Shea Beck

I have been sitting on this post for a couple weeks and then I got some help from good ole’ Ford – (see below). I am going to touch on a point that kind of annoys me, individuals using a big name brand to push themselves into the lime light.

There are quite a few internet geeks claiming to be experts in social media and pushing their ideas on all of us in particular mostly on Twitter – their first piece of advice is to always make it personal, use an actual person or even multiple people. I say, wrong! I feel this is a pure ego play and your interests are in front of the interests of your company. I get that the underlying foundation of Twitter is to feed your ego, I do it…I send out a link to an article or blog and hope to get a response or more hits to my site, but not at the expense of my company.

To hit a little bit more on this, and not to pick on Ford, go to Scott Monty’s Twitter profile. He has a link back to his own site while using Ford in his description so he is found in searches for Ford and obtains more followers, on top of that the official Ford Twitter account has a mention of his personal Twitter account.

Here are a few reasons I disagree with using the Ego play:

1. I’m following Scott Monty for updates on Ford, I’m not following Scott Monty because I know this guy.
   • He likely knows this, why not only use your “Ford” handle?
2. If a normal Twitter user (non-geek) searches for Ford, they won’t know who Scott Monty is and may not follow him where as they would Follow Ford.
   • Right now, Scott Monty and Ford are really fighting for clicks. Would you ever run two PPC accounts and bid on the same terms?
3. Most companies today do not have the resource/capital to have a dedicated social media point. Using multiple players would lead to the same down fall as the bullet above.
4. What happens once you quit or get fired?
   • Do you give back what belongs to your company or do you hijack their contacts?
5. Oh yeah, and because the Twitter community thinks you should use the Company image over a person…

#5 has been proven by a very scientific research provided by Mr. Monty himself. He recently sent out a PollDaddy question to Ford followers asking what icon do you want him to use? The community responded with over 4x more votes for the Brand Logo vs a person. Now this doesn’t specifically tell anyone to use your brand vs using a random person in your organization but it does start the debate against all of the “Social Media Experts” who want you to use a person to represent your brand.

I know this sounds like a bash on social media consultants but it’s not, well kind of…what it’s really meant for is to get you to realize the world wants Brand not Ego.

And of course I will need you to feed my Ego – share this below and then follow me – if I like your stuff, I will even follow you back.

I was recently interviewed by Christopher Heine from BRANDWEEK (check it out here) about using social media as a component to our multichannel retail strategy.My reply was that we initially started using this as another method for customer service and for free brand reputation research but spiraled into a merchandising opportunity.

Let me touch on three reasons we use social media starting with customer service. This is a no brainer as it is the next step on the customer service evolution as Jason Baer writes about here for Marketing Profs. We monitor blogs, twitter, facebook and as much of the social hemisphere that we can. This is pretty simple, if there is a happy customer that is raving about the company – we reach out to them and say thanks. Now, if someone has a question or complaint about us, we just ignore it…just kidding, we hop right on it by moving the conversation to email because you can only converse show much over 140 characters. That’s easy enough right? Before you go out and start contacting customers on Twitter, please take my tested and proven advice when communicating with customers in the social world: Be yourself, don’t talk fluff, respond immediately and every so often share something worth while.

The next tactic for social media I mentioned is using this for free brand reputation research. We set up our own little monitoring lab using iGoogle to read how much the internet loved us…or hated us (read how to create your own free brand reputation monitoring tool here). Okay great, what do you do with that information? We listen is what we do. Then we take all the actionable data, such as “their catalog is always the same thing,” or “their products are out-dated” and adjust our merchandising strategy or our representation of products to keep them fresh and different.

That brings me to the third aspect of how social media helps our multichannel strategy, merchandising. As the article in BRANDWEEK states, listening to the social shakers has provided us with ways of choosing the hottest products to merchandise in our email communication and on our website – I guess you can say that is one way to monetize social media. It really brings our philosphy full-circle of listening, interacting, and giving the customer what they want when they want it.

Since this is an article on social media, it is only fitting to plug my own social network: catch me on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

I have just returned from a week long trip to Costa Del Sol, Spain with Sarah and her family. I don’t remember all of the details but I will quickly share the good parts or you can just click here to skip to the pictures, wait a sec for it load for the most pleasurable viewing experience. The whole experience was amazing, the country is beautiful and they take a lot of siestas.

We flew into NYC on Friday, March 20th in the AM and walked around for 8 hours then got back on the airplane at 11pm to Malaga, Spain. This was pretty cool because I have never been to NYC. The trip started out amazing as we got upgraded to Business Class on the way to Spain. The flight took about 6 hours as we ate plenty of food, drank some drink and slept a little.

We landed in Malaga, Spain on Saturday, March 21st at Noon, we didn’t do much but go the hotel in Marbella and walk around the beach and eat some food.

On Sunday, March 22nd, we did a bit more – we walked around Elvira, the small town outside of Marbella for a little bit just took in the fact we weren’t working. Later that day we hopped in the trusty Ford Focus station wagon and drove up to a town called Mijas. This is a town halfway up on a mountain and is one of the famous “white villages.” Every building is white and they have donkeys for taxis which in itself is amazing.

Monday, March 23rd was interesting. We started the day by going to the “market” in the Marbella slums. It was like a flea market but you couldn’t really haggle like you can in Mexico. They had some good stuff and some stuff that was clearly manufactured, be sure to stay clear of the vendors who speak English.

After we left the market, we tried to go the Rock of Gibraltar but since it is owned by the U.K. we couldn’t get in (we forgot our passports). But we were able to see it from across the bridge. The Rock is on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar which is where the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet (I think). It had some pretty hard core waves and was very windy.

On Tuesday, March 24th we hopped back in the wagon and went to another mountain town called Istan. This was higher up on the mountain than Mijas and was a great drive up. There was a huge lake at the bottom of the mountain and some great hiking around the town. We went into the town and walked around, stopped and ate but I was scared of the food so I just had a cerveza. They get their water from the mtn. stream and there are faucets throughout the town that dispense the water for the residents to get it.

Next comes Wednesday, March 25th, in America anyways. The whole Ellis family hopped in the two Fords and headed to Ronda. On the way we stopped at a very big “white village” called Casares. This particular town was only one of two towns in Spain that Napoleon couldn’t get his hands on. It is also rumored that Julius Caesar stayed there. This town now has a very large wind farm which was pretty cool to see.

After Casares we got back on the winding roads (made us all sick) and continued to Ronda. Ronda was one of the bigger cities, it had the tourist sites as well as some good shopping and dining. Ronda was one of my favorite cities.

After we got back to Marbella, Sarah and I went in to “old town” Marbella to dinner. We researched a place to eat that was supposed to be legit, but once we got there it was closed. Only closed on Wednesdays, so we did what any tourist would do…Walked toward the beach and stopped at the restaurant with the most people in it. We had Paella that was alright.

Judging by the calendar, it is now Thursday, March 26th. We woke up and headed in to Puerto Banus where there is some high end shopping and some big-ass Yachts. This town was pretty awesome – they had several Burger Kings and a T.G.I. Fridays. My kind of travel!

We then had to get back and cook dinner for the family de Ellis. Since it was our night to cook I wanted to order Pizza but Sarah wouldn’t let me, we made Baguettes and Tapas instead.

On Friday, March 27th we woke up and packed our cases and drove 2 hours to Granada to visit La Alhambra which is a giant fortress where some old Muslim rulers lived. It had a huge palace and some immaculate gardens. After Alhambra we headed down to the town of Granada, this is a very cool town as well. It is large but we didn’t have much time to spend there since we stayed at Alhambra for a long time.

After Granada, we drove to Malaga for the night. We stayed on the beach and went to dinner at a little shack that had fried everything with Cervezas.

And here comes Saturday, March 28th. This was the worst day by far. We got to the small airport in Malaga to hop on the flight to NYC, all was well until four of us got bumped from the flight because some family decided to show up and take our place (they can do that when you fly stand-by). Since it is a small airport, there were only flights on Saturday and Mondays. Sooooo, we grabbed the train and headed to Madrid and a bigger airport to catch a flight on Sunday. The train ride was awesome, the country side was beautiful and the train was muy rapido. We arrive in Madrid look at a map and walk to the nearest coffee shop to try and get online to book a hotel.

Well, here’s when it gets really nasty, as soon as we step out of the train station we realize it’s not the best part of Madrid and it’s freezing along with some rain pouring down. Up the stairs to the street we go and what do we find, a huge protest about the awesome economy and packed streets. You know how sweet we felt with oversized suitcases in a sea of angry Spaniards? We decide to get off the streets as soon as possible, forget about booking a hotel online so we stop at three hotels and they are all booked (it just so happens there is World Cup qualifier between Spain and Turkey). So back to plan J. find WiFi and book a hotel by the airport, we get to a Dunkin Donuts that is nicer than any in America and get that done. So now all we have to do is get the Airport and grab the shuttle to the Hotel.

How do we get to the airport? We take the subway, the subway is packed full and the four of us still have our giant suitcases. We had to take three different connections to get to the airport and it was damn near impossible to get on and off them with all of our luggage. That’s not the good part, while we were standing there guarding our stuff some punk decided to stick his hand in my pocket and grab my Credit Card, he was courteious and left me with my ID and wallet. That’s not it, Sarah’s brother got robbed too. It’s all good because the bank reversed the charges but what the heck were we supposed to do in Madrid where the cops didn’t speak English if we needed. We couldn’t beat this kid just in case the Cops didn’t like Americans or the kid wanted to cut us up – so we just let him have his fun, I guess. Once we finally get to the airport, we call the Hotel to get directions and the shuttle…just so turns out their phone number is now incorrect so we are stuck in the airport for 16 hours until the flight takes off.

Sunday, March 29th we finally get on the flight back to New York. We once again were fortunate enough to get bumped up to Business Class but we are too exhausted to take advantage – I immediately passed out. Back in America finally! We have a few hours to kill before our flight back to Phoenix takes off so we head to Chili’s Too and grab some drinks. Times up, flight is leaving or not, the flight is delayed 2 hours and during those two hours the weather turns nasty but oh well. We board the plane at 7pm and get out to the runway, but as I mentioned before, the weather turned wrong! The pilot just decided to wait it out in line on the Tarmac but the weather didn’t let up for three hours. During those three hours the plane ran out of gas, so we had to roll back to the Terminal and refuel. While refueling, we lost our spot in line on the runway so we had to get back in line and wait another two hours. We were on the runway for 5 hours and in the air for 6. 11 hours later we make it back to Phoenix.

Monday, March 30th, back to work :(

The End – I apologize for the bad grammar, misspellings and whatever else is wrong; I had to type fast before the carpal tunnel set in :)

For the gallery below, the first 5 pages are random and then on the fourth row of page 5 the sequence starts on March 21st. Click on “View with PicLens” to the see the entire album at its finest.

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