I sat down with Peter and his team and we talked about various ways to use digital channels to increase the public’s awareness of the gift certificates offered by Oasis Spa. I presented a framework that Doug had introduced to me called “The Hub & Spoke Model”. I had used variations on this technique in the past but never this specific model. Let me say that it is effective – you should try it. But I added a twist that makes it even more effective. More on that in a bit.

Jeremiah Owyang has written an excellent article on various models that companies use for organizing social media. In his blog post, he presents 5 models but concludes that the Hub & Spoke model is the one most often used by companies.

The idea is to pick a central location (or hub) and focus all marketing and communications efforts to that central spot. When I teach marketing concepts we call this “Integrated Marketing Communications”.

I like the model but it lacks action, direction, movement, or flow – all the components just sit there. To me an effective model for marketing and for social media should point or direct people toward a certain goal. Or to put it another way, there should be a call to action. As you can see in the model above, there is no real call to action 0r at least it isn’t obvious.

Being a true marketer and wanting my customer to be successful, I changed the model. As you can see below, the campaign that we developed for Oasis Spa is built on the structure of the Hub & Spoke model but with a difference. The “hub” is a Facebook landing page with various communications channels driving people to the hub – e-Newsletters, Calgary’s Twitter community, Radio, LinkedIn, Facebook ads, Google AdWords, and potentially a video on YouTube.

But the campaign needed a purpose or an objective; some type of action. We considered the objective of increasing Likes on the Facebook page but for a holiday season marketing campaign that objective didn’t seem like enough. We wanted to meet Peter’s objective which was lots of sales and many happy customers. As a result, we modified the model by adding another circle in the lower right corner. We wanted to show that we people should land on the Facebook but then move to an e-commerce page where they could actually order a gift certificate.

One channel that proved to be very effective was involving others in the YYC social media community. The following people blogged, tweeted and posted on Facebook:

• Marie-Eve Mayrand – @MeMay2 – http://bloomingmarketing.com/oasis-spa-calgary
• Randy Milanovic – @Kayak360 – www.kayakcreative.ca/blog/bid/105123/Holiday-Online-Marketing-Campaign-for-Oasis-Spa-Facebook-Style
• Crystal Tost – @RemaxCalgary – www.calgarylistings.com/oasis-spa-calgary
• Al Dhalla and Doug Wagner  – @Doug_Sunwapta – http://blog.sunwaptasolutions.com/weblog/2011/11/buying-attention-in-social-media-does-it-work.html
• Mike Nelson – @sabrecaptain
• Linda Trinh – @RentClickCgy
• Cidnee Stephen @CidneeStephen
• Deepa Acharya – @TheDeepster
• Ryan Kelly – LinkedIn
• Tom Hanger – @TomHanger
• Toni Guffei – @ToniRoni
• Susan Rutherford
• Christina Burnside – http://graysacademyesl.com

The campaign was wildly successful. By December 24th, hundreds of people had purchased online and thousands had visited Oasis Spa to buy certificates in person.

Now that the infrastructure has been developed we are looking forward to Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and maybe even Father’s Day.

The client was Marco Abdi who owns La Brezza Ristorante, a delightful Italian restaurant in the heart of Bridgeland. I have known Marco for years and I had been to La Brezza many times but not recently. This was a great excuse to meet with him again.

There is an excellent write-up about Marco meeting his adorable wife, Filomena, on a bus. The full story is on the Alberta is Energy website. See http://www.albertaisenergy.ca/marco.

Marco and I sat down for lunch a few days later and he told me that he wanted to improve the reputation of his restaurant on the Internet. He had been reading up on social media and thought that he should stir-up a strategy. For lunch we had calamari, probably the best I’ve had – ever. I would highly recommend trying it.

After some chilling online research we figured out that in contrast to other Italian restaurants La Brezza online presence was half-baked. The presence they did have was limited to about 8 reviews on Google Places (a few were unsavory) and a 67% rating on Urbanspoon. Not much to be proud of after 25 years of hard work.

The recipe we cooked up included the following:

• Launching a page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/LaBrezzaRistorante
• Developing a process to encourage guest to write a review online
• Creating a small card to handout to guests

Marco is very happy with the results:

• Likes on the Facebook page increased dramatically – they now have nearly 100.
• There are many many more reviews online.
• But most dramatically, the rating on Urbanspoon increased to 85% saying that they “like it”.
• Nearly 20 reviews on Google Places
• And #1 ranking on TripAdvisor for “Calgary Restaurant”.

Update: January 19, 2012 – Mario Toneguzzi added a blog post on the Calgary Herald site about this, see: http://blogs.calgaryherald.com/2012/01/19/calgary-restaurant-owner-cooks-up-recipe-for-business-success/. Thanks Mario.

Last Fall I was meeting with our client, Jason Taylor, to review the various online marketing campaigns that we are doing for Skyline. At the end of our conversation, Jason lamented about the dated photos on his site. The company had wonderful aerial shots of many buildings where they had done the roofs but only a few of the photos were recent, most were quite a few years old.

I suggested that I use my Facebook account and Twitter feed to help find a pilot. Jason thought this would be worth a try so the next day I sent the following post on Facebook.

Here’s a copy of the Tweet that I sent:

I received a couple of responses. One very promising lead came from Norman Blades of Sunwest Aviation. His reply was: “Hi Jeff, as per our telephone conversation, here is my contact info.  I’m a commercial rated pilot, with access to a small two seater aircraft well suited for aerial photos.  I can work from a Google Map, or I can take someone along to take the photos themselves.”

So I put Norman in touch with Jason at Skyline. The result was that Norman piloted Jason for 2 flights and Jason got all the photos that he needed. A couple photos taken by Jason Taylor, showing work done by Skyline, are shown below.

Olympic Speed Skating Oval:

BassPro Shops:

]]> http://anduroblog.com/2012/01/the-power-of-social-media-aerial-photos-by-skyline-group.html/feed 2 http://anduroblog.com/2011/12/automatic-feed-from-google-to-twitter-via-dlvr-it.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=automatic-feed-from-google-to-twitter-via-dlvr-it http://anduroblog.com/2011/12/automatic-feed-from-google-to-twitter-via-dlvr-it.html#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:46:25 +0000 jeff http://anduroblog.com/?p=1538                                                                 

I have a Facebook profile, a Twitter feed, a LinkedIn profile and a bunch of other social media networks that I use less frequently. In addition, our company has pages on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I’ll admit that keeping up with all of these feeds – posting, reading, replying, comprehending. figuring out how to not look like an idiot – is overwhelming and sometimes a pain in the butt.Then to make the situation even more complicated, Google launches Google+. Now I’m really in a quandary. Typically, I check Facebook, then Twitter, and finally LinkedIn. I read and if I see something interesting I Like, Comment, Share, RT, or DM. During the day, if I see an article that I like I’ll Tweet it to my massive number of followers .

With my Google+ I feel like I have one more (maybe one too many) social network to read and update. The result is that I’m getting a headache and my butt is hurting even more.

I try to automate a few of the connection so that I don’t have to updated each site manually. I decided about a year ago to use Twitter as my main launch pad and automate my Tweets to Facebook and LinkedIn. LinkedIn makes this easy – all you have to do is add your Twitter particulars to your LinkedIn profile – done. Making a connection from Twitter to Facebook is relatively easy using www.dlvr.it. I also automated posts from our blog to be delivered to my Twitter account. All of this seems to work well.

With my new Google+ account I thought that I would just add it to my dlvr.it account and send those posts to Twitter which would also updated Facebook and LinkedIn. No such luck. Apparently the API for Google+ is not available. This was a few weeks ago. Today I thought I would do a little research (on Google) and see if anyone had figured out a work-around solution.

The answer is Yes. There is an excellent post on dlvr.it’s own blog called Connect Google+ to Twitter and Facebook. I did have trouble finding my Google+ user id but found the answer here: How Do I Find My Google Plus User ID? [Google+].

I haven’t had time to test all of these connections, so good luck if you try it.

Enjoy!

This infographic, quite literally, has many of the tricks for search on Google that I use on a daily basis:

• Site:
• Intitle:
• Define:
• Calculator
• Keyboard shortcuts (I love those)
• Ctrl-L (in the infographic they use Command which is for Mac users)

Enjoy.

Our discussion started on Twitter after I sent Doug an article I read in the daily email from www.eMarketer.com called Social Media Comes up Short for Agency Prospecting.

Doug has a good point that using social media to sell tangibles (computers and books) is easier than selling intangibles like consulting and profession business services (legal and accounting). The part that we discussed on Twitter but not mentioned in the article is that although a company can’t “sell” services from social media platforms, it sure helps on the marketing side with credibility, interaction, community and support. In other words, companies that offer a service can still benefit hugely from a strong presence on social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. The strength comes from the marketing side not direct sales.

Great article, Doug. Keep them coming.

Today I received an email from Airmiles offering me 100 bonus reward miles if I spend $100 or more at Safeway before the end of October 2. Kudos to Safeway and Airmiles for creating a near perfect promotion.

Here are some of the features that I noticed:

• A direct email piece to someone who has opted in
• A reasonable offer of 100 Airmiles points that gets my attention
• A criteria for obtaining the reward – spending $100
• An element of urgency because the offer expires at the end of October 2nd – about 60 hours after the email was sent
• And an easy way to redeem the offer – just print it out and take it with me when I go shopping

What more can you ask for in a promotional offer? Not much.

Receiving these types of offers is fairly routine; I get these emails all the time. I’m a card carrying member of Airmiles and I often shop at Safeway, in part because I get Airmiles and also because Safeway is close by.

What seems to be a new feature in the email is the fact that I can see which of my friends Liked this specific offer on Facebook. Notice the arrow and circled area in the screen shot below. This is an interesting disclosure of information. On one hand it is no big deal. 17 of my friends thought this was a good offer and Liked the post. Cool, I might be interested in the offer because they are. Of course it is fun to see what other people are interested in and Like.

On the other hand, do I really want to know that they have an Airmiles card and that they shop at Safeway? In this case it seems innocuous. But it does feel like I’m on an old fashioned telephone party line where I can listen in on the conversations of everyone who is on the line. It is possible that at some point the disclosure of information could be in the territory of “too much information”.

I can think of a possible situation involving airlines (Westjet promotes Airmiles) and hotels (Best Western and Delta are both members of Airmiles) which could make for some interesting discussions between couples or even business associates. The implications between couples are obvious if one person is in a city and a hotel without the other’s knowledge. But a similar scenario could occur between a buyer and a seller. Imagine this situation:

One person is a potential buyer for a substantial purchase from a vendor. They connect on LinkedIn and because they hit it off well, they also become friends on Facebook. No issues so far. Then Airmiles sends out an email for Westjet offering a special promotion of Airmiles to a specific city. The buyer Likes the offer and clicks the button. The supplier receives the same email and notices that his potential vendor is planning to use Westjet to fly to another city. The city of destination happens to be the headquarters of a significant competitor. Now the buyer knows that the suppler is going to that city. Oops for the supplier – he may lose the relationship with the original buyer and may never get the deal with the potential buyer in the city of destination. Like I said, disclosure of “too much information”.

This incident, however, was unusual in a couple of ways. First of all, the form had been completely filled out. Typically, the contact person will fill out a few sections like the required fields and that is it – they hit Submit and send their information to us hoping we will call back. But this form had every single field filled out in detail – including a list of competitors.

But there is more!

The email address of the contact person ended in @dell.com. As I mentioned the Contact Us form on our website is filled out often but, sadly, not very often by a company the size of Dell. I’ll admit my first reaction was disbelief. To give you an idea of how large Dell is, it ranks 41 on the Fortune 500 list. Revenues are $61 billion. To give you some perspective Google ranks 92 on the Fortune 500 and has revenues of $29 billion. I suspected that this was a hoax or someone playing a joke on us. In fact, we were originally contacted in April so this could have been an April Fool’s joke.

But it wasn’t.

I called Jeff H and asked him how we could help out. He said that he was responsible for sales to small and medium sized business in the United States. He mentioned that they spend a lot on paid ads on search engines which made sense because I see their ads all the time on Google. They weren’t looking to reduce there budget but they did want to increase the profile of their website pages on the natural or organic side of the search engines.

I mentioned a  few of the advantages of search engine optimization (SEO) which Jeff H seemed to appreciate. The list below is similar to what I told him:

1) Free Targeted Traffic
The primary advantage of SEO over any other type of internet marketing is found is that once your website is listed on the first page of results for your keyword phrases, you get clicks to your site for FREE. This means that you can receive traffic from prospects 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year at no cost. And here’s the kicker – they are looking for the products and services that your company has to offer! Wow – that is beautiful.

On Google.com search for “business laptops”. Dell.com should be on the first page – probably at the top of the page.

2) Excellent ROI
A return on investment is one of the major advantages of SEO. It may take a few months for your website to rank well for the targeted keywords but once ranked, the ROI is excellent because you are getting free traffic to your website. Nice!

I can’t say how much Dell paid for our services but they have re-cooped their investment many times over.

3) Cost Effective
SEO is one of the most cost-effective ways of marketing. The initial work of keyword research, optimizing pages, and improving inbound links takes some effort and investment. But if the site is powerful (read lots of high quality inbound links) and properly optimized then the rankings on search engines should stay in place for months and sometimes years. Brilliant!

We optimized this page http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/laptops a few years ago and it is still working very well for Dell.

4) Increased Brand Visibility
SEO leads to the increased brand visibility for your website. Your business will start showing for strategically important keywords, and more and more visitors will be there to look for the services you are providing via your website.

You can try a variety of other keyword phrases and Dell.com is on the first page of results. Try: “business computers“, “servers“, and “workstations”.

5) Credibility
Your company will get a boost in credibility and reputation because the search engines are ranking your website highly for specific keywords related to your industry.

The end result for Dell was free visitors, excellent ROI, at a low cost, with increased visibility on a variety of keywords and excellent credibility. The screen capture below was taken today. Dell is still ranking well for “business laptops” and beating out over 34 million other web pages.

AllFaceBook also has a daily email which I have (shamelessly) signed up for. I find it interesting and sometimes valuable.

Some of the suggested ways to get better attention on Facebook include:

1. Ask Questions
2. Fill in the Blank Statements
3. Post Photos (and Videos)
4. Talk about the News
5. Ask for Likes
6. Talk about Facebook – who would have thought?
7. Celebrate Today

Enjoy AllFaceBook

Guest were invited from various groups related to social media:

• FridayBeersYYC Meetup – #FridayBeersYYC
• Calgary Professional Business Owners & Managers Meetup
• Third Tuesday Calgary Meetup – #TTYYC
• Quickinars – #Quickinars

If you attended the event, please Like the Facebook page of the restaurant: http://www.facebook.com/LaBrezzaRistorante

If you would like to make a reservation please use OpenTable.

Below are video shots of some of those that attended.

Variety of people at La Brezza

Toni, Trayah, Marie-Eve, Pat, Hanif and Shamsu

Hamish and Doug

Wait staff: Ali, Amber and Greg

Lyn Cadence and Brian

Moca Joe and Toni

Alma and Marco Abdi (La Brezza owner)

Greg, Matt, Yves, and Hamish

Trayah and Marie-Eve

Amber and Greg, again