The following is an excerpt from Online Social Networking blog (Larry Brauner, author)
Companies that neglect their social media presence will suffer in several ways:
* They’ll have no influence over their online reputation.
* Their customers will view them as backward.
* They won’t receive traffic from social media sites.
* They’ll receive less search engine traffic too.
The following article was submitted by Guest Author, Kathryn Rookes. Kathryn is an experienced franchise attorney and a member of FSB Legal, a virtual law firm. She is one of the very few franchise attorneys in the United States with experience in a government regulatory practice (Maryland Division of Securities), private practice, and as in-house counsel. With this diversity of experience, Kathryn understands the issues that franchisors face on a daily basis.
New York State Tax Law
as submitted by Kathryn Rookes, Attorney, FSB Legal
New York state has become the first state to pass a law that requires franchisors to provide detailed information on their franchisees and their franchisees’ operations to the state, so that the state can compare the submitted information to the tax returns that the franchisees file with the state. Complying with this new law can be quite burdensome and many franchisors do not even collect some of the information that must be submitted to the state of New York.
Who Must File?
The New York law applies to every franchisor that has at least one franchise in New York state that is required to be registered as a sales tax vendor. The law does not require that the franchisor itself be physically present in New York and applies even if the franchisor does not conduct any business in New York, other than having New York franchises.
The actual franchisees have no reporting responsibility under this new law, however, each reporting franchisor should let its franchisees know that it will be providing information on its New York franchises in its annual report.
What Must Be Reported?
The information that franchisors must report on their New York franchises includes:
· Each franchisee’s legal name
· Each franchisee’s phone number
· Each franchisee’s d/b/a name, if different from its legal name
· The owners’ names of each franchisee (e.g., principal shareholder, LLC member)
· Each franchisee’s Federal Employer Identification number (for an individual franchisee, this will be each franchisee’s social security number)
· Each franchisee’s New York Sales Tax Certificate of Authority number
· The beginning date of each franchisee’s unit
· Each franchise unit’s physical address
· Each franchise unit’s mailing address, if different
· Each franchisee’s gross sales, as reported under each franchise agreement
· Any discrepancies between each franchisee’s reported gross sales and gross sales of any audit that the franchisor conducted
· If known, the amount of New York state and local sales tax that each franchisee collected at each franchised unit
· The amount of royalty payments each franchisee paid to its franchisor
· The percentage of royalty that each franchisee pays to its franchisor
· The amount of sales the franchisor or its affiliates made to each franchisee
· The amount of sales each of the franchisor’s designated suppliers made to each franchisee
As you can see, the information required is quite extensive. Many franchisors will have to amend the manner in which they capture data on each New York franchise, as they may not currently be gathering all of the required information.
When Are Reports Due?
The first report under this new law is due September 20, 2009 and must contain information from March 1, 2009 to August 31, 2009. After that, franchisors must file by March 20 of each year, and each report must contain information from the end of the previous report to February 28 of that year.
Franchisees Must Be Notified
By March 20 of each year, the franchisor must provide each New York franchisee with a statement that includes all of the information that the franchisor submitted as part of its report. The statement may be in summary form, as long as certain of the required information is included. Each franchisor should send this statement to its franchisees in such a manner as to be able to verify that each statement was sent in a proper and timely manner.
Where Do You File?
Franchisors must file their information return electronically with the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. To file a return and for additional information go to the Tax Department’s Web site. Information on how to file will be available at this site after September 1, 2009.
What Happens If You Don’t File?
Violations of the law can result in a penalty of $500 for 10 or fewer failures and up to $50 for each additional failure. If a franchisor fails to timely file an information return under the new law, additional penalties of not less than $500 but up to $2000, will apply to each failure. The total penalties assessed for each reporting period may not exceed $10,000.
Yesterday, I read an informative article by Ben Parr (Mashable) about training new employees in social media. The article, “How to Train New Employees in Social Media” was posted on the American Express Open Small Business site and included the following seven tips to social media training:
1. Consider writing guidelines or a social media policy: A policy can clear up confusion and help you keep employee focus away from what they shouldn’t do and towards what they should be doing. We wrote great guides on whether you should have a policy and 10 must-haves for any social media policy over at Mashable.
2. Make it clear you aren’t policing: The focus is on ways to use social media to promote the business, rather than ways to avoid embarrassment. Make that clear to new recruits and stress that you won’t be policing. Rather, you’ll be trusting in their good judgment and their ability to control privacy settings. The Associated Press quickly learned what happens when you become overbearing.
3. Test their social media knowledge: You’re going to have to individualize each employee’s social media training. While one may have 10,000 followers on Twitter, the other may have no idea what a blog even is. Don’t assume everyone’s at the same level.
4. Have them start their own blog: If your employees have writing-specific duties, give them a homework assignment: start your own blog. The practice of setting up a WordPress account, writing posts, and promoting them is real-world education.
5. Give them required reading: Give them a good book or two on using Twitter or pitching to blogs. Give them a set of blogs (don’t forget Mashable!) that they need to read. Have them subscribe via RSS for efficiency’s sake. Finally, encourage them to subscribe to other blogs and explore their interests.
6. Hand them the reigns: They can read and learn, but you have to trust them eventually with the reigns. Once your new employees are getting comfortable, have them tweeting, making videos, and coming up with initiatives. The more they submerge themselves, the faster they’ll learn.
7. Impress upon them the importance of social media: Yes, some employees simply won’t get it unless you put it into context. Explain how far your reach goes with a single tweet, or provide examples of how businesses were hurt by an inability to understand Facebook.
Small businesses operate in a variety of industries and under an assortment of business models. Franchising just happens to be a very popular business model that has been embraced worldwide. The difference, outside franchising, is the small business owner’s sole responsibility and efforts to market the business to consumers (B2C) or to other businesses (B2B).
In a franchise environment, franchisees are often involved in the brand’s local cooperatives where economy of scale prevails, making marketing much more cost-effective than for one location. Further, as many franchise organizations have internal marketing departments, or the luxury of a marketing agency, a great deal of professional experience is available to assist franchisees in developing effective marketing strategies and exploring new tools and technology that enhance otherwise mundane marketing efforts. Outside the franchise arena, small business owners must fend for themselves when developing strategies that must be innovative, just to compete. Often, trial and error becomes the norm, rather than the exception.
Well, the answer for the small business community is close at hand. Due to increasing popular demand, franchisEssentials is proud to expand its marketing and business development services outside the franchise industry. Initially, we will offer our proven services, including social media marketing, to independent small businesses within the State of Texas.
Our brand in this venture will be known as SmallBusinEssentials, and similar to franchisEssentials, is dedicated to small business success at all levels. In the near future, we will create an interactive site, similar to franchisEssentials site, with information and breaking news, relevant to the small business community.
Our services and resources, that have proven extremely effective for franchise businesses throughout the United States, in Canada and in several other international markets, will be available to small businesses across various industry segments including retail and service businesses, professional agencies, network marketing and more. Initially to be rolled out in Texas, services to be provided by staff, strategic partners and independent consultants to include:
For more information please contact Paul Segreto by email at segreto.paul@gmail.com or submit your comments or questions below.
The following article was written by Guest Author, Linda Daichendt. Linda is Founder, CEO and Managing Consultant at Strategic Growth Concepts, a consulting firm specializing in start-up, small and mid-sized businesses, and a Strategic Partner of franchisEssentials. She is a recognized expert with 20+ years experience in providing Marketing, Operations, HR, and Strategic planning services to start-up, small and mid-sized businesses. Linda can be contacted at linda@strategicgrowthconcepts.com and the company website at www.strategicgrowthconcepts.com.
Top 5 Social Media Tips for Small Business
by Linda Daichendt
as posted on Marketing With New Technology July 16, 2009
(Please Note: some content in this posting is from an article by Mya Frazier for Bankrate.com)
A few years ago, using the Internet to market a small business simply meant to create a presence online with a simple, informational Web site. Then came the demands of search engine optimization to ensure Google and Yahoo searches yielded top-ranked results for your company. Was your business’s Web site chock full of the key search terms that would bring it to the attention of customers?
Today, social media is transforming the small-business marketing landscape. Social media are Web- or mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information. It’s not just for seeing who your high school sweetheart married. Businesses can tap into powerful networking sites and other social media to drive customers to their shops or companies.
If done right, small-business owners might even be able to slash their traditional marketing spending to zero. Writing blogs (short for “Web logs”) or on-going online commentary using social-networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube, can provide inexpensive but powerful online marketing.
Because it’s free, people think it’s easy to create a social media presence. But this attitude can lead to missteps. So before you dive headlong into social media, take some time to observe the customs and social norms of these new forms of communications, says David Spark, founder of Spark Media Solutions, a San Francisco-based firm that helps companies tell their story through social media. “Also think about your strategy for effectively utilizing social media before you jump in,” says Linda Daichendt, CEO/Managing Consultant of Strategic Growth Concepts. “It’s easier to avoid costly mistakes before you begin than to correct them after they’ve done damage to your company’s reputation.”
“Think of social media as a cocktail party,” says, David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” and “World Wide Rave,” books about how to create buzz online. “You don’t go into the cocktail party and go into the middle room and scream at the top of your lungs and say, ‘Buy my products.’ … What works is you have some meaningful conversation first. And that’s just how social media works.”
If you decide to take the social-networking plunge, here are five ways to harness social media to help your business.
1. Use free sites. Use free online services, such as the mobile short-message site Twitter, and popular networking sites Facebook and MySpace, to post significant news, specials or events. For example, you run a small Italian restaurant with a loyal following. You could create a Twitter account and upload the lunch or dinner specials via “tweets,” or short messages of up to 140 characters, daily to customers’ smart phones or to other Web sites.
“All you have to do is give a (Twitter) handle and start a conversation. You could put the Twitter handle on the menu or in the restaurant,” says Chris Abraham, Abraham Harrison LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based digital public relations agency. Granted, social networking sites are still for early adopters. “You aren’t going to get Aunt Matilda to tweet about the experience she had at dinner,” Abraham says.
Abraham considers Twitter one of the easiest ways for a newbie to social media to get started. “It’s more challenging to do Facebook,” Abraham says. “You have to create a personal profile, create a page and so on. With Twitter, if you’re Joe Smith with Motorcycle Emporium, you don’t have to create a page. And you can create Twitter updates via a phone or mobile device easily.”
“Don’t try to reinvent the wheel,” he says. “There are lots of people sold on really expensive solutions, but two of the best investments for reaching out to people and engaging with them are free on Twitter and Facebook.”
2. Shift marketing costs to social media. After learning how social networking operates, use social media to free up traditional marketing dollars for your small business by putting it online. You can quickly learn which of your Facebook or MySpace “friends” or online “group” members received and responded to your message.
Stanya Doty has cut her print marketing budget to zero. As owner of Simple Indulgences, a wine and high-end gift shop in Delaware, Ohio, she began using Facebook in December 2008 to communicate with her brother but quickly realized the online marketing possibilities.
“I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, there are so many people here,’ ” she says. Indeed, Facebook boasts 200 million users worldwide. In April 2009, she began promoting monthly wine tastings via a Facebook page for the shop that quickly attracted 100 members. Combined with an e-newsletter created using the do-it-yourself, e-mail marketing Web site Constant Contact, she keeps enough buzz going about her shop that her advertising budget for local print ads no longer seemed necessary. She usually sends out about 700 e-mails, with the response rate sometimes reaching nearly 50 percent. It sure beats a postal mailing. “If I sent out a postcard with postage and paid for all that, I’d still have no idea who read it and who threw it away,” she says.
Indeed, unlike a print ad, Doty gets instant, measurable results. “On Facebook, you can see who has responded to invites,” she says. “It’s easy, it’s cheap and I’m actually appealing to people that at first know me from the store and then hopefully … pass the word along throughout their networks.”
3. Do your own social-media optimization project. Learn about the competition in your industry and geographic region that are tapping social networking. Spark recommends starting by researching the competition in the major search engines — Google and Yahoo.
“Type in keywords and phrases that people would use to find you, like ‘plumber’ and ‘San Francisco.’ If you don’t appear in the top percentage of pages, take a look at the Website of those plumbers that do show up,” says Spark. “Look at their pages, and usually they will have a lot of content on their sites.”
To increase a business’s presence on the Internet, Spark advocates companies create blogs, newsletters and other articles on their sites to bolster the number of keywords — terms that search engines recognize — to boost their ranking in all-important Web searches.
“That’s the way people discover you,” he says. “Take that plumber in San Francisco. The right search terms might just be ‘clogged toilet and San Francisco.’” “That tells me I should write … in my blog about how to fix a clogged toilet and mention that I am a plumber in San Francisco,” he says.
4. Take social-network marketing to the next level. Create and post richer content about what your customers would expect from someone in your business. Don’t view social media sites as a place to simply hype your wares. It’s a place for conversation.
“Social media is about earning attention,” says David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” and “World Wide Rave,” books about how to create buzz online. “What’s most important is to forget about what your company does. Instead, think about the people who are buying your products. Simply hyping products and services online and in social media sites completely backfires. People are not looking for products but for something fun. They are looking to make connections,” Scott says.
So it’s all about having something interesting to say or show. It could be a blog, or a video on the video-sharing Website YouTube.
For example, if you’re a caterer, instead of talking about your service, create engaging culinary content. Imagine positioning yourself as a gourmet magazine on the Web, complete with links to a video you uploaded to YouTube.
“A caterer could create a blog with information about how to create a fantastic party, and each blog post or YouTube video could be another installment,” Scott says. “On the Web, you are what you publish and being on the Web is about publishing information.”
So back to that plumber faced with the prospect of dropping an expensive Yellow Pages listing but worried about customers not finding him if they have a burst pipe or a misfiring shower head. Scott recommends the plumber post a list of “the 100 home fixes for common plumbing problems.”
“All of a sudden you are going to get indexed very highly in the search engines, and people are going to share that content with their friends,” he says. “When someone puts an update on Facebook asking if anyone knows a good plumber in Boston, a friend might point to your content.”
5. Use blogging to drive search results and help new customers find you. Lately, blogging has gained greater attention, with the advent of “micro-blogging” on Twitter. But consider the time commitment and strategy before launching an account.
Even with the spread of micro-blogging, Abraham remains a big fan of traditional blogs, which are lengthier and show up on Web sites. In general, no matter what form the blog takes, it should be consistent over time.
“If you can’t keep up one (blog) post a day or 12 tweets a day, do one tweet every Thursday. Consistency in blogging or tweeting will create a relationship of trust with your followers or readers. Do it once a week, but for the next two years,” Abraham says.
And don’t spend extra money on blogging software, technical help, or a ghost writer for your blog. To get started, sign up with WordPress.com or Blogger – both are free blogging platforms which are easy to use for beginners.
Additional opportunities within the social media environment include: online radio shows on platforms such as BlogTalkRadio, social networking sites such as LinkedIN, Plaxo, and FriendFeed, and a wide variety of additional tools as well depending on your type of business.
Following these social media basics for small business will get your company started on the right road to gaining new customers and increased revenue via social media.
Recently, I posted the article “Are Franchisees Entrepreneurs?” and received plenty of comments defending both sides of the equation. Some seemed to justify their current status as a franchisee as being entrepreneurial while others were emphatic that entrepreneurs are too independent to be franchisees. Franchisors, yes! But definitely not franchisees.
Last week on Franchise Direct the following article, “Entrepreneurship vs Franchising” was posted, and the debate continues…
Entrepreneurship vs Franchising
By Donald Cranford
as posted on Franchise Direct (July 7, 2009)
Given the state of the economy, it’s perhaps a good time to reconsider some of the myths of entrepreneurship to see whether the small business dream holds the same allure it once did. Certainly the days where all you needed to get investment in an internet business was a quirky idea are gone the way of the buffalo. If anything, the death of this kind of entrepreneurship makes the best possible case for franchising.
Some of these thoughts came to us after reading a highly interesting piece in the Harvard Business Review by Walter Kuemmerle, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School in Boston. Although he was writing in 2002, most of the points Kuemmerle makes are still relevant in 2009, if not more so.
In his piece, Kuemmerle seeks to outline the various risks and challenges that a prospective entrepreneur will have to take on to truly succeed. Kuemmerle wants to force business-people to look in the mirror and ask themselves: is this really the model I want to follow to achieve my personal business dreams? The converse to his questions are: is franchising a better business model?
Kuemmerle outlines two entrepreneurship risks/questions that we hadn’t even considered:
Are you comfortable stretching the rules?
Are you prepared to make powerful enemies?
The former is particularly compelling argument against entrepreneurship. Those first two or three years of getting a business going involve taking huge financial risks, and in many cases, hounding off creditors, juggling debt on personal credit cards and even leveraging your family home in order to keep the business afloat. This is a reality that most entrepreneurs simply accept, but it brings great risk and peril to your home life, especially in this recession. But as Kuemmerle says, most success stories for start-up’s he knows include the use of outrageous tactics. Or Kuemmerle later asks: “Do you have the stomach for subterfuge?”
He also points out the fact that having a truly successful start-up often means brushing up against powerful enemies. Kuemmerle adds three other points about the need to be flexible, decisive and incredibly patient to make it as entrepreneur.
Now while all of these skills are generally needed to run a strong small business, the fact is the franchising model eliminates many of the risks and indeed dangers that are part and parcel of launching a start-up. With a franchise, you have a proven business plan and a source of support and knowledge from the franchisor. Some entrepreneurs may disagree with the concept of a franchise fee, but really it is nominal compared to some of the outrageous leaps involved in entrepreneurship. It’s a time for hedging your bets and as Kummerle concludes:
“Being an entrepreneur isn’t for everyone, and even those who have the right stuff find the path to success much rougher, and usually, much longer than they had anticipated.”
Note: Another interesting article surrounding franchising and entrepreneurship was also recently posted on franchisEssentials, “Startups: Do We Really Need Them?”
We’re looking for your comments and insight:
Are Franchisees Entrepreneurs?
Startups: Do We Really Need Them?
The following article was submitted by franchisEssentials Guest Author, Diane Helbig. As a certified, professional coach and president of Seize This Day Coaching, Diane works with people starting their own business, salespeople who need and want to improve their skills, and business owners who want to master challenges and realize greater success. She is also co-founder of Seize True Success, a coaching practice dedicated to helping franchisees grow and prosper.
Accountablilty Begins With Respect
By: Diane Helbig
Many small business owners struggle with making their staff accountable. They know what they expect their people to do. And, as long as everyone’s performing effectively, all is well. The trouble occurs when someone falls short of the owner’s expectations.
The struggle is rooted in fear – fear of confrontation, consequence, repercussions. The solution is rooted in respect. When you respect yourself, your staff, and your customers, you’ll find accountability easier to achieve.
1. Respect yourself – This sounds simple, and it is. You should have a healthy respect for yourself. You took a chance and launched a business, putting your ego, income, and reputation on the line. At the same time, you’re not superman (or woman). When you respect yourself, you appreciate your accomplishments and own your limitations. When you respect yourself, you understand that you have a right to expect reasonable levels of performance and attitude from others.
2. Respect your staff – They are working with you to help you realize your vision. They bring valuable skills and sensibilities to your organization. You respect them when you have clear, written expectations and consequences – not only for their job function, but for their behavior and attitude. Have enough respect for them to let them know what you want. At the same time, have enough respect for them to remove obstacles, especially when those obstacles are co-workers who aren’t up to par. Put yourself in their shoes. How do you think it feels to consistently do a good job while Susie over there skates? In addition, respect them enough to believe in them. After all, they believe in you.
3. Respect your customers – They are the reason you and your staff are able to do what you do. When you respect your customer, you are aware of anything that can have an impact on them. And, rest assured, they’ll know if you are or are not making your staff accountable. It’ll show in their work, their attitude, and most of all – in yours.
A healthy respect goes a long way. If you’ve made your expectations and the consequences clear, and someone isn’t up to snuff, when you keep them anyway, you are doing a disservice to you, them, their co-workers and your clients. Making people accountable is the respectful thing to do!
About the Guest Author: Diane is a COSE Mindspring editor and writer for www.examiner.com. She is also a member of the Top Sales Experts panel at www.topsalesexperts.com. Diane is also a contributing author to Chicken Soup for the Soul: Power Moms. Diane earned a BS in Social Science from Michigan State University and received her coaching certification from The Coach Training Alliance. To learn more about her coaching practices please visit www.seizethisdaycoaching.com or www.seizetruesuccess.com
As we do quite often, Gini Dietrich, CEO at Arment Dietrich PR, and I, communicate on Twitter, on Facebook, by email and by phone, about a multitude of things, both business and personal. Sure, we banter and kid a great deal along the way. But when the discussion turns to franchising, communications and social media, the kidding quickly subsides, and the conversation turns serious. Okay, not completely serious, because we’re both smart-asses. But serious to the point that we’re anxious to share our ideas with each other, and determine ways to share them with our franchise clients and the franchise community.
Recently, I turned one of our discussions into an informal interview, and asked Gini to share some of her thoughts, so I could share the same with the franchisEssentials readers. Always being shy and not wanting to be in the limelight (yeah, right!), Gini fired off her responses without hesitation, further demonstrating her passion, and conviction in her thoughts. I just loved her response when asked about the future of public relations, as we know it today. Well, decide for yourself as you read some of the Q & A below.
Paul: “How important is a communications strategy to franchise organizations today?”
Gini: “It’s not at all important. Ha! Just kidding. To use one of my favorite quotes by NPS senior news analyst Daniel Schorr, “If you don’t exist in the media, for all practical purposes, you don’t exist.” But in today’s age of digital technology, it’s not just the traditional media strategy that a franchise needs to have. I love the case study of the companies that made it through the Great Depression. Know what they all had in common? They didn’t cut their communication. In fact, they increased it. And the companies that did that then are still around today while their competitors, who cut their communication budgets, went out of business. Like Daniel Schorr says, if you’re not communicating, how will your customers know you exist now and into the future?”
Paul: “Is it important for local franchisees to have a communications strategy in place or is it sufficient to only have it at the franchisor level?”
Gini: “I’m a HUGE proponent of local franchisees having a strategy in place that is complementary to what the franchisor is doing. Consider most reporters won’t cover your business unless there is a local angle. Most local baseball teams are sponsored by local businesses. The Mayor won’t show up to your ribbon cutting if you’re not giving back to the community. Add into the mix social media and you know that people buy from people and want to have a relationship with the people they do business with…not the company or the brand. The person who buys your product or service in his/her community, wants to have a relationship with the person running that entity, not the corporate monster.”
Paul: “Is public relations, as we have known it over the years, changing to adapt to a more “connected” society?”
Gini: “There has been a lot of discussion about whether or not public relations, as an industry, is dying. Most PR people (as evidenced by a recent IABC poll) deny it’s happening and are content with doing their jobs as they’ve always known them. I contend social media is changing the way we communicate and PR, as we know it, is dying. Regardless of PR professionals thinking social media affects the way they do their jobs, someone has to own it – be it marketing, PR, or advertising. I’d rather jump on it now and own it. After all, social media is about developing and fostering relationships with customers, stakeholders, employees, influencers, and individuals. Traditional PR is about developing and fostering relationships with media and influencers. Makes sense to me that it fit in with PR.”
Paul: “What role do you see social media playing within the franchise community?”
Gini: “I love, love, love what Tasti D-Lite is doing with social media. I use this example all the time. They have a store in the Empire State Building. Whenever someone tweets that they are in or near the Empire State Building, @tastidlite sends them an offer to come into the store. In some cases, they offer a free frozen dessert. In others, a discount. This has helped them build in-store profitability, loyal customers, and their intensely passionate following. This is SO EASY to do at the franchisee level. This is just one example of how social media helps build a franchisee following. Get out there and try it. It works!”
Today, Gini Dietrich, CEO at Arment Dietrich PR presented an interesting question on the company blog, F.A.D.S. (the Fight Against Destructive Spin), “Should CEOs Spend Time On Social Networking?” Of course, always having to add my two cents, I responded accordingly.
“I would be surprised if any CEO of a publicly-traded company had a social media presence. The reason I say this is because of the SEC and FTC.
The SEC has certain rules about information being presented and disclosed to the public and the CEO would need to be extremely careful as to what he or she communicates, even through his or her own personal social networking efforts. From a liability standpoint, I’m not sure the benefits outweigh the potential downside.
With respect to the FTC, the issue here is the marketing message and how it can and may be perceived. Currently, the FTC is considering guidelines and rules about marketing messages being conveyed through social media. Again, as the leader of a public company, the CEO must tread carefully and, even in conveying a marketing message, must be very careful not to break any SEC rules. Again, the benefits need to be weighed against potential consequences.
All that being said, I stongly believe public companies should have a major presence in social media, including social networking, letting the marketing experts spearhead the activity and content. While doing so, I do believe the CEO could, and should, participate strategically with key, well-defined content, more to enhance the overall effort as opposed to being front and center.
Now the flipside, private companies. I do believe CEOs of private companies need to be as transparent as possible. They’re usually the vision and drive behind the company. His or her thoughts and statements lend a great deal of credibility to the company, which ultimately may be defining factors in a customer, client, vendor or partner doing business with the company.
Often, the CEO, “is” the company which why we see companies named after the Founder and CEO. Many times, the CEO is actually the “commodity” being sold by the company. This is especially true with professional organizations, consulting companies, etc.
Service and product driven companies are different as there are usually consumers or clients as end-users. As such, they rely on the “personal guarantees” of the CEO and that message usually needs to be promoted to drive business. I’m thinking along the lines of George Zimmer, CEO of Men’s Wearhouse.
When it’s all said and done, there are few, more efficient ways of promoting a business, large or small, than through social media, and social networking. The messages are concise and clear, and often present the human side of the business. And, clients and customers alike, feel more confident “knowing” the CEO and his or her thoughts, feeling more comfortable with their decision to do business with the company or organization.
Here’s a simple, yet totally unscientific rule of thumb: If a business needs to have the CEO’s personal guarantee on loans and lines of credit, then the CEO should be very active in social media and social networking activities. If the company can enter into loan and credit agreements without any personal guarantees, it’s best to leave the social media and social networking efforts to the marketing experts.”
Please note: CEOs of franchise organizations also need to be careful not to present inadvertent earnings claims in any social media activities.
Social media is exciting, and is finally being embraced by franchise organizations. Many are beginning to test the waters, albeit very cautiously. Some have been pleasantly surprised and wonder why they didn’t venture in this direction sooner. Others, have been quite confused but are reluctant to give up. Perhaps if they could quantify and analyze their efforts, they would be more confident in their efforts. But where do they start?
First, they must understand some key factors regarding the metrics of social media in order to be able to plug in numbers that make sense. Certain elements of social media metrics need to be defined, that may ultimately convince them and the rest of their management team, there is value in creating “noise” online.
So, let’s take a look at key social media metrics as the first step towards quantifying and analyzing social media efforts. Once understood, it will be easier to track trends and results.
Volume – The number of comments, blogs, posts, tweets, links, etc., about the brand, the competition, and the industry segment.
Sentiment – The positive, negative, or indifferent consumer reaction to the brand or a topic, which can be measured by text analytics and natural-language processing.
Emotion – The reasons that a consumer felt, good, bad, or indifferent that point how the company can resolve his / her problem or how the business can change and improve.
Topic / Issue – The context (e.g., product, customer service, advertising, competitor, etc.) in which the brand is being discussed. Nielsen’s Brand Association Map helps visually associate the relationship between terms; a Google AdWords keyword-expansion tool helps improve the relevancy of the company’s selections.
Source – Where the conversation is occurring (e.g., Twitter, blog, discussion board).
Author (Influencer) – The people talking about the brand and their social media impact (e.g. number of followers, readers, commenters).
Virality – The reach of the brand and relevant topics around the brand (e.g., how many people are reading, posting, linking, and sharing).
Source: Alex Burmaster, Nielsen Online
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