Everyone knows being a social media manager is the funnest job in the world, right? I mean, what’s NOT to like about being paid to be on Facebook and Twitter all day?

If that’s true why am I spending more and more time thinking maybe getting into this line of work was a terrible idea and maybe editing articles about enteral and parenteral nutrition was actually not boring or tedious? Depending on what people call my job, it’s supposed to be the hottest job of all time. What’s not to like?

I just read a post about social media and the stages of grief and it really resonated with me and, frankly, also depressed the crap out of me. If you’re thinking about making a career of social media, you need to read that post. I think it’s important to know that a) the phases (denial, bargaining, anger, and despair) Amber describes in the post are totally accurate and b) when you’re a social media manager, all the emotions and upheaval during each of those phases are directed towards YOU. Are you down with that? You sure?

The important thing to know, I think, is that working through these phases takes time…a LONG time. Moving an organization from being “1.0” to social is incredibly hard and can take years.  Being the person on staff who’s responsible for instigating these uncomfortable phases is really hard. I suspect it’s probably easier if there are other people on staff to share in your misery–other members of a social media team, for instance–but especially in the association or nonprofit world, organizations are lucky to have budget to dedicate ONE hire to social media and I don’t imagine that will be changing anytime soon.

Not to be a Debbie Downer, but I’ve been at it for 3 years now and I’m about worn out. And I know from talking to others in similar roles that they’re just as beaten down and burnt out as I am. And the thing is that social media is still so new that it’s not like organizations are going to be doing any forward thinking about avoiding burnout and retaining talented employees in this role; they’re still mostly stuck in the phase where they see social media spending as experimental, and just possibly (fingers crossed), something that they won’t need to worry about in a few years.

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There are more than 8 million users on Foursquare — up from just 1 million a year ago. This explosive growth means one thing — you might want to get your business on Foursquare. After all, Radio Shack reported that the average Foursquare user spends 3.5 times more at its retail shops than the average customer.

The most recent iteration of the location-based app, Foursquare 3.0, expanded the features and made it much easier for businesses to jump on the bandwagon and start marketing. Best of all, it’s free. Foursquare is winning the location-based app game because it has the biggest user base [aside from Facebook Places] and it pleases both parties — customers want to be recognized, and businesses want to know who their biggest fans are. Mashable spoke with Eric Friedman, Foursquare’s director of business development, about how businesses can get started on Foursquare and the various marketing options they have available to them.

“Foursquare works well when a moment of commerce happens,” says Friedman. And commerce is exactly what business owners are looking for. Plus, as smartphones penetrate the U.S market (currently, about a third of U.S. consumers have a smartphone), there will be even more Foursquare users.

“We’re on every single platform that’s out there, so there’s never been a better time for businesses to start using Foursquare,” Friedman says. “There’s no cost, it’s easy and it works.”

Want to get started? Below, Friedman walks Mashable through all of the steps.

Brands With Brick-and-Mortar Locations

“[Small businesses] have the same resources available to them as a super large QSR, an Italian restaurant or a Starbucks, and that’s a really powerful tool,” says Friedman. He’s referring to the Foursquare for Business Merchant Platform, which creates an even playing field for restaurants, retail stores, museums, mom-and-pop shops and other businesses. The owners can claim venues on Foursquare, establish specials and analyze data on Foursquare’s dashboard. Here’s how to do it.

Claim Your Venue

To claim your venue, search for it on Foursquare.com. It’s likely that someone has already created your venue to check into it, and you can claim it by proving that you own it. If you can’t find it or you are opening a new venue, click “Add a new venue to Foursquare,” which is at the bottom of the page. Fill out the information in the wizard. Once all the information is plugged in, your venue page will come up. Click “Claim here” on the venue page.

Foursquare will ask you a few questions about the business (i.e. “Is this a chain?”) and whether you are authorized to claim the venue. Then it will ask how you’d like to verify your ownership — either by phone or by mail. If you verify by phone, Foursquare will call you and provide a 4-digit PIN that you can enter on the site. If you opt to verify by mail, the PIN will be sent via postcard. Once you’re verified, you will also receive a Foursquare window cling so customers know you are a Foursquare-friendly establishment. (Fear not, efficiency lovers: If you have numerous locations, you can verify in bulk.)

Adding Specials

Once you’re verified as the owner of a location, you can use Foursquare’s Merchant Platform to create specials to reward your customers. The method for creating specials is pretty self-explanatory, and the wizard walks you through each step as you create your special. You can have two specials running simultaneously at a given location. Foursquare 3.0 introduced a new group of specials:

• Swarm Special. A special is unlocked when a certain number of people are checked in. For example, an ice cream store can give away a free scoop of ice cream when 10 people are checked in at once. You can set a limit for how frequently this special can be unlocked so that you don’t give away too much product.
• Friends Special. A reward for when friends check in together. You can specify how many friends need to be checked in and what they receive for being checked in.
• Flash Special. A special for the first X people who come at X time. It’s great way to incentivize customers to stop by during your slow hours.
• Newbie Special. A reward for people who check in to your business for the first time. Offering a reward for a user’s first checkin — even if it’s a small one, like 10% off or a free side dish — is a great way to start a relationship with a new customer.
• Check-In Special. A reward for every single checkin. Restaurants can offer a free soda or a discount, while retailers might offer a few dollars off a purchase.
• Loyalty Special. A reward for a user’s third, fifth, seventh checkin — you determine the interval — to incentivize customers to return a few times to cash in on their special. Loyalty specials can be recurring (“every three checkins”) or not (“on your third checkin”).
• Mayor Special. The mayor is the person who has checked into a venue more than anyone else. In theory, he is your best and most loyal customer. As such, he deserves a prize, whether it’s a discount, a free t-shirt, a beer or a meal on the house. Mayors tend to be proud and protective of their mayorship, and you might even see some turf wars when the mayorship changes hands. You can offer something whenever a new mayor earns the crown, or you can offer a daily reward for the mayor.

Now that you’ve seen the offerings, click the special you’d like to do and fill in the requirements for unlocking the special. Once you finish entering the stipulations and select what venues will feature the special, it will be live (though it won’t show in the “Nearby Specials” filter until a human verifies that the special is legitimate). There are two one-sheets you can print off to explain Foursquare — one for employees, so they know how to recognize a special, and one for customers, so they know how to get in on the Foursquare action.

Dashboard Analytics

Once you’ve claimed a venue, you can access a dashboard of analytics that show how many checkins you’re getting each day, the time of each checkin, as well as a breakdown of the genders and ages of your Foursquare customers. Plus, there are two lists: one of your top visitors in the past 60 days (your most loyal customers), and one of your most recent customers, along with their Twitter handles (so long as they provided that info when they logged into Foursquare). In my experience, only about 25% of people push their Foursquare checkins to Facebook and Twitter, so having access to the Twitter handles of loyal and new customers provides businesses with an opportunity to reach out, follow up and see how a customer’s experience was. That personal touch is likely to bring customers back, and it may also turn that person into an evangelist for your business.

Also, remember that Foursquare is flexible, and you can make changes in real-time. You can run two specials simultaneously at each venue, so experiment and figure out what works for you and your business. With the right campaign, you could actually be saving money — Friedman says several business have stopped advertising altogether, since Foursquare allows them to reach customers for free.

Brand Pages

But not every business has a brick-and-mortar location — look at MTV and Zagat, for example. If your company is a brand without a physical presence — a magazine, a TV channel, a university of a consumer packaged good — you can use Foursquare Pages and Partner Badges to reach consumers.

Foursquare Pages are “a place for brands to have a program and have a cool way to interact with consumers,” Friedman says. The Foursquare website outlines a step-by-step process for setting up a Foursquare Page, which must be done manually (in the future, businesses will be able to create their own brand Pages). Business owners must submit a form; the Foursquare team will reply in about two weeks.

Your Page is highly customizable, and you can have a custom banner to incorporate your logo. The grey box on the right can be populated with information about your brand, along with links back to your own site or to social media sites. And of course there are tips you can leave for your followers so that when they check in to certain places, your tip pops up. The History Channel leaves factoids all over the country at places like New York’s Highline and London’s Tower Bridge, which provide context as you traverse the city. Likewise, Zagat leaves restaurant tips for dishes and cocktails.

Tips can be timeless, or they can be geared to promote an event. For example, The New York Times left tips all over Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics. Tips can be saved to a user’s to-do list, too. The Foursquare site points out tips for crafting good tips:

• Tips can direct people to a certain place or instruct users to try a certain item. The point of Foursquare is to enhance someone’s experience in a location — if you have some insights, share them.
• Don’t leave a tip that is obvious — try to share insider information, a secret menu item or a fun tidbit

Brand Badges

Once a brand has a Page, it can also offer badges for Foursquare users. Of course, Foursquare has its own badges that users love unlocking, including:

• Crunked. Four stops in one night.
• Photogenic. Checking in to three places with a photo booth.
• Swarm. Checking in to a place with 50 other people.

But the brand badges are more self-promotional, and they’re unlocked for checking in to places and doing fun things that are relevant to your brand. (Foursquare doesn’t disclose individual badge prices, which can vary, but “$25,000 a month with a multi-month commitment” is typical.) Users must “follow” a brand on Foursquare to unlock badges, some of which include:

• MOMA — Art Addict. Three checkins at MOMA or PS1 in one month.
• The Wall Street Journal — WSJ Lunch Box. Two checkins during lunch at a restaurant that’s been reviewed in WSJ’s “Lunch Box” column.
• Gogo Inflight — Mile High. One checkin while in flight.

New York Magazine recently did a Foursquare integration with its “Where to Eat 2011″ feature. Below each highlighted restaurant, users could add a restaurant tip to their to-do lists. Checking in to 5 of the restaurants in the list earns a user the Where to Eat 2011 badge, which could also unlock discounts and prizes at these restaurants.

Advice From Foursquare

Friedman has some tips for businesses about how to optimize Foursquare:

• The best kind of Foursquare specials are those that make users feel, well, special. You don’t need to give a discount and lose your margins. Offering exclusive access to a sample sale or a special dessert that is only available for Foursquare users is a great way to get people coming back and checking in. Plus, not offering discounts means you can attract and maintain customers without affecting your bottom line.
• Remember to utilize the fine print when you’re filling out your special.
• Use Foursquare to grow your business — run a special during your slow times to keep a steady flow of customers all day.
• Make sure you train your staff on how to recognize and reward Foursquare users.
• Remember to set an end date for a campaign if it’s a limited-time offer or a one-day special.

“We try to give all the answers on Foursquare,” says Friedman, but if you have questions, leave them in the comments. Also, if you’re a business owner, tell us what your experience with Foursquare has been like.

Mashable Article

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Online personas are like masks. Except for when they aren’t.

Sound confusing? Let me explain.

As businesspeople, we all wear masks to some extent. For some, we put on a “sales” or “marketing” mask before a meeting. Others may put on a “Mr./Ms. Personality” mask just before entering a networking event or a trade show/conference.

An social-media online persona is like a mask, except it is worn by a company or individual as they develop an audience to further their respective business purposes. How does it work?

When in a business situation, most people don’t act like they do around friends while watching a football game, or while out and about on a Friday night or at a party. Instead, they put on some kind of mask in their professional lives, and especially when they’re promoting whatever product or service for their company. If nothing else, they’re at least acting like professionals.

That’s the same kind of thing that needs to be done with online social networking. This doesn’t mean that such efforts be devoid of all personality and sound like a drive-thru order taker who doesn’t really care that you don’t want pickles on your sandwich.

You can “do” personality; just make sure it is an appropriate amount of personality. Sometimes, though, personality can effectively be amped up.

The Extreme that Proves the Point

One of the better online personas I’ve seen has a ton of personality. It’s even too much for some. But I think that’s the point.

I’m talking about Hank Dietle’s Bar, a true dive joint that’s just north of Washington, DC, in Rockville, MD. The crowd that Dietle’s attracts is, well, a bit edgy. The types of patrons there range from stuffed-shirt DC-types to bikers. The place itself has an attitude that’s best described as, well, just plain ol’ attitude. It’s really indescribable.

That’s exactly what Dietle’s Facebook status updates capture. Here’s some samples, all of which are safe for work, but are a bit questionable in taste:

Hank Dietle’s Bar I guess it’s time to take the Easter tree down. It came and went so fast.

Hank Dietle’s Bar ‎270 UPDATE: I-270 is shut down because of me. Sorry, I saw a raindrop, swerved to miss it, and T-Boned a school bus. MY BAD!

 

Hank Dietle’s Bar Good morning faceboogers. I hope you have a great day.

Many of the bar’s updates are definitely not for everyone’s eyes (it took a bit of searching for me to find three suitable for this post!). And that’s the point. People go to Dietle’s to let their proverbial hair down; to become something they’re normally not, or somebody they really want to be. That’s what Dietle’s is all about, and it captures that feeling very effectively in its Facebook page.

Dietle’s promotes its own events through its Facebook account. In a case of a business doing social media right, though, the bar’s promotional content makes up only a small part of its total updates.

Is the Dietle’s page for everyone? Nope, not in a million years. Then again, Dietle’s Bar isn’t for everyone, either. Trust me on that one. But it is a success; I think they have the second-oldest liquor license in all of Montgomery County, Maryland, and the bar has been in business since the early 1900s. I don’t see this joint closing anytime soon, and its Facebook effort is helping in that regard.

You might think that Dietle’s would want to be more generic with its Facebook feed, to attract more people into the bar. My guess, though, that management wants to further build its brand among its current customers, while slowly attracting other like-minded people through its doors. I’d call 1,750-plus FB friends a success, considering their, um, “crowd.”

The only fault I have for Dietle’s Facebook campaign is that it uses a Personal Profile and not a Fan page. Dietle’s loses out on all of the features that a Fan page can bring it, including iFrames, customizable tabs and an uncapped fan count. On the other hand, the account feels a bit more like an exclusive club, because Dietle’s management has to go through the “friend” process for all of its followers.

Foundational DNA

Dietle’s account is one example of many, many others I’ve seen on Facebook and Twitter using what I call “foundational DNA,” or the ideas and personality upon which a company was founded. Foundational DNA may sound like another way of saying personality, except it also includes a company’s (or your own) professional knowledge, expertise and experience. Foundational DNA also sounds like a Harvard MBA-type phrase, which doesn’t hurt.

As with anything else associated with a business—Websites, blogs, printed materials, and so on—any social-media persona will depend on the company’s foundational DNA. If it is known for being witty and knowledgeable about a certain topic, then build that into your social-media presence. Serious and highbrow? Go with that.

And if a company is like a Dietle’s and is known for … how should I put it … “excessive” personality, by all means, use it. That business should realize,though, that its won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. A joint like Dietle’s may not necessarily be concerned about that aspect of their foundational DNA, but other companies might.

Social Media

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The social media community has been hit with ROI fever. We’ve quenched our thirst for counting followers and fans, and have turned to the deeper well of actually measuring to see if what we’re doing is working. Information is flowing, people are weighing in. If you are looking around for quality information on measurement, here are three tips to get you on your way to measurement wellness.

1. Know y

our outcomes from your outtakes from your outputs.

Take a short course in measurement–I mean real PR measurement tactics. Many of us jumped in the social media pool with very little background in PR and marketing tactics and don’t know the difference between an output, an outtake, or an outcome. You don’t have to know all the details, but you should be able to understand the basics. I’d suggest reading Katie D. Paine’s Measure What Matters and Olivier Blanchard’s Social Media ROI. If you can get through those two, even skimming if you already know your stuff, you’re on your way to wellness. I also get the good stuff following these blogs:

• Don Bartholomew’s MetricsMan, Tom Webster’s BrandSavant, and the blogs of two above authors above as well. Amber Naslund from Radian 6 is also tackling a series of pieces on measurement starting with “Counting Isn’t Measuring.”

2. Start with objectives, then find the tools.

I think we get this backwards because forming measureable objectives can be hard, and tools produce instant numbers. Here’s a good resource on creating measurable objectives from Amber Naslund to get you started. 

In December 2010, Radian 6 published a small free ebook called “The Nine Rules of Social Media,” focusing specifically on monitoring, measuring, and engagement. In the measurement section, rule # 2 states, “Give your numbers context.” Raw subscriber numbers, fans, followers, retweets, whatever–they need context to inform the process. The tool box is full. It’s time to start with the question, “what are we going to build?”

3. Know that social ROI isn’t always measured in dollars.

Don Bartholomew did an excellent job explaining this in the piece, “Five Things to Forget and Five Things to Learn,” (Dec. 30, 2010) speaking about what measurement will bring in 2011. He says, “ROI is a form of impact, but not all impact takes the form of ROI.” He continues that most social media initiatives are designed to create impact, not ROI, in the short term. Traditionally, we think of bottom-line dollars when we think of ROI, but social media can take you well beyond monetary outcomes.

I like Amber Naslund’s encouragement to “please stop shorting your measurement practices by assembling some quantitative data point, throwing it on paper, formatting it in a pie chart, and calling it accountability. Your measurement deserves more.”

Get Well at Social Media

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 Your customers may be asking the very same thing Roger Waters famously asked on the 1979 Pink Floyd classic The Wall,  Is There Anybody Out There?

In today’s competitive landscape customer service is more important than ever, and a company’s reputation for satisfying clients has never been so vulnerable. Social Media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can level the playing field enabling businesses of all sizes to interact directly with customers like never before.

The voice of the consumer has never been more powerful, or influential, and has potential to spread virally in an instant. Reacting quickly can often quell negative comments and amplify positive ones. Over 58% of tweeters who have tweeted about a bad experience, have never received a response from the offending company.

Companies now have the option to not only take a phone call, but take a Tweet or a Facebook post, drill down into it, see who wrote it, and respond accordingly. Of course don’t expect social media to replace you customer service department, but instead look for it to increase your overall customer satisfaction.

Your customer service issues are likely to fall into one of three categories:

1.    Product Issues: customers experiencing difficulty with a product or service
2.    Suggestions for product or service improvements customers would like to see in the future
3.    Better ways to market, sell, support or communicate with customers

Be prepared to respond quickly and cordially. In some cases you may need to “kill them with kindness“in an effort to offer an experience that exceeds their expectations.

If a customer has a serious issue with no quick resolution, offer an email address in order to take the conversation offline. I would suggest a dedicated “unlisted” special email address, think “Batphone,” to specifically deal with these types of issues. Let the customer know that their message is important, and that you are doing your best to rectify.  Your number one goal is to turn a bad experience into a good one, save the customer relationship, and get positive word of mouth. After the issue is solved, following up with a quick personal message can encourage the customer to praise your responsiveness.

You can measure the success of your efforts by defining metrics which reflect your overall strategy, i.e. cost saving, service improvement, etc. I would suggest starting with the following metrics:

• Responsiveness- Average reply time.
• Complaints – Is the number decreasing?
• Praise – Is this number increasing?
• Quick resolutions – Are you able to eliminate calls to customer service

Make it a priority to review the progress of your customer service strategy and make adjustments accordingly. Send out an online survey through your social channels asking how your company is doing in regards to customer service.

Solving these issues in real time through a company’s social channels shows your dedication, and transparency, to your customers. So the next time your customer tweets “Is there anybody out there”, you can proudly respond with “Yes, how can we help you?”.

Social Media Story

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