Embrace the Taboo: Pricing

Photo by Soham_Pablo

Money is a taboo in our culture. We’ve all been told, don’t ever be the first to bring up money in the hiring process. We say that there are three things not to be discussed in polite company, but money is possibly the worst. You really shouldn’t talk about money with your date either. So you definitely shouldn’t ask me how much Magic Bottle Marketing’s social media services is going to cost your business, right? WRONG!

I won’t try to explain why people think you shouldn’t talk about money, because I have no idea. I always want to see the figures up front. I can tell you why that is!

• Money is often the deciding factor. I can either work for that amount or I can’t. I have this much money to spend, so I can either afford it or I can’t. I am already doing two volunteer projects so I simply don’t have the time for a pro bono job. These are cut and dry decisions that rest on number. I would rather know that number sooner rather than later.
• It tells me a lot about who I am talking to. How much someone is asking for or willing to pay tells me how much they know about the market, the product in question, what type of project they’re doing, how serious and committed they are, etc, etc…
• It saves me and them a lot of time. If I don’t like what I find out in the above two bullet points I want to know that right away so I don’t waste anyone’s time discussing a project that will never be.

So how much does social media for local businesses from Magic Bottle Marketing cost?

My pricing is similar to a restaurant’s pricing–pick two sides and an entree for $10 set-up. Your choices are…

Sides

• LinkedIn company page
• Facebook business page
• Twitter

Entrees

• Google+ company page
• Pinterest

Appetizers

• FourSquare venue
• Google Places setup
• 1 Google Adwords campaign
• 1 Facebook ad campaign
• FourSquare special setup

Appetizers are a one-time only fee—$50 for each. Obviously, campaigns and specials can be purchased multiple times. Your first two sides are $100 each per month, but the third is just $50 per month. Entrees are $150 per month. You can get a combo dinner (two sides and an entree) for $300 per month.

What are you paying for?

You are mostly paying for content creation and expert knowledge of how each platform can be customized to your business and its goals. Thus, sites whose content requires more time and effort (Google+ and Pinterest) cost more. Services that are a one-time only creation (campaigns and specials) cost less.

Pricing is something I thought about for months before I even bought the domain magicbottlemarketing.com. After surveying the local industry, I decided that my market niche would be affordable, customized content creation for social media for businesses. That niche was empty. Most businesses right here in Claremore either have no social media presence at all, are struggling to manage it on their own, or are being overcharged for setup only, content poor, non-customized social media accounts. And none of my competitors list their pricing up front.

You have better options! Please drop me a line at anna@magicbottlemarketing.com or give me a ring on my cell at 918-933-2303 and let’s get your business on the path to social success that’s affordable!

Customer Complaints: Your Chance to Shine

Fact #1: you can’t please everyone.

Fact #2: people have big mouths.

What happens when you mix the above facts with social media? You get your chance as a business owner to shine. Here are 3 reasons why social media is a better way to interact with unhappy customers than any other method, including face-to-face!

1. You get alerted to the complaint immediately.

If a customer has an issue with your business and mentions it to friends in person or on the phone there is no way for you to know that they did that. Even if they’re forward enough to tell you their complaint there’s no way for you to track down all those people they might have talked to. Not so on the interwebs! First, if you have some kind of social media platform you are inviting people to communicate with you there. When they do, you’re notified, have a way to contact them back, on top of being handed a great deal of their contact information.

Bonus: what if they don’t contact you directly on social media, instead using their own status or posting a review? Between alert services such as Google Alerts and Social Mentions and the built-in search features on Twitter & Google+ you can still find out quickly!

2. You get to be on stage.

When a person complains to me offline about a company I only get to hear their side of the story. I don’t get to find out if the company ever made it right to that customer. If that exchange takes place online the company has the opportunity to change it from a complaint to a conversation. They get to  publicly make it right. As you resolve their concerns and win back their business, all of your network and all of their network get to watch you value your customers through action, watch you be attentive, courteous, and professional. Instead of this being a negative mark for you, it grows your positive brand image.

3. You get to pleasantly surprise people.

Most businesses do not respond to negative customer feedback online. Why this is, I have no idea. Business owners aren’t completely rational beings, I guess. 😉 So, when you do respond you immediately get on everybody’s good side. Take every chance to stand out against the rest of your competitors!

Word of warning here: if you try to censor any complaints or negative feedback online you just end up multiplying it. Censoring is a extreme move that only accelerates the aggression. Don’t hide your head in the sand by hitting that delete button! Deal with the problem!

Your business’ approach to customer service is a big part of Magic Bottle Marketing’s intake process. This is not something either of us wants to have to plan on the fly. I will work with you to have a strategy in place so that when someone does complain, you’ll get to shine!

Refining Your Message

Communicating a message effectively is both an art and science. What do art and science have in common? They both take a lot of repetition to perfect and they both progress faster with feedback! Tuesday, I edited my ‘About‘ and ‘Services‘ pages. I’m CCing it here so I can get your feedback through comments.

About

Magic Bottle Marketing provides social media management and consulting services for local Green Country businesses. Social media is like a magic bottle that conveys your message to your customers faster, cheaper, and more effectively than traditional means. It combines three types of sales leads–advertising, returning  customers, and referals—into one powerful medium.

Anna Bavido founded Magic Bottle Marketing in 2011 out of a passion for her community and her own social media addictions, errr… experience. She has lived in Claremore since 2001 and graduated from Rogers State University in 2009 with a bachelor’s of science in social sciences. When she’s not teaching businesses to be sociable she is invovled in politics, family, karate, social media, and Jesus–but not necessarily in that order. Her favorite social network is Google+.

Services

Magic Bottle Marketing approaches each client every day with 3 mottos.

1. Give the client the biggest bang for their buck.
2. The right tool for the right job.
3. Track performance.

The first one is an attitude of gratefulness and responsibility for clients. You don’t have to give me business and I take the fact that you did very seriously. For more explanation, see Corporate Gratitude. Second, is a messaging approach that leverages the right social networks in the right way for clients’ goals and targeted customers. This is further explained in Social Media and Angry Birds. Third, I look back as often as I look forward. If I don’t know what I did before and how well it worked, I won’t know what to do next. I blogged about this some in the post Reflections.

With this mindset, I provide tiered contract management services for the following social media platforms–

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Foursquare
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Google Adwords
• WordPress

Service packages are customized to each client and start as low as $200/month. Discounts are available for churches, charities, and other nonprofits. Call Anna at 918-933-2303 or drop her a line at anna@magicbottlemarketing.com to find out how Magic Bottle Marketing can best help your business!

3 Needs of a Volunteer: Coach

Part 3 of 3: Coach

Volunteering should never be lonely work. Regularly check in with your volunteers. “How’s it coming? Do you need anything? Have we told you what a good job you’re doing?” This is where you communicate the Vision talked about way back at the beginning of this article. This is where you find out if they need any added training or tools, if the workload is realistic and balanced. These conversations are your biggest listening tool and you need to pay careful attention to what you’re hearing.Most accidents are preventable, right? If you’re not listening, you will be the last to find out about the blow up.

Staying in regular contact with your volunteers should double as quality control. When done properly quality control is actually a huge encouragement to both the checker and the volunteer. If you’re checking each completed task you get to see all the awesome things that are being done well and you get to praise the volunteers for it. But, there is another side to quality control that’s not as fun. It’s tempting for organizations to assign the ‘nice work’ of praising to the volunteer coordinator and the control side to someone else in the organisation (usually the coordinator’s boss). This is also known as good cop/bad cop and will be guaranteed to make everyone uncomfortable. Not only do volunteers get the feeling that they’re being sent to the office, it also sends a signal that the volunteer coordinator is incompetent and not trusted by the rest of the organization.

This may sound like a lot of things to make happen at once (“I’m supposed to coach the vision while making sure everything fits?”), but implementing one makes it easier to implement the others. Another tool that helps is a good old-fashioned intake interview (look for that post soon!). Don’t stress yourself out too much because volunteers are the best of your community. Their patience is nigh to boundless, so they get used and abused a lot. They’ll be thrilled to just see you making an effort.

3 Needs of a Volunteer: Fit

Part 2 of 3.

If a volunteer gets burned out it is usually because they were put someplace they weren’t a good fit for. Consider these points to be my burnout prevention plan.

You and the volunteers need to be realistic about what exactly they can accomplish. Too often we get the idea that we should just take the amount of work needed to be done (x), divide it by the number of volunteers (y), and thus conclude that everyone’s workload should be z. x/y=z but it also equals universal unhappiness. You will be unhappy that everything is not getting done and the volunteers will be unhappy because you’ve completely overwhelmed them. It is much better to simply ask a volunteer how much time they can spend helping you out and then following up in a week to ask “Hey, how did that feel? Can you do more or do we need to back off a little?” Most people will say they can do more. Sometimes you can end up with a volunteer doing a workload of z, but they’re happy doing it because you eased them into it by increments that they agreed to.

Have volunteers do what they’re good at. Break out of the mental rut that volunteers can only set up banquet halls, assemble yard signs, and man parking lots. The best way to find out is to ask. “What do you feel you’re good at? What do you enjoy doing?” The volunteer who works as a salesman for his professional job should not be tasked with data entry. If a volunteer is always asking “Do you have these instructions in a spreadsheet format?” take a wild guess at what she could do! I feel like I should start quoting I Corinthians 11. Finally, remember that any task that you might pay someone to do can be done by a volunteer. There can be a big overlap between volunteerism and in-kind donations.

You need to give volunteers the training and tools they need to succeed. Most organizations are pretty good about tools, but training might be the most overlooked tool in volunteerism. In my experience, a lack of training is certainly one of the biggest causes of frustration in volunteers. Nothing is scarier than being asked to do something you don’t know how to go about doing. Don’t put someone in that spot. Volunteers can come to you already very skilled, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t show their value by adding to it. A lot of times they come to you very skilled in things totally unrelated to what your needs are. If they’re willing and intelligent, don’t let their inexperience count against them–just train them on what you need them to do.

3 Needs of a Volunteer: Vision

I have probably spent more time in my life volunteering than I have spent being gainfully employed. I have volunteered at nursing homes and in church nurseries. I’ve volunteered for presidential campaigns and people running for city council. I’ve done volunteer teaching in karate dojos, inner-city schools in Memphis, and English camps in rural Taiwan. I’ve also recruited, trained, supervised, and run interference on (because you can’t really fire them) volunteers. I have to say, I love it all!

I’ve never run across anyone who wouldn’t admit to the extreme value of volunteers, but I have seen quite a few people and organizations who don’t know how to use them correctly. They’re like a child turned loose with a screw gun. It’s big, it’s cool, and can be very useful, but they don’t know what they’re doing with it and end up damaging the structure, themselves, or the gun. To counter that, I present 3 (basic) needs of a volunteer. This is written to those organizations who utilize volunteers and the people in those groups that supervise volunteers. Since I’ve been on both sides of the coin, I will switch perspectives between organization/supervisor and volunteer. Try to keep up. 😉

1. Vision

Sometimes organizations get the idea that you can keep volunteers satisfied with goodies. Feed them, provide a party every now and then, bring in the organization celebrity (war refugee, Elmo, whoever) for a private reception, etc.. and they’ll be happy right? Well, volunteers probably won’t say no to any of those things (tip: they’re probably tired of pizza), what really keeps people going is seeing progress towards the vision of the organization. The very fact that someone is volunteering for an organization probably means they’ve seen some of the vision already and like it. You need to tell them how their task jives with that vision. Detailed mind and big-picture mindset are not mutually exclusive of each other. Volunteers need to know how their details fit into the big picture.

If you keep yourself and the volunteers focused on the big goal, the vision you eliminate most of the drama that goes with people trying to prove themselves. Yes, this includes you. Many of us are just newly promoted from volunteers and have the insecure urge of proving yourself different from the volunteers, sometimes to the volunteers. Some volunteers want to prove their passion, their work ethic, or innate worth to you by overworking themselves, being ridiculously emotional about everything, or always trying to edge their way into the presence of the organizational celebrity (candidate, founder, rehabilitated whale—whatever the case may be). Perhaps the most irritating to me is the volunteer who feels the need to prove his experience. Every conversation turns into a recitation of his resume. These are also the volunteers who usually feel I’m too young to be telling them what to do (another post, another day!) The bottom line is that if you keep people satisfied by tying their work into the vision of the organization, no one needs to prove themselves to anyone.

As people continue to volunteer they also need a retrospective vision. Show them how far the organization has come and exactly how their efforts have gotten you there. Tell people how (method) and how much (quantity) they’re making dreams into reality. Although it sounds like I’m going there, I cannot recommend going as far as a rewards system, though. Volunteers are usually satisfied just with knowing someone noticed what they accomplished.

Ask the Right Questions

As a perfectionist I’m never done with a project. So, as I mentioned last week, I’m still working on an intake form for clients. I hope someone else can learn through watching my process here.

Thank you so much for picking Magic Bottle Marketing to be on your team! I am so excited to get to work with you! I’ve found the best way to start something is with asking lots of good questions. Please think through each question but don’t over analyze it.

Contact Information

1. What contact information do you want to give customers on social media?
2. How should I contact you?
3. Who do I communicate with?
4. Is there a best time or worst time to contact you?
5. Is there a best time or worst time to visit your location?
6. How familiar are you personally with social media? What sites, if any, do you frequent?

Story Telling

1. How did you get into this field?
2. How did this business start?
3. How did you get started in this particular business?
4. Tell me about your customers.
5. Why Claremore for your business? Why Claremore for you personally?
6. Tell me about your employees.
7. Who is your competition?
8. Who (customer demographic) and what (product/service) is your base?

Goals

1. What is your big goal for your business or what is the mission statement?
2. What are some immediate or short term goals for your business?
3. Have you made any changes (products, major price changes, vendors, locations, etc..) to your business recently or are you about to make any ?
4. Is there a particular part of the market or your customer base that is a priority for expansion/growth?
5. Is there a product or service you want to push primarily?
6. What do you primarily want to get out of social media? New sales leads? Better/cheaper customer service? Maintaince of relationships with returning customers? Awareness? Advertising? You can list as many as you want, but please prioritize them.

Practices

1. What is your philosophy on customer service? Be both abstract and concrete. 😉
2. How do you show customer appreciation?
3. How do you handle a difficult or complaining customer?
4. How do you approach conflicts with your employees?
5. What are your current marketing efforts?
6. Do you use sales or specials? How? How often? What are the goals for these?

Can You Repeat the Question?

I’m working on some forms and surveys for new customers. This has pushed two things to the front of my mind.

1. Asking questions is an art.
2. Social media success is largely dependent on your story-telling ability

Here are some of the questions I ask new or potential clients…

How did you get started in this field? How did your business get going?

Why Claremore? Why did you pick it as a home? Why did you base your business in it?

Tell me about your customers.

To pull in the story-telling side of this, I’ll spin you a yarn by answering one of these questions. Ask me out for coffee if you want to ask me more. 😉

How did I get into social media and think up Magic Bottle Marketing?

I got started in social media in 2008 through politics, just as an activist and volunteer. At that time I found American Majority‘s tutorials on Facebook and Twitter particularly helpful and I still point political activists new to social media to those guides. I’m ever so slowly breaking them of the ‘new media’ phrase. Social media is perfect for political campaigns. It’s immediate, agile, interactive, personable, but still capable of communicating en masse both to supporters and to the broader category of voters. It was a great introduction to the big wide world of social media.

I ‘picked’ the absolute worst time to graduate college: spring 2009. Everyone knew the recession was settling in. No one knew it was going to be a full-blown depression and that it would last through our present time. That fall and winter I found ‘a desperate band of brothers’ in social media–HR professionals, recruiters together with job seekers of every kind trying to find their way back to the American Dream.  I eventually found work (not the best work, but work) through other means. Even though social media didn’t get me hired I learned a great deal about branding from my experiences and the tutelage of some very fine people, professionally and personally. If you’re a job seeker, drop me an email and I’ll be glad to get you in touch with some of them.

Couple of months ago all of these threads came together with other experiences—-a swimming hole as a friend suggestion, the arrival of Google+, a social media workshop where I knew everything covered, a nudge from a friend—and clicked together into Magic Bottle Marketing.

Are You Having Fun?

We added a family member recently. No, not Jarita. An Xbox. It has captured our hearts quickly and is already part of our routines. However, there is a learning curve, and while you’re climbing it the sound effects sound like this.

“NOO!!! Argh. Die. Die. Die……AHHHH! Where did he come from?! Oh, I died…….I’m out of ammo again!……Not that way! I didn’t say that way! The other way! Come on!”

I haven’t been allowed to capture any of the facial expressions yet. They’re quite amusing.

When the tension gets too high someone not sucked into the game (which is usually me) asks the person in torment “Are you still having fun? Because it’s a game. If you’re not having fun you should quit for now.” Sometimes just the reminder to have fun is enough for the gamer to start having fun again and sometimes they let someone else have a turn.

Business owners, when it comes to social media are you having fun?

First, let me try to convince you it’s fun.

When a customers walk into your store don’t you get a little excited? When you stock a new product aren’t you imagining in your head how your customers are going to react to it? When you land a contract aren’t you pumped to go to town on it? Of course! You love what you do and do what you love! You don’t find customer service a drag and consider store hours a chore. Social media is another way to communicate with customers. It’s a way to share your new product. It lets you communicate your excitement and methods as you tackle that new job. What’s not to have fun with?!

Still don’t feel the fun? Then give me the controller!

I really do love social media. When I’ve been working on something for Magic Bottle Marketing for too long and need to regroup my thoughts I just switch to personal or political social media. I’ve never gotten tired of social media. You can hand the controller to me anytime!

I don’t want you to get the wrong idea and think I’m juvenile with what I do. I know that social media for businesses is not entertainment. It is money-serious and that’s pretty serious. My clients are my job and not a game. But I sure do have a lot of fun with it!

Of course, there’s another reason folks have to drop the Xbox controller: time. Social media isn’t as time consuming as some forms of marketing, but it takes time. Probably the biggest time sucker is the most important part: creation of quality content. I’m hoping my blog writing time will decrease as I get better at it, but I know it will always be  a hefty piece of my week. It’s an investment that’s absolutely worth it, but to continue the investment motif, there’s no shame in hiring a broker. Just because you don’t have time to do social media for your business doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be done. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but if you have tried to take your business social without taking the time and effort to do it right don’t think it’s useless. It’s not the oven’s fault you didn’t follow the cake recipe.

Drop me a line or give me a ring so I can be (double checks her analogies) your fun, baking broker!

Exploring Settings

An occupational therapist who had worked as a freelancer specializing in corporate consulting once told me that the phrase she heard the most was “It adjusts?!” in a tone of incredulous surprise. She was a workmen’s comp and disability prevention strategy. CEOs would have her in to improve the working conditions for their employees expecting to be told to buy all new, customized office chairs with ergonomic keyboards and lattes attached. However, most of the time what the employees had was more than adequate if they had only explored its full range of features. In other words, she taught a lot of people how to change the height of their chair.

To turn occupational therapy into social media let me ask you

Have you explored every settings tab in every service you use?

I’m not going to walk you through every settings ever. Instead let’s focus on notifications on social media and how knowing a full-range of features can improve your experience.

A brother who shall remain anonymous missed an important email from me simply because he wasn’t checking his email, a confession pulled from him with many questions. With further probing I found out that he found his email overwhelming because there were so many notifications from Facebook. He didn’t know he even could change his notification settings. He basically said ‘It adjusts?!’

Did you know you could change notification settings for

• specific apps
• certain games
• select groups
• prioritize notifications from friends
• Receive notifications via email or text
• Have different settings on the web than in your mobile app

I’m not sure where I should put the question mark for the above list. How about here?

Also, let’s insert a funny comic about how social media constantly abuses our egos.

Ouch

Here’s some basic road map directions if any of the above bullets were a mystery to you.

From any page on Facebook click the drop down menu on ‘Account’ in the top right corner. 3rd link is ‘Account settings’. Stare at the ‘General Account Settings’ page that it brought you to for a bit and see if you recognize anything. Then remember that’s not what you came for and click on ‘Notifications’, the 3rd link in the left hand menu. Scroll past ‘Recent notifications’ to ‘All Notifications’. Click on a feature/application to expand what kind of notifications it sends you and edit to your heart’s content. Remember that even if you don’t receive an email notification you will still be notified of that action when you log into Facebook. In other words, your little red number will still count notifications the same.

My brother is just a personal user of social media. For business users I recommend a two-step approach to notifications.

1. Receive email notifications about everything on every platform you use.
2. Explore Gmail settings.

You don’t use Gmail? What’s wrong with you? You’ll get your own blog post later.

I'll show you!

I use notifications as record keeping. It’s a more constant service which makes it way better than trying to keep track of backing up all of my different social platforms who are all different pages when it comes to takeout options, server storage times, and rate-of-change of settings. Record keeping for you may not be as important as it is for someone like me who does it as a business, but it can’ t hurt.

So, how do I not drown in email every day? I use three Gmail tools–filters, search, and priority inbox.

Search is what first sold me on Gmail way back when I had a funky anonymous email handle like ‘TexasBlondie’. If you’re on the phone with Larry and need to refer your email conversations with him, don’t try to sift through your social media notifications to find it! That would be like hollering for someone in the crowded stadium instead of just calling their cell. Search for his email or the subject line!

Filters are way to have your email presorted and labelled. Open any notification email and on the right hand side click the magical drop down menu button ‘More’ (what an exciting word! More!) and click ‘Filter emails like this’. I won’t walk you through every step as Gmail is user-friendly, but I will give two tips. For notifications, check the box ‘Never mark as important’.  Also remember that notifications come from weird email addresses so using your ‘subject line’ and ‘contains the words’ options will probably be more effective.

Finally, train your priority inbox.

We hope it's a nice learning robot, not like Omnidroid

Priority inbox is customized to each user. If you don’t teach it as you go it won’t be useful to you. Filters are the best for teaching it big principles–never mark Facebook as important, always put sweethubby@gmail.com in priority box, etc.. For small tweaks use the yellow plus and minus signs inside each email. Kristen Lemons has a great explanation of this.

One last piece of advice. Before diving into setting set up emergency protocols. Have a friend come check on you in a few hours. Always tell someone you’re going in! Users have been known to get lost and never come back out! Of course, the more knowledgeable you are of settings the less dangerous it is. So stay updated!