Community Guy – Jake McKee

A real-life Groupon business story

Our office neighbors, Paloma, recently went through the Groupon experience to promote their spa business. I asked one of the owners, Levi Dugat, to answer a few questions about their experience, and he was nice enough to oblige.

How would you rate your Groupon experience overall?
 We were perfectly pleased with our experience and honestly prepared not to be. We’d heard some horror stories and some positive ones and spent time doing some research, weighing our options and went for it anyway.

We heard lots of stories about the Groupon clients tending not to re-book, being somewhat abrasive to deal with, not tipping the service providers, and so on. We developed a strategy to try to weed out the one-time bargain shopper clients by creating packages for our Groupon deals that were priced a little higher, so we might aim for customers who were willing to pay for a service package closer to the prices of our actual, full-price services. I think this made a HUGE difference for us with who the Groupon deals brought in.

Did you notice any trends in the buyers?
 I would estimate that well over half the spa Groupon clients pre-booked for their next service and told us they were happy to have found their new spa, and the majority of them bought product as well. Another unexpected trend was that a significant number of the Groupon buyers added full-priced services to their appointments and many of them pre-booked for their next appointment as well.

We are very pleased with the amount of business Groupon brought in because it seems so far to have significantly bolstered our regular/pre-booked client base. We also had a VERY significant boost in calls and bookings for 2 or 3 weeks after our Groupon deal hit from new + established client who did NOT purchase our Groupon but only saw it advertised. So it clearly served to bring in new full-paying clients and reminded our existing client that we’re here. We also had tons of folks reference that they’d “seen the Groupon” even though they didn’t purchase it or book for a full-price service afterwards so I think it’s safe to say Groupon broadened our presence and range of exposure in Austin.

What do you think was the biggest reason(s) for the success?
We were very realistic about the cap number we should put on the number of Groupons that we would allow to be sold. This eliminated the possibility for our books to be so bogged down with Groupon clients that our regular clients felt neglected.

We also talked with our staff about the number of Groupon services they’d be comfortable with taking on. Our staff received the full profit from their Groupon transactions since they have not been completely booked anyway. This steered us away from the issue of disgruntled staff feeling pressured into performing a massive amount of services that wouldn’t show them much return as far as their client base was concerned. We’d heard horror stories about disgruntled staff resenting the Groupon clients because they were suddenly working 14 hour days for less pay knowing a small percent of these clients wouldn’t return or tip. In other words, we avoided the horror story of sub-par service for the Groupon clients .

Would you do it again? If so/if not, why?
 I think we would do it again if we needed another immediate push for one of our stylists, because it served the exact purpose we intended it to. Groupon was amazing in terms of advertising for us. We’ve actually already gotten set up for Groupon Now with one of our new stylists who came onboard after most of the Groupon clients were booked with our exisiting stylist.

What was the biggest problem and/or disappointment?
 I think we were prepared enough and had done our research in such a way that allowed us to avoid any major problems that could’ve arose. We asked people we knew in various industries who had used Groupon about their experiences with it and tried to prepare ourselves based on their responses/advice/warnings. There really weren’t any I can think of and the staff didn’t have complaints either. The only disappointment I can think of is that we didn’t sell all the way up to our cap. We were hoping to sell more than we did and were prepared to accommodate that total of services needing to be booked.

If you had it to do over again, would you change anything? If so, what?
Hmmm, tough one. Not sure what we could’ve changed. We probably would just spend time trying to figure out how to design the packages to appeal to a broader range of folks so we could sell more of them. Other than that, we were happy with how it all turned out.

Cool beta signup model

From turntable.fm: I haven’t seen this method of handling beta signups for new community tools. It’s a great way to both control and drive initial usage.

Trends

I’ve been meaning to share these two presentations for a while. Both are very cool, and both deal with trend prediction. The first is for 2011 and the second for 2010. Take a flip through them. Some interesting predictions about what we’re going to see this year and what we saw (and didn’t) last year.

2011

2010

Buy and sell social media fans with FanAuction

I’m proud to report that Ant’s Eye View has launched a new product that we’re really excited about: FanAuction™.

Simply put, FanAuction™ solves two of the biggest problems in social media today:

1. How to quickly acquire new fans to prove social media ROI
2. Eliminating ongoing spend to support fan activity you no longer need

Here’s the official description:

Put simply, FanAuction™ is the ultimate destination for buying and selling social media fans and followers.

Building a word of mouth network of fans, evangelists and advocates takes time. For some brands, it may take years of dedicated, resource-intensive work. But not anymore. With Ant’s Eye View’s FanAuction™, the system to help you Get Fans Now™, you won’t have to invest any more time or money to create relationships with customers!

After hearing from our clients, industry colleagues, and famous circuit speakers about the needs of big businesses within social media, we had to put the work in on this project. And as projects go, this one took more manhours than I’ve ever imagined possible. But it’s ready, we’re unveiling it today, and we’re excited to see how it fares in the marketplace. As a former community manager, I know personally how hard it is to generate and manage fan enthusiasm. FanAuction™ is a major push forward in eliminating that hard work.

If you have questions, head over to antseyeview.com/fanauction or drop me an email. For more information, see our official press release

Chrysler tweet: an issue of process

Over the weekend, I had several people from big brands ask me what I thought about the Chrysler tweet debacle, and whether I thought the right actions were taken. If you haven’t heard, an employee from the agency that ghostwrites the @ChryslerAutos twitter handle accidently posted a tweet to that handle rather than their personal account, as intended. A virtual s$%tstorm was brought down on Chrysler, who in turn fired their agency, who in turned fired the employee.

The reality is that this is not an uncommon occurrence, nor will there be a time when such things don’t happen. Raise your hand if you’ve never mistakenly sent an internal email to a customer. Looking…. yep, no hands raised. We’ve all done it, or something similar.

I feel bad for the employee, and I have no idea of what the circumstances are behind the scenes. But if I were the point of contact at Chrysler, I certainly would have strongly considered firing them [the agency], if not actually doing it. This isn’t because I expect agencies to be perfect or that mistakes are the end of the world. (In fact, mistakes – or the positive recovery from them – are sometimes the best way to build your proof points of authenticity)

Rather, it is because the fact that an employee could accidently tweet anything to the client’s stream rather than their personal stream tells me two things:

• There was/is very little process in place at the agency that ensures such mistakes can’t happen. This process would come in two forms: ensuring that the employee is well trained in specific best practices, dictated and/or signed off on by the brand, and that workflow for how tweets are created includes a buddy system or other forms of human and technological verification before publishing takes place.
• There is no audit of these best practices to ensure that a new employee who is given the keys to the kingdom isn’t, for instance, using a single Twitter app to setup both @funkyfreshagencyguy and @ChryslerAutos. (I don’t know if that’s what happened here, but that’s my guess)

Here’s what I told these contacts when they asked how they could avoid a similar debacle:

• If you’re going to outsource your brand personality (which I’m not passing judgement on), then ensure that you’re taking an active role in the process development and the on-going auditing of said process.
• It’s up to you (the brand) to be responsible for anyone and everyone working on your project. Turning things over to your agency and trusting them to avoid disaster is, in fact, a recipe for disaster. This is your brand, not theirs. Ultimately, you’re the one getting judged on success of the programs, activities, and outputs and as such, you have to be involved in the details.
• Ask to see the process with your own eyes. Watching your agency contacts struggle to show you how things work behind the scenes or watching them quickly and efficiently post content will tell you more than you’d ever get in writing. Documenting process is easy, sticking to it in real life is really hard.
• Ask your account director for bios or resumes on the folks pushing the publish button. Agencies, more often than not, push the task of publishing to very junior employees (It’s easy, after all… why does a senior person need to be doing it? Right??) whose judgement or experience might not be where you’re happy with. Push back if you don’t feel comfortable with their staffing. Anyone who pushes a publish button on your behalf is inherently a spokesperson for your company. There’s a reason the White House Press Secretary is a senior position. There’s a reason why your company’s lead PR spokesperson isn’t an intern. If you’re going to outsource, make sure you have the right person in the hot seat.
• Demand updates on staff changes. Agencies churn people at a regular clip; it’s the reality of the business, and it’s neither good or bad, it’s just how things work. Require your agency to update you if the person pushing the button or anyone on the content flow team changes. Then repeat the vetting process steps above for their replacements. Just because your account director is awesome doesn’t mean that his/her staff isn’t problematic.
• And lastly, regularly reassess whether you’re truly getting your money’s worth by having someone else push the publish button. In the case of Chrysler, because this mistake happened with a layer of removal between the brand and the content, it was harder for the Chrysler folks to apologize in a way that had any personality to it. It wasn’t an Chrysler employee working on a brand many love and many will defend. Instead, it was from a person who was dissociated from the love, so activating an audience of fans to step in and defend Chrysler is nearly impossible.

(Thanks to Armano for the graphic up top)

Carfi recaps SXSW 2011

Recently hired Ant, Chris Carfi recaps his experience at SXSW 2011. This one is worth the watch/listen. That’s right, he’s so cool he added audio to his slides and posted the whole thing on Slideshare for our viewing pleasure. And because I love you, fine readers, I have embedded it below.

SXSW as an API for industry collaboration

Exhausted.

That’s about the only way I can describe how I feel after 6 days of SXSW Interactive. To be clear, this exhaustion doesn’t stem from the parties (I only attended a few…and was at home at midnight all weekend) or the 4,592,103 official panels they had this year (I only attended two, one of which is the one where I was speaking). It doesn’t even stem from dodging 15,000+ people this year that attended SXSWi. Instead, my exhaustion stems from being busy, extremely busy for 6 straight days with events that surround SXSWi rather than come from it.

As someone who’s been coming to SXSWi since 1997, I’ve seen the event follow a fairly common pattern of community development:

• A small, dedicated community comes together around a shared interest, typically driven by a lack of options for connection to folks who “get them”
• Size of the community swells. At first this is a boon to the community – people have more of what they love. Over time, however, logistics, quality, and interactions all get watered down
• The original folks start getting grumpy and talking about how things were in their day. Newbies don’t understand what all the fuss is about (since they’re not seeing the original coolness) and/or they’re not sure why the old timers are so grumpy (because they are happy enough with what they see today)
• The community either reinvents itself in the face of this new reality, or it tends to shrivel and die

Last year was big, unwieldy, and generally not as much fun as years past have been. People were crowded absolutely everywhere. 9,000+ people were crammed into the Austin Convention Center, and the number of parties in a very small part of downtown just made things incredibly annoying. The crowd seemed to consist mainly of folks looking for the new bandwagon to jump on, and the content was… let’s say “thin”.

But this  year something happened that has, or at least could, change the future of SXSWi and perhaps even the industry. That’s right, I said it: the industry.

This year, SXSWi crossed the chasm and morphed into a platform. The event has taken on the characteristics of an API, where the event is the foundation that others build their content off of. By spreading out the activities across multiple campuses, attendees had to more specifically design their experience rather than just going with the flow and showing up “where my friends were checking in on Foursquare”. (It takes time to get from campus A to campus B) Companies and groups seem to have take the opportunity to slip in cool events that were unofficial, yet wouldn’t have existed if not for SXSWi. Even local Austin photographer, Trey Ratcliff pulled together an amazing photowalk that was only possible because of the type of person SXSWi brought into town in the first place.

I spent a huge chunk of the event this year in 1:1 meetings with people who I’d meet during the conference and wanted to spend more time with, or people I’d arranged meetings with beforehand. One of my friends told me tonight that he spent time with several of his company’s biggest clients who happened to be in town for SXSWi and that those meetings alone paid for the cost of his attendance. And he works for one of the world’s largest brands, not a garage-based startup. I talked to countless people who skipped the panels but found their brains full of new info at the end of each day. This has always happened at SXSWi, of course, but I’ve never seen the number of people skipping out on the official content or flat out hacking the conference and showing up without a badge to all kinds of unofficial events.

I’m confident that this API style growth was not at all intended or targeted by the SXSWi team, but they have a real opportunity on their hands to help bring the industry into one place every year and truly change how business gets done in our industry. To make this happen, SXSW needs to focus as much on content selection for panels as they do on core logistics. They need to add their voice to how attendees can get around town, not just around their campus. They need to consider how best to encourage groups to do events unconnected to SXSW. There’ll be a desire to try to own everything, to drive anyone interested in SXSWi-related activity to buy a badge so the conference can make more money. They need to squash that desire and remember that any good API succeeds as much, if not more when the entire ecosystem flourishes.

SXSWi is dead. Long live SXSWi…!

UPDATE: If you’re interested in hearing more about SXSWi 2011, here’s a few links -

• SXSW 2011: The Internet is Over
• Deal with it: SXSW has changed

TED Talk: We are makers

Fantastic video about the future bringing us back to our past. Or at least I hope so.

Great quote from the Hulu CEO

“History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers. Hulu is not burdened by that legacy.”

- Jason Kilar, Hulu CEO

Perhaps the greatest commercial of our generation

If you were a boy who grew up in the 70s and early 80s, you almost certainly tried to move objects with your mind thanks to Star Wars influence. To this day, I still dream of having such skills. So it was with great amusement that I watched this VW commercial. I also had to smile at the dad, who probably tried out his own Jedi skills as a kid knowing how to make his son (or daughter?) feel like he was on top of the world.

Without further ado, perhaps the greatest commercial of our generation: