Social media works 24/7/365. That means nights and weekends. And it is creating a donut hole for small to medium-sized business, making them seem out-of-touch instead of connected. Follow me on this.

For twitter to work well, someone has to be at the switch pretty much 24/7. The old adage, “A lie will make its way half way round the world before the truth even gets out of bed” is fairly accurate. Ask Dominos, Amazon, Target or any other brand that has suffered a twitterstorm (though less in vogue nowadays) if they wished they worked weekends. Amazon does, but their lawyers don’t, at least not for the normal day rate.

For one-man shows like most of the twitter and social media elite, social media is not an issue. They are on 24/7/365 anyway. The cost of their labor is cheap and they are able to monitor their brand whenever, wherever it is being discussed. They are also the ones quick to berate brands for not responding sooner, by not making their brand more human, etc, etc. For the very large brands who have money to staff up 24/7/365, the issue goes away just by making someone a Community Manager and staffing up a department.

But for small to medium-sized companies, we’re out here kinda screwed by the Social Media donut hole. Sure, you can hire someone to be “on call” and mandate they check the social media accounts regularly on evenings, weekends and early mornings and many will gladly do it, relishing their flexible work conditions. But, as anyone who has ever work “flexible hours” knows, it becomes apparent that the flex is all about the flexibility for the company, not the employee. If flex favored employees, then they would have the option of NOT being available to respond.

And resentment builds and somebody somewhere has enough of being taken advantage of and calls in a State labor board who has an entirely different view on what constitutes “working hours.” That flexible position that you created in response to the market need quickly becomes about the most expensive you’ve ever created with lawyer fees, labor board responses, unemployment hearing and eventual back taxes and overtime pay. What you see as flexibility, the State see as indentured servitude.

The current expectations of social media are unsustainable by small to medium-sized companies. In response, most just do nothing as the return is not worth even the labor investment. And labor laws are not flexible enough to make human 24/7/365 social media monitoring a viable option for many. Some resort to automated response which exacerbates the issue in the minds of the social media purists.

I’d love for some of our brands to be more real-time with social media, but until labor laws catches up with the real world realities of the modern workplace, those social media plans are on hold. Monday mornings will just very busy here.

Originally published at GerardMcLean.com

Belly buttons = real people, in real life, living, breathing and buying.

In our always online world, we tend to forget that soccer tournament website visitors, unique pages views and hits mean absolutely nothing to sponsors and advertisers unless there is some action that follows. That action is almost always a trip to the store, restaurant or shop, followed by a purchase. Nothing else really matters.

Our Advice: Don’t just take sponsorship/advertising orders and artwork for your soccer tournament. Help the advertiser collect belly buttons as well. In the TourneyCentral advertising module, there are opportunities to “sell” the goods and services of your sponsors and advertisers through uploaded brochures and coupons, expanded deal copy and video. In addition, any listing can be linked to a Twitter or Facebook account to further push the belly buttons to the advertiser.

When you hook up your soccer tournament twitter account to your website in the Web Site Maint. Module, any news that you post on your front page will automatically be sent to anyone following you. You can also plug the goods and services of your DEALS sponsors and advertisers with every email you send out to your teams.

While you may not want to overdo the selling to the teams, going the extra mile and letting sponsors and advertisers know you are doing it will help sell more ads in the future.

So quit selling ads and eyeballs and start selling belly buttons. It makes the game a lot more profitable and a whole lot sexier.

Originally published at TourneyCentral.com

Over a month has passed and I still have one question a participant asked, playing over and over in my head. It went something like;

I don’t have the time to wax philosophically about the retail marketing industry. Why do I need a blog?

I answered his question as I do anytime someone tells me they don’t need a blog or have time to write a blog. The short answer goes something like this: Your blog is your web site and your web site is your blog. Quit making the distinction.

Your primary audience is now a machine
It used to be you marketed your web site to customers and other human beings. Now, you market to search engines (SEM — Search Engine Marketing) as most searches now start on Google or Bing. Your primary audience in the search engine and your end audience is a C-Suite executive. In order to be a visible business, you have to show up first on the search engines and then punch your way out of that to a human being. If your website can’t do that, you just don’t make the short list of vendors.

It turns out that blogging software like WordPressor MovableType is set up to easily work with search engines by being SEO and SEM-friendly. It is also easy to quickly and prolifically add optimized content to your website. In fact, if you go out to the Internet right now, it is hard to tell a “blog” from a “web site” any more as many “blogs” function primarily as CMS (Content Management Systems) ICC/Decision Services (iccds.com) is one such site. My employer’s web site Rivershark Inc (rivershark.com) is another example.

It’s all about the keywords
How do potential clients describe what you do? In plain language, please. For example, a plumber does not “provide a comprehensive whole-house fluid distribution and waste removal solution.” He unclogs drains and toilets, installs faucets and fixes leaks. When determining keywords, think like a potential clients trying to find a solution to their problem in ways they identify the problem.

Everything you write for your website — from press releases to about pages to articles — focuses on those keywords.

Adding content rapidly and frequently is critical
A search engine indexes pages, not web sites. Once your services, about us and contact us page is indexed, that pretty much it. With nothing left to do with your site, the search engine indexing robot moves on to your competitors’ web sites. And the sites that keep adding content and keeping the search engine indexing robots busy by adding new stuff wins. The easiest way to jolt a search engine robot out of dormancy is to add new stuff.

And you don’t have to wax philosophically about your industry. You can share your opinion on a recent news story that affects you. Your can write a news release. You can welcome a new client. Whatever you do, focus on keywords and keep the content flowing. Building your web site on top of blogging software allows you to do that easily, all the while creating content that search engines know how to process quickly. 100-300 words is all you need for most articles.

But stepping away from the defining what is a web site and what is a blog is the first major step.

Originally published at GerardMcLean.com

Really comfy chairs at the 2010 NSCAA

I have been to several conferences already this year and plan on going to several more. With the exception of one where it was part of my contractual arrangement to tweet and populate the social media spaces, I did not tweet or take photos and send up to twitpic, live-blog any particular workshop or do a video about my experience. Instead, I just attended, met lots of people face-to-face, had conversations, attended the workshops and really engaged myself in the experience around me. And after a few hours, I did not miss myself tweeting and taking photos.

And I have only two observations about conferences.

1. Every conference should have a meeting/networking area with really, really comfortable leather chairs. Really. It is amazing how rich a conversation becomes when each person is able to sit on a throne.

2. Social media should be all over conferences, but not primarily generated by the attendees. The days of hoping the attendees will tweet out about your conference and pithy quotes the speaker just said is about at its end. When attendees are tweeting the last thing they heard, they are missing the next thing that is probably more important.

That does not mean conferences should quit using social media. Far from it. It means the conference should take more ownership in representing themselves in the social media spaces. Send up tweets about the workshops in advance, link up videos of speakers doing interviews before and after their presentations, link their agenda to twitter hashtags to give the attendees “hooks” for feedback, encourage attendees/speakers to write feedback blog posts that you can point back to and send out tweets by the conference staff on main points during the keynote and general sessions (kinda like what E!’s Red Carpet does during the Oscars, Golden Globe, etc.)

But encourage attendees to be present first.

And being present means networking in real life with people around them and listening to and thinking about the material being presented to them in workshops and keynotes. It means freeing up your attendees to participate in the live event, while planning also to satisfy the curiosity of those outside looking in. It should not mean a robotic parroting of quotes during speeches.

And ultimately, it means creating enough excitement that those who are following along on your blog, through twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook are wishing they had gone and will plan to next year.

Social media for conferences is all about increasing participation at your live event.

Originally published at GerardMcLean.com

For more information as it happens, follow @gerardmclean on twitter or search twitter for the hashtag #398NARMS2010 to follow the workshop or comment.

ABOUT RIVERSHARK
Rivershark, Inc. is a closely-held Ohio Corporation dedicated to cultivating and building brands that take advantage of technology and satisfy a need for human whimsy. It was formed in 1995 and is headquartered in Englewood, Ohio, with offices in Brooklyn NY, Minneapolis MN, London UK and Aalborg Denmark. The web address is www.rivershark.com. Rivershark currently manages the e-presence of NARMS and has since it’s inception in 1995.

ABOUT NARMS
NARMS member companies perform well over $3 billion in merchandising services, sales marketing, event marketing, demonstration and other retail services annually. The international trade association serves as a “central gathering point” for the retailing industry; promoting and establishing industry standards; providing critical industry research studies and educational information about the industry while acting as a voice for its diverse membership of service providers, manufacturers, retailers, and associates. NARMS represents all classes of trade including: grocery, drug, mass, department, home and building centers, computer and office supply, electronic, value retailers, specialty, and convenience retailers.

The 15th NARMS Spring Conference & Exposition at Saddlebrook Resort in Wesley Chapel, FL on April 17-20, 2010.

But it might be time to stop growing bigger ears and start growing bigger hands. It might be time for brands to start integrating social media within their operations and not just their marketing or customer experience departments. We don’t really want brands to “converse” with us; just do for us.

What do I mean by this? A couple of examples.

CPG Brands at Retail
Many brands pay merchandising service organizations to go into retailers and perform audits, new product cut-in, restocking, point-of-purchase placement, etc. What if one of the point of purchase placards just had a @twitter address and said something like: “Tweet you are here, take a picture of the 8oz bottles of BrandX and get a coupon for a buy one/get one free.” How many time-stamped, geo-tagged photos and fan tweets do you think that CPG brand would get? Would this create more demand for at retail service due to an increased turn on the product? Maybe, but until someone tries it, we’ll never know.

Pizza
On Tuesday afternoon, about 4:00pm, Papa Johns sent out a tweet something like “Hungry? Order a Papa John’s pizza.” Oh, man was I ever. It was a long day and I did not have time to eat. So, I clicked on the link. Bang, right to the front page. So, from there, I had to log in.. can’t remember my password… looked it up.. got to the order page, had to decide… oh, y’know what, I’m just not that hungry.

What Papa John’s could be doing it give me the option to save a Twitter preference. Next time they send me a tweet, all I have to do is reply to it and my preferred pizza has been ordered, paid for with my save credit card, in the oven and on it’s way to my front door; all just by replying to the tweet. (I know, there are some issues with privacy and such, but maybe they could send me a DM or an email confirming I did indeed reply to and order a pizza.)

What’s missing in social media right now is that last 10 yards of connection to the customer. Sure the smart brands are listening with big ears but until they start growing bigger hands and integrate social media into their operations, social media will be the stuff of late night jokes and CNN scare stories instead of Harvard Business School case studies.

Originally published at GerardMcLean.com

It’s been a couple of months now since the life coaches and go-getters pushed out their brand of RAH RAH RAH and GO! GO! GO! for 2010. We’ve seen folks choose keywords for their life, new resolution for the year, non-resolution for the year, themes instead of resolutions and all sorts of various predictions and start-up dreams, etc.

And very little living. Only doing.

When I worked at a newspaper a long time ago* I spent about 70% of my time wandering around with my cup of coffee, talking with other people in the building; Gary in accounting, Ted, John and MB in editorial art, Jeff in photo and all the print shop and pre-print guys. Before that, when I worked at SPAR Marketing, most of my day was spent wandering around talking to people with my coffee cup. And before that, I did the same thing at Huffy.

And I got a lot done as a result.

But every year during my performance appraisal, my boss of the moment would take the opportunity to chastise and berate me on how much time I wasted walking around, talking to people instead of spending that time at my desk “producing.” And yet, each boss was amazed at my ability to produce a ton of work. No doubt they reasoned that if I could produce this much work walking around socializing, think about how much they could get out of me if I didn’t walk around.**

Here was the secret. What they saw as me wasting time, I saw as gathering stories about what mattered to people. I saw impromptu conversations over a cup of coffee as inspiration for change. I took away their frustrations and ranting as opportunities to solve organizational problems, to remove barriers. I saw my wanderings as keeping in touch with what mattered to people most, what worried them, what gave them fear. When I did “work at my desk” I worked on proposals that solved real problems and helped the organization become more efficient. I presented budget proposals that produced much more than busy work or boondoggles for management. I produced writing that talked to real issues that real people were feeling. The work seemed more real because it connected with real people, not just caricatures or stereotypes.

And that I think is the real value of all this time-wasting social media. To many, it looks like foolin’-around-time. But to those of us who know better, it is the inspiration and fuel of innovation and productivity..

*A long time ago = When the year started with 19
**About half as much, maybe less.

With the recession pulling into it’s second (or third) year, we’re seeing a lot of teams request a late Saturday morning start so they don’t have to book rooms into a hotel for Friday night. As you can imagine, accommodating this request puts a serious strain on the scheduling as most of the time, the start times are determined by the number of fields and the number of daylight hours available. While you can sometimes squeak out another field somewhere, tacking another hour of sunlight on the end of a day is impossible.

So what to do? You don’t want to turn away a team if you don’t have to, but re-writing the laws of nature to fit an economic reality is just not going to happen. When most teams are now asking for a late Saturday start, it become mathematically impossible to grant the request.

Our advice: Publish a cut off date for late Saturday start requests. Instead of trying an Early Bird discount or other pricing scheme to get teams to apply early, have a date or volume cut off. Perhaps only the first two teams for each age group can request a late Saturday start. Once those requests are used up, there are no more. And, while you are at it, do the same for multiple-team coaches. It rewards the teams with special requests to apply early without compromising the price and value of your tournament.

Be sure to promote visibly and keep track of the number of requests. Reward the requester handsomely and make it crystal clear that the reason you are honoring (or denying) the request is because they applied and paid early (or not.) Once you start doing this, competition for special considerations next year will be fierce.

I ran out of coffee filters the other day. Not a big deal, I’ll just hike to Kroger and get some more. When I got there, I saw the empty peghook that once held my filters. Moreover, there was a red tag on the hook informing me that this product would be discontinued.

Here’s why this is a big deal. A few years ago, the 53rd automatic drip coffee maker I have ever purchased in my life, died. Just quit. Arrgghh, there has to be a better way. And there was. Melitta makes this carafe and cone set that only requires hot water and gravity to make coffee. The only wrinkle is that it also requires a size 6 cone filter. But, since Kroger carried it, not a big deal. I adopted my new system. And it was great because it was so simple. It only really required gravity to work. And gravity was free.

Then someone at Kroger decided they were not selling enough #6 filters. And, without asking me, they just quit carrying them.

Amazon.com still sells the #6 and I just bought approximately 2.6 years worth of filters. Until my filters arrive, I am using paper towels to line the cone. In the event Melitta decides to quit selling the #6 cone filter altogether, I know I have 2.6 years to come up with an alternate solution to a perfectly good system. But, what I foolishly adopted outside of the normal 10-cup basket filter automatic drip coffee maker is now showing signs of that death-march to obsolescence. An inferior technology persists because it is ubiquitous.

We get change and new stuff. Really, we do. It excites us. It gets us out of bed every day. But we also have a library of 8mm reels our childhood is on that we can’t watch, a library of 8 track and cassettes our music is on that we can’t hear, a library of VHS tapes our children’s lives are on that we can’t relive and a mountain of Zip Drive cartridges our careers are on that we can’t share or pass on. We’ve seen the result of a system being brought to its knees when a tiny bit of the supply chain becomes obsolete right after we dedicate a large chunk of our lives to it.

We grew up in large families (which is why there are so many of us now clogging the ladder rungs to the top) where everything from dinner to clothes to mom’s attention was a competition with the people you lived with. Most of our families had one car and one income and choices were made based on the supply of resources. We got jobs that promised us work, retirement accounts and free benefits that seemed too good to be true. We took them and squirreled them away, believing that one day they would be gone (turns out we were right.) We’ve lived through and survived at least three recessions and a very large oil embargo. We’ve seen an explosive increase in the divorce rate. In short, we’ve been conditioned to know that free is never unlimited free. Free will run out. Free has a catch. The good times do not last. Commitments are broken every day without apology, remorse or obligation.

And now Twitter and Foursquare want to be the operations in our supply chains, somewhere between service delivery and invoicing. I can see the possibilities for several industries we do work for and it is very, very exciting. But Twitter is free, it has really no reason to be there tomorrow, no obligations, no contract with me.

As I reach for the coffee filters that are no longer there, between boiling the water and lining the cone with carefully folded paper towels, I pause and think, “What if Evan Williams decided to just quit doing Twitter?”

The two dogs here are mine that I walk three times a day. They are each about 1 1/2 years old and grew up together from pups. They hang with me at my office all day and they are rarely apart.

Charlie is a full-bred German Shepherd who weighs about 100 lbs. Sallie is the white mutt we rescued from the local Human Society. She is a bit lab, a bit of something else and more of that. She weighs in about 70 lbs.

And, despite what the photo shows, she is winning this wrestling match (nobody got hurt.)

On the afternoon “thinking/lunch” walk, we go about 1/2 mile to a undeveloped subdivision that the builder abandoned due to the current recession (silver lining!) I then take them off the leash and they run, sniff and stalk each other. And they go at each other with all the sibling love anyone who has grown up with a brother or sister close in age recognizes well.

Charlie is bigger, weighs more and has longer teeth. He can also run faster. If he choose, he could probably crush Sallie’s head. Sallie has shorter legs, is stockier and can turn and roll on a dime. But if you watch them closely, none of these features by themselves is either an advantage or a disadvantage.

When Charlie catches up with Sallie, she either veers quickly right of left or rolls on her back, sending Charlie overshooting her. By the time he turns around, she has darted away a few hundred feet. If Charlie is standing up and Sallie wants to take him out, she body-checks him against his ribs and he goes down like a sack of potatoes. If he is already on the ground, she positions her weight on his chest and he can’t get traction to roll over.

If you were to bet which dog would win in an all out wrestle, you may choose Charlie who is bigger, can run faster and has bigger teeth. But nobody told Sallie her shorter legs and stockier build was a disadvantage nor does she believe it is. So far, each wrestle has ended in a draw.

So, what is your excuse? Do you really have disadvantages in your business or have you just not fully assessed your leverage? If you are small and under-capitalized, you may just be scrappy and creative. In this current economy, do you see limitations or possibilities to embrace change?

Good business people don’t see advantages or disadvantages, only the current climate and an opportunity to leverage their assets.

We can learn a lot by paying attention to dogs. In their minds, they are each at the same time only puppies and the fiercest thing on the block. And, since they can’t understand us when we voice our opinions of them, they are unaffected by what we think is possible. To them, every fight is win-able, but not every win is achieved the same way.