Technology

Moving your franchise business phone system to the cloud can increase employee productivity, improve customer service, and lower IT costs. Imagine a phone system that lets you change your system's outgoing message within minutes, not days; easily add and tie multiple stores or restaurants together; and enable field agents to use their business numbers to call and text customers from their smartphones.

All of this is possible in the cloud. Yet, most franchise businesses have not yet experienced these benefits. Many still rely on legacy on-premise business phone systems commonly referred to as a PBX (public branch exchange). These systems are designed for a 1990s work environment when employees came into the office every day; used desktops, not laptops; and made calls using desk phones, not mobile devices...

Ten years ago, if someone told you that the second biggest retail company by market capitalization (after Walmart) would actually be a virtual or a cloud company, you would have laughed. The fact that AT&T and Verizon would be selling off their landline operations would have been considered impossible. If someone said you could run an entire office without any physical infrastructure except your laptop and smartphone (no servers, PBX boxes, etc.), the person making such a statement would have been declared crazy.

But the "cloud" has affected us in a dramatic way, and all of the above have become truths. Today, you don't need a landline-based phone system for your office. It's actually considered archaic and hinders productivity compared with the features that cloud-based systems provide...

Nothing is more critical to the success or decline of a franchise brand than what customers think or say about its products or services. As a rule, franchisors who understand and appreciate the significance of customer loyalty are the ones most likely to thrive. Those that don't "get it" generally experience challenges that can seep into multiple areas of their franchise organization, including overall sales, recruitment, and retention of franchisees and customers alike.

Franchise organizations that deliver a customer experience that drives engagement and generates strong recommendation behavior on all levels will get a higher return. Customer experience directly affects referrals, repurchase, renewals, and reputation. Today's competitive market, combined with word of mouth through the web, amplifies the impact customer loyalty has on financial performance throughout a franchise system...

On May 30th Google converted 80 million Google Places pages into Google+ Local pages

Franchise online marketers are now overseeing an empire, not just a kingdom. Their reach is offline and online, in websites, directories, social media, mobile devices, and beyond. And this empire continues to grow and change. Google's recent change to Google Places is no exception to how a franchise must watch their empire.

As a result, franchise marketers are scrambling to determine: the impact of these changes on their network of locations; any changes they need to make; how to manage the new Google+ Local pages; and determine how Google+ users are affected.

First, let's take a look at what changed. The old static Google Places page will now be a more dynamic social environment where business owners can engage with customers, and friends can recommend local businesses based on their personal experiences...

3 reasons your business needs a blog
A blog is a valuable asset for a small business. It gives your company a face and a voice, and sets you apart from the competition. In a digital world, competition is not only the shop down the street, it's everything that distracts your customers and keeps them from finding you. Increasingly, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels are essential to business today. Still, a blog lets companies control their message and provides a home base for disseminating accurate information and responding to questions or criticism. Blogs are search engine friendly, too. A regularly updated blog provides the search engines with the keyword-rich, timely content that drives better ranking.

Keep the (blog) ball rolling
Now that you have a blog going, how do you keep it going? And where do you find the time? A blog that's rarely or never updated is worse than useless...

Yellow Pages: "Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated"
Here are four reasons local business marketers should continue to use the Yellow Pages. (1) Providers now offer more than just print directories. They're developing robust online directories of their own, which get significant traffic in local markets. (2) Yellow Pages providers have long-term relationships with local businesses. They've been around for a long time and have strong ties with and deep knowledge of local businesses. (3) They're partnering behind the scenes with the search engines. And, contrary to much received wisdom about advertising and marketing, (4) Print is not dead.

Infographic: How small businesses are using social media
The infographic summarizes current statistics about small business social media use, including the importance of social media marketing for small businesses, what percentage of exposure small businesses gain through social media, and which factors produce the most results...

How to go viral
It's an open question whether anyone can do much to help make their content go viral. Most observers are skeptical, to say the least. About the best you can do is to learn the techniques and understand the places that work when things do go viral. It's certainly fun to try, and if you're already producing good content to share, this infographic brings together what you need to know to get it into the places it needs to be on the web.

Facebook's new cover photos for Pages
Facebook Business (Fan) Pages joined personal profiles in getting the new Timeline features on March 30. Most people seem to enjoy the new features, and they're having little trouble adapting themselves and their content to the new format...

Employees on social networks
Determining social media policies for the workplace is especially difficult for franchisors, who have both corporate employees and independent operators to consider. On the one hand, allowing employees and/or franchisees to use social media can provide great word-of-mouth, build online relationships, keep people at all levels of the organization up to date, and show that a company is progressive. On the other hand, it's hard to control what people talk about online, thus difficult to tell if employees' or franchisees' time spent on social media affects the system and brand positively or negatively. This piece is a good rundown of the pros and cons of social media use inside a businees and may help you decide on best practices...

As we end one year and begin another, this is a good time to take stock of your marketing and branding strategies and execution - and to consider new sources for improving your results in 2012. Whether you're in the market for new marketing and branding tips, tactics, and tools; training your sales staff to succeed in the new normal; or simply looking to keep up with the ever-changing Social Web, here are more than 25 free "must-have" marketing books, magazines, courses, tools, and conferences, courtesy of Maria Pergolino's blog on Marketo.com.

From her blog:

Free marketing magazines
Call me old school, but I still read marketing magazines to stay up-to-date on the latest marketing news. I can't imagine a flight without two or three of these in my bag to ensure an interesting trip.

Bloggers can be a business's best friends
A powerful and frequently misunderstood aspect of creating an online presence is the necessity of link-building. Inbound links are the currency of the Internet, the most important things a website needs to rank well in Google and other search engines. One of the best ways to get inbound links is discovering which bloggers are most relevant to a business and cultivating friendly relations with them. Besides providing inbound links, bloggers can be a source of reviews, feature stories, and a crucial bridge to the community that's most interested in a business's products or services. This is a great piece about how to communicate with this important group of people.

YouTube releases updates to YouTube Analytics
Video creators have been able to find out who's watching their videos and where they come from through YouTube Insight...

Franchising is a complex business in that as a franchisor we have to fully understand two layers of customer profiles: 1) our franchise partner profile (who partners with us to develop Mama Fu's sites); and 2) our retail customer profile (who spends money at our Mama Fu's locations). We feel strongly that we know what type of franchise partner we want to build our brand around - successful multi-unit, multi-brand restaurant operators - but until recently we didn't fully understand who our retail customer was.

Like many brands, we figured our customer had a particular income and family demographic, but beyond that, what traits did they have in common? What psychographic elements drove their behaviors? And how did distance from our store affect them? We very much needed to find quantitative answers to these important positioning questions and, not surprisingly, our current and prospective franchise partners wanted to know these answers as well!

To help us implement the customer model and site selection tool set that would allow us to 1) understand our markets better, and 2) drive specific action based on our findings, we selected the Buxton Company after a noteworthy amount of reconnaissance...

The final step in a simple social media strategy comes down to preparation. Your company may never be up against the worst-case scenarios, but creating a responsibility workflow to avoid potential knee-jerk reactions is crucial to ensuring that your team remains level-headed if such a situation ever arises.

Fear surrounding severe negative customer service reactions is, by far, the number-one item that's top of mind for all levels of management. However, social media is positive and provides your company the opportunity for real-time customer feedback, glimpses into operational misfires, or potentially harmful employee practices. Regardless of whether the consumer has inflated their experience, your company has a chance to save that relationship and influence other potential customers...

I began this series in June by asking if your business had a social media strategy. I didn't intend to be condescending, but I'm still in awe every day of how many large companies are being misguided when it comes to this marketing option.

(Editor's note: Catch up with part 2 on setting measurable goals and part 3 on using Facebook for local marketing.)

Now I could write a long article about which channels are best and how you should gain traction by integrating several different resources online, but bottom line... if you're a franchisee it doesn't matter. Your franchisor should be worrying about overall branding. Your role is to focus on local-store marketing - just in a different way than you have before.
The majority of the North American population is using Facebook as their channel of choice, so why reinvent the wheel? You're probably thinking, "Really, Erica? That's all you've got for us?" And my answer is YES!
If you're just getting started or still getting your feet wet, stop and focus on where the customers are...

Sites with Twitter "share" buttons get 7x more links
A study of 4 million randomly sampled Tweets showed that websites with a Twitter share button get almost 7 times as many link mentions on average as ones that don't have them. Easy to install widgets make "social share" buttons available to any website owner, but only 53.6 percent of the 10,000 most popular websites are using social sharing buttons. This is a simple and effective way to boost crucial social media dissemination of your brand's content.

Have you tried Google+ yet? (25 million others have)
On Google+ yet? Social media maven Chris Brogan has six suggestions for how to get started.

Facebook recently announced a major initiative regarding brand Pages and the ability to map and link to each local Place, basically creating a Facebook Place for every brick-and-mortar location. Before we dive into why this is a good thing, I'm going to provide a little history of how we got here. Stay with me... If you didn't take social media seriously before, I promise you will now!

A little history
Since 2008, Facebook has allowed businesses to build their online presence with a brand Page. Some franchisees also began to create Pages for regions or specific locations, since they also had an interest in driving awareness for their own businesses. Sounds good, right? Well, unfortunately this created fractured branding at the corporate level and a lack of guidance from many franchisors, causing confusion for franchisees and consumers alike...

You won't find much disagreement among today's franchise CMOs and marketing executives with the statement, "Mobile marketing matters." However, as with any emerging technology, it's not as simple to agree on ways to use mobile marketing to connect with customers effectively. Three studies on the subject shed some light on how to translate opportunity into practicality - increased sales and customer loyalty - and to measure its ROI.

1) Why Mobile Marketing Matters
The first, titled "The Reason Why Mobile Marketing Matters," is from Coremetrics, an IBM company that provides web analytics and marketing optimization. The report is a general, high-level overview of mobile marketing that includes plenty of figures and charts...

Google+ Off to Fast Start
Facebook took 852 days to reach its first 10 million users. Twitter took 780. Google+ took just 16, and after a month it has grown to more than 25 million users. One big reason for its rapid growth is the popularity of Google's widely used Gmail platform. Google doesn't publish the number of Gmail users, but it's generally believed to be several hundred million. Google+ for business is expected to be out before the end of the year, and is eagerly anticipated. Widely expressed reasons for G+'s popularity include a better approach to relationship control than Facebook's, with the Circles interface, innovative features like the Hangouts (multi-user video conferencing), and integration with other Google products...

The good news for franchise recruitment is there are key lead generation sources that will work to various degrees of success.

Google+: What's It All About?
The new Google+ network has debuted. The social media community is scrambling to figure out what it's good for and where it may be going. Facebook haters hope it's a Facebook-killer, for example. Twitter lovers fear it may displace Twitter. Google Buzz suddenly gets useful. Here are some comments on Google+ from around the web. Chris Brogan writes a list of 50 things about Google+ that are interesting to think about. Jay Baer calls it a "...Facebook Twitter hybrid with outstanding ease-of-use and eye-popping potential." And for businesses looking for something like Facebook's Fan Pages in Google+, that feature will be coming "soon."

Founding Fathers Offer Web Advice
For July 4th, Hubspot shared inbound marketing secrets from the Founding Fathers...

Last month I discussed three steps for businesses to get started in social media. The most important of those steps in your strategy is setting measurable goals.

Your marketing team has very different ideas of what constitutes measurable success than, say, your operational team, right? Social media is a prime example of how these two worlds can merge successfully, as well as opening up the possibility for incorporating human resources, product development, and customer experience research. Social media reaches across many different departments of your business, so each individual branch or team should be involved in establishing short- and a long-term goals. Polling and collecting thoughts from various business units allows you to gauge your efforts and track key performance indicators (KPIs) over time...