Umami Burger: Social Media Marketing Done Well
I’m writing this in a post Hatch Burger euphoric state of mind, so forgive any rambling thoughts or typos: I’m in heaven.
My trip to famed Umami Burger would not have even been a thought in my head, had it not been for their social media efforts, specifically on Twitter. It all started when I posted a pin from my Pinterest file “Say What?” about a Knork – Spork’s knife/fork cousin. Umami picked up on my tweet and responded (assuming they were monitoring the keyword “Knork”), proudly announcing they now had this freak of utensil at their restaurants.
Their tweet triggered something in me. For those of you who are fortunate to have enjoyed one of LA’s top burger spots: You know what I’m talking about. I got to thinking about Umami, more specifically, my favorite menu item: the Hatch Burger, which is topped with roasted green chilies and house-made American cheese on the best brioche bun around … I digress.
A couple of tweets later, they had me converted into a paying customer, as I was calling to place a takeout order. My world soon came to a screeching halt, when, after several rings, I got the machine. Umami happened to tweet me as this was happening, I responded that I was disappointed they were closed on a Monday. They immediately switched from Marketer to Customer Service rep, tweeting me their La Brea location’s hours, verifying that I used the correct number (I had). I called back – something I wouldn’t have done, had they not been in communication with me via Twitter at that very moment. This time: success. Ten minutes later I was at Umami, checking in on Foursquare; my food, fresh and hot from the kitchen, waiting for me at the counter. Another 10 minutes later, I was home, posting a pic of my burger to Instagram. Another 20 minutes later, I’m writing this blog post.
Granted not everyone Umami tweets will be like me: an existing, enthusiastic (and hungry) fan, who is extremely tech savvy, influential online and boasts almost 13,000 Twitter followers. But they managed to catch me during a perfect storm, and from their social media marketing and customer service efforts, converted me into a paying guest. In turn, I shared my experience across several social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and WordPress – embodying what interactive marketing is all about: reputation management, engagement, advertising and the coveted word-of-mouth marketing.
Umami didn’t get me just from this one interaction. They do an excellent job of having a presence across many platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, Tumblr, Flickr, and beyond – posting updates and quickly responding to customers online. Their consistently engaging posts have planted many seeds over the past few weeks – today’s tweet session was the tipping point. And I’ll be back; not only because I love their food, but they keep reminding me via Facebook and Twitter just how good it really is.
By Gretchen Schneider, Principal, Interactive Marketing. Gretchen lives and breathes all things social media. Based in Los Angeles, she oversees the interactive division for treadsocial, working with brands and personalities to strategically market themselves in an integrated, engaging manner online.
Klout! Why hath you forsaken me?
Is it possible I’m not as cool as I thought I was? Quite likely. But Klout: Why do you have to throw it in my face and announce it to the world? As most people know the social influence rating machine that is Klout revamped its algorithm in an effort to make user scores more accurate. Although, Klout CEO Joe Fernandez claims most people will be positively affected by the changes, I have to disagree. I have yet to meet anyone who has benefitted from the change.
Today, my score dropped yet again. I’m now down from 66 to 54 and officially joining #OccupyKlout. I’ve done everything in my power to raise the score. I’ve been retweeting, posting engaging content, talking to my tweeps more than ever. So what gives, Klout? How do I get in your good graces again? Should I even care?
This morning John Scalzi, guest columnist @CNNMoneyTech canceled his Klout account, and in a blog suggested the service to be “evil.” Why? Scalzi points out that no one really knows what algorithm Klout uses, therefore we have no clue what data they are pulling to create these arguably arbitrary scores. Furthermore, who made them God?
Scalzi goes on to point out that Klout just causes “status anxiety — to saddle you with a popularity ranking, and then make you feel insecure about it and whether you’ll lose that ranking unless you engage in certain activities that aren’t necessarily in your interest, but are in Klout’s.”
I’m still not convinced about the relevance of Klout and how much impact my increasingly mediocre will have on my online cred. I am not ready to cancel my account, but I am getting close. I’m definitely questioning the benefits for my clients and holding off on adding them to Klout for the time being. Anyone else jumping ship?
The United States of Twitter
Our friends at Geekologie have released this interesting map “America According to Twitter,” which highlights the city kick names Twitter users list as their locations. I’m from Columbus, Ohio and have never heard it called “Bucktown,” but the others seem familiar. Sending love from my new place in the States, El Lay.
10 ways to be more interesting on Twitter
Great post from our friend Ciaoenrico on tips to be more engaging on Twitter. To us, this isn’t groundbreaking news, but we know how little people know out there and see users screwing up their Twitter every day. Use these rules to make the most of your 140 characters: you will be amazed how your numbers grow and people start engaging.
Please watch. 10 ways to be more interesting on Twitter.
Are you Google ready? Tips on using social sites to optimize your SEO
There are many reasons for a brand to establish a presence on social networks: Customer Relations, Reputation Management, Engagement, and (what we consistently recommend to clients) to increase search engine optimization (SEO). This helpful blog Optimizing Social for SEO: A Three -Step Beginners Guide was recently posted on MediaPost. Here are their tactics that we found quite useful.
- Claim your social profiles. It’s vital to grabbing your brand name across all social networks. Having a presence on social sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will instantly increase your visibility on Google by taking advantage of their SEO.
- Connect your profiles. The blog suggests that after you have claimed all your profiles, to connect them on Google Profile through a few easy steps.
- Establish a Google company ID.
- Then fill out all the information you can on your Google Profile including all of your associate’s social media profiles.
- Engage on social media. Follow others and engage with them across your social networks. “After you’ve told Google via the Google Profile what your social media profile IDs are, Google can then make the connection with who the followers of those profiles are — and thus connect them with the social circle.”
12 tips on getting started on Facebook Pages
You’ve finally realized it’s time to get set up a Facebook Page for your brand. And why not? With Facebook’s nearly 700 million users and its updated Pages features, which make marketing a breeze (compared to the olden days…), you’re a fool not to. Having a Facebook presence also takes advantage of their SEO, which will help pop you to to the top of the list on most searches. In fact, Bing have deepened their relationship with Facebook to take “social search” to new heights.
So where do you begin? Here are a few tips on where to start from your friends at BuzzRocket.
IMMEDIATE
- Establish a Corporate Social Media Policy, which will advise your associates on how to behave online. Example: Bashing the company online is a fireable offense. Click here for a more complete rundown from BusinessWeek.
- Establish Brand Standards that your associates must adhere to when posting anything on your social properties, or if they are discussing the company on their social sites, they must speak within the brand/communications standards.
- Set up the Twitter app on all Facebook Pages so that all Facebook Posts automatically get posted onto the respective Twitter page. (We recommend this for the less tech-savvy folks out there. Once you get used to using Facebook and Twitter, you should get set up with a Twitter client like Hootsuite, which will track your tweets, and offers invaluable analytic information.
- If you are a location-based brand, make sure you list your page as a “Place” so users can check into your branded Page.
- Sign onto Facebook as your Page and “Like” all the Pages of the brands you work with, or with whom you want to stay in contact. Once you do this, those Page’s posts will appear in the newsfeed and make it easy for you to keep up with what they are posting.
- Suggest your Page to your friends. Do this via Facebook and by uploading your e-mail lists into Facebook.
- Identify strategic partners and develop a network on Facebook and request that they send out a message on their Facebook Pages welcoming you to Facebook and suggesting that their fans “Like” your Page.
ONGOING
- Post frequently. At least once a day. We would suggest 2 posts a day. Say you’re a restaurant operator: Mix it with informative (daily lunch/dinner special), engaging (ask a question: We’re featuring Brancott Sauvignon Blanc this week! What’s your favorite white wine varietal?) Post images with people from your establishment. People like seeing people.Post Events and Images
- Post sales, specials, news
- Answer all questions fans and followers ask on Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis
- Link comments back to other pages (This feature has been disabled over the past few days. We’re hoping it returns!)
- Reshare and comment on other Page’s posts that make sense for you. If you are a coffee shop and your local newspaper posts something about the best lattes in the city, you can comment on their post as the coffee shop, which increases your visibility and further markets your brand. RESOURCES – Facebook changes almost on a daily basis. We suggest keeping up with things online since most info out there goes bad quicker than a bottle of red left uncorked overnight.
Hootsuite makes good
Many of you out there felt the pain of the massive Hootsuite outage, which left its users without service for more than 15 hours last Thursday. We manage a lot of accounts and can only do so by using a service like Hootsuite, which allows you to monitor and publish countless accounts to Facecbook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more from their social media management website and mobile app. For people like us: it’s a godsend.
So it was a welcome surprise yesterday that Hootsuite, a service from which 1 million updates a day are posted, sent out an apology email to its Pro and Enterprise users for the outage. According to the email, “Our Terms of Service to our users outlines that we’ll provide refunds after a 24 hour outage. While this incident was significantly less, we acknowledge users were inconvenienced and we want to make things right. With this in mind, we are offering a credit for HootSuite’s Social Analytics.”
So now we have 50 credits (worth $50), which will be applied to our analytic reports. The best thing is that now we finally know how much a credit costs, which has been a question since Hootsuite launched their new, user unfriendly analytics back in March. We love the analytic information, but the reports can be pricy and each form cannot be used again. But clients seem to be dazzled by the colorful graphs offered on the free analytic template, so maybe we’re just being snobby. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Facebook Fan Page Engagement
Visibli recently posted an interesting study, which analyzed more than 200 million Facebook Fans to determine the engagement habits of three different fan types: artist, brand and media.
One thing we as marketers often struggle with is how often to post. The Visibli study shows that posts get 50 percent of their “Likes” within the first hour and 20 minutes. Sixty percent are accounted for after 2 hours and 15 minutes. We have seen brands that post too often lose fans, which is not the case for artists. People want to connect with another person. It’s less invasive. While brands don’t get as much love as an actual person, these numbers show that posts on Facebook are more resilient than those on Twitter.
They had some rather surprising findings. First was that Audi USA had more fan engagement than social media superstars Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga! Visibli found that for every post Audi made, there were more than 225 “Likes” per 100,000 fans. Bieber came in second with more than 180 “Likes” per 100,000 fans.
The study also found that for artists, as their fan numbers grew, so did the engagement, which was not the case for media and brands.
Click here to check out the full report. It’s a pretty interesting read.
Social Media Monitoring – Who’s using it and how?
Once again Flowtown has created an informative chart: This time on social media monitoring tools. Anyone working in social media has to quantify their work, and we’re always looking for the most accurate way to do so. This is an interesting look at what’s out there, who’s using it and how. We found it most interesting to see that the majority of people using Twitter have just one account, and 23.4 percent are on Twitter solely for personal use. Click here for the full report.
foursquare secures your check-ins
Following the lead of most major social networking sites, foursquare is now using https across all its websites. In layman’s terms, as they put it on a Twitter post, “For non-nerds: this means foursquare is even more secure.”
Recently Facebook and Twitter also have announced using https, which encrypts your information so that people cannot access it, even in insecure locations like wifi hotspots. We hope this will encourage more activity on foursquare, which is the most fun, especially with its recent iPhone and iPad app overhaul. Points, badges, deals. We can’t get enough.
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