Reflection and Resolutions

It’s a few days early, I understand, but Happy New Year!

As I have oft been reminded these last few days, this time of the year is perfect for reflection and resolutions.  There are several people who should take credit for my “jumping on the bandwagon” and posting about my reflections on this past year, and my resolutions for 2011.

In no particular order, these three authors and posts were the catalyst for my content this week.  If you’re reading this post, please click on the links and read the ones that inspired me.

Amber Naslund | Brass Tack Thinking | The Brass Tacks of Resolutions | 

Rick Stilwell | Over Coffee | Just Doing It in 2011| 

C.C. Chapman | ccchapman.com | End of a Decade | 

This past year has been a challenging year for me.  In addition to the commitment I made when I created this blog, I also run a beverage manufacturing company.  My partners and I bought a 33 year-old company almost 2 years ago.   The transition period took almost 14 months to complete, and during that time we weren’t able to focus on much marketing or brand building.

During the past 12 months, we launched new products, a new website, and, a new on-line store.  We doubled our marketing spend, developing new sales materials, attending more tradeshows, and developing strategic partnerships.  We also hired new personnel.  In an economy where other companies were cutting budgets and people, we went in the opposite direction…we spent.

As anyone can tell you, when you ramp up your spending like we did, you simultaneously ramp up your stress level.  Thankfully, a lot of the programs we initiated have paid dividends, and should continue to benefit us in 2011.

My new year’s resolutions, at least for this blog, are to write more consistently (but always focused on providing valuable content, right C.C?).

In order to do that, in addition to my normal posts I am resolved to read more social media, marketing, and/or business management books.  I’ll post a review of the books, and offer up practical information I can implement in my own businesses.

I am also going to add an interview category.  I’ve been involved in foodservice beverages for over 15 years.  Over that time, I have networked with several FnB industry leaders.  Their views and opinions of industry trends are not only insightful, but also relevant.  I’ll be asking them about their views for the industry, current trends, future predictions, and best-practice examples.

As we head into the new year, what are some of the things you will do differently to make 2011 better than 2010?

TRANSFORM CLIENTS INTO SALESPEOPLE

Customer service as marketing and sales tool?

I grew up in Central Florida.

When I was in high school, I was lucky enough to land a job at the Magic Kingdom in Disney World. I say “lucky” because one, it was a job at Disney; and two, the experience introduced me to the Disney approach to customer service.

The job itself, like most high school jobs, was menial. However, the education I received from working for “the mouse” has continued to serve me over the last 24+ years.

Disney is often referred to as “The Happiest Place on Earth.” Anyone who has visited the Magic Kingdom, or any of the Disney parks, can attest to the validity of this statement. Not only are you happy to be at Disney, you are also happy giving them all your money.

For Disney, the secret to achieving this level of happiness starts with a commitment to customer service (They call is guest service, which makes you feel like you’re part of their family.)

Disney initiates their guest service program long before you ever reach the park. Call them for help with your reservation and by the end of your call you will feel like you have been having a conversation with a relative…a relative who has up-sold you during the entire conversation.

I have been involved in sales most of my adult life. Phone sales (think stock brokers) are the most difficult type of sales jobs I can think of, yet the folks at Disney make it look easy. Some of my favorite sales conversations with Disney guest relations’ representatives have gone like this, “As long as you are staying on property with us, you should think about the Disney meal plan.” Another favorite is, “I see you are scheduled to stay with us for two nights. If you extend your stay an additional night, I can offer you the following deals…”

When you hang up the phone, you’ve got a smile on your face; you feel like you have just made a very helpful new friend, and you have already blown your vacation budget before ever leaving the house.

As a business owner, we always look at ROI (return on investment). Whether we are contemplating the purchase of a new piece of manufacturing equipment or the hiring of additional employees, we want to know how much that investment will add back to our bottom line (and, how long will it take to recover those investment dollars).

But things like a commitment to customer service, or an “investment” in social media marketing are difficult to analyze quantitatively. If we can’t put an actual number on the effectiveness of these marketing practices, how can we determine if those investments are adding to our bottom line?

Measuring the ROI of customer service, like that of social media marketing, is nearly impossible…at least in traditional terms. Can you quantitatively measure how each dollar spent towards customer service adds to your bottom line? No.

Can you track how much revenue has been added to the company relative to the number of man-hours your staff has spent engaging your clients in social media spaces? If you can, email me the formula…please.

The message has to be clear and consistent among the entire organization. But a long-term commitment to customer service (and social media) programs will pay off. Engage your customers, build a relationship with them, exceed their expectations and they will become your best marketing and sales team. They will talk about you in a positive light. They will refer you to their friends and families. And, they themselves will continue to do business with you.

Disney engages you at every point during your visit with them. Everyone on the front line has a mandate to exceed the customer’s expectations. From the moment you arrive, you are continuously greeted by, “Have a Magical Day.” And every employee (cast member) works hard to make sure your stay is magical.

At the end of your visit with them, no matter how much money was left with Mickey, Minnie and Donald, you have had a magical time…more importantly (from Disney’s perspective), you have already started planning your next visit. (And next time you are going to coordinate with friends and family, because imagine how much fun it would be to go as a big group…)

If your clients don’t have that same level of passion about your organization, ask yourself what can be done to foster that level of loyalty. Do you engage your customers, or do you react to problems and issues as they arise?

Have a great Disney guest relations’ story? Please, share it below.

Is your organization committed to exceeding customer’s expectations? Are you using social media as part of that commitment? Let me know what you’re doing, and if it’s working for you.

Social Media Sniper School - HOORAH!

“One Shot. One Kill.”

That’s the motto for the US Army Sniper School.

What does that have to do with social media marketing and/or foodservice beverages? Read on. I’ll tell you.

“How can you incorporate social media into a foodservice manufacturing company’s marketing plan? We are B2B, not B2C?”

I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard that question (or some variation thereof) from one of my peers.

Wait, I do. But that’s only because my circle of influence is pretty small. The foodservice beverage industry is enormous from a revenue perspective, but pretty small from a company/personnel perspective. I think that’s one of the reasons I love this industry…it has a “small-community” feel about it. But I digress.

I follow quite a few blog authors. My RSS feed looks like a “who’s who” of social media. The content shared on these blogs has been instrumental in my understanding of social media marketing.

If you haven’t done so already, check out the infinite blogs out there and sign up for a few of the good ones. You can start with this one if you’d like. (Any of my foodservice peeps that don’t know what a blog is, or how to subscribe to one, have no fear. Send me an email, or call me on the phone…I’ll walk you thru the process. We non-natives need to look out for one another.)

Generally the blogs offer suggestions on how to increase your twitter following, or talk about the steps you should take to build an effective social media campaign. But this week, whether planned or not, a common thread has been to focus on “content, content, content.” The message is: nobody wants to write just for the sake of writing. And surely as readers you don’t want to read something that isn’t a 10/10 in content.

So, today, I am posting a real-life example of how my company has started to use social media for lead generation.

Yes, this information is going public, which means any of our competitors can use the information to compete against us. But, I’m confident in our employees. I’m confident in our strategic partners. And, I’m confident in the uniqueness of our products. Besides, I have always liked competition.

One of the social media sites I have used for some time is Yelp! When I’m at industry events (foodservice industry, not social media) talking about the benefits of social media, one of the first apps I show is Yelp! To truly “wow” my fellow digital immigrants, I show them the monocle widget within the app.

I can’t quite describe the looks and/or reactions when one of my industry peers holds my phone and walks around in a circle, looking at the interactive “head’s up display” which shows all the restaurants in a 360degree fashion. It never fails to bring a smile to my face.

But Yelp! is more than just an app to find nearby restaurants, bars, nightclubs, etc. For me, it is an awesome lead generation system.

How, you ask?

One of our target markets is the catering industry. We have a line of iced tea concentrates that are perfect for the catering industry. And, we spend a small fortune on traditional marketing to make sure the industry knows about our products. But, traditional marketing is more of a “shot gun” approach. You throw it out there and hope you hit something.

Yelp! allows us to be marketing “snipers”.

What do I mean? Go to the yelp! website. At the top is their search header. Search for “caterer” and plug in a city “Austin, TX”.

What happens when you hit the enter key?

I’ll save you the effort and tell you. You get 196 entries, all complete with addresses and telephone numbers. Do you want to know a secret? These contact numbers are more up-to-date than any list we have purchased.

You can filter your search by type of foodservice operator too. Have a product you want to pitch to sports bars in Columbus, OH? There are 184 listed.

If you are a sales manager for a foodservice distributor or manufacturer, and I told you I’ve got a sales tool that will filter out the specific type of operator you desired, gave you the operator’s contact information, was capable of mapping the locations and providing you directions to the location, and would constantly update itself so your information was never stale, how much would you be willing to pay me?

How much more effective can your sales organization become if it can achieve the same level of concentrated focus as the US Army sniper? One targeted shot. One confirmed hit.

Social media IS changing the way our company does business. We can embrace the change and learn how to make it work for us, or we can ignore the change and hope to stay in business.

I’ve made my decision. How about you?

Social Media for OLD people

Anyone who has followed my blogs knows that Chris Brogan has had a significant impact on my social media education. The amazing thing is, he and I have never met nor have we even talked on the phone to each other.

I was sent a link to one of his blog posts. I read the post, liked it, and then searched his archives. Some of the suggestions and tips he offered were useful in our “everyday” business of selling iced tea concentrate to foodservice operators. Some of his ideas and postings were completely new revelations to me.

You see…I am old. Well, I’m older than Chris. I learned spreadsheets on Lotus 1-2-3. I did not have online access to research sites and news archives. I had to look stuff up in encyclopedias (real books) that required you to correctly spell the thing you wanted to research. For news archives, we would sift through hundreds of microfilms looking for a particular picture or quote. It was tedious and sometimes painful.

I love what the Internet has developed into so far. With news apps, search engines and alerts, we can filter information to specific key words so we don’t have to read the “fluff” until we get to something that is personally useful and/or relevant.

As a marketer and brand owner, I really love that social media is reshaping how business gets done. We have heard the term “social media marketing” so often that we blindly accept the phrase without really understanding what it actually means.

The concept of social media marketing is not an easy one to understand. (At least not for my age group.) We can define it as “marketing strategies utilizing the Internet and social/community websites”, which sounds pretty, but what does it mean?

Initially I looked at it in the context of traditional marketing. I tried to figure out how our print and word of mouth marketing campaigns would fit within the social sphere. To put it simply, I tried to fit a square peg (traditional marketing) in a round hole (social media).

It wasn’t until after reading Chris’ book (co-authored by Julien Smith) Trust Agents and then the book Socialnomics by Eric Qualman that the proverbial light bulb went off.

Social media marketing is not so much about marketing as it is about communication.

Reading those words now, I feel pretty silly. And I am sure a few of you out there (Chris, Julien and Eric most likely) are probably in disbelief that I didn’t just KNOW this simple truth.

Facebook, Twitter and the like are not about forcing a brand or product upon the consumer. For the companies who DO employ that strategy, IT IS SIMILAR TO WRITING AN EMAIL IN CAPS…it’s just not very professional.

Social media sites are about communicating. Sometimes you communicate with your clients and consumers. Sometimes you communicate with your peers. Every once in awhile you may even communicate with your competitors.

The marketing aspect comes from keeping your brand and/or product in front of consumers. By engaging in conversations about your product/company/ brand/ or even personal interests, you develop (or enhance) a relationship with your customer. You get to know more about the people using your product, and they get to know more about the people making the products they use.

I still have a lot to learn about social media marketing.

Thankfully, BECAUSE of social media, I have an almost unlimited supply of reference material and expert advice available to me.

Is social media viable?

Every once in awhile a question comes up on LinkedIn and I feel compelled to add my two cents worth. Most recently it was a question that came up in a food manufacturers forum. There were about 10 other answers before I added my thoughts. If you’d like to read the entire discussion, here’s the LINK.

How do you feel about the potential viability of "social media" communications in the food service channel?

The fact that we can have this discussion on a social media site IS pretty promising. And yes, I agree with the comments about it being more difficult to figure out the B2B strategy as opposed to the B2C one. But, I believe our industry needs to figure out an overall social media strategy (and soon) because consumers (both operators and ultimate end-users) are getting information differently than they did a few years ago.

As manufacturers, what we need to understand is social media is about communication. People are having conversations about our company, our industry, and our brands. They're talking about us 140 characters at a time. Some of the talk may be good. Some of the talk may not be as positive. But the talk is happening.

One of the questions I am asked by my peers is, "how do you monetize social media?" Since you can't measure the ROI on an investment in social media the same way you can measure the investment in a new piece of manufacturing equipment, most manufacturers seem hesitant to commit.

Personally, I think it is because they don't fully understand the dramatic changes in communication that have taken place over the last few years. And of course, there is always the comment about, "why would I care that you are standing in line at the grocery store waiting to check out? Do I really need to know that much about your life?"

10 years ago I would have answered, "absolutely not!" But today, yes, I want to know that you are in a grocery store. Not only that, but I want to know WHICH grocery store you are in, and if you geo-tag your tweets, even better because I will then know in what state and city you're currently located. And, if I have a coupon going with that particular grocery store where you are standing in line to check out, I can send you a quick little note to remind you to purchase my item and take advantage of the coupon.

Communication.

We, as an industry, need to figure out how to communicate more effectively with the actual people who are purchasing and using our products. Then, we will see the monetization of social media and the more traditional return on our investment dollars.

I ended my response there, but I apparently I had more to say on the issue. Here is what I haven't added to my LinkedIn response...yet.

The foodservice manufacturing industry consists mostly (if not entirely) of digital immigrants. We, myself included, grew up without instant access to information. My first computer had to be started with a 5 ¼” floppy disk, and I needed to know how to write DOS to get the computer to do ANYTHING.

The young men and women coming out of college today, our children, are digital natives. They have never known anything other than instant access to information. They embrace transparency in every aspect of their lives, because that is all they have known. The Internet has provided them a way to find out almost anything. Want to find out the annual sales revenue for a privately held company? It’s out there and available if you can ask the right question. Want to read classified communications between government agencies? You can find that too. Want to see how intoxicated “Jamie” was at last weekend’s house party? There are probably pictures and a written account of the actions online.

These “natives” live in total transparency and expect everyone (companies, brands, products and even government) to be just as transparent…just as honest…just as raw. If you want to know an opinion, just ask them. They won’t hesitate to tell you.

Over the years, I have spent small fortunes on market research…polling groups about a label design or a flavor combination. With the advent of social media and sites like Twitter and Flickr, I now have a much bigger audience to poll, and will have instant feedback from that audience. And, I will have access to this information at a minimal investment cost.

Social media is a tool. It’s a way for us to communicate. It can be used effectively by the foodservice manufacturing industry, for both B2C and B2B communications. But we as an industry need to understand the way we do business is changing...140 characters at a time.