Itai Boublil

There is a revolution taking place in NYC, and for once it does not involve fashion nor celebrities.

What is common to Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, Bistro Truck, and Holton Farms? They are all using trucks to sell food in the streets of  NYC, and they all do it by using Social Media!

Equipped with a laptop, wifi, and a twitter/Facebook accounts, these revolutionaries are changing the way NYC famous food carts are doing business.

Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, for instance, is using Twitter to promote specials and tweet its location at any given moment so people will know where to go when in search for an Ice Cream.

Bistro Truck is taking online orders via email, and uses Twitter to tweet its location, and new dishes, adding pictures such as “soup of the day”, to instill hunger in people’s mind (quite smart if you ask me). In addition, they use Facebook as a publishing platform for articles and some PR. The owner of Bistro Truck , Yassir Raoull, claims that 10-15% of their sales come from using Social Media. Not bad.

Holton Farms uses Twitter and facebook in the same way, and have people waiting in line minutes after they tweet to get some of their delicious sandwiches.

What I liked the most about their interaction on Twitter is that they really get personal with their clients. Inbound Marketing is about building relationships with your clients and engaging them to build trust (which at the end create leads), and these guys are mastering it like true marketers.

I find the fact that these vendors are using social media in such a brilliant way exciting. By using social media, these revolutionaries managed to reach out to a new market, and create a niche in their industry.

So next time you are in NYC, make sure to check their Twitter account and get to learn about the Ice Cream of the day :)

What do you think? Are you familiar with these vendors?

Social Media ROI

These are some of the Social Media numbers Moore mentioned:

Below is an excerpt of his statment:

Social Media Business Cards

Business cards are cards bearing information about a company or an individual, and they are usually printed on some form of card stock. They are not interactive, they cost money, and they waste a lot of paper.  A lot of companies seem to agree on this, and built products that function somewhat as virtual business cards.

A few examples of the first buds of virtual business cards:

• SMS: Contxts; TextID; DUB
• Mobile Web: MyNameIsE
• Email: Dropcard; WeaveMet
• iPhone: beamMe (app)
• Social Networks: LinkedIn; Xing; Facebook
• Google Profile
• Twitter

With so many options to choose from, how do you combine all this information together, use vanity URL, and describe yourself with more than 140 characters?

This is where Card.ly comes into play. The company’s goal is not just to get you a phone and an email address, but to create a beautiful, shareable social media business card.
There are a few (very easy) steps to follow before you can create your (Free) embed-able, shareable social media business card. The end results is a simple, clean and useful webpage that you can use as a virtual business card.

My Card.ly Social Media Business Card

Itai Boublil Social Media Business Card

You can also embed it on your Website

Embed on Your Site

A few tips about choosing your username:

It is important that you choose your username based on your first and last name (if possible). This makes it easier to remember, and also it will show up in seach engines. Mine, for example, is card.ly/itai. Simple enough to remember, and share.

What do you think? Are you already using Card.ly as your Social Media business card?

Statistics

I came across this very insightful article today titled The Ultimate List: 300 + Social Media Statistics. I enjoy reading statistical data (especially one that deals with what I’m fond of , Marketing), because I find it an accurate tool to analyze almost everything in life. I post this mainly as a reference link for future use, but I thought that maybe some of you would find it interesting as well. And yes, I know these numbers will change, and probably already did, but it still gives a good estimate to what is going on in the Social Media Sphere. :)

Social Media Hierarchy

I read an interesting article today titled “How Small Business Is Using Social Media”. The article presented data about social media sites that business owners choose to use to interact with their customers. What struck as odd in this article is the fact that having a Blog represented only 39% of what Business Owners choose to use as a way to communicate with their customers. I mean, what is a better way to educate your customers about your services and products than writing about it in a way they can understand?

As the chart below shows (copied from source itself), the most popular social media tools that are being used are also the easiest to create. It does not take more than 20-45 minutes to create a (good) Facebook page or a LinkedIn account (45 minutes if you have a lot of information to upload), but does it mean you are actually educating your customers about your products or services? I doubt it. Facebook, and LinkedIn can serve as a good distribution, customer service and listening platforms, no question about it, but what you really need to ask yourself as a business owner is this: what value am I adding to my costumers? Most likely not as much as writing a Blog about your area of expertise will.

How Small Business Are Using Social Media

The reason I think the percentage number of starting a blog is low is quite obvious. Blogging means hard work, period. First, you need to develop a good content strategy, then you need to optimize each page for keywords, and after that you need to find your “writing voice” (and also keep this “voice”), and to top all this you need to find your audience and create GOOD content. As you can now see, starting and maintaining a good Blog is a not an easy task if you have a busy schedule, but so as spending hours on Facebook, and LinkedIn every single day to monitor your clients activity.

The percentage number of starting a Blog is low, yes, but  I reckon that if the chart were to examine the ROI of each of these three social media approaches (Facebook,  LinkedIn and Blog) in the long run, starting a Blog will stand on top of the pyramid.

The Hierarchy of your Social Media approach as a small business owner should place starting a Blog on top, ahead of other social media channels. When people talk about ROI in the social media world, Blogging, in my opinion, can be a significant factor.

Remember this: content is king, no doubt, but creating value for your customers is the entire kingdom.

What do you think? Do you agree that Blogging can provide a better value to Small Businesses than Facebook,  or LinkedIn?

Promoting Peace Using Social Media

This post is not about politics, but rather my fascination as a marketer by the way social media marketing infiltrated to almost every aspect of our life, including the following example.

When you think about peace, and more specifically peace processes, what usually comes to mind are serious faces, world known leaders with expensive suits, bodyguards with armored vehicles, and lots of diplomacy. The last thing that comes to our mind is Youtube, twitter or facebook.

Today, as I was browsing the web to read some of the latest news, I came across an interesting article on Ha’aretz website. The article, titled as “Peres dives into social media with a YouTube channel”, illustrated how the President of the state of Israel is using Youtube to promote his message for peace.  Wow, I thought to myself, this is really fascinating. A world known leader, a president of a country, uses YouTube to promote peace!

There are many implications for this type of action, but the most important message we should all take from this story is that Social Media has no borders, no police, no military, no soldiers, and no governments, it has only freedom. This means that any message you embed in the Social Media world can and will reach anyone, regardless of their nationality, religion or political views.

As a marketer I find it interesting how Social Media does not fail to surprise me every single day, which is  why I truly love what I do.

Facebook Friend Lists

You finally managed to reach your goal of more than a 300 friends on Facebook, but now you are facing a dilemma: How do you manage to track all these friends?

Fortunately there is a solution. Facebook lets you divide all of your friends into small segments, or ‘lists’ (e.g. Family, Best friends, College friends, childhood friends, etc), which you can use to track specific news feed of your friends. For example, I created  lists for my Family, Best Friends, childhood friends, work friends, marketing groups,  Military Friends, and others. This way I can click on each list and get specific information about different people. From a marketing point of view this can help  businesses gather specific information about different segments of their market, but this post is not about marketing, thus I will not cover it today.

These are the steps to go about it:

1. Log on to your profile
2. Click on Friends on the top menu
3. Click ‘All Connections’ on the top left menu
4. Click ‘Create New List’
5. Type name of your desired list (e.g. family, work friends)
6. Select the friends to include in that list
7. Repeat for other lists.

This is a great way to keep track on all of your friends. If you have too many friends, more than 1000 let’s say, then you can create sub lists as well. For example: Best friends; super best friends; Best friends I can trust; etc

Go ahead and create your lists, and then make it a habit to follow it so next time you will not forget your friends birthday.

Did you find this post useful?

Is Social Media Generation turning into Generation Greed?

I noticed an interesting phenomenon this pass month that I can not say I relate myself to. It took place a couple of times when Twitter and Gmail were under Denial of Service Attack, and had to shut down their services.

The two companies that we learned to rely on their free services over the years became in a matter of seconds the most disappointing services on the web-sphere.

TechCrunch were the first to announce that both services were down, and you could instantly watch the negative comments starting to accumulate by ungrateful users.

I thought to myself, here we have two great companies that provide two great services for absolutely free, and these users have the audacity to complain?

Have we become so greedy, that we demand more even though what we have is more than we ever wished in such short period of time? Sure, we can always wish for more, but are we really in a position to complain about a service we did not even pay to use?

Personally, I think the Social Media Generation has been damaged by decades of traditional ‘guerrilla’ marketing, that it can no longer distinguish between good service and bad service. We have learned to resent the old days, the days that big corporations would abuse their power to say to us “because we can”. As this new social media industry evolves, we as users need to embrace it, and appreciate the free tools it provides us.

From a Social Media Marketer perspective, this put us (the marketers) in a very tough position. On the one hand, we constantly are thinking how to create remarkable services that will bridge the gap between us and our customers. On the other hand, we have created a generation of users that will turn their back on us when ever we do wrong.

Coming back to my question, is SM generation turning into generation Greed? Unfortunately it is embedded in our genes as human to be greedy, so in that sense the answer is yes. However, I do think that if marketers will keep focusing on building genuine relationships with customers, we might be able to see some more tolerance and understanding when incidents such as Denial of Service Attack take place.

Share you comments, I am curious to read what you have to say.

One of the reasons I love Inbound Marketing is because of its ability to reach a massive amount of users in a matter of seconds. This could be a great tool if you know your ways in Inbound Marketing ‘land’. It can also be a damaging tool to a brand if their customers know how to use a few simple tools, such as Twitter, to create some social waves.

Let me illustrate it by sharing with you a story that happened yesterday.

Last week we started having problems with our Internet connection. At first it started during the night time, around 8pm, and remained disconnected for 5-6 hours. Then, during this last weekend, we started getting disconnected in the morning time (and night time), sometimes for hours.

At this stage of the problem we decided to call Comcast, who provides the service to our house. We spent a good 20 minutes on the phone trying to explain the problem, and at the end of this phone call the operator suggested to send a technician. The technician arrived to our house, and said to us that the problem is too complicated for him to repair, and it actually a problem that requires Comcast to send an engineer to fix. As we were talking with the technician outside the house, we came to learn that a few of our neighbors have a similar problem with their Internet. At this point the technician suggested to call the company to  keep reporting about the problem, and eventually they will send an engineer to examine the problem (“only if you have enough complaints”, he said).

This is the point I decided to use the social media marketing skills I have to create some ‘social wave’, or, if you will, shake Comcast’s brand a little by creating enough damaging “buzz” to push it fix my Internet problem a little faster. .

I chose the fastest and most powerful tool I have in my Inbound Marketing tool box, Twitter. This is what I tweeted:

• I can’t believe it, 7days in a row & no Internet in morning or night! @comcast sucks! That’s it, I had enough of this BS, switching 2day6:26 AM Aug 31st from TweetDeck

• danronken@ItaiBoublil Dude, that’s crazy. Seven day in a row w no internet service due to comast? Do you have other broadband options where you live?6:29 AM Aug 31st from HootSuite in reply to ItaiBoublil

• U bet I have other options @danronken Welcome to America @comcast , your competitor is begging 2 have my business, and they will!6:36 AM Aug 31st from HootSuite

‘ alt=ComcastBill>

• ComcastBill@ItaiBoublil whats going on can i help7:15 AM Aug 31st from web in reply to ItaiBoublil

• @ComcastBill The tech guy was here on Thur, said everything is fine. He said that entire street is down, and what we need is an engineer.9:15 AM Aug 31st from HootSuite in reply to ComcastBill

• ComcastBill@ItaiBoublil will see whats up9:21 AM Aug 31st from web in reply to ItaiBoublil

This is more or less the entire social media conversation I exchanged with @ComcastBill. It lasted about 6-7 Tweets, and resolved by Comcast sending an engineer on the same day!

Fortunately for Comcast they realized the power of Inbound Marketing. In contrast to Comcast, other companies, unfortunately, are still struggling to accept the fact that the rules of customer service have changed, and the customer now has the power to strengthen, damage , or destroy their brand.

Share your own experience by commenting.