Speaking at SOCIAL MEDIA FOR BUSINESS & ENTREPRENEURSHIP Alumni Club on June 16th – Here’s the information – hope you’ll join me if your in New York City at this time.

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR BUSINESS & ENTREPRENEURSHIP (Alumni Club)

—It’s Here to Stay—Now What?
Event Date: Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 6:30pm

Please join us for a very informative panel about social media, for the corporate marketer, the small business owner, and the “newbie” social media user.  This will be the first of a seven –part educational series of social media events which will cover the full spectrum of issues regarding social media (e.g., how to utilize it to promote business and build a brand/franchise, personal branding for your career, measuring ROI , etc.).  At the end of the event, volunteers will be stationed at the Samsung computers for hands-on show-and-tell.

Date: Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Time: 6:30 – 8:30 pm (includes refreshments, one-hour panel discussion and Q & A)

Location: The Samsung Experience, 10 Columbus Circle, 3rd Floor, New York 10019

Cost: $25 for CBSAC/NY members/ $35 for Non-Members

Click here to buy tickets!!!

Become a member of  CBSAC/NY
Moderator: Dorian Benkoil

Panelists: Marshall Sponder, Jeremy Merrin EMBA ‘00, and Lawrence Sherman, FACME, CCMEP

Dorian Benkoil has over 20 years’ media experience and is currently SVP and Senior Consultant at Teeming Media (www.teemingmedia.com), a NY-based strategic digital media business and editorial consultancy.  He was previously Editorial Director for Mediabistro.com and has worked at ABCNews.com, Fairchild Publications and CNET.com.

Marshall Sponder is a Social Media and Analytics Consultant and Founder of www.webmetricsguru.com –a blog renowned in the industry. His major clients include award-winning agencies such as Porter Novelli and Converseon. He previously worked as a Senior Web Analyst for Insights Group at MONSTER Worldwide, Inc. as well as at IBM.com. He also co-leads the Meetup Group: NY Data Stories.

Jeremy Merrin, EMBA ’00 is the Founder & CEO of Havana Central (www.havanacentral.com). One of the locations of this Cuban restaurant chain was formerly known as the West End Gate, a landmark bar/restaurant and still a meeting place for many Columbia students. Prior to becoming an entrepreneur he was Executive VP of Business Development at iParty.com.

Lawrence Sherman, FACME, CCMEP, is a medical educational professional known worldwide for using new and unique approaches such as social media in medical education.  He works for Prova Education (www.provaeducation.com), an evidence-based continuing medical education organization for physicians and healthcare professionals.

Sponsored by the CBSAC/NY Social Media Committee and Sobel Media Events and Samsung with special thanks to Cecilia Pineda Feret ’92 and Bill Sobel.

I didn’t go to the New York Restaurant show today, instead, I went to a Tweetup Sunday night which turned out to materialize something very interesting about Social Media ROI – and I’ll get to that as this post goes on – which you’ll probably want to read all the way though – since what I’m going to say now will be well worth reading – perhaps a few times over.

Turns out the NY Restaurant Show Tweetup was hosted by Paul Barron of SocialCoco he terms himself “agent of change” and a “social media mentor for the restaurant business”- and a part owner in three Restaurant Chains (and has an iPhone App to access all his content online).   And I didn’t get to speak much to him till I was about to leave – but then the fun began.

First of all, just as I was leaving I got into a conversation with  Paul Barron the Social Media ROI of the three restaurant chains he is part owner of, which has a fairly large number of franchises – he and his team invested a lot of time and money into developing a propitiatory Social Media dashboard for his Restaurant chains  based on third party tools that include a custom implementation of HubSpot – the makes of Twitter Grader and Facebook Grader, among other applications.

1. Part of the ROI aspect was based on datamining Twitter to find out who has actually visited one his restaurants  – much of this is done textually by creating a series of queries to each restaurant that containing words and phrases like “I am at” <name of restaurant> OR “I’m at” <name of restaurant>, etc, you get the idea – there are probably several searches for each restaurant like that.   All of this feeds into his dashboard.

2. When it’s Twitter or Facebook – note is taken of the number of followers or friends – and this is plugged into an equation that is fine tuned to each channel – clearly a lot of thought has gone into this.

3. With his restaurant chains – the franchises are supported by marketing and advertising created by his organization – including social media, the tracking tools and the dashboard he’s created – that allows him to sell a franchise and tell the buyer that they don’t have to worry about the marketing or tracking – it’s part of the package.

4. By having a Business Strategy that is aligned with his Social  Media Strategy (or vice versa) Paul and his business partners are able to take fandom and subscribers from one channel and send them to another – ie: Twitter —-> Facebook ——>Youtube ——-> Email ——–> Twitter —-etc, you get the picture.  Paul says this is “engagement of the business channel” and he’s able to keep his visitors engaged by giving them great content.

Clearly, Paul Barron’s approach won’t work for a local restaurant – this is more for franchises – but Paul did share that his Social Media Return on Investment (ROI) is between 20%-25% and is at least 2.5 more profitable than any other way he could spend his money marketing (he said traditional marketing has about an 8% return on investment).   While I am a measurement expert – I’m not a business expert  and I’m not in a position to get into a discussion about his financials – so I stayed out of that part and asked Paul more about how he operates social media.

Paul Barron said to me that a typical restaurant with say – might generate about 2.3 million dollars a year and that a rule of thumb is to spend 8% on marketing, or about 300,000 dollars.

Paul’s belief is that 25% of that spend should be in Social Media.   Huh!!!!   25 percent - that would be close to a 100,000 dollars per year, per restaurant. I asked Paul exactly what he was spending money on in Social Media, besides staff and a few tools – since much of Social Media has been thought of to be “free” – the cost is in the effort while the reward is in the viral spread and good will of the message.

That’s where the discussion got even more interesting – in that 25% of the marketing budget was spent, in his case, in creating better content his audience wanted – like signing up an Olympic athlete and giving them their own video channel connected with the restaurant chains – then using the Social  Media Strategy that I touched on in point 4, above – to keep the message spreading and circulating in his vast network of food aficionados.

Interesting – once he figured out that Social Media was the biggest ROI channel he had – it was just a matter of figuring out the best way to spend the money he already decided he would spend – 25% of his total marketing spend in Social Media – because he could prove to his own satisfaction – and his business partners – that the ROI was, indeed, there.

But that gets to a thorny problem – there aren’t many good use cases of Social Media for Restaurants – and even less that have any direct ROI in them, but many that have some indirect ROI, like customers returning more often.    But if you go to a local restaurant – can you really see anyone spending 25% of their marketing budget on Social Media?  Probably not – they’d not know even, what to spend it on – since it’s not clear – in other words, without the business strategy – how could you possible know how to spend the money and where in Social Media to spend the money.

Paul suggested that when your starting out on spending money in Social Media – you try a number of things and see where the audience is engaging the most – and work out from there – there will be an element that can’t be predicted – so the 25% of the marketing spend will initially be spent on things that will not always pan out – but once you get traction in one channel (say, Video) you build on it and then funnel it to other channels.  Still – without that strategy – it’s hard to see how anyone could make it work – hense get the ROI percentages he’s claiming he gets.

Then again, it’s a little confusing to me – he said he spends 25% of his marketing budget on Social Media but he also says he gets a higher ROI from Social Media – of 25%, which is 2.5 times what he can get from any other marketing his restaurant chains do.   But why is 25% keep coming up – shouldn’t the ROI of Social Media be over 100%?   I don’t know.  I don’t know how he comes up with his figures – probably because I’d need to continue the conversation we just had, hopefully we’ll get a chance to do that sometime soon.

So, making Social Media work for the average restaurant – that’s going to take a bit of work and imagination – and honestly, Paul Barron admitted that we’re just at the very beginning of the journey -we’re pioneers, he said.

Anyway, it just so happens that a restaurant I am working with somewhat was across the street from the place of the tweetup; an associate and I dropped by.

What you don’t know is that I have set up alerts that email me every hour (now it’s every 10 minutes as of tonight) when the restaurant is named in any way.   As I was in the restaurant I got and alert from a customer who was saying she was in the restaurant – via Twitter.

As the alert took place in real time – the customer and her friend were given free drinks and discounts – in other words – we used Social Media and Social Media Monitoring (via Radian6) to reward a customer who was having a great time – and we made that time better.

And you know what …… THAT gesture was worth it in my opinion … look what the customer tweeted after the evening was over …..

TWEET FROM: KIMBERLY819 Name: KIMBERLY819 Posted on: Mar 1, 2010 1:07 AM Followers: 66 Following: 87 What a GREAT night at Havana Central!!!! My new favorite spot!!

Link http://twitter.com/KIMBERLY819/statuses/9811482654

You want Social Media ROI – you got ROI – a customer for life.  Is it replicate-able? Yes – but it would take work – you have to set up good alerts – you’d have to train staff, you’d have to find a way to figure out which location the tweet is from (when there are more locations for the same chain) – in other words – you’d have to have a strategy.

Personally, and I can only speak for myself here – if we offered anyone who tweeted from the location – something …. that would be working from the center, out.

Anyway, I hope you found it worth your while to read this far down – and yes, there’s real ROI here – and you build it gradually – day by day.

By the way, at the end our our little conversation, Paul Barron and the small group around us talked about Google – the data it has and he agreed – Google is big brother – and knows just about everything about us – somehow, we got on that topic through the article at MyCustomer.com that was published on Google getting into Social Media Monitoring.

There were also some video interviews done and I was interviewed about metrics for Restaurants using Social Media – that will appear on one of Paul Barron’s websites, perhaps SocialCoco, in a month or so.

Enough for one post.

xx

i got the impression people like the posts that I have written comparing the Social Monitoring platforms with each other and over the last few weeks I compared Radian6, Alterian, Sysomos, Brandwatch and Biz360 on the same features (volume, sentiment and geolocation)

However, I have wanted more platforms to look at and I have several more that have opened up access for me and I’ll be looking at them shortly.

For starters, today I spoke in depth with Laura Khalil and Margaret Francis of Scout Labs and they have given me access to the Scout Labs platform for an extended period so I might evaluate and write about it.   I was excited to hear Scout Labs works very closely with Twitter and is able to handle the entire currant of Twitter messaging for it’s monitoring platform.   I’ll have a lot more to say about Scout Labs in a week or so, but I’m very happy Laura and Margaret reached out to me and being fans of this blog (and reading it all the time) it means a lot to me when people care about the content.

I’ll give Scout Labs a fair but honest assessment.

Another platform I have been granted access to over the last week, but haven’t used yet, is Synthesio – and I have Michelle Chmielewski, Synthesio’s  Community Manager, to thank for this.   I spoke with Michelle last week and she gave me a pretty good idea of what Synthesio does and I’ll be meeting with the Synthesio team in London at #msmbc10 next month – in fact, Synthesio is a sponsor of Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp.

I also got to hear a presentation about ListenLogic, another high end platform that has an interesting technology – I’m still waiting on some more information and a limited access to the product to evaluate it.

Then, I also met with Wendy Thorpe of Socialtality.com – a new Boston based  startup  in stealth mode.   Socialtality is an interesting idea – sworn to secrecy so I can’t talk about the product but it look like it might be good for some types of customers.

Later this week I’ll be seeing an updated demo from my friends over at Adaptive Semantics - who are now partially owned by the Huffington Post – in fact, I’ll be going over to see Elena Haliczer and Jeff Revesz at their digs in  Huffington Post’s building in Soho – I’ll have more to say about Adaptive Semantics once I’ve seen their updated platform.

Also, before I forget to mention it – I’m going to be a speaker next week at Jeff Pulver’s 140 Conference meetup at the New York Times Center.

Discussion Panel: The Emerging Real-Time Web and Education

- Deven Black, TAB NYC MS SS/Reading Teacher (@spedteacher)
- Lisa Thumann, Ed Tech, Advisor for NJECC.org (@lthumann)
- Liz Pullen, Sociologist & Teacher (@nwjerseyliz)
- Nirasha, Founder of http://www.MommyNiri…. (@mommyniri) Moderator
Additional speakers:

- Ted Rubin, CMO, e.l.f. Cosmetics (@TEDRUBIN), topic: TBA
- Marshall Sponder, @webmetricsguru, topic: TBA

I’m pretty excited.