John Cade

Pinterest.

It’s what everyone is talking about. Growing at a staggering rate (4000% increase in page views in six months), many businesses are asking the question: how can we use this new tool to drive traffic and sales to our website?

The rhetoric reminds me of the earliest social media discussions held within LifeWay (my current employer). Everyone caught the bug, but there were more questions than answers. “How should we use it? Why should we use it? How do we measure it? What can I do to be better at it?”

In my quest to answer some of these questions about Pinterest over the last few weeks, I have learned a few valuable lessons. Mostly about why your business won’t be successful using it. 

1. Your photography is awful or you don’t use images on your website - Pinterest is a visual social bookmarking service. If you don’t have beautiful images on your website, your content or products probably won’t spread on Pinterest. 
   
   
2. Your products just aren’t that good - Marketing doesn’t sell products. Products sell products. If your products aren’t great, don’t expect people to share them.
   
   
3. Your demographic isn’t women - Shoes. Nurseries. Cupcakes. These are things you will see on Pinterest almost every day. Recent studies report that 80% of Pinterest users are women. If your main demographic is men, don’t expect much of a return if you choose to invest your time with Pinterest.

Marketers and e-commerce websites using top-notch photography to sell products that are useful and beautiful, whose products are also appealing to women, will ultimately win on Pinterest (possibly without lifting a finger). Without these ingredients, marketers are destined to fail.

What other reason will businesses fail at Pinterest?

Internet Retailer published an article today featuring Target, who according to a recent survey, has the best social media presence among retailers.

One paragraph in particular stuck out to me:

The most socially adept retailers do share a few basic ideas about how their social media operations should work, L.E.K. says. For instance, those retailers feature large amounts of user content, such as reviews and product images; offer exclusive deals; and quickly respond to users’ comments and needs. “Those three things ensure that what a retailer is doing is interesting to users,” says Lewis.

Seems pretty basic, right? While he doesn’t say it explicitly, clearly if these are the things that users find interesting, they are the things that retailers should be doing.

What would you add to his list?

In nearly every post I write, there’s one keyword I never leave out. It has nothing to do with social media, social commerce, or Twitter. Or myself.

It’s LifeWay. My employer.

Though I use this as a personal blog, I’ve found several reasons to blog about my employer. Here are three:

1. It gives me credibility
   I could write blog posts all day long about how your business should use social media. I could do it under the guise of my expertise and try to make myself sound awesome (and probably fail). The truth is that LifeWay carries a lot more weight that I do. Blogging about LifeWay strengthens my message.
2. Transparency is valuable
   When I’m looking for information that will help our business, I don’t want to hear it from someone who is vague about their sources. I’d much rather hear it from someone who is clearly in the thick of my industry.  I assume that most people feel the same way. Understanding how another organization operates is beneficial to many people. Be transparent and let readers know how you know what you blog about.
3. It’s mutually beneficial
   When you make your employer look good, you look good. And vice versa.

Do you blog about your employer?

50 million tweets are shared per day. That’s almost 600 per second. Holy smokes, Batman. That’s a lot of tweets. Especially if you need to search for something.

Last week at LifeWay, someone asked a simple question: “Is there a way I can filter my Twitter search results so I see tweets that are only relevant to me?”

Let me introduce you to Twitter’s advanced search operators. Though their advanced search tool offers similar functionality, you can actually do an even more advanced search in Twitter’s native search box if you know the operators yourself.

I’ve created the Twitter Search Cheat Sheet as a free download to help you learn these operators and as a reference to keep handy. Post it on your wall, pass it along to your friends, and please - tell them where you found it! 

It wasn’t too long ago that the phrase “social commerce” made me cringe.

Yet in October of this year, I became a full-time social commerce strategist for LifeWay. The title was not one that I was excited about. After accepting the position, I planned to keep using social media the way I always had on behalf of the organization. Listening. Connecting. Solving customer problems. Everything a good social media professional should do (especially when you’re the only full-time social media team member).

Selling through social media? Not my cup of tea, I thought. That’s contradictory to the root of the medium. Isn’t it?

Not exactly. As a social commerce strategist, I still do the things I did before the word “commerce” was in my job title. But as our social media team grows, I have learned that social commerce is an important piece of the puzzle. It’s not simply “selling”. Social commerce solves a customer problem.

The problem is that people can’t buy, explore, or share the things that they want from wherever they want.

My favorite definition of social commerce so far is:

Helping people connect where they buy and buy where they connect.

Social commerce is not like cold-calling. It’s not begging users on Twitter to check out the latest and greatest product from your company.

It’s giving customers the access they want, where they want it.

Remember a long, long time ago on Twitter when you had to click on a link and go to an external site to see a picture that someone posted? Me neither. But there was a time when this was the case. Now you can view all kinds of media in the sidebar.

What if you could buy in the sidebar?

We know that social media is driving traffic to our website. But what if social media was driving direct sales instead? What if the customer had a better experience because they didn’t have to open a new browser tab or leave a site that they prefer to stay on?

That’s how social commerce works. Not by broadcasting at customers. But by joining them.

Social commerce is not a dirty phrase.

Do you agree?

I see it every day. Twitter users mention a username to start a tweet. It looks something like this:

@martyduren is LifeWay’s new Social Media Strategist.

It makes logical sense. Why not mention the user’s profile when talking about them on a platform they use?

But there’s a problem with the structure of this tweet.

Who will see it?

• @martyduren
• Your followers who also follow @martyduren
• Anyone who visits your profile page

So who won’t see this tweet?

• Your followers that do not follow @martyduren that do not visit your profile

This tweet will not show up in anyone’s timeline that isn’t following you both. Twitter treats tweets that start with the @ symbol as a reply. By default, Twitter does not show your @replies to users who don’t follow your account and the mentioned one. This functionality makes sense. Who wants a Twitter timeline full of tweets directed at people they don’t know?

The good news is that there are a few ways you can structure your tweet to extend your reach. Some common solutions are:

• Placing a period before the @ symbol

. @martyduren is LifeWay’s new Social Media Strategist.

• Placing messaging before the username

Congrats to @martyduren who is LifeWay’s new Social Media Strategist.

The one caveat is retweets that start with the @ symbol will show up in the timeline of the people who follow you, even if they don’t follow the account in the beginning of the tweet.

Did you know this secret? Do you have any others?

When I accepted the Social Commerce Strategist position at LifeWay, Foursquare was the first project I tackled. I quickly learned that Foursquare makes it extremely easy for retailers to claim venues and set up specials. Even with 160+ venues across the U.S., it took us just a few hours to complete the process. Our specials were non-existent one day, up and running the next.

Easy for us. What about for customers? Easy for them, too.

There are three simple steps to unlocking a special:

1. Checkin to a venue
2. Look for the ‘special unlocked’ messaging
3. Show cashier mobile device to redeem special while checking out (in most cases)

This is a great user experience. It’s simple. But there’s one flaw with this process that hurts the retailer more than anyone else.

There is no integration between unlocking specials and the word-of-mouth aspect of Foursquare. None. Zip. Zero.

Though users can leave a ‘shout’ on every checkin, many users, including myself, do not. And given that specials are unlocked after a checkin, the process doesn’t give users the opportunity to tell their friends about the special at the moment that they’ve unlocked it.

If Foursquare made it easier for users to share deals with their friends after they’ve checked in, would we see higher coupon redemption rates? It certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Here’s a few things they should do to help retailers out:

1. Automatically show a ‘Special Unlocked!’ icon or shout on the checkin

Foursquare should take the burden off of the user to tell their friends about specials.

2. Prompt users to tell friends on other networks about the special

Foursquare should prompt users with a “Share this Foursquare special on Twitter or Facebook” message after it’s unlocked. Many users choose not to send their checkins to Facebook and Twitter. This would allow them to share the special without necessarily  telling the world their current location.

3. Tell nearby users when a special is unlocked or activated

If a user is within a certain radius of a venue that they have checked in to previously, tell them when a special is unlocked or becomes available. The combination of the real-time notification and the convenience of how close it is to their current location would likely drive more foot traffic to the venue. Sounds spammy? Give the user the option to turn this feature off.

What features would you add to benefit retailers?

Altimeter Group is easily my favorite resource for research on social media. Their reports are practical, easy to read, and most importantly - free. 

In their report titled The 8 Success-criteria For Facebook Page Marketing, they identify 8 criteria brands must follow to be successful:

1. Set community expectations
2. Provide cohesive branding
3. Be up to date
4. Live authenticity
5. Participate in dialogue
6. Enable peer-to-peer interactions
7. Foster advocacy
8. Solicit a call to action

Of these 8 criteria, Solicit a call to action has been the most important for LifeWay. Without a call to action, we get little or no response from our community.

What is your most important success criteria? Would you add anything to this list?

Read the full report below:

LifeWay is a pretty exciting place to be right now as a social strategist.

Dr. Rainer, our President and CEO, has made it clear that social media is a priority. And he hasn’t just said so. He’s proven it with his actions by adding two full-time positions to focus solely on our social media efforts.

Recently, @martyduren was hired as our corporate Social Media Strategist. Joining him will be @jonathan_howe, who will help our executives propel their influential content to new places.

As LifeWay’s Social Commerce Strategist and LifeWay.com’s Community Manager, I will be able to focus on moving our customers toward a frictionless e-commerce experience through online engagement as well as embracing their user generated content to help LifeWay and each other in the online community. 

LifeWay is adapting to the new business landscape, and Jonathan and Marty both will be influential in the future of how we interact and communicate with customers online.