Small Business Saturday at Penn Station/MSG

Ken Chenault, CEO of American Express/Amex was on the Today show this morning to promote Small Business Saturday.  He appeared passionate about the new movement as he says there is room for everyone; you can shop at the Big Box retailers on Black Friday, online for Cyber Monday and now “Shop Small” on Small Business Saturday.

Taken from their Facebook page, Amex describes the mission of Small Business Saturday as follows:

First there was Black Friday, then Cyber Monday. This year, November 27th is the first ever Small Business Saturday, a day to support the local businesses that create jobs, boost the economy and preserve neighborhoods around the country. Small Business Saturday is a national movement to drive shoppers to local merchants across the U.S.

A couple of weeks ago I teamed up with Jeff Namnum and his LITweetup group as we joined forces to help spread the word of Small Business Saturday to the local Long Island, NY community.  Nearby New York City was the first city in the nation to proclaim November 27th “Small Business Saturday” as Mayor Bloomberg and American Express encouraged other cities to participate.  So with very limited time, we reached out to our own networks and helped spread the word and educated those on how they can promote their Long Island small business through Facebook and other Social Media avenues.  I was able to reach out to John Chae at Yummy Sushi Huntington to utilize Small Business Saturday to raise awareness and promote his restaurant gift certificates.  I was also able to get the Small Business Saturday promotions implemented quickly for my husband’s photography e-studios: Furry Paws Pet Portraits and Real Portrait Images.

At that time, Small Business Saturday’s Facebook page only had a mere 100,000 followers.  According to AllFacebook.com, The Small Business Saturday Facebook page is the fastest growing new page on Facebook. More than 850,000 ‘likes’ in just over two weeks.  With the multichannel advertising support including Facebook Cost Per Click, full page ads in the Wall Street Journal, television ads, on Penn Station/Madison Square Garden’s big board, plus word of mouth from folks like our group, they now have over 1 million.

Throughout the past couple of weeks, they updated their Facebook page wall with interesting statistics and great reasons to shop small such as:

• For every year over the last decade, 60%-80% of new jobs were generated by small businesses. Another great reason to shop small!
• For every $100 spent at a local small business, $68 returns to the community.

Amex even offered $100 worth of Facebook advertising support for small businesses that applied before the November 18^th deadline and who qualified. We applied to support Furry Paws Pet Portraits/FPPP e-studio and received the acceptance email a couple days later…

“Your ad has been reviewed and approved to run between November 12th and 27th*. Within three weeks after your campaign’s completion you will receive a report via email detailing your ad’s performance.”

Although we will not see ad performance statistics for a while, FPPP is already seeing a significant lift in traffic/daily post views on the Facebook page, with a lift in orders on Thanksgiving and Black Friday from last year. We shall see what happens tomorrow, and the results in a couple of week, if any lift correlates with the Amex/Facebook ad.

As if this campaign wasn’t big enough for a “small” cause, Amex on top of all this is donating $1 up to $1,000,000 for each like on their Small Business Saturday Facebook page to Girls Inc., a charity that helps empower young women to be entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

Oh and one more great thing, Amex is offering  a $25 credit to the patron who “shops small” with their pre-registered AMEX card on Small Business Saturday. So these small businesses are able to offer a great incentive to shop with them, while it doesn’t affect their already fragile bottom line.

What do you think of this local community economic support promotion?

As the calendar turns over to our last summer month, I figure it’s time for me to put down the ipad (after I finished the quick great read of “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran”) and start getting my thoughts down on paper.  Over the past two months, I have spent a lot of time listening, reading, and learning.  In the past several years, social media space has been full speed ahead on the concord.  Remember when we were poking friends on Facebook? Now we are cheering for groundbreaking campaigns such as Procter and Gamble’s Old Spice Guy Yet I felt like I was losing touch of what social media was meant to be, social. I had to stop myself, unbuckle the seat belt and relax in the back yard with my two Jacks as I grounded myself.  In this process, I came up with 5 tips that seemed to gel with me.

1. Fire Your Marketing Manager…and Hire a Community Manager

This was a recent Harvard Business Review(HBR) hot title of a blog post.  No they didn’t mean it, but it makes a very good point to have internal qualified staff to help manage the company’s social media.  As companies grapple with how to incorporate social media into their business strategy, they may also be struggling with an existing team who may not be fit to play the social media role or assume that all this work can be done externally through the consultant and or agency alone.  Larger companies are slowly recognizing the importance and investing in a hierarchy of internal staff from Director to Analyst level that owns social media with a designated person who plays a champion role. The consultant therefore has an internal dedicated team to work with who executes campaigns and moderates the networks as part of their daily routine.

2. Have a Strategy in Place

As mentioned above,  in any discipline within a business, there should be a strategy and implementation process in place. This is no different for social media.  Step one in building a strategy is listening to your followers and customers. An organization needs to know what the general sentiment about itself is in the social media community, which may take time.  But this is your foundation; make sure it’s a sturdy framework before you start to build a village.

3. Deliver Happiness!

If you have not read the new book Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, then stop right now and go ahead and order it for delivery or ebook reader (Just come back here when you’re done). It’s a must read. OK, now that you are done with that, your premise for adding social media should be so that your followers and friends feel good about your company/brand. Tony has examples of customer service that may seem extreme, as his team is encouraged to even field a call asking “where can I find a local pizzeria”. His staff was selected very carefully and was even given a choice to take $3,000 to leave if they wanted to before they were hired. He wanted to make sure that he built a business empire that was true to his beliefs with people that can carry the message in their daily responsibilities and lives. Tony is very well respected by his team and is well known to be just as personable on twitter.  The brand is fun and the company consistently generates great stories with different perspectives from its employees, customers and loyal followers. The company continues to operate successfully and is able to keep its unique culture even after its acquisition by Amazon.

4. Have a Response Team and Plan in Place if Something Should Go Wrong

This goes back to the concept of having a strategy.  Reputation management in companies has been closely controlled as marketing and PR teams deployed traditional one way messages. This means that promotions were typically sent to customers and prospects via traditional marketing channels leaving a small window of opportunity for a disgruntled customer to express his/her comments publicly and potentially leading to a damaging groundswell . Entering social media space opens the avenue both ways. The public’s response and opinion of your brand can now be seen very easily and response to your promotions as well as business practices can be seen almost instantaneously.    The downside of this is an increased risk for a situation that can spiral out of control very quickly if not monitored. This is why having strategies, policies and processes with a proper team in place to manage and maintain your reputation are keys to minimizing this risk.

5. Provide Educational Content Which Represents Your Brand Well

A blog shouldn’t be cumbersome. As in any thriving company, news should be happening every day. These stories can be explained through pictures, video and in print.  Even Old Spice educated us as they took an old stodgy brand and revitalized it. They schooled us by letting us know that this isn’t your father’s Old Spice anymore.

BONUS—Turn That Frown Upside Down

Set good intentions for your followers and friends.  CEO of Twitter @Ev recently tweeted a great example of setting the tone for your followers “Sign in pediatric office: URGENT: Smile until 5:01pm.” Make sure your networks are bright, light and joyful. Visuals usually do this trick, so talk to your creative director and get the creative team involved in how to jazz up the networks.

What do you think? Share your story with us in the comments.

Thanks to Jonathan Tafarella for editing this post.

Image from the Norwegian Olympic Curling Team's Pants Facebook fan page

Once again we are shown that it is IMPOSSIBLE to predict what will go viral, what will be popular and it certainly doesn’t take a big fat budget to get there. But monitoring your brand in social media can lead to unplanned yet successful business opportunities.

As the 2010 Winter Olympics comes to an end, we can reflect on many surprises: The US Bobsled team won a gold medal, the US hockey team made it into the finals, as well as the fact that there was not enough snow in Vancouver Canada with 50 degree temperatures delaying certain events.

The Olympics and its vendors planned their online and mobile experiences well. The Olympics made it onto the iphone with their own app and NBC had their own dedicated website where once logged in, one can view exclusive video and highlights. They even had the Olympic pulse tweets which included updates from competitors such as Apolo Anton Ono and Rachel Flatt.

While the official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Facebook Fan page has well over 1 million fans, the Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants fan page, has a little over a half a million fans with most of their wall updates consisting of hundreds of comments. Who would have thought? Loudmouth Golf, the makers of the pants monitored this page that was started by Tony D’Orazio, a 37-year-old curler from Rochester, N.Y.  Once the page reached 100,000 fans, Loudmouth Golf approached D’Orazio asking to post their website on the fan page in exchange for a portion of the proceeds sold. D’Orazio accepted but decided to donate the money to charity. Great story for the crazy pants, for the charity, for the Olympics, for curling, and for Facebook.  But no one could have predicted such success. Monitoring is the key, you never know where your brand, and the story, may end up.

The full story of the pants page evolution as well as the information on the charity can be viewed here from Omaha.com:

http://www.omaha.com/article/20100228/NEWS01/702289903

Image from The Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants Facebook fan page.

J-E-T-S Jets, Jets, ha-chooo, Jets!

Comfort in sharing misery…

I have been sick for 2 weeks. But I wasn’t alone.

From Twitter: @hisilver…I caught this from a friend who has his cough for 2 weeks. I am miserable – you must be too!

Since the new year, status updates and tweets, including mine, were related to the frustration of being under the weather.

Facebook: I can’t believe I’ve got another sinus infection!

Twitter: (with a smiley face avatar) Day two of the stomach flu… Kill me :-/

And common illness hashtags include: #sick #strep #tired

#Flu on Sunday January 3^rd showed quite a spike on Twitter.

I am always interested in seeing what someone has to say about running, as I am a runner and now in training for the ½ more marathon.  So while searching for the word “running” I saw a tweet..”Why can’t my nose stop running!”

Along with the “hope you feel better” and “yes I’ve been sick for a week too” comments included the remedy suggestions of tea, rest, the very popular neti pot, chicken soup, vitamin c, vitamin d, and meds. Feel good support from the global community. I felt better knowing I wasn’t the only one.

Can’t escape it, it’s January and we are sick. Good thing we have the comfort in knowing we are not alone.  We are human and we feel crummy. Back to the J-E-T-S Jets, Jets Jets game.

Photo Credit: Real Portrait Images

That is an image of Adam Hirsch, COO of Mashable and creator of the Summer For Social Good conference and online charity sponsored by Zappos and MailChimp. Over 400 attendees filled those seats at the 92nd Street Y auditorium and with donations still coming in topping $30,000, Adam was a great builder. Both an educational day and a day of giving, all proceeds went to four charities: Livestrong, WWF, Oxfam and The Humane Society. As an attendee, it was quite an enlightening experience and somewhat spiritual. The room was filled with giving people, and those who wanted to learn how to effectively raise awareness and funds for the non-profits.

An example of build it and they will come is Drew. Tomorrow is 9/9/09. Neat huh? Well tomorrow is also a day of blame. The event, Blame-a-Thon is organized by Drew Olanoff, one of the speakers from last month’s Summer for Social Good Conference. Drew was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma on May 20, 2009 and ever since then has been blaming everything on his cancer. Then it became a community blaming random things on drew’s cancer. “I am a geek so I started a website”. Blamedrewscancer.com is now partnered with Livestrong, a Lance Armstrong Foundation and has succeeded in getting big corporate attention with the Taco Bell truck being the first to donate $1 for the first 1,000 tweets with the dedicated hashtag #blamedrewscancer. They are now partnering with Drew on tomorrow’s blame-a-thon.

Presentations throughout the day included an engaging keynote speech by Randi Zuckerberg, Marketing Director, Facebook. I know, this blog is called TwitterCoach, but ever since FB integrated a Twitter feed on their fan pages, I feel I can get away with sharing their story. And boy did Randi have quite the announcement to share, the launch of charities on Facebook. Now you can purchase a donation to a charity of choice for someone’s birthday. They launched the gift shop, with virtual real charity gifts for Project Red, Kiva, Toms and WWF. If all goes well, they could open to all.

There was so much wonderful insight in the non-profit arena but I realize this is a blog post not a book. I will try to mention the key shout outs in good ole twitter style:

“If you have a voice or a platform you have a responsibility to voice your word” Randi Zuckerberg Facebook

“Our CEO is a twitter addict and we have 6 people out of 25 dedicated to social media.”…”We have buy in and resources to leverage social media. Our CEO visited Michael Vick in prison, we let the conversation happen but made sure it was taking place under our roof.. We were prepared for the twitterstorm” Carrie Lewis The Humane Society

“The more people that are engaging, the more leaders will feel pressure to do the right thing”… “Why social media?…best way to reach supporters, quickly trend people checking Facebook and Twitter more often than email” Andy Ridley of EarthHour

So build it, because they will come. No fear, no shame, don’t be afraid to tell your story and to ask for support. Lastly, it feels good to be a part of something, it was a Summer for Social Good, it was damn good!

Drew’s cancer is pissed, make it more pissed on 9/9/09. Raffle tickets are available for those who cannot physically attend blame-a-thon.

Summer may be over, but social good is still accepting donations

To join the conversation and to see what others had to say about the event, you can search #socialgood

To find out more about these charities and the social good conference, visit the Mashable event site here

Images of the presenters, attendees, cocktail reception and Adam’s shocking feel good proposal can be viewed on Real Portrait Images Facebook Fan Page