Category Archives: Helpful Hints

June 1, 2012 · 8:47 am

Symon Says

Today’s Foodie Friday Fun is a broader business point made by a chef.  I’m going to be brief today but I could go on for hours about the topic (and those who’ve worked for me have heard me do so!)

Michael Symon

Michael Symon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I made a note a couple of months ago to talk about a panel discussion at the South Beach food & Wine Festival because I found something that chef Michael Symon had to say resonating with me. HuffPo reported it on it and you can watch the discussion on Ustream if you’re interested.

This is a great summary:

Symon said that the hardest part of being a chef is to delegate work. Over the years, as he has continued to open restaurants, Symon has grown comfortable with the team he has put in place. He hasn’t worked the line in 13 years, but still remains involved in his restaurants. “The greatest chefs are the greatest teachers,” he mused.

Two great points that go well beyond the business of the kitchen.  As I became a better manager and as I trained others to manage, the single most difficult thing for me to get them  (and myself) to do was to delegate effectively.  You can’t do everything and the one thing I tried to make sure I did was to empower others and give them the tools – knowledge, resources – to get done what I charged them with accomplishing.  It requires trust and it requires you to train them. Neither is easy – both are critical.

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May 31, 2012 · 8:48 am

Likejacking

Fascinating piece in Business Week on some of the spam practices within social media.  While the focus is on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, it reminds all of us who create content sites that we need to be vigilant about protecting our sites and our users from these dirt bags.  The piece cites an executive from an anti-spam software company who stated that spammers create as many as 40 percent of the accounts on social media sites. About 8 percent of messages sent via social pages are spam, approximately twice the volume of six months ago.  Because the email providers have become pretty good about filtering out obvious spam, the spammer have moved on to social.

What they’re doing now is embedding code that forces a “like” into a link to a page with something such as a video as bait.  Likejacking.  On Twitter, it’s provocative text linking to spam; on Pinterest it’s a photo that links to a virus or other spam.  I don’t think many of us are engaged in doing this – it seems to be a few rotten apples, some of whom have been sued.  Or are we?

There is still a tendency for marketers to use social media as we used to use traditional media – we talk, they listen.  We broadcast messages and wait for the register to ring.  Today, doing that on a Facebook brand page or within a Twitter feed is a sure way to get blocked, unfriended, hidden, or ignored.  To a certain extent, any sort of one-sided discussion is seen as spam in many folks’ minds.

We spend too much time wondering if social is marketing or PR or customer service.  We might argue about which department ought to control it.  Those are good discussions to have but what we can’t be doing in the interim is flooding our fans’ news feeds with off-target messages about us when we ought to be listening and engaging where appropriate with them.    Otherwise, how are we different from the likejackers?

Thoughts?

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May 30, 2012 · 9:09 am

Another Great Service Experience

Yesterday I wrote about how AT&T wireless treated me to show how some companies are putting the “service” back in customer service. Today, I’d like to present another great example and it comes from a different perspective.


The company is Carl’s Golfland, an online retailer. At least, I thought they were just an online retailer.  Turns out they’re one of the oldest golf retailers around and they were chosen for the 27th consecutive time as one of Golf Digest‘s Top 100 Golf Shops. Carl’s is the only off course golf store to be named 100 best every year since the inception of the award.  I suspect this might have had something to do with the service.  More about that in a second.

They were recommended to me by a golf buddy who knew I was looking for a golf show that’s difficult to find, at least at a reasonable price. I went to the site, placed an order (great prices!) and received a confirmation mail almost immediately.  Very good ordering and communication experience.  However, the next day I got another mail – the shoes I had ordered had, in fact, been out of stock when I ordered them.  As happens sometimes, the computer inventory hadn’t kept up with the physical inventory (I had this happen every so often when I was running an online store – it’s tricky).  The note I received could not have been more pleasant and included a few proposed solutions – same shoe different color (with a link to it), a discount on a better shoe (with a link), or wait a few days for the inventory to restock.  Since I needed the shoes quickly, I chose the different color (which I actually like better now that I have them).

The series of email exchanges were not with “customer service” – it went to an individual’s email box (thanks Tim!) and he promised me he’d make sure they got to me quickly (which they did a day later – no charge for what I suspect was upgraded shipping).  They turned what might have been a big negative (first time customer, incorrect inventory, delayed order fulfillment) into a positive (I will be ordering from Carl’s again and have already recommended them to another golfing buddy).  I suspect that their main business is still in bricks and mortar has something to do with this.  It’s hard to look customers in the eye and blow them off (especially if you’re not in NYC or another big city).  The fact that the store is rated very highly makes me think they emphasize the customer and this has carried through to their online store as well.

That’s something to think about – do you treat customers you know from cyberspace differently than the ones you’ve met in person?  Why is that so?

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