Yellow Dog Consulting

Sales & Marketing Consulting for solo-preneurs.

Hey Brands – What’s Taking So Long?

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drink more beerI got a text from my friend the other day:

New business idea for you. Call all your fav breweries and have them got on their social media stuff and set up a system to do so. Because it shouldn’t take a week to like my tweet.

I LOVE this! Here’s the deal folks – if you’re on social media you have to BE on social media. No phoning it in. This isn’t a one way street, this is a back and forth conversation with your network. My friend and I often meetup at the Taphouse for a beer or cider and we’ll tweet at the brewery we’re consuming. Often the breweries will comment back to us or favorite or re-post our tweets. And that’s super cool when it happens! Correction: It’s super cool when it happens within a day of doing it. But a week later? That’s lazy.

I’m not asking you to favorite everything customers say about your brand, but I am saying you need to be on top of it. 5 minutes a day is fine. Just pop into your social media accounts – check out who’s tagged you or commented to you. Answer questions, thank people, repost a couple of cool comments if they’re there. 5 minutes, not 5 hours.

If I like your brand I’ll be tweeting about it. As long as you’re on Twitter and also active. It’s not fun to have a conversation with yourself. And on social media it can be even more obvious when you are.

4 Things to do When Your Event Runs Long

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stop being lateToday I left an event 45 minutes later than it was scheduled to end. And yeah, I was super annoyed. By now you probably know I’m an organized person (so organized, I married a CPA) and I like events to start and end on time. Nothing annoying me more when networking than an event that starts late and ends late. It’s disrespectful of the event attendees and makes me wonder what you’d do if I gave you my money.

Here’s the deal – sometimes your event will run long. Sometimes you may want to leave the event open ended, especially if it’s a networking event, and that’s FINE. Put a schedule around it (5:30 event starts, 6:00 remarks, 7pm raffle, end ???) and I’ll know that I’m free to leave after the raffle (or before, but I LOVE free stuff).

If you’re hosting events, here’s 4 suggestions for what to do when your event runs long:

  1. Make an announcement at the time the event was supposed to end – This is being respectful of your attendees. “Hey it’s 2:30 which is when I said this would be over, I think we’ll be about another 20 minutes, but I understand if you need to leave now.” and I would have been a happy camper.
  2. Start on Time – Sounds simple right? But so many people say “let’s just give folks a few more minutes to get here.” Guess what? We all knew when this event started. Yes parking sucks, yes traffic sucks, yes I left 10 minutes late so I could get ONE MORE THING DONE but that’s not the host’s fault. If I’m late and I walk in and the event has started I’m OK with that. I knew I was late. Start with some simple housekeeping and introductions so stragglers have a chance to come in but not interrupt too much.
  3. Cut out the fluff – We arrived at 1pm and at about 5 after the event host said that we were going to informally network for about 15 minutes, so we just talked to the people next to us, but it was a small enough group we could have just done group introductions. WHICH after the 15 minutes we did. So…yeah, there’s 20 minutes that could have been saved.
  4. End on Time. Test this stuff folks. You know how many people you’re expecting and how long activities might go. You know what you’re talking about and how long that content will go. YES you’ll have long winded people in the room, learn how to cut them off politely, trust me, the rest of the room will thank you for it.

Don’t Confuse the Clients

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don't confuse your clientsThis morning in my pilates class the instructor mentioned that the new owner wants the classes all to be renamed to be more fun and creative. I understand WHY she’s doing this, to bring that uniqueness to the class and studio. BUT, the first thing that came to my mind was that people checking out the studio aren’t going to know what the heck these classes really are!

I LOVE my pilates class as I’ve mentioned before here. And if I were to rename it it’d be rock & roll pilates because we listen to a lot of great music (today was Madonna, Kid Rock and Bruno Mars…), and if you want a zen pilates experience (take yoga instead) this class may not be for you.

Too often in an effort to be unique and creative we forget that it makes ZERO sense to the outside world and may be confusing to our clients. The next time you come up with an amazing idea for your business, make sure that it will also make sense to your clients and prospects.