Create Goodwill for Your Small Business with Community Involvement

For any small business to succeed, whether it’s a single location or a few franchises, it must build goodwill with the surrounding community. You can have Facebook fans or catalogue customers all over the world, placing orders by phone and email, but if locals aren’t walking in the door, you’re doomed.

Branding your business as a “hometown hero” can make a huge impression on your customer base and serve as an important differentiator in the marketplace. Here’s how to do it:

Promote local vendors and distributors. If you’re satisfied with work done by local workers or businesses, let them know! Announce how much you like them on your website and social channels, and even on your storefront. Such efforts cost nothing and generate enormous goodwill – and even lead to partnerships down the line.

Join all the local trade organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce. These are great ways to network, but many such groups put out directories or give their members some sort of seal of approval. In a sense, these organizations are doing your marketing for you.

List your business on Yelp and Foursquare, and encourage customers to “check in” when they visit you and to write a review. An easy to way to use Foursquare is to offer a discount or prize for the “Mayor” – the person who checks in at your business the most. This triggers the best kind of competition: Who can visit your business the most often?

Image courtesy of Tom Edwards (@TheBlackFin)

Participate in community events. These can be holiday events, charity fundraisers, county fairs, or events tied to the local school or college. You can simply donate money to get your business listed as a sponsor, or “go big” by becoming the sole sponsor of an event or local youth sports team. Go even bigger by hosting your own event, whether it’s just for fun, like a Fourth of July barbecue, or to raise money for a (preferably local) charity.

The inverse of that idea is to hold a contest among your employees that benefits a local charity. Give a prize to whichever employee can sell the most candy, bring in the most cans to recycle, or raise the most money. Prizes can be as simple as an extra vacation day. Again, there’s no point in keeping this a secret; tell the charity, post updates online, and display a leaderboard so your customers can see your efforts.

You can also encourage employees to volunteer at the charity of their choice, perhaps giving a paid (or non-penalized) personal day to allow them to attend weekday events. You yourself can also join the board of a local charity, which will guarantee your name in their marketing materials.

Photo courtesy of D'Anna Associates

Finally, take pride in your community. Decorate your workplace with photos of local heroes, celebrities, or important events. Try to get endorsements from the local TV anchors. Congratulate local teams on their victories and let nearby schools post flyers for their events. You can even make the community part of your tagline: “Proudly serving Plano since 1997,” for example, not only shows your commitment to the community but also helps with your SEO.

These strategies make goodwill and community involvement part of your brand and differentiate you in the marketplace. Organizations from local banks to TOMS Shoes have successfully incorporated the spirit of giving, which creates a strong emotional connection to their brands. And that makes customers want to spend money on your products or services instead of your competitor’s.

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What's Foursquare Really For?

The best social sites have clearly stated goals. Facebook is for connecting with friends. Twitter is for live updates. LinkedIn is for business networking.

So what is Foursquare? The smartphone app allows you to "check in" to a location, with the option of adding a comment and/or sharing the update on Facebook and Twitter. You can leave a "tip" at your location, so other users will see "Be sure to try the nachos!" when they check in at the same restaurant. 

You get points and badges for various "achievements," whether it's visiting five different Italian restaurants or traveling to different states. You can compete with your friends for the most achievements. Whoever checks in the most at a location, whether it's a park or a store or the Rose Bowl, becomes the "Mayor," with their photo on the location's main page.

But what's it all for? The points have no value. You don't need a third party to announce your location on Facebook and Twitter. The tips aren't moderated, leading to weird or unhelpful comments, and old tips can become outdated. When you check in at a museum or gallery, for example, you'll see many posts about exhibits that are long gone. 

One of the best uses for the service was for businesses to offer discounts to anyone who checked, or to the Mayor. Dozens of Houlihan's franchises give a free order of fries for every check-in, while the current Mayor receives 10% off all food items. This strategy could lead to consumers actually competing over who visits an establishment the most -- a dream of any store owner. But few companies have followed Houlihan's lead.

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley recently spoke to VentureBeat about the service's "identity crisis." He said Foursquare is "most interested in taking the data from check-ins to model what’s happening in the real world, and help people find new things." He pointed to Radar, an app now available on phones running iOS5, which alerts you when your friends are nearby or when you're near a venue you've told Foursquare you want to visit.

I'll be the first to say that Facebook and Twitter can't match that. But just a few weeks later, Foursquare also announced that it was adding menus to 250,000 restaurant listings. Even Yelp and Urbanspoon don't offer that feature. But how is it social? How do recommendations and menus align with points, badges, and tips? How will any of these lead to more businesses offering discounts to attract new customers?

It seems that Foursquare has a lot of good ideas but isn't sure which direction take. If Zagat, now owned by Google, adds menus to its app, it could quickly overtake Foursquare's new feature. Facebook's "Add a location to this post" option now threatens Foursquare on another flank. And I travel all over New York City and hardly ever see a Foursquare sticker on a store window or the logo on the menu.

I hope Crowley can find a clear path for Foursquare. After all, it's a great concept. But its time is running out.

The Latest in Social Media for Retailers

With the big Labor Day shopping weekend behind us and retailers already planning for the holiday season, I thought I’d spend this week’s blog looking at the recent developments in social media for retail.

Not Such A Great Deal?
The biggest news came from Facebook, which eliminated its Deals feature after only four months. Just a few days later, Yelp announced that it was scaling back its Daily Deals service, cutting that department’s sales force in half. These unexpected moves signaled that the trend of retailers using daily deals and online coupons may have peaked, probably due to market saturation. MSNBC’s Technolog says consumers are suffering from “daily deals fatigue,” citing a 7% decline in industry revenue between June and July.

Image courtesy of Yipit

Social Media Isn’t Going Anywhere
But retailers aren’t giving up on social media. A recent survey conducted by audience research company Bizo revealed that 65% of retail marketing executives think social media is “most important” for the upcoming shopping seasons. And 96% thought that social media marketing is more important, or as important, to their marketing in 2011 versus 2010.

Does that mean social media marketing leads to sales? In the Bizo survey, 41% of respondents said the most important aspect of social media was simply “creating general awareness.” In fact, only 14% had actually tracked the business results of their social media efforts. So many companies are finding it either difficult (likely) or undesirable (unlikely) to measure social marketing’s effect on their sales.

QR is OK
Meanwhile, mobile marketing is growing. ComScore, a digital analytics company, just released the results of a study on mobile QR code scanning. Almost 40% of the 14 million Americans who scanned codes on their phones in June did so from a retail store. 25% scanned a code from a grocery store and 8% scanned from a restaurant. That’s more than ten million people using mobile technology to enhance their shopping experience in just 30 days.

When Customers Play, Retailers Win
Retailers are also using mobile games to drive sales. The iMedia Connection blog recently listed 15 ways brands are using gamification, such as points and rewards, to increase business. Several retailers made the list, including Target, which uses the ShopKick mobile app to incentivize shopping. Customers receive points when they enter a participating store and when they scan select product barcodes. Customers can then redeem the points for Target gift cards. A number of other retailers, including Home Depot and Sephora, are using a similar app calledCheckPoints.

So deal-of-the-day websites are declining while QR codes and mobile discount games are on the rise. Looking ahead, retailers should beware “daily deals fatigue” and concentrate on loyalty programs, scannable in-store codes, and ways to “gamify” their shopping experiences. The next step in this mobile retail evolution is the exciting world of augmented reality – but that’s a topic for another day.