Make belief – The official blog of Renaissance Creative

A favorite hobby of bloggers who specialize in social media and online communities is producing elaborate infographics to prove a point. Most of them are interesting, but a few really drive the point home.

Here’s a good example of that from ZDNet’s Enterprise 2.0 blog about community management:

Earlier this week I attended a strategy session with Social Media Club — Jacksonville, for the domestic violence shelter Hubbard House. During the two-hour session we examined the status of Hubbard House’s current social media strategy, and looked for opportunities where they could grow.

A theme that came up consistently throughout is the “time” dilemma: There are these social media platforms that your company or brand should be using, but everyone is stretched so thin that the time just is not there to make anything work.

It happens to bloggers, too.  It even has a name, called “blogger fatigue.”

Here’s what I told the people from Hubbard House to help them overcome this problem and move onward to a sustainable and realistic social media strategy:

Earlier today I posted a Tweet about an article I read in eMarketer, titled “Big potential For In-Store Mobile Marketing”. A few minutes later, a reply came in asking me what I thought it meant for SMBs.

The entire article is fascinating, but I found this part the most insightful:

As more in-store shoppers—especially millennials, who are used to turning to their mobile phone to stay connected anytime, anywhere—become mobile web users, demand for an in-store experience that takes advantage of web capabilities will only grow.

Developing and executing an in-store mobile marketing strategy can be expensive, which is why it will mostly be done by larger companies with numerous brick and mortar stores. However, opportunities exist for small and medium-sized businesses to develop a more cost-effective strategy for developing an in-store mobile marketing strategy.

When talking about social media with a skeptic, I like to remind them that social media has been around for about 10 years, and blogs have been around for closer to 15. Only in the last two years has social media become commercially viable. I whip out that line whenever I hear people dismiss a new evolution in the social media space as being a ‘fad’ or purposeless.

The latest evolution in social media, geolocation, has dealt with the same withering criticism by non-users. The difference is that the commercial applications of geolocation are much clearer than they are with Facebook or Twitter. There are many companies and services vying for geolocation users’ hearts, but right now that crown belongs to Foursquare.

Geolocation’s early adopters who saw the commercial appeal included Starbucks, who signed a deal with Foursquare to promote their Frappuccino Beverage by offering a discount to the “Mayors” of individual Starbucks locations.

Now it has begun to trickle down to SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses), who are also beginning to offer discounts and benefits to customers who “check-in” at their store.

Here are some tips that SMBs can use to engage their customers, encourage them to check-in and get them to tell their friends:

When I say “social media training,” I don’t mean teaching your employees to be sitting at a computer, monitoring conversations and replying to people. Instead, what I’m talking about is ensuring that their actions are bringing attention to your company’s social media presence.

In Wednesday’s post I made reference to our client III Forks — Jacksonville. I’m going to reference them again, because they’re a good example of the opportunities that exist in ensuring that your employees are working to nurture the company’s online communities.

In a restaurant setting, the opportunities for using social media are great and applicable across almost every area of the restaurant operations. III Forks is a dinner-only restaurant, which changes things a bit. Here are some examples of how social media can be implemented across the restaurant operation: