Category: Blog

It’s a jungle out there on social media. Between countless United meme’s to even beloved celebrities getting called out for seemingly innocent remarks, it can be a minefield for big companies navigating the social jungle. But one company has recently been killing it on social: Wendys.

Two imparticular instances recently:

1. Street fight with Hardees.
   Wendy’s has really started to own the brand of being a fast food chain in this era. They have fun social media and are not afraid to step on a few toes. In the below altercation, a Wendy’s fan and a Hardees fan have a little beef on twitter. The offical Hardee’s and Wendy’s accounts get in on it. Wendy’s starts off with just a little shade and Hardee’s trys to take it up a notch. Bad move. Wendy’s rebuttals well and really cap it off with the ‘lol they blocked us’ comment.
   
2. #NuggsforCarter
   The internet is fun for a lot of reasons. One of which is that it removes gate keepers and brings everyone on to the same playing field. 20 years ago if some random guy asked Wendy’s what it would take to get a year of free nuggets, whatever store manager he was talking to would have just starred at him like a crazy person. Today, with a fun twitter account, a brand can interface with someone like Carter and have a bunch of free social media coverage from all over the world.

Some big brands have tried to give Carter a push for his nugs:

This a great example of how to handle a fun brand on social media today! Wendy’s is winning!

 

 

I owe a lot of people for helping me get the point I am today. But over time it has come clear to me that at least a few personalities helped shape my path more than others. One who provided freedom, one who provided permission, and one who provided motivation. This week we are going to look at freedom.

Of course, I mean William Wallace (or Mel Gibson). Just kidding!

I mean Dave Ramsey. My wife and I did not start out our marriage as a Dave Ramsey couple, but sometime in the first year, I started listening. Originally I had always thought Dave was just an arrogant talk radio guy and was just always yelling to get ratings.  But during an Entreleadership live broadcast at my then workplace I heard Dave’s heart about what he does and I gave him another try.

From there Renae and I got on the program and started working toward financial freedom. We worked hard and creatively to pay off our student loans and live within our means. We lived in a crappy apartment for the first 3 years of marriage and saved up a big downpayment on a house. We continued to live within our means as we got better jobs and raises.

Something you might not expect from someone who started his own business is: I am actually risk adverse. But this financial freedom, having no debt except the house and living within our means, severely lessened the risk of striking it out on my own.

It allowed us to continue to live on my wife’s salary and the cash from a part-time job I took on when I launched the business. This gave me the mental freedom to not be stressed under the weight of starting a new business all the time. I was able to quit that job 8 months in! Because I was focusing on building the business instead of making quick cash to survive, it also gave me the freedom to make long-term decisions instead of short-term decisions.

Long-term decision making is always better than short-term. 

When I am talking with people who are thinking of starting their own business one of the things I bring up is how much debt they have. If they can minimize that debt before they jump ship, they will be in a much better place to start. Those additional monthly expenses make it much hard to survive when starting out. That burden will make prematurely returning to a ‘real’ job, before you really have the time and work invested to see if your business is going work out, to likely.

Thank you, Dave, for helping us find financial freedom! It is allowing us to do great things!

I make stark raving fans.

Well, at least I try to. Sometimes it’s out of my control. But as far as it goes with me, I try my best to meet and exceed my customer’s expectations. When I am able to make customers into fans, I am able to create a base of people who want me to succeed as well as pay me. It’s a great combo.

How do I do that? I am still figuring it out, but here are some thoughts:

Deliver:
Make it happen. Everytime. Sometimes you land the plane with no sleep or in the Hudson, but you still land the plane. When it comes to delivering on a project, you need to be willing to move heaven and earth to accomplish something you said you would do. Failing to deliver is not a way to make stark raving fans.

Being willing to say: I don’t know or that I was wrong.
I make mistakes sometimes and sometimes I don’t know the best solution for my client. I am willing to refer people out to a better solution. (Most) People appreciate honesty. I tend, to be honest enough to lose business sometimes and so far it’s worked out really well.
When you make a mistake, be willing to take a hit financially as well. If I screwed something up, I am willing to take a hit financially and have. But offering your customer a discount or a refund on a mistake is treating the customer right and that is a great way to make a stark raving fan.

Answer the phone/ talk with everyone:
I love learning about other people’s businesses. Because of that and general human decency, I talk to everyone who wants to meet with me. This can be time-consuming, but you never know where the next meeting might lead.

I also answer the phone. Let me be clear when I say answer the phone, I mean I call everyone back. My phone is almost always on silent and especially during times of focus, I leave my phone out of reach so I can get some work done. So I will call all my customers back in a timely manner, every time, every day. Communication with customers is a key component of building stark raving fans.

Don’t nickel and dime people:
I quote things by the project. This pricing allows me to take care of everything people need and not has to keep coming back to them for more funding. So when I give them a price for social media content creation and management, that includes photos and video. When we build a website that includes content creation and strategy.

This also means going above and beyond the contract sometime. When it’s needed sometimes you need to do that extra thing, beyond the original scope of the project. But it is that kind of effort that can make start raving fans.

You can read part 1 of this series here and part 2 here.

 

Every chance I get to share my expertise I take it.

Click here to read part 1 in this series.

I believe strongly in the positioning as an expert branding technique. The more people who understand that I know what I am talking about when it comes to marketing the better. How do I do this? I tell them about it. This serves to purposes: 1. It puts me in front of people and expands my network. 2. It helps build my position as someone who is worth paying money for marketing.

How do I do that?

CO: communicate: I co-host a monthly event on social media at theCO with Austin Thompson of Thompson Industries (This also doubles as work toward the first portion of my marketing scheme). Each month we give away for free knowledge about how to use social media for business. While I expect none of these students to become customers, what it does is helps position me as an expert on small business social media in Jackson. This is a long term play for sure, but I believe it will pay off.

Speaking at Community Events: Anytime I am invited to speak at a function, I take it. Every chance, I get to speak on marketing or entrepreneurship, I see it as an opportunity to further grow my influence. Even if this is just to students who are looking at marketing, I dive in! You never know what will come of an opportunity you have available. Just this week some potential business came from a community event from over a year ago!

The ROI on this is hard to determine sometimes, but it is there!

That being said, if you need someone to come and talk about marketing or entrepreneurship, I would love too! Just drop me a line!

Click here to read part 3 in this series. 

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This month’s social media win comes from an unlikely source, a utility company. A utility company at first blush is not an exciting venture: generate power and delivering it to people’s homes. Most people think about a utility company about as much as they think of a long snapper in football, which is usually only when they mess up.

That is why this social post caught my attention. It was doing really well and had 158 thousand views from a video put out by a utility company. The video is a 360-degree video of a helicopter delivering someone to the top of a power structure. That lineman then climbs off the helicopter and onto the structure. It also had over 1000 shares which is a great engagement stat!

It’s pretty awesome. Watch it here. 

It led to some great comments from people who were reminded that they are glad someone else does the dirty work. Including the lineman’s mom, which is super sweet!

This is a great example of documenting instead of creating content. This shows us that even conceptually boring industries can create compelling content!

 

Great job TVA!

 

 

To be honest, the idea of writing this post seems like a bad idea. But I know that ideas are free, it is the execution costs. I invest lots of time and money into doing these and these ideas won’t work for everyone. So here is week one of my three pillars of marketing myself:

(ALSO NOTE: While some of this may make me seem pretty mercenary in my actions, this is only one of the many motivations behind my actions. Other things factor into my decision making besides business, like my faith in Christ.)

Be a Great Community Member.

It is easy to start a business and just take, take, take. But as part of my personal philosophy and part as a marketing strategy, it’s a great thing to give back to the community and to be involved.  I love it when you can kill two birds with one stone. But there are limits to what someone can do and I regularly tell people, no. Because I want to do the things I am committed to well. Here is how I work out being a great community member as I think about allocating my time:

Be a great CO Member: I love theCO. I will tell anyone who will listen that theCO is a great place. I owe a lot of my success to the referrals and relationships I have built through theCO. So because of that, I want to invest back in theCO. I teach classes, give tours, help out new members, even move tables and chairs every once in a while. The relationship I have with theCO has been beneficial for both of us and I will be ever grateful for the crucial role it has played in my success.

Be a great Chamber Member: The Chamber of Commerce in Jackson is a great organization and a great customer. This has come after lots of time invested and some dollars (member fees and event fees). By showing up to events, being an asset to their staff, and even serving on the Leadership University board, I have built relationships that have helped lead to business and referrals.

Be a great Board Member: One of the best things about being self-employed is the flexibility in schedules and priorities that if offers. This has allowed me to dedicate a good amount of time to being a great board member at Madison County CASA over the last couple of years. By taking on this responsibility and doing well at it, it has helped be build new relationships in the community.

Click here to read Part 2 and Part 3.

 

The third phase of the ‘Know, Like, Trust” mentality is helping someone build a long lasting relationship with you. Each phase of this process is helping someone go deeper into building a relationship with you.

Trusting is by definition: showing or tending to have a belief in a person’s honesty or sincerity; not suspicious.

I have seen this repeatedly over the last few months in my own business. Several people have heard my name enough from enough people that they were willing to come and spend money with me. First, they heard about me (know)  and secondly, they liked me enough to know more about me. Thirdly, because of good words spoken about me by others they trusted me enough to make the call.

And the bigger the purchase the important the trust factor of this relationship becomes. Selling a burger? Trust is not as important, selling a house, trust is super important.

On the flip side, if you violate someone’s trust, whether you are selling a burger or a house, the consequences will be the same. That customer will avoid you and speak badly about you to the community.

So how do you build that good word of mouth to build trust? Create star raving fans by doing what you say you are going to do and going the extra mile. One of the best things about the way I am building my business is that people frequently come to be with some trust already because of the people I have already done business with or helped in the community.

These are investments that will pay dividends for years.

Social Media is the best source of marketing. One of the hard things about it (and one of the reasons it will be around for a long time) is that it is always changing and making updates. Instagram has been making some neat changes lately.

1. Galleries- Instagram will now allow someone to upload galleries of different pictures. There has been some great utilization of this already by different brands. One of which was the NFL who honored DeMarcus Ware’s retirement by showing all the quarterbacks he sacked in his career, with icons on several different screens of the gallery. One of the questions will be is how is user engagement in the galleries compared to posting mulitple pictures or s grid layout.
2. Heart-ing Comments- I am super thankful for this one! This makes interacting with the community much faster. For a while, Instagram did not have the equivalent of the like button for comments, which meant writing a comment to thank people for interacting.
3. Story update: Font color- If you press on the color bar when selecting colors for your fonts, it will bring up a color picking screen. This is great if your company has brand colors that are super important to its marketing.
   
4. Story update: Sticker Change- Most people don’t know that if you tap on a sticker you change it to another variation of the same principle. This works really well in the weather and location stickers.
   
5. Story update: Live Live has recently rolled out to all users. Live on Instagram differs from live on Facebook in one key way: Instagram live is there and then it is gone. So if you are going to use live, be sure to have some lead up content to build an audience!
6. Saved Things- Now you can save things from your feed to a special saved item menu. This is great for saving inspiration. I use to save good examples of graphic design so I can have a central deposit for inspiration. 
7. Links in Stories: This is only for verified accounts right now but it allows for call to actions within a story with swipe up. I hope we get these soon!
   

The second phase is marketing your business is to get people to Like you and this is not just a Facebook Like. This is helping someone see that you are an alright person and someone they wouldn’t mind doing business with. Some of these steps will vary based on how large your business is or what your product is. But here are some general thoughts on getting people to like your business.

The biggest part of this is personal relationships. Most of the time, people buy from people. This means that getting to know people is very important to this strategy. How do you get to know people? It is more than just handing out business cards at a networking event. It’s then having lunch with someone and talking about more than just business. There may be programs in your area like Leadership Jackson in mine that will help you build relationships with a group of varied people. The key to relationships like this is that they run deeper than just business help.

Another element is corporate community giving of either time or money. When your company donates time or money to a cause you have the opportunity to build some affection from the community. If your company is known as one that gives more than its share, people will be more likely to choose you to do business with over a similar competitor. This is amplified by people who care a lot about certain causes, the biggest fans of that cause will soon become your biggest fans if you align the cause properly with your business.

The third way and something social media is allowing to do is associating your brand with good feelings. We have seen this becoming more popular with the advent of social media. Big charity events or even just doing cool things for fans is a great way for people to like you. An example comes to mind with a cellular carrier. These feelings can range from just funny or to a deep emotional joy.

These are a few ideas on getting people to like your company. We will look next time on getting people to trust your company.