Social Media Roundup: November 27, 2018

3 Tips for Scaling Your Brand to 24-Hour Customer Service

Customers today want round-the-clock responsiveness from their brands. But how does a franchisor make this happen most effectively? Writing on Help Scout, Craig Stoss, support manager at Bonfire, puts it this way: "Delivering 24-hour customer service is an exciting challenge to solve. It typically means your business is expanding or you are taking on larger customers. Scaling a team to this level comes with some unique considerations that range from cost and location to language and local customer demands. The strategy you choose needs to take into account your customers' needs, the region or time of day at which your load is growing most, and your business goals and expansion plans." After understanding your customer's needs, choose a method to analyzing your caseload growth. His 3 tip? 1) Expand your co-located team. 2) Add employees remotely or in dispersed offices. 3) Outsource or partner. To learn more, read the entire article here.

4 SEO "Best Practices" that May No Longer Be Best

SEO has always been a moving target, with marketers trying to figure out how to beat Google at its own game, or at least do their best to play under the rules - if they could figure them out before the algorithms changed again. Here's an article from Target Marketing by Phil Frost, founder and COO of Main Street ROI. Here are 4 "old school" tactics he says you can safely ignore, along with his suggestions on what to do today:

1. Obsessing over keyword optimization. Write content the way you would speak to someone in front of you. Take the keywords you have and treat them more like topics rather than bait for ranking.
2. Obsessing over anchor text. This is no longer a good strategy. Google's algorithm is much smarter now, and that means Google knows when you're trying to manipulate it to rank your site for what you want.
3. Page for every keyword variation. A good tactic many years ago was to create a different page to target each keyword variation. Google's algorithm, he writes, understands that a single page can be relevant for similar keyword phrases and even some synonyms.
4. Paying for links. As Google's algorithm improves, websites that relied on paid links will lose their rankings because those paid links will no longer count toward their "popularity score." This is great news for all the websites that play by the rules because they'll be able to move up in the rankings to replace the "cheaters."

5 Tips To Overcome the Omnichannel Challenge

In this age of every channel all the time, choosing how to allocate your limited marketing resources is a mountain every CMO and marketing manager must climb daily. "More options can cause more challenges, particularly when it comes to engaging with customers," writes Sherri Kolomayz, senior product marketing manager at Infor Global Solutions, in an article on MarTech Advisor. "Likewise, adding more channels to the mix can make it difficult to manage and coordinate resources behind the scenes, maintain cross-channel consistency, and deliver relevant messages." Kolomayz offers the following 5 tips to help sort things out:

1. Map and design the customer journey
2. Create personalized content
3. Segment your customers
4. Focus on relevance
5. Master the campaign lifecycle

For details on each, read the article here.

Marketing Follies: Pizza, Burgers, Fries, and Orange Chicken

Marketers and advertisers are providing some smiles as they compete for the public's attention and dollars. Here are some recent examples.

• Domino's sues Toppers Pizza. In a case of Goliath vs. David, the pizza giant is suing Toppers, which was founded almost 30 years ago by Scott Gittrich, a former manager at Domino's - and he loves it. So what's the ongoing beef behind Domino's cease-and-desist letter from last June? It's Toppers' "Us vs. Them" ad, which tweaks the pizza giant for not making its dough fresh in-house daily, like Toppers does. Oh, and the campaign featured a Domino's truck. Asked in a recent interview in Entrepreneur why he singled out Domino's, Gittrich responded, "It's really the whole industry, but we decided to use Domino's as our placeholder for the big pizza chains. We came up with the idea to do it in a brash, fun-loving sort of way, and, gosh, am I glad we did. I do it with love. I've got a bunch of good friends at Domino's, and they're certainly a good company that does a lot of things right. But hey, there are some things we do differently, and we think we're better. Customers can make their own choice."
• Carl's Jr. spoofs its 2005 Paris Hilton car wash ad. Possibly responding to decade-long criticism of its "hot babe" ads, Carl's Jr. has replaced Hilton with Australian comedian Celeste Barber in a new ad campaign called "Famous Stars Eating Famous Stars." In the new commercial, Barber washes an old station wagon (vs. the Bentley Hilton swabbed down). The voiceover is supplied by Matthew McConaughey. In another new campaign, actor David Koechner stars as Hardee's GM "Ron Tenz." See both ads here on AdAge.com.
• KFC agrees no one likes its fries. In the U.K., where advertising is feistier than in the U.S. (think KFC's FCK apology for running out of chicken), KFC has done it again - responding to a tweet from one of its biggest critics about how bad the brand's fries are. According to Adweek, the brand "has built an entire ad campaign around hatred for the French fries available its U.K. locations."
• Pei Wei continues tweaking Panda Express. Who ever thought orange chicken would be a bone of contention between these two Chinese food brands? Pei Wei Asian Kitchen picked the fight, challenging its larger competitor to "come clean" about the ingredients in its most popular menu item, according to an article in Restaurant News. With no response from Panda two weeks after issuing the challenge, Pei Wei posted a video showing the ingredients found on packaging in dumpsters outside a Panda restaurant. Pei Wei even formally petitioned the FDA to compel restaurants to disclose the ingredients of the food on their menus.