Fresh ID » Customer Experience

Brands of Any Kind: Do You REALLY Know Why People Follow Your Social Media Accounts?

Kristi — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:06:24 +0000

I read a very interesting article called CMOs Need to Change How They Communicate to Their Fans in 2012, that is worth a look. In a survey of consumers and marketers, the expectations were not aligned regarding the reason someone “Likes” a brand on Facebook. The most glaring gap is in the questions shown below:

While it’s true that these consumers in the survey ranked high a desire to learn about new products, that is not the same as what the marketer thinks… that people want news on the brand and products. “New and different”, vs. “continually tell me about your products again” are very different things. And by and large, in this game-playing, high-expectations world we live in, customers, friends and followers don’t just want content – they want games, incentives, promotions and something to do, moreso than something else to read. The YouTube generation has a less than 2 minute attention span – they aren’t going to spend it reading a press release.

We need to ASK, in a formal survey of our friends, fans, followers, prospects and customers, why they follow us and what they seek from us. That’s one place to start. Some of the things marketers believe didn’t make the list at all for people who answered this survey, so if that’s the case with your batch of followers, throw out the pointless activities, trim the fat, and spend your marketing budget giving people what they will actually interact with instead of more of the same.

: United Sponsored Sweepstakes

We do contests and promotions on Facebook for our clients, but haven’t done that for ourselves. I’m going to be looking at what we can do to make our updates – especially on Facebook – more interesting than noise this year. There are things even a creative agency can give away or do for people that don’t cost us much, but would benefit a prize winner greatly, like a site conversion to WordPress, or a rebrand of social media channels, for example. We could also design some unique things to make on zazzle.com to give away, like an iPad cover or messenger bag… not with our logo all over it, but with a cool design on it that benefits the recipient (or maybe our logo could be included, but very small and subtle.) Look at your business and see what you could do to bring a little fun to your social networks in the way of a contest or promotion of some type, even if you are a B2B service provider.

This is not the only study I’ve read that talks about the need for more interactivity and games, contests, etc. in the content mix. Below are some additional articles with more information and food-for-thought. If you have questions or want to brainstorm ideas about your Facebook content, let me know in the comments. Have a great week!

How Consumers Interact With Brands on Facebook

13 Best Practices for Restaurants on Facebook
This is an aside… I have noticed that whenever I post images of the food at Pandolfi’s Deli on the Facebook page, consumer interactions are increased, and quite often someone will come into the deli to eat because this prompted a reminder. This is EASY for you to do if you’re a restaurant or food seller of some type. People want to SEE and desire what they don’t have in front of them that moment. Help them, help you!

ExactTarget Study on Why People “Like” a Brand on Facebook

Why Brands Need Friends – Not Fans – On Facebook

CMOs Need to Change How They Communicate to Their Fans in 2012
Be sure and look at all the questions and answers from the survey I talked about in this post – very interesting.

(REPEAT!) Dear JC Penney: A Logo Change is Not Rebranding

Kristi — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:42:23 +0000

HOLD THE PRESSES!!

JCP, or JC Penney, or whatever we are supposed to call them this week, has changed their logo again. Sadly, it still looks like something done in Powerpoint. How do they keep doing this???? Behold…

The logo links to an article about it with a video they’ve also done to promote this new… rebranding? Attention-getter? Pointless exercise demonstrating another bold lack of creativity by a creative team who ought to know better? What is a red empty box supposed to mean, anyway? (Insert your own lack-0f-creativity and brand soul jokes here.)

This concludes the update of this post – the text below is from the last rebranding less than a year ago. Geeeez. I worked for them as a visual merchandiser, you know? It used to be about selling clothes and linens and things.

JC Penney announced last week, in press releases that they had crowdsourced a logo redesign, are changing it to all lower cap letters inside a little square and debuting it at the Oscars, where they are the sole retail sponsor. My immediate reaction was the thought, “oh lovely, the Gap square is back!” BrandChannel’s opening line about this ground-breaking news is worth repeating:

JCPenney has thrown in with all the other brands suffering sluggish performance in the belief that a logo change will make a difference.

This is the crux of my problem with this logo change, and subsequent press release about it. Changing a logo will never fix a brand’s problems. Are you listening? I will say it louder – memorize this if you work for clients or a company on branding:

Changing a logo will never fix a brand’s problems.

Why on earth major brands, some of whom have been around since the 1800′s or early 1900′s, think they can slap a new logo up and people will magically start coming into their store or restaurant or grocery or whatever again is baffling. It takes so much more to rebrand oneself, and changes have to come from the top down and within, and an entire company has to get aligned around a new spirit, new messaging, new changes in product line or services, etc. Yet, as we have seen repeatedly and with unfortunate hilarity online lately, companies are changing brands like underwear.

One element of ridiculousness in all of this minor hype, is that JC Penney repeatedly referred to themselves as jcpenney in their news release… which does not work to set their name apart as an entity inside paragraphs of text, and just looks plain wrong – like an editor fell down on the job. It also makes it seem like a third-year design student is actually running this rebranding initiative inside the company, as opposed to simply having won branding rights in an upscale crowdsourcing contest – JCP used design schools and ad agencies to do the free concepts for this logo change.

Brand New has a compelling argument against this change: “The biggest problem I have with this whole thing is the perception that this is a “bold new logo”. It’s not. It’s rearranging the chairs on the Titanic, reupholstering them if you want to be generous. But bold or new? No way. Looking at the result… as a type exercise it’s actually very decent, it’s well spaced and nicely positioned, can’t argue with that but it is also a confusing visual and verbal nomenclature.” Please read the whole article – it targets many of the problems with this logo change.

I will add to that, it’s a box. And Target owns red and white, minimalistic type, bold TV advertising – are they willing to risk being confused with a discount retailer???

Despite JCP’s “red gift box” at Christmas and the “it’s all inside” campaign, the box has negative connotations for me. JC Penney is inside a box of their own making, and has been, for a long, long time. I worked for JCP in my early 20′s as a visual merchandiser (which is why I call them JCP, not because of the new logo – it’s a shortcut I am used to using.) I have wrapped thousands upon thousands of those boxes… not my favorite thing to do as a window dresser! I will forever associate them with blue more than red – maybe that was the prevailing color when I worked there. I ran the risk of becoming a “lifetime employee” when they offered to train me to be a visual merchandising manager, something I thought I wanted at the time. But I looked around and realized that if I did that I might never leave the company. So I quit my job, became a waitress and went back to college, still in search of what I wanted to be when I grew up. It wasn’t until I became a Marketing Director at Whole Foods Market and used a Mac in my daily chores that a plan began to form. To this day, when I go into a JC Penney store, it feels exceedingly familiar – it feels like home. Because there have been no great shifts in their merchandise, no strides forward in the world of merchandising, no great shakeups in the brands they sell or the types of items they carry… all of which would signify an actual and genuine rebranding!

To contrast this grand announcement via press release of a logo change that so many companies are doing in a desperate plea for attention, I think of Apple. Apple has changed their logo several times over the past years since Steve Jobs returned to the company. But a new logo has NEVER been the primary driver for announcements – it’s been a smaller, perfectionist detail of major, never-before-done innovation in the product line. When Apple refines the logo, it’s because they actually have ALREADY changed the brand! Their changes come to the public from the inside out – they create amazing products in R&D, refine them in the manufacturing process, test them to death for quality, and then release them, often with accompanying changes to packaging or logos or advertising. But the brand evolution is around what Apple is actually tangibly selling, NOT what a logo looks like on signs, bags or storefront.

JC Penney is guilty of a software industry mantra that I’ve often mentioned: “leave no customer behind.” They want to be seen as youthful, hip and modern. But their customers are people like my deceased mother-in-law, who often purchased from their catalog, and who used to work for them years ago when they were here in Garnett, a town of 3500 people. Rural women and families in small-to-midsized towns are who JCP should have kept finding ways to serve, despite economic hardships in these towns and less spending. Closing catalog storefronts was one hindrance to good customer service, but the recent change to cancel all print catalogs could very well hurt them more than help them. For people who aren’t near a larger city where there is a store, and who don’t shop on the internet, they’ve now killed a customer from their database… many of them loyal, long-time customers. And why? To attempt to attract younger people who frankly want hipper, cooler merchandise than JC Penney carries? By brands and designers not in stock in their stores?? Rather than kill all print catalogs and do “Look Books” that force people to buy online, they could have done a purge and possibly saved some customers or at least not alienated them. I would have sent out a postcard saying if you still wanted to receive a print catalog, they had to send it back with an opt-in address (giving people a chance to blow it off, or to make sure they had an updated address.) That would have saved print costs, and if they tied the catalog products to the existing online store inventory it’s just a matter of designing and printing what is online anyway – but making it available to those who are still living and spending, but not doing it online because they don’t want to. Offering people a look book with no pricing or helpful info is an extravagant, wasteful expenditure – I get them all the time, look at the pretty pictures once, and toss into the trash. From the MultiChannel Merchant article, “JC Penney admitted that ceasing the big catalog book hurt total sales more than they expected it would in the second quarter of 2010.” I’m surprised they were surprised! They should frankly be more savvy than this, after years upon years in the retail business.

As people get involved with technology, they become superior to those who don’t use it as much but that is so short-sighted. A loyal customer should never be left behind unless you absolutely can’t help it. I fear that this logo change won’t help at all, and the cancellation of services that helped JC Penney grow as large as they have will continue to hurt, and what we are looking at is yet another retailer on a downward slope to inevitable closure. I hope they will do more than just focus on slapping the logo up everywhere and make some other changes that will save the company from being yet another vacated storefront in semi-empty malls.

Some great articles on this subject:

WordPress vs. Tumblr – A Simple Overview

Kristi — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 09:10:56 +0000

This post, originally published a year ago, has been updated as of December 3, 2011 to reflect changes on both platforms and offer new ideas. This is the single most-read post on our site, and daily searches of WordPress vs. Tumblr and Tumblr vs. WordPress is how people find it – so apparently lots of folks are debating this question! The ever evolving world of blog platforms can be confusing so we try to help our clients understand the basic differences between the options they are considering. Much of the discussion regarding platform benefits is often slanted from a developers point of view, making it a bit frustrating and hard to understand for someone who isn’t living in the coding world. Therefore, we created this quick and easy overview to help our non-techy friends grasp the “so what” of both platforms.

Important Note! This is a comparison of using Tumblr vs. a self-hosted WordPress site, NOT using the free, hosted, WordPress.com version. WordPress.com is great because it’s free to have a blog there, but it is much more limited in design unless you pay for very expensive VIP hosting, plus we can’t do custom features on it so as a creative agency we don’t utilize it for ourselves or clients.

Benefits of BOTH platforms include:

They are “free”, meaning there is no cost to use the platform software, though hosting and design/development for these platforms is not necessarily free.
Free themes can be found and easily installed for either platform.
Both platforms can be customized with unique design and development of features.
Both platforms are Content Management Systems (CMS) that can be updated from anywhere you have an internet connection.
Both platforms allow you to name your pages with keywords that can help them be found in search engines (though Tumblr has a search engine disability we will discuss below.)
Both are somewhat easy to use, but training may be necessary if you’re not computer-savvy.
Tumblr & WordPress both are VERY popular platforms that are well-maintained and will likely exist for some time to come. Both of them have export capability so if you need to move your content you can, though.
Both platforms allow some importation of content from other CMS-driven platforms like Typepad and Blogger.

Functionality & Control

Example of a corporate WordPress site

A WordPress site can easily be expanded to replace your current site if you choose. Here at Fresh ID we have redesigned a number of corporate sites as WordPress sites so that clients can update their content without messing up our design. WordPress is a robust Content Management System that has an easy user back-end that allows for page, plug-in, widget and sidebar updates to be made by non-tech experts. It can support multi-page navigation and serve as a robust and comprehensive website with database management and control. WordPress software can be hosted on a server that is user controlled allowing better control over stats and personalization OR you can use wordpress.com to create a hosted blog (making it more similar to Tumblr in that regard.) We often switch many corporate sites done in .asp or html to WordPress, so that marketers, customer support and others in the organization can update content immediately, instead of having to wait for Marcom or worse, the IT department to update site pages for them. Tumblr cannot be installed on your server, ever… your site is hosted on the Tumblr.com platform, though you can use a unique url instead of the subdomain.tumblr.com address. You have complete control over your content, and can export it and move it to another platform if you want to take it off of Tumblr. For some reasons why we love Tumblr, read this older post called, aptly, Why Tumblr? that Kristi published some months ago. BOTTOM LINE: Some people make a big deal out of the fact that WordPress can be hosted on your server, giving you “control” of all your content. While that is certainly an aspect to consider, it doesn’t rule out Tumblr (to us) as a viable business blogging platform. The Tumblr TOS clearly states: ”You own and control what you share on Tumblr” so content posted there is considered yours – but like Facebook and Twitter there is language around letting Tumblr use and aggregate that content for subscribers to see it, should they want to. (Placing it in featured areas, or possibly using it in a book or a television ad, etc.) This language is not uncommon to public-facing social platforms these days.

Cost and Usability

Tumblr is typically cheaper as it does not require the installation and configuration that WordPress does – the cost for hosting a Tumblr site is free, and our cost for custom Tumblr design is less expensive than it is for a custom WordPress theme, because it is much simpler to code (but also more limited.) Tumblr offers an extremely user friendly dashboard that makes updating posts easy for text and multimedia alike… it guides you in posting various types of media which no other platform does in the same way. Tumblr is also easy to update from your mobile device and most smartphones have a Tumblr app available that can be downloaded. WordPress.com allows free hosting, but the design and functionality is more limited than what you will have access to if you host the WordPress software on your own server. So the “cost” is for hosting, design and development of custom functions, not for the software itself. WordPress also offers a fairly simple (for computer savvy folks) back-end and supports multiple media formats like pictures, audio and video. When it comes to sharing content others have posted, Tumblr is the hands-down winner – WordPress does not have built-in community functions of ‘following” like-minded people, “reblogging” their posts, and “liking” what someone else has posted so that others in your friends list can see it. Of course, there are ways to use tools provided by web browsers like Firefox, or bookmarklets that you can keep in a toolbar, to share things, but with Tumblr this functionality is built in (to share posts within your community there.) BOTTOM LINE: Tumblr is simply fun to use, for writing posts and sharing images and video content. WordPress is fairly easy-to-use, and if your requirements demand additional features that Tumblr does not offer, it’s no less easy to do posting of text, pictures and embedded video.

Design and Customization

With WordPress a developer can create different layouts for internal pages, posts and your homepage. This is nice for the corporate sites we do, as we often code about 5-6 different page types for a single site, and then apply the right one when we need it. Tumblr on the other hand is limited with one type of page layout that must be applied to every page on the site. Tumblr has now added Page support for the platform, and you can have normal looking page names. Woohoo!! The url’s for those pages used to be really ugly by default and getting to these pages to edit them again was very difficult, but that has all changed for the better. See the url for the “About Kristi” link on the kriscolvin.com site to see the old ugly format. Page support was necessary because so many people using WordPress for a full site (and not just a blog) require pages and not just posts. Adding the page names in Tumblr is done in the “Customize” backend section. WordPress supports widgets/plug-ins that can easily be added/customized without hard coding, but Tumblr that must be custom coded for pseudo plug-in functionality (having things in the sidebars of a theme.) WordPress allows you to include native calendars and contact forms which mean you can update them all from the same WordPress back-end. Tumblr can support calendar and contact pages but only from third party sites that requires a separate log-in from the Tumblr back-end and some trick coding. You can use Wufoo for contact forms on Tumblr but it will require a developer or knowledge of javascript to make it work well. That said, Tumblr has a NEW feature called “Ask Me” that comes with every site, but you will have to enable it from the Community section in the backend to make it work. If that meets your needs you may not need a contact form. You can see it here. BOTTOM LINE: Both platforms can be customized beautifully and have navigation to other areas in-site and off-site, but WordPress is by far more extensible and flexible if you want to mess with your own site design and layout a lot. If you need to do big business with ecommerce, forms, listings, heavy content, advertising and the like, WordPress is the direction you need to go.

Social Tools and Integration

Tumblr is well-built for social integration. You can set up your Tumbles to post to Twitter as links automatically, to drive traffic back to your site. On Facebook, you can set up your Tumblr posts to come in whenever you make them, and most of my Facebook friends see my Tumblr content that way, vs. my Twitter friends who actually go to the site. For some reason people like to just hang out in Facebook all day if they are active participants there it seems. You can set it up so that RSS from other sites you might own will be fed into your Tumblr as links, text or pictures automatically. And using simple HTML or custom coding you can integrate just about anything with a widget or api function into the sidebar of your Tumblr theme (such as Twitter updates, an Etsy mini widget, a Facebook widget, Amazon book widget, etc.) With WordPress, you have to use plugins to accomplish the same thing, though there are several. You would also have to use custom coding to find the right spots in the many files that make up a WordPress theme for more complex integration, though Twitter & Facebook & widgets of all types can be inserted easily using a widget in WordPress. Social sharing tools like ShareThis or AddThis usually require some understanding of development in order to implement into posts or a sitewide area, but it’s not too difficult. Third-party services such as Flickr are jumping on the Tumblr bandwagon and adding sharing to Tumblr from within the site. For WordPress sites they give you embed code but you have to insert it into the HTML portion yourself vs. using an easy mechanism that just feeds the content into your Tumblr like you may have experienced with auto or push feeding content to your Facebook or Twitter account. BOTTOM LINE: Both platforms handle sharing well, but you have to get the hooks in place to do it. Tumblr comes with a few more out of the box that enable the average person to connect things more easily and in less time than it takes to implement WordPress plugins and widgets.

Friends & Commenting

Tumblr has a key advantage over WordPress in the aspect of friends and followers, in that you can follow other people and they can follow you as you do on Twitter/Facebook, etc. This gives you two key aspects of a Tumblr experience: people see your content in their own dashboard and can like it (they click a heart icon to signify that) or reblog it (share it with their Tumblr network and possibly beyond if they have Twitter/Facebook hooked up) AND you have content readily available to you, to share with others by reblogging or liking it. WordPress just can’t compare as it does not have the social networking aspect built in as a function of the platform. On WordPress, blog comments are the way to develop friends and a “network” or community, and very popular blogs have many commenters who mainly participate and interact via the article postings in this way. Commenting on WordPress is built-in, whereas on Tumblr you have to (oddly) set up a separate account at a site called Disqus and then implement that into your Tumblr theme. A bit of a pain, and I hope someday Tumblr will make commenting automatic but I don’t know they will, Disqus is such a part of the way things is done. That said, people like Disqus so much they have been implementing it on WordPress sites also (replacing the default commenting system), so Disqus is a good system to use and offers some great features that can enhance comments functionality regardless of where you use it. It should be noted that Disqus is a global commenting system and not on your site only, so some corporations would not like this aspect of commenting as comments will be displayed other places and not only on your site. BOTTOM LINE: Tumblr’s follow feature is one of the reasons we love it so much. Once again, pure fun to have neat things that interest you at your fingertips to reblog if you want to, or just to read, sort of like having your own personal newspaper.

Authors & Permissions

Tumblr is a one-id-and-password pony, whereas with WordPress you can have granular levels of permissions and multiple authors, with pics and bios on each post, and many levels of permission, from public to private, password-protected pages. We are setting up a site now with an Intranet area on WordPress that only the company’s board members can access, and it will have multiple posts and areas inside it, and that is all made doable with the WordPress platform itself. BOTTOM LINE: If you need many authors writing only in their area, with limited permissions, WordPress does this but Tumblr does not.

Ecommerce

You can sell goods and services from either platform, but there are more limits with Tumblr than with WordPress as far as shopping tools go. Basically Tumblr can have a Paypal or Google Checkout button added to any post or page where you have something to sell, as can WordPress or any platform where you can add HTML to the site in order to enable payment. But WordPress has several ecommerce cart plugins available, and if you have the need for a “store” of any type or quantities of merchandise, you will find Tumblr too limiting. We used the free WordPress e-Commerce Plugin to design a custom store experience for our plastic surgery client, for their beauty and skincare products. This is a highly customized version, coded by Tom Jenkins who is a very skilled developer… not everyone could have done what we wanted with this WordPress store, so bear that in mind if you have dreams of a beautiful, customized experience using WordPress and a plugin. BOTTOM LINE: If you have a few products you can sell via Paypal or another service you can add buttons to each item to sell, Tumblr is definitely feasible as a site that will allow selling. If you need a shopping cart and have multiple items and categories, WordPress with a plugin is a better way to go. If you need a complete ecommerce solution with cross-promotion and email promotion capability and coupon codes, etc. for a large ecommerce site with many items, you’d be better off looking at Magento or possibly Business Catalyst as a platform. Magento is strong on ecommerce, not so strong on content – there are many costs/payoffs with these platforms and each case is unique. We recommend WordPress for content and Magento for ecommerce for large-scale needs in many cases.

Search Engine Optimization and SEO Performance

WordPress content is very well-received by search engines and can be easily optimized with various plug-ins added to the back-end, such as our favorite “SEO All-in-One.” WordPress can also easily support ads which can be placed in different places on pages as you choose, using Widgets. WordPress also has clean code in the back-end which allows for faster performance, providing a better user experience. Google has a problem with Tumblr, it has been reported. There is a coding trick that can be added in the HTML to optimize the way page title url’s are created, and it is recommended you use this trick and also read and follow the advice in this post. But Google reportedly doesn’t quite know how to distinguish real, quality posts from frequently reblogged ones, and so has not included Tumblr in keyword searches as it should. We hope this is something they will rectify in the future. We also believe the best SEO is to write good content and share it other places, so we don’t dismiss Tumblr based on SEO reasons but it IS important to be well-informed if you have content you particularly need to show up in search engines. BOTTOM LINE: What is your site about and what kind of SEO traffic do you truly need? That’s what you have to answer first – not every site needs high-ranking search engine traffic (shocking, we know, but true!) If you do, you probably want to go with WordPress unless you have a very large, active social network that will help spread content around.

Multiple Blogs in Central Location

Tumblr and WordPress are both free, so you are free to have two or two hundred more blogs should you choose to create all that content. Tumblr makes it easy on the site and on the phone app, though, to hop between them or choose which blog to share content to, which I have found handy when posting a food image to my Weary Princess Tumblr vs. something random to my personal Tumblr. It is easy to add a second, third, etc. blog to Tumblr yourself. WordPress used to have something called WPMU, which stands for WordPress Multi-Site, and it was a separate setup, but since version 3.0 they have integrated it into the core features and now you can run many blogs from a single WordPress installation… HOWEVER, I have not myself seen how to do that and think it requires a developer to help set that up right, and I am not sure you can use one login to access them – I will check with Tom and update this paragraph accordingly. BOTTOM LINE: I love Tumblr’s easy-add for blogs and use it for personal sites, and in the past did use it for a corporate site with multiple niche topics. It works well. We tend to use WPMU not for multiple sites of our own, but for allowing users within a site to have their own blog – a totally different set of purposes.

Joining a Community vs. Creating Your Own Community

Tumblr has an awesome design function called the Dashboard. When you login, you will see content posted from anyone you’ve followed. When you sign up for Tumblr, you are essentially joining the Tumblr community, and within it are niche Tumblr’s on topics like food, animals, fashion, art, comics, cars, interior design, sports and more. You can explore the most popular tagged content and find people on Tumblr you want to follow this way, so that you always have a variety of content interesting to you to look at in your Tumblr dashboard. The only way to really interact with these people is to leave a message on their posts and try to get to know them that way, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter if they offer that information on their Tumblr. If you install Disqus you can invite comments on your posts and encourage a community to form around your content too, like any blog. With WordPress, you don’t have this dashboard of content – - you have an admin area where you put in content, unless you use wordpress.com (they aggregate content in the system with tags too but you have to subscribe via a reader or add links to a blogroll to keep up with these blogs later.) Your site is the hub where you can create a community that interacts on your blog posts, with whatever your niche interest is as the central theme. If you want to go further than that and create a community like Tumblr where people can follow each other and private message friends, and talk in forum discussions, you can use a WordPress extension called BuddyPress that we love. This is how we created the Sporting Membership community for the pro soccer team, and we’re looking to do more with BuddyPress for clients since it is so powerful. BuddyPress out of the box is not sexy – it needs to be dressed up with design and development and that is not inexpensive, so be warned it takes time and money to develop, but if you need a community site we highly recommend this path. Check out some really stunning BuddyPress sites on this Pinterest board I created – you’ll need to click on the image for each to see the actual site design. BOTTOM LINE: For playing with looking at content and generally wasting time online immersed in other people’s content, Tumblr can’t be beat! Given the short format of many posts (often a picture or video), it’s easy to see lots of interesting things in a single session. But WordPress with BuddyPress gives you the ability to create and market your own community – a service we see doing more and more of for clients going forward. There is a lot of community software out there, but we love Buddypress because it is allows us to custom develop around it and it offers our clients the ease-of-use of the WordPress CMS for inputting content.

The Verdict?

The truth is, we recommend WordPress to some clients, and Tumblr to others. ~~We are about to deep-dive into Business Catalyst so it will also be a platform we recommend, based on need and business goals.~~ (We never did get into BC and are sticking with WordPress for CMS and Ecommerce.) Making the choice between WordPress and Tumblr depends on what you want to do, who your audience is, what your technical threshold is for learning, and who is going to be using the site to write content, plus your gut instinct. Both are free to set up an account with to try out, so why not take a peek at both and see which one you enjoy using more? If you don’t enjoy using these tools, you won’t do much with them and that’s what really matters if you want to start blogging or posting content. Both are great platforms in their own right, and we will continue to provide services and use both platforms for our content. What do you use for your sites or blog? Tell us in the comments. If you’re an Etsy seller you might also want to read “The Etsy-Twitter-Tumblr Triumvirate” which describes why we feel connecting platforms together is the best thing an online seller can do for themselves.

Breakdown of Facebook’s big Announcements 2011

freshid — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:33:51 +0000

SEPTEMBER 2011 UPDATE!! And the updates keep coming! Thank you to Mashable for being quick and responsive to all the changes going on at F8 and with daily changes coming out of Facebook. This article breaks down whats been going on this week (Sept 22) Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed by Ben Parr There is another update! Today (September 14th 2012), Facebook Launches their “Subscribe” button. So what does that mean!? On the site, you’re going to start to notice that some users have the button at the top of their profile that says “Subscribe”. If you click it you’ll start seeing that persons/brands updates in your News Feed, just as if you were their Facebook friend. SO WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? Unlike normal Facebook friends, when you subscribe to someone, they do not approve your request so their is no limit on how many people can subscribe to anyone. It’s a “Twitter-esk” and Google + like update. Read this article for more great information! “Facebook Launches Twitter-Like ‘Subscriptions’, Let’s You Share with Unlimited Users” via TechCrunch Today (Aug 22nd, 2011), Mashable announces that Facebook will be making massive Privacy and photo tagging changes. It’s one of the largest privacy overhauls in the companies history! It’s going to help users make it much clearer about who you are sharing pictures, status updates and locations with. Check out the article for more information “Facebook Makes Massive Privacy and Tagging Changes” via Mashable Facebook made a big announcement yesterday (July 6, 2011), and lots of people are still wondering what it’s all about. So Fresh ID is going to break it down for you! After watching the press conference and browsing the internet for more clues, and reading what others have said, I think I can sufficiently break it down for us “average joes” in the technology world. So, what was the conference all about? First off, be prepared because Zucky said that this is just the start of “Launching Season 2011″. Secondly, Mark Zuckerberg did a great job of talking about WHY and WHERE Facebook is going, giving some insight on how social networks are being used today, how they will be used in the future, and how Facebook plans on keeping up. Zuckerberg talked about the social networking trend being at an “inflection point” and that for the past 5 or so years, we’ve all talked about how social networks are used to “connect people”. He sees the next 5 years of social network activity to not just be about connections, but be about the value we receive from it. He talked about measurement, and how in the past we’ve been measuring success on these sites based on “number of users”, but Facebook wants to measure it based on the value of what people are using and getting out of the network. This is an interesting concept to me, and I definetly agree with him on this point that in the future, we are not going to be measuring number of users online, but measuring VALUE, what we are getting from online networks, searches etc. The internet holds such a vast capability to enhance our communication, knowledge and relationship skills as human beings, so I’m thrilled to know that Facebook is really working with this model and staying on top of the social evolution that has become the internet and Facebook. Zuckerberg announced that there are now over 750 million users on Facebook and everyday they share around 400 billion content (this is publically shared, not counting privatley shared goodies). This number is huge, given the fact that they announced a few months ago that they hit 500 million users! It truly is taking over the world and how people connect. Have you ever been out (say a bar) and had someone say to you “Facebook me”? It’s becoming as common, or even more common than “Call me”. We now know that people are sharing TWICE as much information today than they were the same time last year, and the Facebook team only sees it growing in the future. Ok, so what exactly was the “Big announcement”? Well there were actually three. Let me break it down.

Group Chat: This product was rolled out less than a year ago and already over 50% of users utilize this function, with an average of 7 people per group. It’s a way to organize a group of people and gives the ability to see the history of what everyone has said (which can sometimes be annoying if you get stuck on a chat you don’t want to be on, trust me I know), but in the grand scheme of things its an efficient way to communicate with larger groups of your “Friends” . So, what’s new?

NEW:

Add friends to your chat box
Even if your friend isn’t online, you can “chat” with them and it shows up in a message so they can later see it when they log in to Facebook

I really like that you can now add friends to the conversation on the chat box that’s in the right hand corner of the screen. This will be great if you’re trying to make plans and want to get others involved, and even if they’re not on Facebook at that moment, adding them allows them to see the conversation later, so that’s a cool function 2. New Chat Design: Everyday, a billion messages take place on Facebook, so redesigning it to fit more browsers is smart. It’s one of the largest chat networks online today! So what’s going to be new about this design? NEW:

Simplified “chat” tab
Takes into account different browsers and computer sizes
Ability to send messages by clicking your friends account, as seen on the right hand side bar.

I see this as just the evolution of Facebook chat and a smart, simple re-design that was necessary and won’t neccesarily make things worse, but in the end provide an easier to use chatting experience no matter what kind of computer or browers you use. 3. Video Chat: This was the “big” announcement that has had the internet buzzing for awhile. Yes, Facebook announced that they are partnering with Skype and creating Facebook Video Chat. I was a little skeptical about the new addition, but after watching it be demoed, it seems incredibly easy and something I am personally very excited for! See, you don’t need Skype to participate, you just need a Facebook account. You can talk to any of your friends (and only YOUR friends) by simply downloading and “allowing” the app. Facebook claims you can download in 20-30 seconds and chat away with whoever you’d like! This “one click connection” is really going along with Facebook’s theory about measuring the value of HOW people are using the internet and Facebook. The ability to talk to any of your friends directly from your Facebook page is very exciting, easy to use and absolutely the next “evolution” in this social networking ecosystem. NEW:

You can now push a button that says “Call” and video chat with your Facebook Friends
It’s easy to download and very user-friendly
Did y ou know you don’t HAVE to have video/microphone capabilities on your computer? Local social networking expert, Ramsey Mohsen, talked with KCTV5 News yesterday and explained that your friends/family don’t even need camera/mircorphone to use the Facebook Chat!
Only individuals can use Facebook Chat right now, not businesses…but who knows what the future holds (Hello awesome customer service!)

I’m really excited and interested to see how this Facebook chat not only effects how we are connecting and communicating with each other, but how human beings will continue to use the internet and change it’s use over the next few years. The video chat, to me, is right on scale with where social networks should be going, and I look forward to see how businesses, celebrities and even educational institutions use this in the future! Here are a few links that I used to help me wrap my head around what all Facebook rolled out yesterday. Ramsey Mohsen did a GREAT job at really laying out what the Video chat does and how easy it is to use. Check out his news interview from KCTV5.com right here: FBVideoChat The Press Conference that was done yesterday by Facebook and Skype can been seen in a few places, but I watched it here: FacebookAnnouncement Other references I found helpful: Mashable Huffington Post Forbes Have fun checking out the new features! Let us know what you think, and until Facebook makes another change, we will talk next time!

How To Enhance Your Tumblr Site

Kristi — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:14:51 +0000

Given the vast majority of our site traffic coming to us with Tumblr (vs WordPress) questions, I’ve decided to add some posts on these and other blogging platforms to help people get the most of our their chosen platform. I will update this post of Tumblr “How To’s” as I get specific questions from folks. So let’s get started with some basics!

How To… Choose a Theme

Tumblr has a theme set up by default that you will likely want to change, as it’s just generic. They make “trying on” different themes super-easy though, by using the Theme Garden. Login to your Tumblr site, and then go to http://www.tumblr.com/themes and look at the available themes. They are organized by Featured, Premium (which cost money), Recent and Popular themes, and they show you how many people are using each theme. You can click the “Preview” button at the bottom of each design to get an idea of what your site would look like using this theme. There are a few additional places where you can find paid themes. These themes look good as-is, but can also be customized by professional design agencies (like ours) to coordinate with your brand. For an example of this, see the original Style Hatch theme “Savory” and then look at our client’s site, Cowgirl Cravings. Using the same brand identity elements that we use on her other sites, we adjusted the Savory theme to make it unique for her brand. Sites who have Tumblr themes we admire and use, that are loaded with great features:

For a totally custom theme, contact us. We’ve done quite a few, our most popular being my personal blogging Tumblr theme, which has been featured in hundreds of sites online: http://freshid.com/portfolio/kris-colvin Prices for a custom Tumblr theme range from $950-3000 depending on required features and desired design style. For some design inspiration, check out these Tumblr theme collections:

How To… Add Comments

Tumblr does not come with Commenting enabled automatically, like WordPress does. So you will need to add Disqus in order to allow people to comment on your posts. Go to: http://disqus.com/admin/tumblr after setting up your Tumblr site and these instructions will guide you through the process of adding comments. You will only have to do this once, and then you will only need to visit the Disqus site to moderate comments if something inappropriate needs to be deleted.

How To… Add a Contact Form

Tumblr does not have a built-in contact form, but you can add one to a Tumblr page that you create for this purpose using a Wufoo form, which is free for a basic account. After creating a Tumblr page on your site, create a Wufoo account and set up your form on their site. Then follow the directions in the Code Manager for integrating a Wufoo form onto the page (you will need to be using the “HTML” method of entry in your Tumblr page. See an example of how this will look afterward at an old site we are no longer using.

How To… Sell Things on Tumblr

Right now, there is no plugin or add-on or even a specific theme I have found to use Tumblr as an ecommerce site, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible with a simple solution or downright ingenuity. Let’s talk about both.

Easiest Ecommerce on Tumblr
The easiest way to sell something on ANY blog is to use a Paypal or Google checkout button. Both services have reasonable fees (compared to the overhead of taking credit cards and bank drafts on your own) and both are fairly easy to use as a novice seller, once you know the process of adding a button to a post or page. Learn about PayPal’s “Buy Now” button or Google’s Checkout method and select the one that makes the most sense to you. In both of these cases you should be able to redirect buyers back to your site somehow at the end of the transaction. Another easy way to do ecommerce is not to let people pay directly, but send them an invoice using an already established process. See the above information on how to setup a Contact Form, and set up a form that includes basic invoicing information, then send the customer an invoice to pay.

Intermediate Ecommerce on Tumblr
Another way to sell things on Tumblr is to embed a store using a widget or iFrame. I know nothing about Wazala, but they are worth investigation as they have direction for adding a shopping cart to Tumblr and they have built their software specifically to be integrated into your website. Their features are pretty stout – and they say this works in Facebook business pages plus has a mobile browser optimized store, so I recommend digging further into this tool. An Etsy store widget can be embedded on Tumblr and when listings are clicked on, will take the customer over to Etsy. The downside is, now they are on Etsy and have left your Tumblr site so you don’t necessarily have a way to cleanly bring them back to your site. But you might be able to add your site link to the Thank You message delivered by Etsy upon purchase and at least encourage coming back. You can use the Etsy Mini widget, or check out the cute widgets at Craft Cult and how they look in a sidebar. This is the widget we have used on the kriscolvin.com Tumblr to show people our latest brand designs available at Etsy.

Advanced Ecommerce on Tumblr
So far, the only store I have seen was developed by Tumblr themselves and it uses Shopify for the cart, so it is not a custom cart, but rather a series of workaround and redirects to make this store experience work. It is called “Of a Kind” as in, ” a few of a kind only” and it’s an awesome example of highly custom Tumblr coding. There are some fancy things going on with listings, display and categorization that we will be reverse engineering to see how they did this – we believe we could do this for clients if needed and in fact, we’d love to, having toyed with ecommerce for Tumblr in the past but not going deep enough. This would cost more than the typical Tumblr project, but if you want to sell and use Tumblr as your preferred platform it can certainly be done and given the excellent searchability and ability to have followers who reblog your items, it’s a valid platform for ecommerce. If you need more help with ecommerce sites in general, check out this list of 22 ecommerce platforms to sell your products online. I’ll add some more “how-to’s” later, but in the meantime if you have specific questions please leave them in the comments. You might also want to read other articles we’ve written on Tumblr or check out our Tumblr themes for sale on Etsy also.

Happy tumbling!

How Not to do a Social Media Promotion

Kristi — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:01:42 +0000

I was excited, then disgusted last night, in fairly short order. I learned that there is something called SocialCam coming from Justin.tv, the video site. SocialCam is a mobile app that lets iPhone and Android users take some video, upload it, tag people in it and share it swiftly with their social pals. Sounds awesome, right? So I marched over to the little site and put in my email address for “early access” which I liken in my mind to be Beta testing, although I realize that may not be accurate – maybe they have already done Beta and this is a pure marketing play. If this is their beta testing process, it is WAY off base, so I will assume for the sake of argument it is not. I got this little gem of an email almost immediately: They can’t wait to get the new app into my hands, IF I pimp the ever-loving crap outta their unproven, unseen warez, is the stark reality of this “offer.” I don’t like it. I don’t like the approach. I don’t like the marketing philosophy that says this is okay. I don’t like the subtle extortion, I don’t like the encouragement to blast your social networks with this referral link – especially for a SIGHT UNSEEN product. Maybe this thing royally sucks! Maybe it’s hard to use, unstable and unreliable. Your social friends should be able to know you believe in what you’re sharing with them, and your mention of it is either:

news you find interesting or compelling or important (or know they will)
something that delights you so much you want to share it with others
something that offends you so much, you feel compelled to take a stand against it, and are therefore sharing it
something you have personal experience with, and you are sharing your honest opinion about
something noteworthy that people might be interested in (which I am sure Socialcam is counting on you thinking it is)

But at the end of the day, this is a play for free ole’ marketing, done by you, on behalf of them, for the “carrot” that is POSSIBLE inclusion on this wonderful early access list. Forced or coerced sharing in return for something you consider of value is NOT a good marketing practice. When it comes to social and the ever elusive Holy Grail of “Viral Marketing”, don’t be an ass. Stop thinking users with social network accounts are stupid. We don’t all buy Snookie’s book and sit around waiting to promote your company for free, for nothing. Be respectful of others, be intelligent, offer something of value, make a good product, have good support and any social media sharing, blog kudos or mentions will happen organically, naturally and deservedly. This should be your #1 “Social Media Best Practice” if you are USING it to market your company, products or services.

Fresh ALERT: New Etsy Feature Will Let Users Find You by Email by Default

Kristi — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 16:01:47 +0000

This post could be titled “The Almost Perfect Way to Make a Security Change on a Social Site” This morning I got the following email from Etsy. We sell some templates there so this is in reference to a new site feature that will go live in the next few weeks:

Now, upon first reading this, you might think “Awesome – Etsy actually notifies their sellers IN ADVANCE about a feature that might affect their privacy, security, and usage of the website. What a marvelous approach.” But look closer… yes, they are telling us in advance. Yes, there will be an opt-out checkbox AFTER the feature goes live. Sigh….. so close, yet soooooooo far away from doing what is ultimately in the user’s best interest here. Etsy should have:

Planned to make the feature OPT-IN only
Sent the great email above, describing what’s happening and how to opt-in
Altered their privacy policy to reflect the changes, as they have done
Set all users up to NOT automatically be using the new feature (disabled by default)
Done whatever marketing is necessary to convey the benefits of the feature after launching it

But they didn’t, and just like Facebook’s new privacy setting automatically enabled for all users the other day, they have not done the right thing by the population at large. When will these companies ever learn the boundaries of user experience, security and privacy???

Fresh ALERT: Facebook Privacy Setting Enabled

Kristi — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:32:34 +0000

I was alerted this morning by Facebook friends that there is a new setting automatically enabled, that you may well not want enabled. I have some screen shots here of how to go and disable it or at least learn what the setting means so you can decide for yourself whether you want to play in these advertiser games or not. 1. Go to your “Account” and click “Privacy Settings” 2. Click the “Apps & Websites” Link 3. Click on “Edit Settings” next to “Instant Personalization” 4. Read the information & decide to leave the setting enabled or disable it Now, why is this a big deal? For one thing, Facebook needs to stop setting up opt-in settings for users en masse, without giving them a giant alert notice when they hit the site, so they can make the decision right then and there. Despite hundreds of thousands of complaints, articles written and grievances filed, the company continues to prove non-trustworthy when it comes to what and how they are USING their users. And they are using you – make no mistake – to get more partner and advertiser dollars and to inflate the value of their company. For another, neither the partner sites NOR Facebook can ever really know you well enough to make valuable personal selling recommendations based on your purchases or interactions with friends. I wrote about this sometime back in Are Recommendations Engines Circumventing User-Focused Design? if you’d like to look at this from my perspective as a usability specialist and customer advocate. (Pardon the missing images – this post is from an old blog site and I have to locate the missing images. Argh.) At any rate, non-opt-in is BAD, and taking the responsible measure of informing people of changes made on their behalf is GOOD. Facebook notoriously errs toward the bad side in this regard, so user beware!

The Etsy-Twitter-Tumblr Triumvirate

Kristi — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:18:19 +0000

This post is primarily meant for Etsy sellers. (We are one now too!) There are currently 273,270 active Etsy sellers, people signing up as members at a rate of over 300,000 per month, and in November 2010 Etsy broke a sales record of over 2 million items sold in one month. So how can sellers expand their reach, have more fun selling and increase their sales potential? By adding some other social networks to their mix of daily activities! We are going to be making and selling themes and templates in support of Etsy sellers and have just begun stocking our store. The set Lulu & Fifi has only had 77 views since I put it up, so I just tweeted about it to let people know it’s there, using the handy “Share” button on my page. If I used Twitter simply to promote my Etsy wares, it wouldn’t work as well. It is because I am actually friends with people and do a lot of reciprocal sharing and communicating, that anyone will care to click on my link. In a few minutes time, my views have gone from 77 to 111, just while writing this paragraph. That’s the power of using Twitter in conjunction with Etsy (and why it’s important to build social networks with like-minded folks who you enjoy interacting with.) Another important use of Twitter is for customer service – it’s easy to chat back and forth via DM or using your public stream, with an interested prospect or buyer. Showing people you’re around and active during buying times, plus seeing your interactions with others is another way to demonstrate they can trust you to provide quality service and merchandise. Here’s the tweet I sent – note how the latest version of Twitter shows the full graphic if you look at the tweet by itself… awesome! If you don’t have a Twitter account you can get one here. Be sure to match your background and colors to your store for the greatest brand effectiveness.

I also have a Tumblr for my personal blog, which I dearly love because I follow a lot of cool, fun people who post interesting things, that I can “reblog” in a matter of seconds. Things I love, I reblog, so I can reference them later. So think about what’s on Etsy for a moment… TONS of adorably quirky, fun, neat things. Things that people on Tumblr who like to share and play, might find interesting enough to pass along to their friends. The moral of this point? Set up a Tumblr and make friends there! I would use it, if you have no other website, as the companion site or blog for my Etsy store. Seeing handmade stuff on Etsy is very cool, but sometimes hearing the backstory of how something creative came to be, is even cooler and draws people who are intrigued by it toward purchasing. Plus, blogging your thoughts and letting people know who you are as a person (the same goes for tweeting) breeds familiarity, and familiarity breeds trust, and trust is a cornerstone of selling. So there is benefit in being accessible and approachable as a businessperson, and not just the Wizard behind the curtain (the curtain being the graphic avatar of your store.) Another benefit of Tumblr is that with some custom coding, you can add the Etsy mini widgets to your sidebar or the top or bottom of your site. You can also put one on Facebook, like we did on our Fresh ID business page. I have not put the Etsy widgets on my Tumblr yet, because I’m trying to decide whether we’re going to create a new one for the Themes & Templates we are going to sell or not, but the graphic here shows how it might look. Selling on Etsy is obviously not our core business – we are a creative services and social media agency -but if it’s yours you shouldn’t hesitate to put that on your Tumblr so that everytime people visit it, they will see the latest stuff you’re offering in your store. You can also set it up so that when you Tumble something, it goes into your Twitter feed, and if you post something you’re offering on Etsy as a story on Tumblr, that will automatically get sent to Twitter. You can get a free Tumblr account here. You will need to find a Tumblr theme, buy one or have a custom theme made for your site, so try to get one that coordinates with your store branding. We do custom-designed themes with lots of social network-integrated coding that run around $1000. We are going to eventually offer a Tumblr theme just for Etsy sellers that will be much less (under $100), and will be built to quickly brand it like your store and insert your Etsy Mini listings. If you want to know more about that theme just contact us… it’s not out of production yet. We also intend to do some Tumblr themes that will match the shop templates in our Etsy store. Tumblr, just like Twitter, involves reciprocal friendship for maximum effectiveness. I use my Tumblr for a highly personal site (as opposed to this blog, for our business) so I can reblog, write down, and share anything that amuses, delights or annoys me. So it is a total mix of goofy pictures, designer-inspired home decor and illustrations, funny, raunchy things, thoughtful musings, tirades against injustice and self-promotional blather. In other words, it’s the sum of my parts. If you want to keep your Tumblr more business-like though, you will be in plenty of good company. Everyone from major publications like Newsweek to hugely popular web applications like Twitter and Foursquare are making use of Tumblr for their business. When I began writing this post I had 77 views of my Lulu & Fifi Shop Theme, and I now have 160 views, a retweet of the link and a question from someone about our shop sets. Not bad for taking the time to send a single tweet to let my friends know what I’m doing! Do you have any questions or success stories to share about using other social networks to promote your Etsy wares? Would love to hear them. Ebay is doing something kind of unique – they have a new “social media sellers” program they’re initiating. If there is enough interest from Etsy sellers on social media we can help set up a regular Twitter chat about this topic so we can all help each other. Happy selling! Kristi

The Ultimate Restaurant Site – What’s Missing Today

Kristi — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:18:56 +0000

I have a lot of problems with the vast majority – and by that I mean 98% of all restaurant sites today. They are not set up to help the users who are there for a specific purpose or to fully engage prospects who’ve never been there before, and there’s really no excuse for not making these sites better. 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
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Contact us at Fresh ID about your restaurant site
Listen to Hospitality 101 radio shows – they are chock FULL of helpful tips!