reDesign

September 1, 2008

Your customers are Twits

Filed under: advertising, customer service, lbs, local search, marketing, social networking, twitter — Rocky Agrawal @ 3:58 pm

Last year, I blogged about how local businesses could use Twitter to reach their customers. In that hypothetical example, a street vendor would let regulars know whether he was working or not.

A number of large companies, including Zappos, Comcast and jetBlue are already using Twitter to engage with their customers. As Twitter’s popularity grows, it will cease to be a tenable channel for customer service.

But for local businesses, it’ll be a great opportunity. Witness this exchange between Twitter developer Alex Payne and 21st Amendment Brewery.

Twitter exchange between Alex Payne and 21st Amendment brewery

Twitter exchange between Alex Payne and 21st Amendment brewery

Three of the big challenges in getting local business online are that it’s too expensive, too complicated and too hard to prove the return. A Twitter presence can address all three:

  • It’s free.
  • It’s easy. You don’t have to create a Web site to reach your customers. If you don’t have one, your Web presence can be your Twitter page. Not ideal, but better than nothing — at least it’ll get you into search engines. If you do have one, you can autoflow Twitter updates to your Web page making it easy to keep your Web presence fresh.
  • It’s easier to prove return on investment. Twitter can improve both the “R” and the “I”. You can see who’s following your business, showing return. Because there is no cost and the effort is lower, the investment is lower.

There are a number of ways businesses can use Twitter:

  • Specials of the day. “Soup of the day: tomato basil”
  • Special events. “Windsor Cooley book signing Friday night” “Closed for private party”
  • New products. “Transcontinental IPA on tap at the 21A”
  • Problems. “Closed due to broken water pipe”

The immediacy of Twitter also offers a way to do real-time inventory management. Have an especially slow night and food going to waste? Send out a tweet with a special discount.

More on: Twitter

Why don’t local businesses use the Internet?

Filed under: advertising, lbs, local search, marketing, newspapers, yellow pages — Rocky Agrawal @ 2:15 pm
John makes a burrito with his goose sauce

John makes a burrito with his goose sauce

Back in the mid 90s, I frequented The Weinery, a total dive of a hot dog place in the Cedar/Riverside area of Minneapolis. Jerry, the then owner, collected email addresses and would occasionally send out specials. Say the password when you placed your order and you got a discount.

The other day, I received an email from John at Pedro & Vinny’s. John ran a burrito cart in downtown DC. (I wrote about John’s honor system earlier.) He moved away a while back. Friday’s email announced that his burritos will be hitting the DC streets soon.

But John and Jerry are rare among small business owners. In the last 13 years, Internet use has exploded and tools have gotten easier and easier. Yet few local businesses do a good job of communicating with their existing customers and reaching out to new customers.

To be fair, they haven’t been in the habit of advertising. Before the Internet, the key local outlets were newspapers, television, radio and the yellow pages. You essentially had to buy the entire DMA for thousands of dollars. Direct mail (Valpak etc.) and Entertainment coupon books were among the few options that made economic sense.

The Internet has drastically changed the economics. Publishers can slice and dice virtually infinite inventory into smaller and smaller buckets and make advertising affordable for small businesses.

So why aren’t small businesses advertising online?

  • No one is asking them.  Publishers (by and large) haven’t changed their compensation systems for sales reps. If I were a sales rep, I’d much rather work on selling the full page ad for $10,000 than an online presence for $100.
  • It’s too complicated. Search advertising seems like a prime opportunity for local businesses because it can be highly targeted. But the interfaces and the structures are well beyond the skills or interests of small business owners. They’re too busy running their businesses to run keyword campaigns.
  • They’ve been burned. Most restaurant sites look like they were built solely to show off the Flash skills of the design firm. The restaurateur spent hundreds or thousands of dollars for a site that doesn’t drive any foot traffic because it’s unusable and doesn’t show up in search results (because everything is Flash or an image).
  • It’s hard to see the return. Online advertising is a slam dunk for businesses that can complete the transaction online. They can see what they’re getting for their money. It’s harder to show that value to businesses that rely on foot traffic.
  • No need #1. In a town of 500 people, there’s no need to advertise. Everyone knows who you are.
  • No need #2. If you’re the hot new restaurant in town and there’s always a wait to get a table, why spend money on ads?

Taking the “dead” out of the dead tree media

Filed under: journalism, media, newspapers, wikipedia — Rocky Agrawal @ 1:48 pm

Last week we saw that Steve Jobs died. The week before, we learned that Barack Obama chose Chet Edwards to be his running mate.

Both were the results of slips by news organizations. Bloomberg prematurely put Jobs’ obituary across the wire, apparently after someone had just finished updating it. The Los Angeles Times released various versions of a story about Obama’s vice presidential pick featuring likely candidates and a couple of long shots. (I wonder if they had a version ready for McCain picking Palin.)

News organizations routinely prepare and update profiles on famous people to be ready to go when something big happens. In one odd case, the author of The Washington Post’s obituary of Gerald Ford died 11 months before Ford.

The big mistake isn’t that news organizations accidentally release the work like they have in the last few weeks; it’s that they don’t keep that work online to begin with. All of this time and effort goes into maintaing these stories and they only see the light of day when someone dies or otherwise makes news. The profiles of Chet Edwards, Kathleen Sebelius, Evan Bayh and others written by the Los Angeles Times are valuable, even though they weren’t selected to be Obama’s running mate.

Think about the people pages you could create with such profiles. They could be linked to from within news stories to provide users context or serve as a standalone reference. Think of the Google juice!

One thing that computers suck at and humans excel at is analyzing and synthesizing information. Compare the Post’s automatically generated page on DC mayor Adrian Fenty with the Adrian Fenty page on Wikipedia. For someone looking for a summary of Fenty, the Wikipedia page is the clear winner. The Post page requires the reader to read and synthesize many stories. (This page, incidentally, is the page that washingtonpost.com automatically links to on Fenty stories.)

The Post surely has an obit ready to go in its system with a profile similar to the Wikipedia page. But that more helpful page won’t be available until Fenty dies.

To be sure, that information isn’t updated as often as Wikipedia. But the edited profiles along with automatically generated recent stories would be a big improvement over what exists today. It would be even better if significant stories were highlighted versus run of the mill daily stories.

Even the list of people for the reporter to call for quotes at the top of the Jobs’ obituary is valuable to readers who are trying to understand a subject. The list includes Steve Wozniak, Heidi Roizen, Bob Iger, Al Gore and John Lassiter. Think of the page views!

The problem is old line thinking in newsrooms that revolves around traditional media. The assembly line mentality needs to go.

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