Five days ago I wrote a blog post lamenting the fact that SoLoMo (social, local, mobile) marketing was taking too long for retailers to adopt and questioning if that would be the death of Foursquare.

I was pleasantly surprised when I checked in at Whole Foods today and there was a “special” on their Foursquare page.

Whole Foods has a great promotion with American Express where if I buy $75 worth of groceries between now and June 15, AMEX will give me a $10 refund — 13.3% discount.

Awesome cross-promotion by Whole Foods and AMEX, facilitated by Foursquare.

I’ve already told my wife that I need to go with her on her next “big” shopping trip to Whole Foods.  She now understands why I keep “checking in” everywhere I go.

Hopefully many other retailers will see the benefits of promotions of this type.

What SoLoMo promotions have you taken part in?

Thanks to Peter Shankman, Stacey Acevero and Vocus for a great webinar today on “Nice Brands Finish First.”

I urge you to watch the webinar when you have 45 minutes, Peter is a GREAT speaker and storyteller.

Peter would probably be happier if you bought his new book Nice Companies Finish First.

Peter shares some wonderful examples of companies that have provided outstanding customer experiences and have been rewarded royally in media coverage and in incremental business as a result of their efforts.

The following are some nuggets I took away from Peter’s talk along with my insights:

1. “Focus on the customers you have to get the customers you want.”   Instead of spending 80% of your marketing budget on getting new customers, how about spending 80% of your marketing budget making your current customers happy and they’ll help you get plenty of new customers. 
2. “The current norm for level of service is ‘crap.’  Treat customers better than the norm.” Shouldn’t it be easy to deliver better than crappy service?  If not, why are you in business?
3. “Think about how to get your customers more involved with your brand.”  Give them a behind the scenes look at how things work.  Ask them what they’d like to know more about your business.  The more you get your customers involved in your brand, the more emotionally connected to your brand they will be.
4. “It’s nice to give away money.  It’s better to give away an outstanding customer experience.”  Customers will remember it and will tell others about it.
5. “No brand has ever gone wrong giving someone an incredible experience.”  How can you give your customers an incredible experience?  Don’t know, ask your customer facing employees for their ideas.
6. “P.R. no longer stands for public relations.  P.R. now stands for personal recommendations.”  Personal recommendations are gold.  85% of consumers trust the word of their friends and family.  70% of consumers trust the word of people online they don’t even know.  Less than 20% of consumer trust what companies have to say about themselves.
7. “Create amazing experiences.  This is the new currency” for driving customer satisfaction.
8. “Empower your employees to do nice things.”  Don’t restrict your employees from creating amazing experiences.  Most importantly, recognize them when they do.
9. “Making people smile will drive repeat business.”  Making your employees smile will encourage your employees to make your customers smile.
10. “Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, not because it will make you more money.”  Ultimately, the return on your investment will be ten-fold or more.
11. “Fun shows through in everything you do.”  Have fun in everything you do and encourage your employees to do the same.  Your customers will see it and feel it every time they do business with you and will be more likely to tell their friends about it.

You may think these suggestions just apply to B2C businesses.  Please don’t.  B2B clients want to do business with nice companies just as much as you want to.  B2B clients are human too.

What do you and your company do for your customers that’s nice?

What could you do for a customer that they would consider amazing?

Share this with your employees and get their suggestions.

I didn’t sign-up for Foursquare when I first heard about it because I didn’t see the benefit to me as a consumer.

Then, Chipotle had a promotion encouraging customers to sign-up on Foursquare and check-in at every visit.

Since I eat a Chipotle at least five days a week, at home and while traveling, I signed up and started checking in.

As a marketer, I know there’s tremendous value in knowing who your best customers are and ensuring they receive a consistently outstanding customer experience.  These are likely to be your “raving fans” as well as your best social media promoters.

However, I don’t see any retailers using Foursquare to develop, or even a have a relationship with, their best customers.

To date, I’ve checked-in 2,692 times, have 24 badges and am “mayor” at 20 venues.

Not once have I received anything from anywhere I’ve checked in — even a “thank you for checking in.”

While I see tremendous potential for SoLoMo (social/local/mobile) marketing, it’s uptake by retailers seems awfully slow to me.

What do you think?  Is SoLoMo over hyped or are retailers missing the boat?

If retailers are missing the boat, what can we do to help them?

I wasn’t familiar with the terms “content snacking” or “Tl;dr” until I read this article; however, with increasingly shorter attention spans and a desire for more focused content, it makes a lot of sense.

In case you aren’t familiar, Tl;dr stands for “too long, don’t read” and is most frequently used in online forums, social networks, or when someone sends a URL to a group with the warning that it’s going to be wordy.

If your target audience is looking for quick bits of information, you have to decide whether you want to cater to their needs by providing snack-sized content, whether it’s text, audio or video.

It also means you need to think more strategically about content and determining the critical information you want to share. You want to tell a story that stands on its own but also links to content that adds depth and new dimensions to the material.

Other things to consider:
- Ensure web content stays “above the fold”
- Keep press releases and case studies to two pages
- Keep blogs to 250 to 350 words
- Keep subject lines to 50 characters or less
- Focus your writing and avoid extraneous words — especially on email as more and more email is being read on smart phones

Adapt your message to the media and to your target audience. Get read, create interest so your prospect will reach out and start a dialogue with you.

What are you doing to avoid having your content labeled Tl;dr?

My best friend owns a charter bus company, Holiday Tours, that covers central North Carolina.

I am always amazed when he tells me about the number of “price-only” shopper queries they receive.

Anyone chartering a bus for a school group, church group, business outing or a group of friends, ought to be a little more concerned about safety.

I would provide a list of questions to ask when chartering a tour bus, but I know EDLP (every day low price) providers will not give you an honest answer to your questions.

They are typically in the business on a whim and running their business on a shoestring cutting corners everywhere they can to stave off inevitable bankruptcy that’s the result of pricing that fails to cover their cost, let alone provide a reasonable profit.

Nonetheless the following are several items you need to consider:

• Will the driver hold a current Commercial Driver’s License with a “passenger” endorsement ?
• Will the driver hold a valid medical certificate ?
• Does the company have a driver drug/alcohol testing program that complies with DOT regulations ?
• What is the maintenance schedule for the buses?
• What is the company’s safety record?
• How does the company ensure the safety and security of passengers?

Charter buses are a great, and environmentally friendly, way to travel with a group for business or pleasure; however, safety should come before price more so than in any other purchase you make.

What are your experiences with motor coach travel?

In speaking with several owners of small and medium-sized businesses recently, I learned that they understand the value of referrals; however, they’re not sure how to get their employees to understand their value and get them to ask customers for referrals.

As an attempt to help, I created a PowerPoint presentation entitled “The Power of Referrals” for employers to share with their employees.

In it I explain there are five things an employee needs to do to help grow their employer’s business:

1. Provide an outstanding customer experience — one in which the customer says “wow, I’ve got to tell everyone I know about the incredible experience this person just provided me.”  Employees that learn how to provide an outstanding customer experience will never have trouble finding a job.
2. Ask for referrals — employees need to know that referrals can help their employer be more successful and reduce marketing expense.  If your employees don’t want to help you be more successful, either you aren’t empowering your employees or you need different employees.
3. Remind good customers to provide referrals, especially if they have provided them in the past.  Someone who has provided referrals in the past is more likely to provide more in the future, as long as you and your employees keep providing an outstanding customer experience.
4. Help customers provide referrals — your employees likely know social media better than you do. Let them suggest to customers to post on Instagram and Pinterest, as well as Facebook and your website and encourage them to help customers do so if they need assistance.  This will build the relationship between your employee and the customer.
5. Thank your customers for everything — especially for referrals.

Encourage your employees to engage your customers.  Doing so will improve their knowledge of the customer, their likes and dislikes and will build trust.

While you don’t want to pay your customers for referrals, it may come across as a “bribe,” you do want to reward your employees for doing the five things that lead to referrals.

What’s the “lifetime value” of a referral to your company?  Make sure your employees know that and reward them accordingly.

Do you reward employees for providing an outstanding customer experience?

How about referrals?

Please let me know if you find the PowerPoint presentation useful and forward any suggestions for improvement.  Thank you.

In its prime, Wachovia Bank was in a neck and neck battle with Nations Bank, now Bank of America, and First Union for market share in North Carolina.

Wachovia was seen as the “old money” bank for wealthy North Carolinians,  Nations Bank was the aggressive bank for up and comers while First Union was the bank for the tobacco farmers, textile and furniture manufacturers and their employees.

Wachovia tracked awareness, market share, switching preference, and spending every two months.

Since Wachovia did not have the media or production budgets of Nations Bank or First Union we looked for other ways to differentiate the bank and make our bank more attractive to new comers and people who were considering switching.

We developed a series of five “head” commercials that gave very logical reasons to bank at Wachovia — typically rate or fee driven.  And, we developed five “heart” commercials that provided more emotional reasons to bank at Wachovia — the “sundown rule” and dog biscuits at drive-throughs.

We ran these commercials for more than a year.  At the end of the year, we were able to prove that the “heart” commercials drove greater awareness and switching preference than did the “head” commercials.

Making an emotional connection with the customer pays — even for banks.

How do you make an emotional connection with your customers?

Whether you’re branding yourself or your company, the following are five questions we all need to know the answers to whether we’re an owner, an employee or a prospective employee.

You can ask the following questions in your strategic planning session, in a company meeting or in an interview:

1. Who are we?  The answer to this question should be consistent with your vision, mission and values, as well as be sufficiently differentiating.
2. Why are we here? The answer to the question should be consistent with your vision – the desired end-state the company would like to achieve in the future.
3. Who do we want to be?  This too is consistent with your vision and needs to be realistic, achievable and consistent with your values.
4. Who are our customers?  Everyone should have a good idea of the demographics, psychographics and firmographics of their customers and their prospective or desired customers.
5. What are they hiring us to do? Have a conversation with your customers to ensure you “know” the answer to this question.  Their answers may surprise you.  You’ll also learn what makes you “different and better” than your competition.

What other questions do you ask?

Do all of the members of your team provide the same answers to these questions?

If not, how do you get everyone on the same page?

When I was the account executive on Bounce Fabric Softener, I created bi-monthly Nielsen analyzes for our client.

Nielsen provided market share, pricing and distribution information for food, drug and mass merchandisers for Bounce and each of its competitors.

Fortunately, Procter & Gamble had been subscribing to this data for a number of years before I began working on the account so I had plenty of data with which to work.

With multiple-variable regression analysis, I was able to show when Bounce was priced no more than 30% higher than generics, it gained share.  When the price difference became greater than 30% it lost share.

By optimizing Bounce’s price, we were able to compete against generics, without losing share, while maximizing revenue.

Do you have sufficient data to know the price elasticity of your brand?

I had the opportunity to meet with the founders of The Orchard at Altapass in Little Switzerland, NC yesterday.

Bill Carson, Judy Carson and Kit Carson-Truby bought the last apple orchard on the Blue Ridge Parkway saving it from developers.

The Orchard at Altapass is a non-profit foundation that needs to build an endowment to secure the future of the orchard after its founders are gone.

The Orchard at Altapass is:

• Preserving the history, heritage and culture of the Blue Ridge Mountains
• Protecting the underlying orchard land with its apples, wetlands, butterflies, bees and other natural features
• Educating the public about the Appalachian experience and the history of this important area of the Blue Ridge Parkway
• Showcasing local musicians with more than 150 live performances when the orchard is open
• Promoting education and exercise with dancing to the music provided by the local musicians
• Promoting the foods and crafts of local artisans

If you are traveling the Blue Ridge Parkway or are interested in the protection of some of our vanishing natural and historic resources I encourage you to visit the Orchard at Altapass in person or online.

If you’ve ever been to the Orchard at Altapass, please share what it means to you and help to spread the word about this jewel on the Blue Ridge Parkway.