasepoint.com and prurgent.com.

Keep in mind the free sites take a bit of time to set up your profile but once you use them the first time they are much easier to use again in the future. Please feel free to leave your favorite press release site in the comments section!

I have long had a fascination with what lies across the sea. Though I’ve not been to Europe yet, I have often imagined myself there for reasons unknown even to me. The idea of many places there just call to me, but this panoramic view of Paris offers lessons beyond appeasing a girl’s fancies.

Immersion into an environment like this IS the ultimate experience, and it’s far better than Second Life or a virtual reality. Zoom in closely, and you can see people eating on a terrace, or the Saints on the top of the Sainte Chappelle, something you could not see as closely if you were there in person.

This wonderful site is not the only place you can feel as if you’re standing in front of a place you’ve never been. Google Maps latest “street view” feature for many places is totally amazing. To revisit a place you lived as a child, explore the home of a friend you’ve met online, study a city you’re moving to before you arrive… it’s all possible now for a lot of major places by just putting in the address and zooming around the nearby streets.

So how does this translate to your business? Are you giving people something tangible to see so they almost feel they are experiencing it firsthand? When we redesigned the APS website we went in and took photos of the location, staff and even some faux surgery photos to give people an up-close look at what working with these plastic surgeons, nurses and supporting staff would be like. @zachishere and @simonkuo from Westside Studio did a great job capturing different aspects of a “day in the life” of these busy doctors and staff and we used them throughout the site, telling a graphic story in pictures that are more compelling than stock photography ever could be (we have a few of those mixed in as well, but not many.)

Don’t just paint a picture in words of what you can do for people… find a way to have them experience it. Our friend Kamran @swagclub sends unforgettable goodie boxes to people sometimes (we loved our gifts!!), knowing that’s the best way for people to get what receiving customized promotional merchandise can feel like when it’s a good fit for the audience.

I’d love to hear how you make things tangible for people in the comments. I will be thinking about this for our products and services too, as digital goods are often just experienced via samples online. An interesting challenge, to be sure!

Not as many people know about Red Chair, but it’s new – this is the first event – and the creator of it is an only recently discovered gem in the sm industry. His name is Olivier Blanchard, and we are pleased to call him both a friend and business partner… he is someone that we rely on for advice, debate, discussion and who we mention in RFP’s and proposals for corporate or on-site training. We’re lucky enough to get to pick his brain at will, but his Red Chair events offer everyone the chance to get to know him personally and take whatever understanding you have of social media marketing, social media ROI or social communications and customer care to a new level of intelligence.

Here are 21 reasons we think you should head to a Red Chair training in Portland this week, or a future event if you can’t make it there now:

1. Olivier doesn’t do “fuzzy math”. His slideshare presentation from a conference speech on social media ROI has garnered over 104,000 views, was featured on Mashable as a lead story, is embedded on nearly 600 websites and blogs, and has literally been used in dozens of presentations by OTHER social media consultants, to make a point with clients or close a business deal.

2. He has been an outspoken advocate FOR corporations WITH consultants who insist that ROI is just an old-fashioned term that deserves a new-fangled meaning, diluted for the social media space. Return on inanity, return on engagement, return on interaction, etc. mean little when it comes to budget spend and making decisions that are going to impact the health of your organization. He offers a site dedicated to just the topic of social media ROI at http://smroi.net

3. A former business consultant, product marketer and brand advisor, Olivier has both B2B and B2C as well as startup and Fortune 500-level expertise, working with such companies as Microsoft and SYNNEX and he knows operationally, and from the corporate level, what it means to do something as simple as start a Twitter account. You’ll never find him promising to make your video “go viral” or get you a ton of followers on your Twitter account. The short-term tactics of many consultants are not the strategy Olivier takes when helping you assess your approach to social media.

4. An active blogger since 2005, Olivier has had a front-row seat to the changes we have all made online the last few years, and has been at the forefront of experimenting with and learning about marketing to and serving customers with a mix of traditional and social methods since the first social platforms started appearing. He brings practical, real-world experience to both his training sessions and his consulting gigs.

5. He will help you, in these Red Chair events, determine a blueprint and strategy for designing a comprehensive social media program. (That link is just a very brief snapshot of what this training will include.)

6. Olivier has become a sought-after speaker the last year, and his presentations, keynotes and chats bring valuable insights to participants and are often tweeted about and written about online.

7. He goes deep and delivers real substance, above and beyond what many experts in this field offer for advice and guidance. Case in point: covering every detail of presenting your company’s brand on Twitter in images and verbage as a plan and not an accident.

8. Red Chair trainings, at least as far as I know, do not exist in this form anywhere else. This is like a crash-MBA in social media marketing and communications… without the MBA pricetag!

9. Olivier, with all of our help, wants to help people understand the real value behind using social media for business, and how to use it to transform your company culture, user satisfaction and ultimately sales. He has spearheaded the use of terms like “people to people” and “social communications” that others pick up on and use, because they make sense and add another step along the path of social evolution that all of us in this realm are defining.

10. Olivier has made me smarter. I honestly believe that everyone attending his Red Chair trainings will walk away smarter too. It’s not merely the education he imparts or the insights he pinpoints for you so sharply… it’s in his questions. He poses questions and theories that make you think for yourself and in doing so, your brain enlarges just that little bit more, that you feel you really see things in a different way, or you can imagine something new you hadn’t quite visualized before. Armed with new viewpoints, you will tackle problems and see opportunities in a different way after being exposed to this unique frenchman!

11. And speaking of France… Olivier is not 100% American. His heritage is French, with some other influences mixed in. Why this matters is because he has a lot of international, and therefore broader experience in the world than some of us do. And if social media has taught us anything, it’s that the world feels smaller than it used to – we can reach people faster and easier than we ever could before. And we need to be aware of what that means from the organizational standpoint, if we’re becoming a social company.

12. Olivier is active on his and other people’s blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Linked In. I don’t want to speak for him, but I am pretty sure that if you attend his trainings and get to know him, you’ll have a lasting and rich relationship with him and will be able to reach him as things come up that you need a nudge in the right direction with. I have seen him help countless numbers of people online.

13. Customer service managers, directors and support people: Red Chair will have a lot of information to help you build or improve a solid customer care program.

14. Executives and anyone concerned about social media and the ramifications and impact: Olivier will be covering lots of legal issues like defamation and confidentiality, as well as social media policies.

15. Ad and PR agency principals and managers: you will leave with a blueprint for how to help clients put a social media program in place, as well as concrete, actionable steps you can take to improve your own social presence.

16. Chief Marketing Officers: you will be armed with the knowledge you need to help you make hiring decisions, marketing campaign decisions and more after your Red Chair sessions.

17. Human resources managers and recruiters: Do you know how to hire a social media director, community manager or other social media personnel? Olivier has been very vocal in the community about who is qualified for these important responsibilities and he’ll guide you in making sound choices that will actually be effective for your company.

18. Social media is about integration into many facets of your operation… not just something the marketing team or your PR agency does. You’ll learn how to integrate social media into your company in a planned strategy that minimizes risks and embarrassing brand failures.

19. Olivier Blanchard has… well, finesse. His approach has been admired by many industry heavyweights, who I have seen compliment him on his style, manner of handling issues and people, and willingness to stand his ground about topics others shy away from. What better person to learn from?

20. There is an art to teaching something that sticks in your memory. Olivier blends humor with graphics with clear, concise words and his indelible style equals a pleasurable learning experience you’ll be able to relate to, comprehend and remember.

21. We value the work Olivier does and highly recommend attending his training! It will be an investment of time and cost well spent.

We love what Olivier is doing with this training program so much we will be bringing it to Kansas City this summer. The date is not yet determined. His next event at the moment is not until May, so check out the Red Chair Portland sessions and if you absolutely can’t make it, see the schedule of future events at the site.

• Follow RedChairGroup on Twitter
• Visit the Twitterface Page
• Join the LinkedIn Discussion
• Join the Facebook Group

What we learned, was more than we bargained for. Things blew up. We had to make adjustments, there were issues and confusion. And of course, all of it happened in front of everyone watching… talk about exposing yourself! It’s a bit nerve-wracking to do these experiments in the social space where things could go horribly wrong and people may jump all over you about it. But it gave us so much real experience, and mostly worked well, so I am thankful we are offering this now. I wanted to recap what was going on behind the scenes of this fantastic conference and tell you what we’re doing to make these events better in the future.

The Twitterface page for Like Minds had the aim of using an assortment of services, and whenever you combine technologies, mayhem often ensues before you get it totally right. Our goals were:

• Live Streaming of the Conference
• Watching Real-Time Conference Conversations
• Tweeting from the Page
• Links to Conference Information
• Delivering Live Blog Feeds
• Providing an Online Experience that Extended the Live Experience

Live Streaming

Our partner and developer Joe Taylor did an amazing job of coding the video feature for Twitterface pages so that it’s easy for someone to embed a video on the page. It is super-easy to use the embed code from Ustream, YouTube or anywhere you have embed code offered and put it on the video page. It’s not as flexible as it hopefully will be in the future though – the pane that shows up beneath the video, does not automatically adjust to fit the video width, so we need to work on that. However, we can adjust that pane width after the chosen video (or service you will use) is added, to make the page look more polished. So that’s a minor inconvenience for now. Overall, I was thrilled with how adding a video and changing video codes work.

Watching Real-Time Conversations

A lot of people like to read and watch conversations without joining in, or they like to hop in and participate. We wanted this to be easy and so we added an auto-refreshing of the panes feature to Twitterface a few weeks ago. In reality, something we did not anticipate was our product producing api overage errors. We are going to have to work with Twitter to see what we can do about that. When an unknown number of people are hitting the page, and panes are refreshing every 20 seconds (or longer) it caused our limits to be hit quickly. I didn’t really know we had limits, as Twitterface is a whitelisted product, so to see this happen as the conference opened, at 4 am our time (Joe and I were up to make sure all went smoothly) nearly caused us a heart attack. What was frustrating is that we had tested this on Twitter the night before and this never happened – of course, there weren’t as many people hitting the page. Doh! We figured out that having a profile name up, instead of searches, would give tweets and not api errors so everytime we saw the api errors happening, we switched to a profile name. We’d like to thank @thebrandbuilder and @adders for being such great live tweeters as they saved our necks because we put their profiles on and still had some coverage.

Tweeting from the Page

Our product has its own login (it does not use oauth) and is meant for one person to use, like your Twitter account on the web works. But we wanted people to be able to send tweets from this page without having to leave it, and we wanted it to be secure as possible and use Twitter’s oauth mechanism. So hooking that up, in conjunction with our tool being architected like it is, was a hurdle we had to get over. With the help of our developer Tom Jenkins, who now has a dayjob but graciously did work for us in his spare time on this, we managed to get a working oauth widget on the page, and though it had a few display bugs (the page had to be refreshed if the widget box didn’t work right) it worked and you could tweet from the page.

Links to Conference Information

One of the initial features of Twitterface was links to real sites in the footer, to make navigating to other places easy. The conference organizers added their schedule, a link to ways to participate, a link to add photos to a Flickr pool and links to their sites at the bottom of the page, and we used that Schedule link constantly to adjust the page settings… we put the speaker’s name beneath the video as they were about to speak and changed that pane when they went to lunch to keep people in the loop about what was going on in Exeter.

Delivering Live Blog Feeds

Like Minds had two official live bloggers using a service called CoveritLive to do real-time coverage of the day. Our dream was to drive these feeds, since they had an RSS feed, into the page but we needed a way to do it. The awesome @dlvrit service saw my pleas for help on Twitter and gave us the PERFECT solution. I was so happy. Unfortunately, you can’t test CoveritLive without them going live, so what we did not know was that our solution was not going to work. Until we were Live and in front of thousands of people, of course. The RSS feed produced only some sort of timestamp, not actual coverage, so later in the day we discovered @adders was blogging live, and tweeting also about his live posts, and so we switched to his tweets and it helped so much. We love http://dlvr.it and will work with them in the future on live event feeds though – they supported us above and beyond what we anticipated and their tool is excellent.

Providing an Online Experience

Despite all the technical problems and glitches, one thing we seemed to actually deliver on was providing a great online experience for virtual attendees. This is important, because Like Minds and we at Fresh ID want to come up with ways to do paid attendance to certain events in the future. So a good experience is very key to this working at all. Throughout the day, attendees watching the Twitterface page seemed to have good things to say about it – like they felt like they were in Exeter, that they loved watching it online, that it was so good to be able to watch it live they felt they could cry. In reality, you can go to Ustream and watch a live event. And of course you can set up hashtags and things in your own Twitter client and keep an eye on things that way. But what we wanted to create was an extension of the Live Event, and that means branding. That means attention to detail, and focused conversations, and cutting out the noise. So I think what worked for people, and the reason we’ve created the product, is that they were attending a branded experience online, because they couldn’t be at the real event in person, and they felt the connection because it was planned, branded and constantly monitored to ensure a smooth experience and really, the best one we could give them despite technical issues that gave the Fresh ID team headaches all day long.

So, the net result of the day was pretty positive, both at the event, and on Twitter from what we could tell. Here are some things we’ve learned, that will affect our product offering and future events:

• Events must be monitored every single minute, by someone. I got up at 4 am because in the UK they were going to start around 10 am. Joe had stayed up – it was 2 am his time in California, and thank goodness we did get up/stay up because the api limit issue would have made this page unusable had we not started making changes to refresh times and adjusting pane settings to not display the error when it happened. The opening of Like Minds was smooth and fun there it seemed, but it was a nightmare for us and drove home the continual monitoring issue, which we had not planned for. I’d had two hours sleep because of getting the page finished Thursday night, so though I didn’t plan to stay up, it wasn’t optional. My team was also not around – Joe eventually went to bed and Lisa and Matt were en route to meetings and the office. So during their lunch, I got ready very quickly and drove to my office to continue monitoring until Matt got there, and then he took over the rest of the day. We will be offering this as a service to companies who need it, but people who do not hire us to do this DEFINITELY need to plan to have a person attending the page and making constant adjustments to keep things flowing.
• One of the things Like Minds did to us was use video from two different ustream channels, which I sort of figured out on my own. LOL! We did not have a member of their web team on a phone speed dial or even Twitter.  I mostly worked with Scott Gould to set this up, one of the founders and event organizers, and I didn’t want to bother him because I knew he was busy at the event. Fortunately, I happened to notice he had streamed from both a LikeMinds and a ScottGould ustream channel, so if one went off-air we checked the other to make sure we weren’t missing something. But we needed communication with a member of the tech team there – it would have helped us know what was going on and when they were going to stream or not stream.
• We have to talk to Twitter directly about these api issues, and we’ve never worked with them directly. Fortunately for me, I am making that Lisa’s job. Haha! I hope we can get that improved, but if not, we know how to get around it during an event.
• The official hashtag for Like Minds is @wearelikeminds, but no one tweeted from it all day and we needed it when we had to switch from a search to profile views only because of api issues. I really recommend that you assign someone to tweet from the official account – even if you have to ask a participant to do it and hand over the login temporarily. For people wondering what is going on, that would make a big difference and it would have solved some of our problems doing this live offering also.
• The presentations could not be viewed behind the presenter, but with some adjustments they could have been. We are going to design a combo video/slideshare page I think, but it would have been very nice if the presentation had been dropped down behind the presenter (almost even with his feet) so online viewers could see the slides and hear the person talk at the same time – in fact, that would totally rock!
• Organizing the remote event team, with the team on the ground, for fast communication via skype or twitter makes sense. We will make sure to do this in the future. I actually think it helps for the remote monitoring team NOT to be at the event, to minimize distractions. It is too easy to have to put out fires at the event and lose track of monitoring this page – for us, our sole job was to watch the page, fix issues and keep things flowing online, and we were not hit up with other issues that took focus off of that task by being in the building where it was happening.
• When Like Minds broke for lunch, there was no Ustream feed for at least an hour and a half. I think we lost some online viewers then. I know that in the future Scott wants to enable video at the lunchtime talk sessions – that would have helped, or even having an event take place on stage (maybe one of the lunches is done there) would have helped not break the momentum of online viewing. I loved the lunch idea though – they had numerous mini-sessions over lunch at different restaurants around the city! Such a cool idea. Attendees got to choose the type of food, speaker and type of conversation they wanted to have.
• One of the things I noticed, was that this conference WAS very pleasant to attend online. When I got up at 4 am I was still in bed. So here I was in my jammies, comfortably propped up on pillows in the dark, while everyone in England was looking dapper and had makeup on and their hair done. Yet I was learning the same cool information they were – it was REALLY pleasant! And watching the tweets from people actually there, plus being able to tweet without leaving the page was very nice. This is an experience I would want to repeat at tons of other events… not just conferences, but musical events or education of some type – it really did work like I envisioned it, aside from our little issues (which we will find a way to make better!)

We were very pleased with the analytics behind spreading the word about the event Twitterface page. One thing we did at the 11th hour was a press release, informing folks that this would be a live event online. We definitely want to do that earlier than midnight before the event, next time. LOL! Because that press release was picked up by numerous sources – Lisa has the exact count. We’ve had over half a million potential tweet impressions of the twitterface.com/likeminds2010 link, and 75o of the aggregated bit.ly link for that url, and it was mentioned online in blogs, on Twitter and on Facebook in more conversations that I don’t have a number count for. We had over 660 people watching the page it seems, from Google Analytics. That number is important, because only 300 people or so could attend the actual event in Exeter before it was sold out (and it was sold out.) So they increased attendance twice over in online attendees – pretty cool!!

I want to thank all of the people on Twitter who helped us test this page with a live ustream video of race cars in the wee hours Thursday night. I wish I could give you all a present – you helped us so much and we’re very grateful you took the time to test the tweeting and video watching for us.

We have had many inquiries about doing this for other events, including SXSW which is coming up soon. Contact us and let’s talk about hooking this up for your event! We’d love to keep experimenting with what we’re doing and perfect the kinks in the process.

In the coming days we’ll be hearing from someone who attended the event virtually (@brandguardian is writing a blog post) and I am eager to hear what others thought, so if you watched our Twitterface page during the event Friday and want to share your experience, please let us know in the comments!

This week I saw a great example of neuromarketing and wanted to share it with you. I think this is just so neat, that the Campbell’s company put the time and effort in, but I like this example most for the enhanced user experience. Check out this new label…

The Wall Street Journal says that the research was conducted over a two year period, to figure out how to get consumers to buy more soup. From the PSFK blog:

For the past two years, researchers studied microscopic changes in skin moisture, heart rate and other biometrics to see how consumers react to everything from pictures of bowls of soup to logo design.  They combined these biometric tools with a different type of deep interview to more accurately gauge which consumer communications worked better.

These labels are not just pretty to look at – they will actually make locating the right soup for your needs much easier… right now the logo on red really does draw your eye to it much more than is helpful – it’s distracting compared the often lighter-colored soups. Color-coding the cans will also be helpful – so though this was done to make soup a more appealing purchase decision, it also makes buying it quickly easier, so the user experience has been improved also. I can’t wait till these cans hit the shelves.

If you want to learn more about neuromarketing (as a layman), my two favorite resources are Roger Dooley’s blog and the book Buyology. Roger Dooley is a fantastic guy to talk to – I’m lucky to have him as a friend on Twitter, and his blog is so educational and interesting. What I love about his posts is that he uses lots of examples and then explains why and how the example is effective or not, all without overloading you with information or too-complex details for those of us not immersed in this field of study everyday. I read everything he ever writes and highly recommend it: Neuromarketing, Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet. Read Roger’s take on the new packaging in Your Brain on Soup.

Buyology, by Martin Lindstrom, is a book, a site, and an experience. You can view chapter summary information, buy it at numerous places, or read many news articles about the book and Lindstrom’s take on what makes people buy something. Visit the site – there is a lot of information to explore!

Amid the day’s hustle and bustle, she composes several 140-character posts a day updating the company’s 400-plus Twitter followers about available donut and coffee flavors, as well as new product offerings: “What if we take chocolate, add chocolate to it & then top with a little chocolate? Wait WE ALREADY DID! Try our Triple Choc Muffin today! ”

Amid the day’s hustle and bustle, she composes several 140-character posts a day updating the company’s 400-plus Twitter followers about available donut and coffee flavors, as well as new product offerings: “What if we take chocolate, add chocolate to it & then top with a little chocolate? Wait WE ALREADY DID! Try our Triple Choc Muffin today! ”

How to make social networking work for businesses

Businesses’ growing use of these services to communicate directly with customers has spawned an industry of social media marketing consultants, like Overland Park-based Evans Media Group. President and CMO Paul Evans said the company became an early adopter of social media about three years ago when it started advising clients to get on Facebook, FriendFeed and others.

Paxton and Evans said that by using social networks properly, companies can raise awareness and increase engagement of customers. “That’s the huge piece,” Paxton said. “The people who interact become brand evangelists so quickly. Others will say good things about you, and that’s the value of social media and what you can’t easily quantify or turn into an ROI.”

Here is the full excerpt of the email interview Lisa had with Katy:

1. What prompted you to become involved in social media?

I began participating in social media back in 2004 when I joined LinkedIn as a way to network professionally with colleagues outside my local area. I have always been one to enjoy connecting with others so participating in online communities was a no brainer for me. I love to learn from others, talk with others and share my opinion and social media enables me to do all three…sometimes at the same time! I’m a wife, mother and business owner so finding time to “read the world” and “engage” during normal hours is almost impossible. Social media is a 24X7 world letting me participate when it’s convenient for me. I also love the global aspect…it isn’t uncommon on Twitter to get in to conversations with people from Australia, England, or India to name just a few. To have the ability to see the world through their eyes and from their perspective is pretty powerful.

2. What role does an organization like SMCKC play in cultivating the local social media landscape, and how does it help individuals and businesses learn the social media tools they need to succeed?

SMC brings together people who are intensely and actively immersed in various aspects of social media for marketing, customer care, promotion, fundraising, employee communications and virtual networking, so that they can learn from each other and band together to achieve business goals. With over 1,000 members, SMCKC serves as a great resource for members, the community and local businesses alike to hear about the quickly changing landscape we call the internet and embrace new practices and tools to enhance and extend their brand. We have members who are respected as industry leaders and often speak at local, regional and national events sharing with others how best to adopt social media in to their day-to-day business operations.

3. What, in your opinion, are the benefits of a business using social media over more traditional forms of advertising?

It’s not an either/or… really, all forms of promotion – traditional, experiential and digital – are all needed. It’s just that companies now have more avenues available for budgets of all sizes, and the benefit of many free-to-use tools that allow them to both promote and communicate with fans and brand enthusiasts. It can be more fulfilling to do a Facebook campaign, or post an ad on YouTube, and get immediate response and sense of enthusiasm, than to put an ad in a newspaper and wait to see if anyone walks into the store or picks up the phone because of it. Organizations have to be prepared, though… the more passive traditional marketing and advertising methods don’t have the consequence of many people talking about them (both positively and negatively) and some companies handle this new realm of promotion better than others.

4. Are there any KC businesses that you think do an exemplary job of using social media?

I think what is most exciting is how Kansas City isn’t just doing a great job using social media but is well regarded as a strong leader in the industry. We have companies like H&R Block, Garmin and Sprint who are well-known and have been recognized for their social media efforts. What I think is even more telling is how our small businesses are benefiting from expanding their reach through social media. I love to use Grass Pad as a great example of how small businesses can leverage Facebook to connect with a bigger audience… they are a local small business with over 1,500 fans on their facebook page. You will see their Facebook Wall is buzzing with activity including questions, comments and an overall appreciation for how the company is helping their customers. What I think is great about social media is the numerous benefits it offers to businesses when they actively participate within the various communities, forums, and networks. Social Media is more than just a new form of marketing, it can truly serve as the catalyst to knock down the silos’ and help a business take better care of their customers during the entire lifecycle..from lead generation, service delivery, to customer care.

5. What’s on the horizon for SMCKC in 2010-11?

We have many things on our plate for 2010…in fact we just announced our annual membership plan at our breakfast this past Friday. We just recently put in place an Executive Board at the end of 2009 so this was a great exercise in thinking about our foundational elements. Our plan was built with three primary pillars in mind…our membership, our community and our businesses. We identified four goals; Establishment, Contribution, Outreach and Fun. We think developing our efforts in these key areas will help us mature as an organization (we are less than 2 years old) while holding true to our fun grass roots philosophy that we believe has been the primary factor in our fast paced growth.

6. Anything else?

Thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit about SMCKC and the world of social media in general. You can learn more by visiting http://socialmediakc.com

]]> http://freshid.com/kc-businesses-make-a-difference-to-bottom-line-by-getting-social/feed 2 http://freshid.com/people-are-powering-brand-identity-changes http://freshid.com/people-are-powering-brand-identity-changes#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:07:00 +0000 Kris Colvin http://freshid.com/?p=1006 I’m excited to see some brand redesigns that have recently occurred, to two long-standing brands we are all so used to we probably don’t even think about them much, for bananas and ketchup.

Heinz has updated, with brilliant results, the lowly ketchup packet and if you think about it, you’ll see how people and their needs factored into this design. The old ketchup packets can be messy, inconvenient (if eating while driving, and unfortunately, we have to do that sometimes) and they don’t even hold much. The new condiment packaging is more like a small tub, so you can peel back the cover to dip your fries or whatever in it, OR you can rip off the top and squeeze out the contents. The beautiful part of the design is that it resembles a tiny bottle of ketchup… this was inspired creative thinking, to solve real complaints by customers for over 30 years, and I really love it! Yahoo has an excellent piece on this from the company’s perspective about how and why they made this change and what took them so long… they’ve apparently been working on a new design for years.

Chiquita Bananas have also been modernized, with a playful, icon set of stickers that will introduce a whole new cast of characters to banana lovers. Stickers, games and a Facebook community give people something to play with and talk about… there are even skateboard graphics! Everyone knows bananas are healthy to eat, but with all of these little images and fun ways to participate with the brand itself socially, now I believe they’ll be more fun. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see this positively impact Chiquita’s bottom line. The graphics are kid-friendly, but not kid-like, if that makes sense… they will appeal to adults too, especially those who Tweet and hang out at Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and the like, where we talk in OMG’s and LOL’s. The images are quirky, fun and cool. There’s a wonderful article with a lot of details about the design here… check it out! Their website also rocks – very interactive and playful… corporate businesses could stand to take some lessons from it about how to present information in small chunks and make exploring a site fun and compelling.

The thing that cannot be denied is that people are increasingly affecting what brands do, where they participate online, and what they offer. And that’s a great thing! We’ve had focus groups and marketing analysis for years, but those efforts to get into customer’s heads by nature, can only represent a small sampling. With the advent of social conversations, sentiment analysis, and being able to directly ask anyone listening online what they think about your brand, or what they need, the opportunities for hitting the target when changing a product or service are better than ever. I have noticed, in the last six months, nearly every single proposal we do has SOME element of social marketing or social presence in it, because it’s needed (we think) or wanted (by the prospect.) Despite the economic troubles nearly everyone has faced, it’s a really fun time to be in the business of branding, marketing and selling!