I was listening to the latest Convince and Convert podcast with Carlos Garcia from HYP3R this morning, which resonated with my passion for loyalty and location based services.
This is one of my current favorite podcasts and always has some gems. For example I like to think that organisations are doing social listening for people talking about their business and following the advice that Carlos or Jay Baer suggested in this interview (sorry can’t remember which one it was) which is, amplifying positive feedback about your business or operation at a higher ratio than negative feedback, that is mostly not directed at your handle, because as well as developing great relationships with your customers, this can have a significant impact on your sentiment ratings.
Here’s an example of this concept at work. A little over a year ago I was heading for a domestic flight from Auckland airport. I got on the escalator from the carpark and took a little video.
If you haven’t clicked on it, it showed my side of the escalator not moving and the other one going up. I put a note on Instagram asking if anyone could see what was wrong with the picture.
What happened next impressed me so much!
I checked my Twitter account only minutes later and this is what happened.
This is what I’m talking about! In no time flat they had made a fan out of me AND I have told dozens of people about Auckland Airport’s amazing response and the commitment they made to social media monitoring, especially when you consider how many grumpy people use social media to vent about things impacting on their airport experience.
I was really interested in what HYP3R had to say about geofencing social media around properties like Hotels, or in fact anywhere and capturing conversations on social media taking place at that location because most of the conversations are about business, service providers, corporates, government or a location, not with it.
I use social media listening tools, but what I understand is that if people don’t have location services turned on (especially with Facebook) their location is incorrectly shown by default as being in the US, which is not particularly useful in New Zealand. So they won’t be shown on the map on Brandwatch or in my HootSuite radius search.
The blog discussion then went on to Foursquare and what went wrong with that model for business use. I used to be a Foursquare Ambassador, I still have some of my Foursquare Ambassador business cards somewhere. It was an amazing opportunity which I really wanted to explore when I owned The New Zealand Smartphone and PDA Academy because I saw an awesome opportunity to develop loyalty programs for hospitality and tourism.
However, Foursquare would only allow me to have a one on one relationship with each of my customers which meant that I had to have a seperate account for each and every retail client. This was never going to be scalable and while plenty of cafes and other businesses were keen, the BCR was never going to stack up without some automation.
I strongly believe this could have been huge if they simply supported my model. I developed a new one, which can work for retailers and destination businesses, but it is so frustrating when you see a business model that is so close to being awesome. Their business model was to be a social network first and the loyalty part was soon forgotten. To me that was their USP.
Do you listen to what customers or potential customers are saying about your business, especially when they are not communicating with you. Do you agree about the value of amplifying positive feedback and communicating with ‘customers’ who like what you do?
SoLoMo Consulting 