Social Deals - The Real Thing (for Some Businesses)

There's a lot we have to learn at Five Star Martial Arts, and I don't just mean Karate. A big part of my job is to leverage my business experience to pave over some of the bigger potholes and speed bumps before we hit them, but a lot of what we face is new to me as well. I've never been responsible for advertising, for example, so now I have to draw on what I've learned in my MBA program and what I've seen my friends in the Marketing Departments do.

And some of our challenges are just plain new, because they involve technologies and services that simply didn't exist before. Social Marketing is one big one - using Facebook to serve existing customers by providing a constant (daily) stream of news, events, motivation, encouragement, recognition, articles and other information. It also serves potential new customers, giving them a taste of what we're all about, showing how active and dynamic we are, and showing that we're "hip," using this new technologies that a lot of our competitors either don't bother with or don't use with energy and consistency the way we do. Sadly, it's hard to draw conclusive effectiveness data from social marketing on Facebook. Did we actually get any new students or retain any existing ones because we were using Facebook aggressively? I have no way to really tell, but it seems like a good idea anyway.

The other brand-new technology is the "Daily Deal" form of social marketing. I'm referring of course to tools like Groupon and Livingsocial (among many others). I'm not personally responsible for using this tool at my business, but I have input and I try to account for it in my strategic business planning. And a powerful tool it can be, if used for the right purposes. Sort of like The Force, I suppose.

I read an article recently about how Groupon, as a company, is more or less one big Ponzi scheme, paying today's bills with the deal they're going to offer tomorrow, and so on. Moreover, the article argued that companies dealing with Groupon were at severe risk of digging themselves into a hole, relying on the sales of new Groupon offers to pay for the supplies they needed in order to fulfill the previous ones they'd sold. Well, here - you can read the article for yourself: Why Groupon is Poised to Collapse.

I can't entirely disagree with the article, because I just don't have enough facts. But I can sort of disagree, because I've personally seen some incredible results using these tools. I even left a comment about it on that article. Here it is:

Like any other business tool, companies need to be smart about how they use Groupon. It's not going to be for every business. You can only afford to sell at or below your cost for a very short time before you overload yourself and go under. The business I work with - a martial arts and fitness center - has been EXTREMELY HAPPY with Groupon and LivingSocial. They bring us QUALIFIED LEADS in the form of customers who have already paid for the privilege of trying us out before they've even walked in the door to see the place. Read that again - they PAID for the privilege to come see what we're all about. And what we give them back in return effectively costs us nothing (at least in terms of inventory or product) - it's the service of our knowledge and our classes, both of which were going to be there anyway. Granted, when we sold over 200 fitness classes the first time - expecting to sell 20-30 if we were really lucky - it stressed us out a bit and we needed to buy some extra equipment in a hurry, but it was totally worth it and then some. The cash we got from Groupon itself was a pittance, but the new customers we gained - especially those we've been able to convert into long-term clients under contract - are irreplaceable. PLUS, we've managed to get in the game early and beat our competitors to the punch. We consistently see them showing up AFTER us with similar deals that sell much worse than ours - because we've already captured that market.

I'm positive that a lot of companies would lose their shirts using Groupon. That may arguably even be Groupon's fault if they're overselling their own product and not divulging the ristks, but I can say with confidence that it's a tremendous service for the right industry, and we're thrilled we got on board with them when we did.

I'll tell you, success feels good, and these new "social" tools feel like they're successful to me. They're working like crazy for us, anyway. Every business struggles with basic challenges like building brand identity and getting the word out to potential new customers. How can anybody find out how awesome you are if they've never heard of you. Advertising is expensive, but Groupon (as one example) PAYS YOU for the privilege of advertising your services to a broad range of customers. And it pulls them in by the truckload. If you're the right kind of business to take advantage of that without losing more than you can afford in the deal, maybe you can win with social deal marketing, too.

Facebook Secrets! (Part 3)

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Facebook Secrets! (Part 2)

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Facebook Secrets!

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[Karate] Five Star Martial Arts 2.0!

For the last month, I've been intensely focused on helping my good friends at Five Star Martial Arts take their business to the next level. It's incredible how much we've gotten done in just a few short weeks, and today is the official launch of Phase Two of their awesome Karate and fitness school.

One key component of Five Star 2.0 is that they now have an official website! They've wanted one for a long time, but getting the right team in place to create it and developing a cohesive vision that really captured their desire for a centralized web presence can be a little tricky. In the end, my lovely wife developed the site from soup to nuts, based only on a static mock-up in Photoshop, including some graphic design, photo editing, CSS, PHP scripting, server administration, and HTML. I had the job of writing all the copy. Luckily for us, we both had some solid background in our respective tasks, though it was the first time we'd worked together to build a commercial site from the ground up without a team of IT and Marketing departments at our backs. It was pretty cool, and everybody's super-happy with how it turned out!

Another aspect of Five Star 2.0 is the addition of two new fitness programs. Five Star now offers both Hatha Yoga as well as the ONLY Certified Russian Kettlebell classes in the whole Central New York region! Again, this took a while to pull together. We started reaching out to and interviewing Yoga instructors months ago, but it took time to find just the right fit. Meanwhile, I was contacting instructors in other fitness styles, and had the great good fortune to connect with the ONLY HKC-Certified Russian Kettlebell instructor within 40 miles! Russian Kettlebell is a hit all over the world for a fast, intense workout that combines strength-training and cardio in one workout. Plus, my wife loves it so I've gotten to see first-hand how quickly you can see the benefits.

On top of that, there's been a ton of search-engine optimization (more to come), Facebook improvements (we now have all the features of a "Place" page right on our Facebook "Business" page, including a check-in deal!), an active Twitter account that's already over 30 followers in just a couple weeks (not so hot if you're a bigtime Hollywood celebrity, but not bad for a little dojo in North Syracuse!!), and so much more I can't remember it all.

Plus, I set up our domain, including web-hosting and various email addresses, meaning that Five Star's owners and employees can finally have their own custom email addresses. It's not really a big deal, but it's not something anybody had even told them was possible and one more item on a fairly lengthy checklist for the month of April.

On top of all of that, we've got our first LivingSocial deal going live today, too! After the way our Groupon deal went completely ballistic, it'll be interesting to see what happens with this one. It's sure to be a smaller response, but we're anxious to see it. It's also one of the first (possibly THE first) LivingSocial Family deals offered in Syracuse.

Next up - Seminars! I'm making arrangements to bring some fantastic seminars to our dojo this summer and fall and I can't wait to announce them. I'm very much hoping to connect our school to the rest of the CNY martial arts community, make some great friendships, and share some knowledge.

I'm frankly amazed at how much we've accomplished so quickly. Of course, I've hardly seen my wife this month, but it's going to be an awesome thing when we start seeing the response. If you haven't already, definitely pop over to Five Star Martial Arts and let me know what you think. The "News and Events" page goes into more detail about some of what we're rolling out.

Now, off to work on more great stuff!

Social Marketing - The Real Thing?

"Social Marketing" is the relatively young term for driving customers to your business using the "social" tools of the Internet - Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and all of the other, similar applications that people use to feel connected to one another electronically. Social media is all about sharing every aspect of your life, and businesses hope that through social marketing you'll opt to share their products and services in such a way that members of your network are inspired to buy them as well.

I wouldn't say that I doubted it was possible for social marketing to work - some products and services would seem like great fits, and any really well-developed marketing campaign can succeed if it's thought through carefully enough. But these days, the "buzz" is that you have to do social marketing, sometimes to the exclusion of virtually every other form of product advertising. I was pretty skeptical.

Martial arts schools are one area where I know this thinking is very prevalent. I attended a couple of webinars hoping to learn a bit more about using Facebook, not realizing that they were really just sales pitches by a firm that sells consulting services and software in the martial arts industry. So I got an earful about how dojos need to jettison door hangers, yellow pages ads, and flyers and get with the social media program. Really? I wondered. Can that really work? I mean, they're talking to a guy who gets very few facebook responses to the stuff I post, and who couldn't even get 25 people to "like" the page I administer for the Syracuse Writer's Roundtable (once you have 25 or 30 likes, you get more info about site traffic and can assign it a unique site name. I haven't been able to do either of those things for the Roundtable - there's just not enough traffic, despite my efforts to make it relevant and interesting to people).

Something happened last week to change my mind. Well, I should say that it opened my mind to the possibility that social marketing could possibly work. I'm not sold yet, but I'm not too far away, either.

You see, the karate school my family goes to, Five Star Martial Arts, has put out some terrific deals through more "traditional' media - print ads and through the TV show "Bridge Street." The Bridge Street deal was actually available through their website, but that still doesn't really count as social media. Anyhow, these two "traditional media" offers were pretty similar, and they didn't sell worth a damn. Practically zero interest.

Then they put out virtually the same offer again, this time through Groupon. Groupon is a service that people sign up for, and they send out a "deal of the day" every... well, every day. It might be a deal on a restaurant, a spa treatment, dog grooming, photography services, movie tickets - anything. And it's always at least 50% off the regular price. You have 48 hours to buy the deal, and it's common for people to share it with each other on Facebook or through email. That's the "social networking" part. In fact, the deal doesn't become "active" until a minimum number of people have bought in, so buyers are encouraged in that way to share the deal - so it will activate.

The deal went live on Thursday morning. At 8:33 AM, they hit the minimum purchase quantity of 10, and the deal went live. The dojo's owners were delighted. Based on their previous offers, getting 10 sales was outstanding. They continued to watch the numbers sold: 20, then 35, then 50... All day long, the counter continued to rise. And rise. By the time the deal was up Friday night, they'd sold 220 of the deals. Go ahead, read that again, because it's an amazing number. 220. The same deal that sold not a single offer on Bridge Street had sold beyond anyone's wildest expectations. The people at Groupon were floored - it was the single biggest fitness-related offer they'd ever sold in Syracuse. Turns out, when they did a little research, it was one of the biggest responses they'd had anywhere. It was on par with the kinds of numbers they'd see in places like Miami, which could hold Syracuse's entire population in a couple of neighborhoods.

And at the same time, all of these new customers were banging on their Facebook page (which, granted, is currently their entire web presence. They're working on that). They were "liking" it. They were asking questions (and getting immediate responses, or nearly so). It was exactly how social media is supposed to work.

I still think social marketing works best when you somehow get your numbers up high enough for the buzz you generate just going about your regular business can be self-sustaining and "viral," but I no longer totally doubt that it can work. I've seen it work. Wow. I'm prepared to be a believer.

Attn: Business Owners. You Suck at Facebook

So you've decided you want to promote your business through the magic of social networking. You want to communicate with your customers, share information about your business, and possibly generate revenue by leveraging the friends of your existing customers. That's all well and good, but don't screw it up! For the purposes of this article, I'm going to deal with Facebook because it's far and away the most popular, successful social networking site.

There are a handful of different types of "pages" on Facebook. Choose the wrong one, and you minimize your potential business impact, miss out on useful tools for tracking activity, and even potentially frustrate your customers. Like me.

"Personal" pages - these are sort of the basic Facebook pages. They're intended for real, live, regular people. Not businesses, not celebrities, not associations, not schools, just PEOPLE. DO NOT use this sort of page for your business. I'll discuss why below.

"Group" pages - luckily you can no longer create these, but the old ones still linger. They suck. They were intended for clubs, associations, and other, well, groups who needed a dedicated gathering place online and wanted to control who was able to join. Group pages could be "open," allowing anyone to join, or "closed," where you needed permission to join. DO NOT use this sort of page for your business. Again, I'll explain below.

Here's a picture of what you actually see these days when you click the "create new page" link in Facebook:

"Community" pages - these are sort of the replacement for groups, I think. Sort of. Anyway, they're intended for groups of people who share some common interest, from organizations to charitable causes to political activism. They're not intended for businesses. DO NOT use this sort of page for your business.

An "Official Page" - ah-ha, now we're getting somewhere. These used to be called "fan" pages, because you would click the "fan" button to indicate that you liked the page. You can choose from the list you see above, because Official Pages are meant for businesses (like yours), products, organizations (from sports teams to political parties), and celebrities. THIS is the sort of page to use! Why? Read on!

Personal pages are meant to be used by people, so a lot of the information fields don't really apply to businesses. Plus, networking with a "person" in Facebook is a two-way street. Somebody who wants to network with you must "request" that you become their friend, and you must then accept them. Then you show up on their "friends" list and you are in all other ways treated as a "person" in Facebook. It's incredibly awkward, and may be a turn-off for some potential customers. They don't necessarily want you on their friends list, they just want to see when you're having a sale or a special. Another factor - and I believe it applies to both "Personal" and "Group" pages - is that there's a limit of 5000 "friends" for each type. There's no limit for "Official" business pages - you can have 10,000 people "like" your business. Why limit yourself if you don't have to? Sure, 5000 seems like a lot when you have 0, but by the time you're at 4,999, it'll be way too late to say, "Gee, I wish I'd used a different kind of Facebook page for my business."

Worse, a "Person" page can really only be interacted with by other facebook members. If you want people who might not have joined Facebook (yet) to be able to see your page, they won't.

I'm going to skip over "Group" pages because you cannot create them anymore. If you already have a "Group" page, read on to see the merits of an "Official" page and it should quickly become clear why you're in the wrong place. I'm going to skip "community" pages, too. They're just not the right place for your business because it's not what they were made for. Now, on to "Business" pages.

A properly-configured "Official Business" page on Facebook can be a good marketing tool for you. I actually know of some folks who are convinced that Facebook pages are the be-all, end-all of marketing, supplanting everything businesses have learned about marketing best-practices over the last fifty (or a hundred or a thousand) years. I'm not quite on board with that yet, but there are definitely some strong benefits to be had if you're using a Facebook page to market your business. For instance:

As I noted before, "Official Business" pages don't require you to log in to see what's on their wall. Anybody can come visit your page. AND, Business pages have built-in tools, native to Facebook, that let you monitor traffic to see how many visitors you've had, how active the page was, and other useful information. You DO NOT get this built-in to non-Official pages.

Also, clicking the "like" button on an Official page is a piece of cake. It allows interested Facebook users to follow your messages on their own "News Feed," just like a friend, but it doesn't involve them waiting for you to "approve" them as a friend, nor do you show up on their list of friends.

Best of all, Official Business pages were designed specifically for businesses. They have all the necessary fields for you to explain what your business is all about, and doesn't have all of the goofy fields like "interests" that simply don't apply to a business. An Official Business page will make you look professional and web-savvy. It allows you to turn on various "applications" such as discussion forums, coupons and special offers, special events, and even a customized "Welcome Page." If you learn the Facebook-specific HTML (or hire somebody who knows it), you can even tie those applications or the "Start Page" into other websites or databases. You can control access to things like coupons or special offers so that they're only available once people "like" your page. Once you have 25 "likes," you can even set up a custom short-name for your Facebook page so people can find it more easily. Simply, an "Official Business" makes you look like you know what you're doing, and any other type of page makes it look like you don't. Plain and simple.

So from one Facebook user to another, please, please, business owners, get it together. Do it right. It'll make everybody's life easier and really help contribute to growing your business.