Archive for the ‘Basics’ Category
It Takes Time
Recently BCV was thrilled to have one of its first clients, Piccolo Sogno featured in a Mashable story on how restaurants can and are utilizing social media. The article brought out a lot of things Piccolo Sogno does right such as respond in real time to clients, use rich media to drive interactions, and use social media as a way to develop real relationships with customers. However one thing the article forgot to mention was that a strong social media presence simply takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight, it doesn’t even happen in 3 months. Piccolo Sogno has been utilizing Facebook, Twitter, and foursquare for well over a year. I can promise you in the first 4 months the level of interactions and the level of trackable ROI was not nearly as high as it is today. Piccolo Sogno also has a number of components that translate well to social media. For example, Tony and Ciro care deeply about the experience each customer has at their restaurant and that comes through across any medium. They value when someone posts on facebook or tweets at the restaurant and in turn want to take the time to thank the person and ...
Hiring
I’ve been meaning to write the post about how we found our most recent team member, Katie Gear, for a few months now. Obviously it disappeared in the recesses of my mind, until a similar post by Digital Royalty and Barack Obama’s CNN Town Hall where they discussed hiring. Here is the deal, we are a startup social media firm and by definition everyone has a number of responsibilities. Mine include new business, client services, operations, and taking the trash out. Finding new team members is not part of my everyday routine so making time for it can be challenging. Also because we are a startup there is a premium on finding the perfect fit as they can have an outsized impact on the culture. Lucky for me, we are in the social media business and between your Twitter and Linked I can find a host of relevant information about each candidate. When I research a candidate I’m not looking to see if they mistakenly put up too many photos of themselves and friends having too much fun, I’m looking to see if they understand the mediums and how they use them. ...
Is Your Company As Social As They Should Be?
All brands know the importance of marketing and advertising, which is why they pour MILLIONS upon MILLIONS into their advertisements, strategies, and methods needed to analyze the effectiveness. What they don’t seem to quite grasp yet is the importance of not only incorporating social media into their plans, but that they need to be paying more attention to it. In a recent Advertising Age article, it discussed the fact that brands FACEBOOKS alone drive more activity and engagement than the website they had previously created. It’s not only driving more page views, but Facebook likes, comments, and more click-throughs to the articles, blogs and photos posted on those websites. Marketing and advertising strategies need to be able to shift as quickly as possible, especially when all of their consumers are embracing social media via Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and more. Just because these sites don’t offer the types of analytics a company may be searching for, it is much more worthy of the time and money flowing through these departments to get in the social media game even if they can’t measure it as effectively as some other engagements. Consumers of all sorts are on social media… that’s a fact. Most likely, they are the ...
Google Places
It’s one of the most basic steps a restaurant should take, and lately I’ve noticed it’s one of the steps that restaurants are often overlooking. Google places is the aggregator of the most basic information that Google serves up when individuals are looking for your restaurant or looking for places to eat in your area. Even if you haven’t set up your listing, Google will pull the relevant information from any public channels it can find, such as yelp, opentable, citysearch and metromix. It may also pull images and videos from youtube, urbanspoon, flickr and all the other places you can imagine. Even though Google does a pretty great job of pulling this information, you should always verify the details to make sure the phone numbers, addresses and information is accurate. [caption id="attachment_104" align="aligncenter" width="150" caption="Page Not Claimed"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_105" align="aligncenter" width="140" caption="Owner Verified"][/caption] Google places can be a great landing page for all of your rich content, not to mention Google has fast become the new yellow pages. With reviews from multiple sources, images and videos, it doesn’t take much to understand why people ...
Is Starbucks killing FourSquare specials?
Being an early adopter of FourSquare means that you both love the product and recommend it to friends, AND are constantly wishing for more features, better stats and a simplified way of seeing specials data… or maybe that’s just me. A couple of weeks ago FourSquare partnered with Starbucks in a move that had me applauding along with everyone else. $1 off make your own frappuccinos for being the mayor of your Starbucks? You bet I’ll take one with at least an extra shot of espresso. It wasn’t until about a week later that I started to notice something interesting; I wasn’t finding specials for a lot of venues that I knew had specials. I could locate the place and then see the “special here” but whenever I would see “special nearby” in a specific area I found it to be Starbucks. Lately I’ve been encouraging a number of restaurants to actively engage their fan base in defining a FourSquare special (FourSquare Owner). A lot of times that leads to dishes that are off menu or unique cocktails that are still being tested out. Now, everywhere I go the ...
Social Media and the UK Election
a superficial rebuttal to a superficial Economist article What was the impact of new media on the UK election? We are not totally sure, and since we weren’t in the UK during the election or following it like a good voter should, we are not going to answer that here. However as new media enthusiasts we want to add our post/tweet/support to the UK post mortem. And we are going to do it by picking apart a particular sloppy Economist article, trumpeting the triumph of old media. A bit self congratulatory? Yes we believe so. As the Economist points out, a record number of people watched the leader’s debate and it led to a ten point swing for Lib Dems, thus old media (in this case TV) wins. No doubt the televised debate was powerful as measured both by the impact it had on the race and by the days of coverage that followed, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. People interacting and engaging through social media might have generated additional interest prior to the event and led to the high viewership. (Although the novelty of the first leader’s debate probably would have had a strong audience on any medium) Twitter ...
Mr. Owner – Please don’t play foursquare
You’re at one of your favorite haunts, a small restaurant, a dive bar, or your Friday night spot which has somehow become your Tuesday and Thursday night spot. (We’re not judging) You come here often, you might be considered a regular, perhaps you even believe that you single handedly keep the fish tacos on the menu. You pull out your phone to FourSquare to the world and hopefully tempt your friends into joining you at ‘your spot.’ You launch the application, find your spot, check in, add some text to throw to twitter and Boom. This is where it hits you. Who is this Frank Washington guy? There he is, as always, on top of the screen occupying the mayorship of ‘your spot’, yet there is no way Frank Washington has been here more than you. Who is Frank Washington?!? Frank Washington is the morning stock employee, or the line cook, or the owner. Bottom line is he has to be there, he works there. While FourSquare is a great game, colonizing the world over, the game is meant to benefit the customer. It might not be possible for you to keep your inner Napoleon at bay all the time, but realize ...
