Author Archives: Dukky

Social Media Small Business Success Stories

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You don’t have to be a big brand to use social media successfully. In fact, some of the most striking social media success stories come from small businesses that use social media to market their products and services in creative ways. Sometimes, taking a look at what other companies have done can help jump-start your own creativity and give you ideas about how to more effectively implement social media in your own marketing efforts. With that in mind, here are 5 small businesses using social media to achieve real, measurable success:

Naked Pizza

Of course, we have to start this post with a shout out to our fellow New Orleanians at Naked Pizza. As Entrepreneur Magazine noted when it covered them last month, Naked Pizza considers itself “a social media company that sells pizza,” as well as a healthier lifestyle. Naked Pizza uses Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to connect with customers. The Twitter account tweets specials, news and nutrition tips.

What have they got to show for it? Well, a few days ago they expanded from the original NOLA store, opening their first franchise location in Miami, Florida. Per Entrepreneur, the company now has over 300 stores under development in 18 markets and 6,297 Twitter followers, many of whom are just waiting for a Naked Pizza franchise to open up near them.

Creme Brulee Man

San Francisco’s Curtis Kimball is also known as the Creme Brulee Man. He operates a small creme brulee cart, selling out of this world flavors like vanilla bean, lavender and Mexican chocolate. He uses Twitter to keep his 13,397-and-counting followers updated on what flavors he’s offering and where his cart will be. You can read more about he uses Twitter on the New York Times and in TechCrunch.

Emerson Salon

Emerson Salon, located in Capitol Hill, Washington (near Seattle), uses Twitter and Facebook to drive word-of-mouth. They do this so effectively that according to Penn Olson, Twitter and Facebook alone bring in 75% of the salon’s business. Impressive!

Humphrey Slocombe

This tiny ice cream shop in San Francisco is known for inventive flavors like prosciutto and an extremely entertaining, slightly off-color Twitter account. In the New York Times, Sean Vahey, Humphrey Slocombe’s co-owner and operations manager, explained how Twitter has contributed to the store’s success:

“We started using Twitter just because we have zero money for any kind of advertising or promotion whatsoever. We have a product that changes daily. Our customers were asking, ‘How do you keep us up to date on the different flavors?’ Twitter was the perfect answer…As soon as we put it on Twitter it moves. It’s an instant response.”

Emma Bridgewater Pottery

Emma Bridgewater Pottery, a UK-based producer of handmade pottery, uses Twitter and Facebook to showcase their products, offer discounts and connect with customers. They’ve also made a point to connect with mommy bloggers, inviting them to tour the factory with their children. Read more about how Emma Bridgewater Pottery is using social media to build buzz online at socialsmallbiz.com.

Social Media: It's Not Just For Kids Anymore

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Millenials may have pioneered social networking, but new research from the Pew Internet and American Life project indicates that Baby Boomers are jumping on the social bandwagon in ever-increasing numbers. In fact, in only the past year, the percentage of people over the age of 50 who use social networking sites has almost doubled, going from 22% to 42%. Among baby boomers, the rate of adoption of social networking sites is also increasing much more quickly than it is among younger adults. The study reported that the growth rate for social networking use was 88% among adults aged 50-64 and 100% among adults aged 65 and older, compared with a measly 13% for adults aged 18-29.

Clearly, adults over 50 are finding the allure of being able to connect with old friends and distant family irresistible. For grandparents, easy access to pictures of grandchildren don’t hurt, either. However, if you’re trying to reach this demographic with your marketing campaign, don’t let the growth of social media adoption among the boomer set blind you to the important role that email still plays in their lives. From the Pew Report:

While email may be falling out of favor with today’s teenagers, older adults still rely on it heavily as an essential tool for their daily communications. Overall, 92% of those ages 50-64 and 89% of those ages 65 and older send or read email and more than half of each group exchanges email messages on a typical day.

Fortunately, email marketing and social media marketing are not mutually exclusive. By combining the two, you can drastically expand the reach of your marketing campaign by harnessing the power of social sharing. In fact, in our campaigns we’ve seen what an amazing difference social sharing can make in response rates for both email and direct mail.

Real-Time Search Gets Real

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The tech community has been throwing the phrase “real-time search” around like a hot potato for at least the past year. However, most real-time search offerings simply haven’t lived up to the promise. They’ve been released to great fanfare, but have yet to be widely adopted by regular internet users.

That may change soon- Google, the 800-lb gorilla of the search engine world, just released its own real-time search offering, called (appropriately enough) “Google Realtime.” Realtime lets you search tweets, offering better results and more filtering options than Twitter’s own search feature does. For example, you can choose to limit results to a certain geographic area, and you can “rewind” the results to see what people were saying about your search topic in the past. This post from HubSpot also seems to indicate that results from other social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace will be included at some point, though right now all the results I’ve seen have been from Twitter.

Assuming it succeeds where other real-time search engines have not, what does Google’s Realtime search mean for marketers? Obviously, it provides another way to enhance the already considerable power of word-of-mouth on social networking sites. The ability to set alerts also provides an easy, free tool to tell you what people are saying about your company or brand on Twitter. As HubSpot puts it:

Businesses participating in social media will have a clear advantage in getting found online because of their automatic inclusion in real-time search results. Marketers now have a new tool to monitor online conversations about their business and understand which marketing events directly caused an increase in word-of-mouth buzz during a given time. Google real-time search is a huge boost for marketers not only in monitoring but also in demonstrating the value of social media to their business.

With real-time search, customers’ voices are only going to get louder. Give them something to talk about, and make sure it’s something positive.

In Social Media, We Get By With a Little Help From Our Friends

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Every time we log in, social networking sites inundate us with a flood of information, calls to action and advice. How do we decide which of it to take to heart and which of it to discard?

This is an important question for marketers, as we obviously would prefer that consumers not discard our messages!

Earlier this month, eMarketer examined the results of a study by Invoke Solutions that sought to pin down how social media users perceive advice they encounter online. The study found that people were more likely to trust information posted online when it came from people they know, rather than from brands or “independent” bloggers.

As eMarketer noted, the network the information was posted on made a difference, too. For example, 26% of people surveyed declared that they had “complete trust” in blog entries posted by people they know, while a slightly lower percentage, 23%, said the same about Facebook postings from people they knew. Interestingly, Twitter was the least trusted social networking site, even when the tweets came from friends.

However, no matter what the venue, the study participants were more inclined to trust information passed on by friends. Whether consumers blog, post on Facebook or tweet, social media means that everyone is now a potential influencer for their own friends and family. That potential for influence has always been there, of course, but now it’s easier than ever to use it.

In a post on the Web Strategy blog, Jeremiah Owyang examined the Invoke Solutions data and made the following recommendation for marketers:

Brands should focus on social marketing that harnesses the “social graph” which is getting friends to share with their own friends. By developing advocacy programs and focus on word of mouth marketing, brands can increase marketing and sales margins by getting customers to do the work for them.

Exactly!

Single Channel Communication is Dead

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post was written by Steve MacLaughlin of Blackbaud and originally appeared on his blog, Connections. It is reprinted here with permission. Enjoy!

Direct mail is dead. Email is dead. TV and radio are dead. Face to face is dead. Telegraph is dead. Social media is dead. There are so many obituaries being written these days that it’s hard to tell what’s still alive. Is everyone just trying to be clever or are they auditioning for a role on CSI?

None of these channels are dead. Ok, telegraph is still dead despite rumors of a comeback. And there is a continual evolution within each of these communication options. Nonprofits are still improving their use of direct marketing, phone, email, and other channels.

What is dead is the use of one channel at a time to engage people. What is dead is operating in silos of data and systems that don’t play well together. What is dead is mindset that multichannel communication doesn’t apply to your organization. The old ways of planning and managing constituent communication are dead.

Single Channel is Dead

There, I said it. In fact, it’s been dead for a while now. Most savvy companies and organizations recognized this years ago and have diversified their engagement streams. The reality is that you can only get so far riding one horse. The channels aren’t dead — using them by themselves is dead.

Using a single communication channel to engage with constituents is a dead on arrival strategy. This isn’t just theoretical pontificating. An analysis of trends and data support this fact. And basic biology does too.

Humans are Multichannel

People come multichannel-ready thanks to sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. This explains why watching television, texting, and browsing the Web all at the same time isn’t a medical disorder. Thinking in single-channel mode almost always means ignoring multiple senses. Great communication strategies focus on hitting two or more senses. I have a sixth-sense feeling that most communication today is either seeing or hearing by itself.

People’s channel preferences don’t rise and fall as quickly as the prognosticators might like. I didn’t stop liking the alumni magazine just because my university started sending me emails. I didn’t stop liking video just because an organization decided to invite me to an event. I didn’t stop wanting to renew my membership online just because I can give via SMS. It doesn’t work that way.

Faux Multichannel is Dead Too

Just because you sent out a mailing, blasted all of your email addresses, and posted something on Twitter does not make you multichannel. That’s faking it. Multichannel communication means thinking strategically about how you combine the use of channels to work together.

The cause of faux multichannel communication is often the silos of systems and organization charts. It’s easier to just do your thing with your tools than worry about what anyone else is doing. Of course, this is very hard on your constituents. The end result is not pretty.

The Proof is in the Numbers

Some new trends were revealed in a recent donorCentrics Internet Giving Benchmarking Group meeting held by Target Analytics. The group was comprised of 14 very large nonprofit organizations and a review of online and offline giving between 2005 and 2009. The median percentages of multichannel donors compared to online or offline donors are very telling.

First year retention for multichannel donors was 51% compared to 30% for offline donors and 22% for online donors. Multi-year multichannel donors do even better with 75% being retained versus 59% for offline and 52% for online. The reactivation rate for multichannel donors was 16% compared to just 7% for both online and offline donors by themselves.

Tyranny of the Or

Recently, I’ve heard some in the nonprofit sector predicting a massive shift from direct mail to online giving. They’re missing what is really happening. This isn’t direct mail vs. the Internet. That’s the mother of all oversimplified ideas. That’s the Tyranny of the Or. The global fundraising perspective is that it’s about person to person and events and telephone and face to face and direct mail and web and email and peer to peer and social and mobile and other channels. Multichannel means more “and” — less “or” across the board.

Today, just over 5% of giving in the US happens online. While the growth in online fundraising has been tremendous let’s not forget that 95% comes from other channels. And it’s not all from direct mail. Nonprofits continue to diversify their channels. They aren’t turning them completely off. Don’t succumb to the Tyranny of the Or. Think multichannel and succeed.

Preserving ROI with Promotions and Offers

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post on how to create a compelling offer while keeping ROI in mind was written by Mark Hasland and originally appeared on the Overnight Prints blog. It is reprinted here with permission. Enjoy!

The promotions businesses offer consumers is one of the three pillars on which successful direct mail campaigns stand. By utilizing lucrative offers, entrepreneurs may be able to encourage customers to make purchases they wouldn’t have made otherwise.

A recent article from Direct Magazine discusses the use of the four basic types of offers: free shipping, promotional items, flat dollar discounts and percentage discounts. When used wisely, each one of these promotions can help business owners generate sales and manage return on investment.

Free shipping is often the most effective offer, especially for online businesses. According to Direct Magazine, free shipping can generate 20 percent lifts in sales. The second-best promotion is flat dollars off, followed by percentage discounts and free merchandise.

No matter which offer companies pick, it’s critical they determine the goal of a direct mail campaign first. If customer acquisition and brand awareness are primary objectives, entrepreneurs may want to consider promotions they will only break even or even lose money on. Conversely, if bottom line is an issue, organizations should use more conservative offers.

This is especially the case when using the least effective offer, promotional merchandise. Direct Magazine says that offers of this type can generate returns of 5 percent. However, for many direct mail campaigns, response rates hover around 3 percent. The potential customers acquired and 2 percent sales lifts generated by a promotion should be carefully weighed against the cost of the actual items.

Additionally, the source suggests considering whether discounts are needed at all. For example, seasonal businesses may pull respectable numbers during peak times of the year and don’t need subsequent deals to encourage sales. Once the company is out of season, though, then they may want to consider using promotions to attract customers.

Finally, Direct Magazine highlights the importance of observing both consumer response and competitors. Businesses should stay competitive with rivaling companies, offering discounts that make them a viable alternative. Entrepreneurs should also analyze direct mail recipients to determine which offers are successful and which are not.

A recent article from Target Marketing Magazine also recommends including time-sensitive calls to action with offers. Time-sensitive phrases including “hurry” and “buy now” may encourage consumers to act promptly and make purchases sooner rather than later.

Facebook Places Round Up: 5 Resources for Marketers

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Just in case you’ve been hiding out under a rock with no Internet access all week: yesterday Facebook announced its highly anticipated location feature, dubbed “Facebook Places.” Facebook Places is just starting to become available to users, but that doesn’t mean it’s too early to try to decipher what it means for marketers. With that in mind, here’s a round-up of some of the best resources for understanding Facebook Places and how it could affect your business:

Mashable: A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places

Mashable’s guide to using Places is primarily focused on users, demonstrating how to check in, add places and customize your privacy settings. There’s also a useful section on how to claim your business on Facebook Places.

PC World: Three Ways Businesses Can Take Advantage of Facebook Places

PCWorld writer Tony Bradley shares ideas for how your business can use Facebook Places to build customer loyalty and promote positive word of mouth.

MediaBistro: Agency Execs Weigh in on Facebook Places’ Marketing Implications

Robson Grieve of Creature, Kevin Purcer of Erwin-Penland and Frank O’Brien of Conversation discuss Facebook Places and how marketers can use it to connect with consumers without making themselves unwelcome.

Duct Tape Marketing: 5 Reasons Why Facebook Places is Kind Of a Big Deal

Noting that Facebook already has a much larger user base than services like Foursquare and Gowalla, Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch goes on to explain why Facebook Places could be a much bigger deal to marketers than previous location-based services.

AdMaven: 5 Ways that Facebook Places Will Change the Marketing Game

Nicholas Kinports describes 5 ways that Facebook Places will affect marketers. Mostly, he talks about helpful new capabilities (once Facebook works unleashes its advertising tools) such as the ability to create a “swarm” of customers when business is down and the ability to get more data about your customers’ behavior.

What do you think of “Facebook Places?” Will it be a game-changer for marketers? And how will it affect startups like Foursquare and Gowalla?

CrossView Study: Retail Shoppers Prefer Direct Mail, Email to Social Media

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Although social media consumes ever-increasing amounts of our time and attention, another study, this one from Crossview, shows that marketers shouldn’t abandon traditional direct marketing tactics just yet. Interviewing 160 shoppers in North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois and Kansas, Crossview’s study showed that retail shoppers value promotions highly, and that they prefer to receive them via email and direct mail.

Looking at the breakdown of how the respondents preferred to receive marketing materials from retailers, 37% preferred email, 23% preferred direct mail, 18% preferred text messages, 11% preferred in-store and only 9% preferred social media.

Of course, social media marketing is still in its infancy. As customers begin to spend more and more time on social media sites and become more comfortable interacting with companies and brands in that space, their preferences will likely shift. In fact, companies from Einstein Bros Bagels to Dell have already used social media for promotions with great results.

In a press release, Mark Fodor, Chief Executive Officer at CrossView, commented on the results of the study:

“The survey findings reinforce how important promotions are in influencing consumer purchasing decisions. It also shows that delivery methods and consumer preferences are across the board, which means that retailers need to be able to communicate brand, product and promotional messaging consistently across channels. Consumers have very definite ideas of how they want to receive promotional materials. Regardless of which technologies are ‘hot,’ shoppers expect to navigate between channels based on convenience and personal preference.”

In such a rapidly changing marketing climate, how can you ensure that your campaigns have the highest possible reach and the best possible response rates? It’s simple-don’t put all of your eggs in one basket! Tools like Dukky’s personalized URLs allow you to design promotions that can be initially distributed by email and direct mail, then shared via social media. Dukky also allows you to poll your customers to see how they’d prefer to receive promotions in the future, if you’d like, and our analytics let you see which social networking sites your customers are using.

4 Reasons For Small Business Owners to Jump on the Social Media Bandwagon

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Rates of social media adoption have been climbing for small businesses, but according to the Small Business Index, only 24% of small businesses are currently using it. If you own a small business, you’ve probably already been told that your business needs to develop a presence on Facebook and Twitter, but you may not be sure why or even if it’s really that important. However, several recent studies indicate that small businesses are poised to benefit from social media, in some cases even more so than larger companies and brands.

So, if your small business is one of the 76% that hasn’t yet begun using social media, here are 5 reasons to hop on the bandwagon:

Reason #1: Connect With Existing Customers

Odds are, your existing customers are already waiting for you to connect with them on Facebook and Twitter. According to checkfacebook.com, 128.9 million Americans already have a Facebook account. Over at SocialMediaToday, Roy Wells crunched some numbers to determine that 41.6% of Americans are on Facebook.

Meanwhile, according to Edudemic, Twitter has over 110 million users and gains about 300,000 new users each day.

Reason #2: Find New Customers

Social media is also proving to be a great place to find new customers. According to social media expert Brian Solis, when it comes to finding new customers on social networks, small businesses seem to have an edge over the big guys. Solis quotes a study by Regus that found that 44% of small businesses using social media were successfully using it to gain new customers, versus 36% for medium-sized companies and 28% for large companies.

Reason #3: More Effective Direct Marketing

Integrating social sharing is also a great way to give your existing direct marketing campaigns a shot in the arm. For example, at Dukky we’ve seen time and time again how allowing your customers to share offers via social media can increase response rates for both email and direct mail campaigns. In fact, the direct mail campaign we did for a pair of local Chick-Fil-A franchises had a response rate of 279.8%! 22% of that came from the direct mail pieces; the rest was a result of social sharing.

Reason #4: Drive Word of Mouth

Used correctly, social media can be a powerful marketing tool because of how effectively it drives word of mouth. For example, a recent study by Yahoo showed that the Internet is even better at driving word of mouth than TV in some instances, and that people who use social networking sites are more likely to drive these conversations.

Stay tuned-later this week, we’ll take a look at some small businesses that have successfully used social media as part of their marketing mix!

Social Media Research: The Email Wars

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On the heels of the Econsultancy study I wrote about last week comes a new study from Nielsen analyzing the Internet usage patterns of Americans that shows email use is declining in favor of social media.

According to Nielsen, Americans spend 22.7% of their online time on social networking sites, mainly Facebook. That’s almost 14 minutes out of every hour, an increase of 43% over this time last year. Email, on the other hand, only accounted for about 8.3% of time spent online, about 5 minutes of every hour and a 34% drop from what it was last year.

Naturally, this prompted a flurry of somewhat sensationalistic headlines, like this little gem from Reuters: “Nielsen Says – In: social networking; Out: Email.”

Is it really that simple? Can we all scrap our email lists in favor of making new “friends” on Facebook and Twitter? Actually, no. We may be spending less time in our email inboxes, but it’s still the third most popular online activity. (Number two, in case you were wondering, is social gaming. Yes, Farmville and Mafia World et al. are huge time sucks.)

In evaluating the results of the study, even Nielsen made it clear that email’s not out of the game yet:

Despite some predictions otherwise, the rise of social networking hasn’t pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time.

To tell the truth, I don’t think that social media will ever unseat email completely. Rather, I think we’re evolving toward a “new normal” in which social sites take over the social functions that email was never particularly good at anyway. For example, sharing photos via email was always a clunky experience, as was planning an event or holding a conversation involving more than one person. On Facebook, all of these things are dead simple. So people will naturally want to spend more time on Facebook and other social networking sites, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll abandon email altogether. To thrive, marketers need to be comfortable using both email and social media to connect with customers.