With an A.D.D. impulse I was immediately intrigued by this as I am with mostly all new tools that come through the twitterverse or like minded social media peeps. I instantly saw uses for this tool in my professional life and shared this enthusiasm with Evan who then introduced me to Joel, the founder behind this new favored tool of mine. After testing buffer for a week I became a paying customer and its only fair that I share why I am so enthusiastic about this new tool. So here is my review and a short tutorial for my clients who will be introduced to this tool from now on.

Why Buffer Works for Me:
At Work, my daily routine as a community manager consists of checking google alerts and reposting positive sentiment to our twitter account. For the accounts I manage at work I can get many google alerts per day. It would not be efficient for me stop what I am doing and repost when the alerts come through in real-time. I check every morning and post the great ones, at times that can be overwhelming for our followers and is not a good practice. In comes BufferApp, a tool that allows scheduling of tweets in 1 swift click. The power behind this tool is the chrome browser extension which makes adding tweets a breeze.

Note: I am not saying that this is all we tweet from this account, nor am I saying that scheduling tweets is a smart practice but for this activity it is the perfect solution. Tweeting great alerts from fans is our way to show support for those blogging about our brand. And because their are many people managing the Twitter account I can be sure that I am not the only one managing the feedback that comes in from the scheduled tweets.

Why Buffer Works for my Clients:
As a social media consultant I manage multiple accounts on a daily basis. Buffer allows me to add scheduled tweets for my clients as I am going through my daily activities and find something that might work for them or their brand. Buffer also allows me to show clients how to add their own tweets without having to use or learn how to use a Twitter Client like Tweetdeck that can be overwhelming for a newbie. For many of my clients I set up google alerts, so again a great way for them or myself to easily tweet their alerts by adding them using the Buffer extension.

Interviews

Long Promotional Video

Soon after, I introduced my parents and it was my mom who pointed out that they were on Facebook. Then, I came with friends from SMMOC, who pointed out a discount on Yelp. On another occassion, I woke up and decided to check my Twitter stream and there was DX Peruvian wishing everyone a Happy Peruvian Independance Day and while there was no offer given, it was still enough to get me to recruit my co-workers to have Peruvian with me for lunch that day. This string of events involving social media marketing at DX Peruvian prompted me to ask the owner Rashad to share his experiences marketing his new restaurant. My hope is that his experiences may help some other restaurant owners looking to use social media. Here is my Q&A with Rashad:

Daniela: How many hours do you spend per day/week using social media?
Rashad: not much really, a few minutes here and there daily for FB and twitter, I try to make it part of my routine, when things come up, or come to mind I post them instantly, I also reply to customer comments if needed as I see them. I use an iphone so I do most the updates from there – makes it easy. Also I snap photos & post them instantly as I see interesting things.

Daniela: How do you market your restaurant online? (ie: social sites, website, daily discount coupons, online ads, etc?)
Rashad: We are Off & on online due to budget, We signed up with yelp for a year and that was the biggest mistake and waste of money ever.  We use search advertising with google, and we advertise some on facebook, which I found very effective at targeting a specific demographic. We do some coupons off and on, online and in print, primarily to promote trial and build habit.

Daniela: Have you noticed anything significant as a result of using social media? (increases in business, increase in website traffic, increase in online engagement)
Rashad: Hard to tell, facebook helped early on because it allowed us to reach a niche clientele (Peruvian & south American) quickly, Yelp brings people in for sure, but that has nothing to do with anything we do, it’s customer driven. I can’t say with certain about google, but I do see the clicks so… What I can tell you though is that facebook and twitter allow us to stay top of mind with our core customer base, they also help build brand loyalty. Something that would have been probably impossible to achieve for a small business without them.

Daniela: Have you learned any tips worth sharing with other restaurant owners?
Rashad: Don’t try to be everything to everybody. Find your core customer group and go after them. Social Media, facebook, twitter, and google in particular will allow you to reach them very effectively in way that in the past was probably on available for larger brands with economies of scale.

DX Peruvian Restaurant
3930 S Bristol St
Santa Ana, CA 92704
(714) 424-0014
www.dxperuvianrestaurant.com
www.facebook.com/dxperu
http://twitter.com/DXRestaurant
New to the South Coast Metro area, DX Peruvian Restaurant is an authentic Peruvian eatery with the best Peruvian chefs north of the Amazon.
Our food is our number one priorty — it is flavorful, delicious and unpretentious — guaranteed to bring you back for more! Just about everything we sell is made from scratch. We make our own dough, our own sauces, and our own desserts. We use the best quality ingredients and buy all produce fresh from the local markets — all to provide our customers with an unforgettable dining experience. Come try one bite of our heavenly empanadas, lomo saltado, and alfajores and you will be craving us again and again.

The lesson here is that while all business owners probably want to put blame on the customer it is bad business to do so. Having a level-headed person managing your social media accounts is key. Just like you wouldn’t have your PR or marketing person insulting customers, you should make sure that you social channels are properly cared for as well. Would love to hear you response to this owners way of handling the situation. How would you have handled it?

Transcription

Joe Land (Customer): I went to 333 for the first time in May. Obviously I was wearing the wrong clothes and driving the wrong car. The “valet parking attendant” and the lady that seated me had an indifferent attitude to my presence. The waitress was ok, but did lack a genuine happy attitute. The food was good, but a little over priced. This S. California Native will not come back to 333 again.

Jeff Reuter (Owner): Joe, I seriously don’t think that any perceived reaction from the Valet, Hostess or Waitress had ANYTHING to do with what you were wearing or driving – it was most probably 100% YOU that they were reacting to! 333 is a local beach hangout that receives every conceivable type of person, dressed in every possible type of clothing and driving every car made. You admit the food was “good”, but over priced????? What int he hell were you expecting to pay sitting in a 10 million dollar restaurant on the water in Newport Beach; the average price for food is 12 dollars?!?!?!?!?! For a “So. Cal. Native” you are obviously completely out of touch – stick with the drive thru’s…

Steve Rin

Steve shared some insights into working with one of his Orange County restaurant clients, zpizza. zpizza has been a pioneer in the Orange County area in openly embracing social media as an essential part of their business model. As the landscape continues to grow and mature they will be a brand that will benefit from the fan engagements that are created because of their participation and understanding of their social media networks. Here are some helpful tips Steve shared that both small businesses and community managers should find useful:

1) Engaging your customers is more important than throwing promotions at them.
zpizza started to use social media as most restaurants do, by promoting their daily specials to help increase their sales.  It became clear early on that social media would best serve them as a way to engage their fans and build loyalty. It’s great to offer a deal every now and then, but tweeting and posting deals on Facebook constantly made their communications impersonal and didn’t encourage any conversations.  I strongly believe that a successful social media campaign revolves around engaging your customers.  To do this you must get to know who your customers are and why they love your brand. When I post for zpizza I try to do so in a way that gives our customers an inside look at the day to day operations.  We offer customers the chance to get to know our employees and connect with them by sharing staff hobbies, their favorite zpizza AND their favorite non-zpizza dishes.

2) Nobody wants to follow a brand that constantly talks about themselves over and over again.
When you do offer a promotion make it fun, creative and personal to the customers. During the NBA playoffs and more recently the FIFA World Cup we tweeted/Facebook’d game scores, game updates and then tied some of our promotional meal deals based on halftime periods where you could get a buy one and get one free zpizza if you called in during halftime. Also by partnering with local organizations like we did with OCTA for a Halloween “Trick-or-Tweet” tweetup you can increase the amount of people seeing your promotions.

3) Building brand loyalty online doesn’t happen overnight, learn to see things from a customer perspective.
Social media is a tool that many companies want to adopt because it is the trendy thing to do, but with that attitude comes a false perception that overnight twitter or Facebook will land 100+ customers at their doorstep at no cost to them.  The reality is that businesses first need to understand that a social media campaign doesn’t happen overnight and you need to build relationships with the fans that you acquire over time.  Getting to know the fans of your brand will help you better understand how your brand is perceived in their eyes as opposed to having the company tell their fans how they want to be perceived.

4) Use your social networks to your benefit.
The social media networks and monitoring tools out there today can provide many companies with instant feedback on ways to improve their business.  It can help resolve customer service issues by providing companies both small and large the chance to directly respond to a customers concerns, therefore, strengthening the relationship they have with that person and ultimately increasing their brand loyalty. zpizza utilizes Facebook, Twitter and Youtube to spread their conversations through the web.  The trio of these platforms allows us to communicate to a wide variety of fans.  For the quick up to date meal deals we utilize twitter and also monitor our feedback from customer experiences they had at our stores. Facebook allows us to build that long term relationship and further increase our brand loyalty as we encourage fans to write on our Facebook wall and post pictures and links.  Youtube gives us a way to broadcast the lifestyle and culture that is zpizza.  Fans can get a glimpse of the laid back and environmentally conscious atmosphere that surrounds our stores and our employees.  

You can connect with the zpizza nearest you via Facebook or Twitter. Steve manages these accounts for the Tustin and Santa Ana locations:

Tustin
Facebook
Twitter

Santa Ana
Facebook
Twitter

Just recently, a local Orange County restaurant just recently made the same mistake and I am sharing it here because it is the perfect example of how NOT to manage a Facebook page. Upon noticing that 3 Thirty 3 in Newport Beach, which happens to be a local and personal favorite restaurant had put up a page and left it astray I reached out and offered assistance. A couple of weeks later, and after no response, I noticed a customer had left a negative review of the restaurant. This comment has been up a couple of weeks now and no response has been made by the restaurant. This is a perfect example of poor community management.

Hopefully the restaurant will soon address this problem. If they had someone managing this account the problem could have been addressed and the customer would have been contacted and responded to openly on the page for all to see how the restaurant takes care of such incidents. Businesses cannot assume that a page will take care of itself and should have someone monitoring and maintaining these social networks on behalf of the restaurant. Some great examples of restaurants in Orange County that are doing it right are The Alley Restaurant, Sol Cocina, and DX Peruvian. Fast Food Mavin of the OC Register is also a great resource in Orange County to find local deals and restaurants that are marketing correctly online. This post by Sukhraj Beasla further explains the implications for your brand in abandoning your online efforts and lists more failed attempts by restaurants in Orange County.

Special Thanks to @theREcoach for shooting this clip!

This post IS NOT a recap of the day but if you want one I have provided many at the bottom of this post

This IS a personal reflection that was gained while attending the Social Media Day event.

Background: If you haven’t read any of my previous posts or know me in person:  I am a fairly recent CSUF Business graduate who up until a month ago had been self establishing my career path by freelancing in marketing and job hunting. I am now a Community Manager for Symbaloo.com.

Here is How I built my network without knowing it:

1. I joined the Social Media Club of Orange County when it launched in early 2009 and while it only had a few meetings I was able to meet influential people who genuinely care about sharing and building community resources. One of the founding members, Morgan Brown (@morganb) spoke on the panel at SMdayOC. The others that I met here that were also at SMdayOC are: @markgundlach @ksablan @lorennason @vitaminOC
2. I was later invited (by @markgundlach) to join what I thought was going to be a smaller group. The Social Media Masterminds of Orange County (@SMMOC) turned out to be the most connected and amazing groups of positive social energy to wake up to at 9am on Saturday mornings. Turns out the founder of this group @TopBrokerOC was also invited to speak at SMdayOC and many of the members attended as well.



3. While I don’t particularly enjoy being in akward situational gatherings and not knowing anyone first hand I forced myself to attend a couple tweetups. It was there that I first met some of the influential SMdayOC attendees and reconnected with people from the SMCOC meetings I had been attending. Had it not been for these tweetups I would not have been able to meet and establish relationships with: @bigheadasian, the @vitaminOC team, the fab @boutiquing gals and @enjoioc.
4. Confession: I started using Twitter in early 2009, because it was the cool thing to do. I now use it daily for personal and professional reasons. At SMdayOC I arrived with Team Symbaloo to set up our booth and the first person to greet me was OC Registers VP of Marketing,  Lelani Bluner. I introduced myself and she told me that she already knew who I was because she had been following my tweets. Amazing Right? I thought so.

So Here is Why it’s never too early to start building your network:
By being proactive in joining social media communities, going to tweetups and playing with Twitter I managed to grow my network without even knowing. *Note* that I am an active participant and love to contribute to conversations which plays a big factor in establishing relationships. I can’t say that any of these contacts are very good friends of mine but having a personal community of online contacts that might be able to help, share and educate you at any given time is priceless. Each of these people is influential in some way or another and one never knows what opportunities my arise out of such contacts. By pushing myself into the scene and forcing myself to get over the awkwardness of it all I am now more comfortable meeting new people and growing my online network.

My Advice: Join a community now, find what ever it is that you are interested in pursuing and jump in! You may feel lost in the beginning and not too sure of your path but through trial, error, practice, patience and most importantly consistency, you will figure out the right path for you and you WILL build your own community and online network in the process.

Additional Social Media Day Resources:

Food trucks, the tweeting kinds. by Simon Oh

Interactive Webmix of Attendees by Symbaloo

Social Media Day in Orange County by Tanya Salcido

Podcast by Tech by Southwest

Recap & Pressroom Tour by Meredith Simonds

Recap by Hilton Costa Mesa

Blog Post: Social Media IS Social by Glenn Hansen

Blog Post by Jennifer Stumph

CNN Coverage by Ten Nguyen

32 Videos by “Video Nut” TheRECoach

Commentary by @bodybyb

Short recap by @djchuang

How we covered #smday Orange County by Kevin Sablan

The crowd caught #smdayoc in pictures by 140pix