The questions come from many sources: our chat utility available on all our pages, our Facebook Page, our Twitter page, from emails and phone calls, and even from the customers we meet on the street.  While answers to many of these questions have been sent to the asker already, there are a surprising number of questions asked but without any contact information.  We hope adding them to these installments will give those wayward queries a home.

Remember folks: always empower people to contact you.  Leave an email address, phone number, Twitter handle .. anything, so we may be able to respond.

Now, without further ado…

Question:  ”What does social guides do?”  (asked via chat tool on our pages)

Answer:  SocialGuides offers tools & services for businesses serious about marketing and generating revenue, using Facebook.  Or more simply, we help you set up shop on Facebook.  You can sell your products & services through Facebook, schedule & run promotional campaigns, chart the return on investment of each marketing plan … everything you need to run a complete business, on your Facebook Page.

Question:  How much do your apps cost?  (asked via contact form, and others)

Answer:  The short answer is we’re one of the least expensive (if not the least expensive) providers, with our two packages costing $15/mo and $30/mo.  We do offer custom service packs for businesses needing us to run all their social marketing for them, but those are tailored to each client.

The longer answer involves knowing that while others may claim lower pricing at times, they get rather sneaky how they come around to charging you more than “advertised on the box.”  Some prices are better but only if your Page has very few fans (are they asking you to be unsuccessful at marketing?).  Others will charge you if a lot of people view your promotions, and others charge per promotion.  Well, if you know anything about marketing, you will appreciate that SocialGuides‘ fees are flat rates, where you can run as many activities as you desire.  In fact, we encourage it, because responsible & effective marketing is all about finding what works, what doesn’t work, and doing more of the former and less of the latter.

Question:  Do you accept non-U.S. currencies?  (asked via chat tool on our pages, and roughly translated from Hindi)

Answer:  We expect to have world-wide currency support soon.

Question:  ”Do I need a merchant account to run credit card transactions in your Store?” (asked via contact form)

Answer:  Nope.  Perfect for businesses just starting out, we handle the merchant account, security, and everything else.  You sell your products & services on your Facebook Page, and we’ll send you a check for whatever you’ve made.  That’s it!

Question:  ”transaction fees” (asked via chat tool on our pages)

Answer:  While we’re not entirely sure what is being asked, we’ll guess it has something to do with those pesky (and pricing) transaction fees charged to the merchant every time a credit card is swiped.  Not so with SocialGuides.  Every f.Store has the option of no per-transaction fees.  Pretty cool, huh?

Question: “Looking for a private label platform for my agency.”  (asked via contact form)

Answer:  This is definitely a conversation we can have, but it is best had with our head of business development.  Contact us, and we’ll make sure to introduce you.

Question:  ”Disseram que eu convidei estranhos não estou entendendo primeiro me cortaram 15 dias agora 30 dias e agora mais 30 dias/?/???? poxa” (asked via chat tool on our pages)

Answer:  So, we were able to figure out this question was written in Portuguese, and that it says something about inviting strangers, 15 days, 30 days, and more than 30 days.  Outside of that, we’ve no clue…

Question:  ”how are you guys different from wild fire” (asked via chat tool on our pages)

Answer:  The simple answer is we’re less expensive and more empowering.  Wildfire charges per promotion and per day, whereas SocialGuides allows you to run as many promotions as you like for a flat monthly rate (a rate, we’ll point out, less than an entire month of their daily rate).  The complete answer, of course, is more complicated but we’d be happy to chat about it.

Question:  ”I am trying to add a facebook welcome tab to my facebook fan page. I have two and accidently added it to the wrong page. I tried to delete this app several times but when I try to re-add it to the correct site I get a prompt to upgrade my page. Help.” (asked via our chat tool on our pages)

Answer:  Ahh, this is a common misunderstanding about Facebook Applications, and the accounts you create with providers of those applications.  Deleting the application from the Facebook Page does not remove your account from the provider’s database.  It only removes the application from the Page.  Most providers offer their free applications to only one Facebook Page, but just simply contact them to have them clear things up on their side and you’re good to go.

Question:  ”<snip>Unfortunately all of the non-fans out there are still able to access/like/see my wall and all its contents such as photos. What I really want is for them (non-fans) to like my page first in order to see my timeline and photos. Is that possible? <snip>”  (asked via chat tool on our pages)

Answer:  Unfortunately, no application does this, as such an activity is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service.  As long as you’re not trying to bar users from other Facebook Features (such as your Wall, Photos, etc.), you can use our f.Welcome, f.Promo, or f.Store applications to provide content that can only be seen by Liking your Page.

Question: “Najbolji pevac Jovan Perisic” (via chat tool on our pages)

Answer-ish:  We have no idea what’s being asked here.  We don’t even know what language it is.

Look for our next installment of “You Have Questions, Here Are The Answers”, coming soon.  Until then, please feel free to contact us by email, Facebook, Twitter, contact form, or any number of other means.  We’d love to hear from you.  Sincerely.

As always, I am Scott Campbell.

Would you miss the biggest shopping season of the year?  Neither would your fans.

How do you, a business, take full advantage of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the biggest shopping season of the year.

1. Identify products & services that you can offer compelling discounts for.
2. Be social about those discounts.
3. Use services that help you avoid the additional work.

Those steps, explained.

1. Every business is aware of what products & services are the most popular sellers .. the goods that get the customers to come in the door.  Identify these products, and determine what level of discount you can offer for them.  Make sure the discounts are compelling.  Would 5%-10% off compel you to shop at a business?  No?  Then why are you trying to get customers with the same level of discount.  If you don’t, chances are your competitors will.
2. Fact: Facebook allows you to message to Fans of your business, and through conversation be introduced to their friends, all for free, making it one of the most powerful methods of marketing today.  But it only works if you are social - if you’re talking to Fans and customers.  However, with the discounts you identified in Step #1, you have some of the most potent conversation starters.
3. “Work smarter, not harder” is a mantra every entrepreneur and small business owner lives by.  No one wants to add another hour of work to each day, spent writing & checking posts on social networks.  Find tools that help you complete tasks in short easy steps, and then you don’t have to worry about them anymore.

• • Schedulicity (schedulicity.com) can take care of managing appointment-based resources (e.g., stylists, consultants, teachers, trainers, classes) for you, with a short setup time and now the first 30-days are free (they don’t even ask for your credit card).
  • SocialGuides’ dashboard has a Post Scheduler, so instead of spending time each and every day posting updates to Facebook, schedule an entire week all at once.  Then, don’t worry about it for the rest of the week.  Look inside our Commerce Package for the Scheduler, and other tools!
  • Want to offer those discounts from step #1 on your Facebook Page without having to spend time posting Updates to every new fan?  Look at offering Coupons with SocialGuides’ Promo Package.  It takes 3 minutes to setup.
  • Want further tips on how to market on Facebook?  AllFacebook.com has a great article, “10 Facebook Marketing Tips for Small Businesses“, and our friends at Mashable have a very helpful article “Top 5 Facebook Marketing Mistakes Small Businesses Make“.

Lastly, you have us - SocialGuides.  Talk to us.  Don’t be shy.  Here, take our co-founder’s number.  It’s 415.763-5475.  Call him (he may be busy; if so leave a message) or email him at scott@socialguides.com.  Seriously.  If you have a question about social media marketing, contact him.  That’s how serious we, at SocialGuides, are about helping small businesses build their business by effectively using social media.  Boom!

BOZEMAN, MT(October 25, 2011) - Schedulicity (www.schedulicity.com), the leader in online appointment scheduling for small businesses, announced today a partnership with SocialGuides (www.socialguides.com), a social loyalty platform that helps small businesses manage social marketing activities. As part of the partnership, Schedulicity will integrate into the SocialGuides loyalty tab, adding online scheduling into their existing social media capabilities, which include customer acquisition and lead generation tools that help its clients attract and retain customers and amplify word of mouth.

To launch the partnership, Schedulicity and SocialGuides are creating a “Social Salon Package” for Marló Beauty Supply, a Michigan-based beauty supply company servicing salons and professionals across the US. It is the first company to adopt the special offering, giving them the opportunity to launch online marketing campaigns, create content, and schedule appointments from the same platform. “Social Packages” can be optimized for any small business wanting social engagement and increased customer acquisition.

“Having a comprehensive social media presence is paramount for small business owners and service professionals looking to build credibility in their market,” said Schedulicity CEO and founder, Jerry Nettuno. “Our partnership with SocialGuides will provide small businesses with the necessary tools to increase loyalty and engagement without sacrificing valuable time that could be spent running a business.”

The need for small businesses to maintain a social media presence that is both informative and engaging is growing at a rapid pace due to consumer demand. According to The Kelsey Group, in 2010, nearly all consumers (97 percent) use online media when researching products or services in their local area. This is up from 50 percent in 2007 and 82 percent in 2008.

“Today, even the smallest businesses are finding that a social media footprint is the key to staying top-of-mind,” said Christian Gammill, president and co-founder of SocialGuides. “Our platform offers businesses a way to reward social fans for their likes and comments on Facebook, and incorporating Schedulicity gives our clients yet another option to retain business and increase awareness among social customers.

Schedulicity takes the effort out of time-consuming tasks by completely automating and streamlining the entire scheduling process for appointment-dependent small businesses. By offering online service scheduling 24 hours a day through its digital channels, these businesses are able to save time and increase profitability through eliminating the hassles of scheduling.

SocialGuides combines social commerce applications and social media onto one platform. Subscription-based and easily integrated onto Facebook, the platform features a welcome tab, which enables fan-exclusive content, and a variety of social loyalty programs, aimed to retain existing customers with exclusive offers, listings, and panels.

SocialGuides offers small businesses three, tiered packages: Plus, Pro, and Platinum. All subscribers are given access to a SocialGuides dashboard that enables easy access to data, deals, and fan activity. Depending on the package, the users may also have access to Social Deals and Social Listings.

About Schedulicity

Schedulicity is the leading online appointment scheduling solution for small businesses. To date, more than 6,000,000 appointments have been booked through Schedulicity (an appointment is booked every four seconds) in more than 1,900 cities across the U.S. and Canada. Schedulicity currently facilitates over $450 million in appointment-based commerce per year. Schedulicity earned the prestigious DEMOgod Award at DEMO Fall 2011 for exceptional potential to thrive in the market, and was also honored by Tech Awards Circle 2011 for Best SMB Service, which recognizes small to mid-sized companies that have created a truly outstanding technology service. To sign up for the service or to find a service provider near you, please visit http://www.schedulicity.com or Schedulicity’s Facebook page.

About SocialGuides

SocialGuides is a Social Loyalty and Commerce platform that helps small and medium businesses with their social marketing efforts. SocialGuides’ applications and platform make it easy for local businesses to grow their fan base (with welcome tab and coupon apps) and drive customer retention (with loyalty programs) – all tied to Facebook to amplify word of mouth. For more information, visit www.socialguides.com.

1) The new Timeline feature is not being rolled out to Fan pages yet.
For many brands this is a bit of a disappointment as there certainly were lots of clever and beautiful ways the Timeline could have showcased products on their Fan page.  Mashable has a fun article  that illustrates what the Timeline could look like on a fan page. We may see this yet, but as of right now, it seems Facebook is taking a conservative approach before rolling out the Timeline to brands as well.

2) The new action feature opens up new sharing possibilities for products and brands.
fCommerce provider 8th bridge whipped up a quick “want button” to correspond to the ever popular like button.  Look for more intent driven concepts from companies that are sure to benefit fCommerce in the near future.

3) The new story feature unlocks a higher level of engagement for brands.
The big demo at F8 was showing the realtime new ticker of what your friends were listening to on Spotify or watching on Netflix.  When you clicked on it the news item, you two could instantly begin listening to the same song or watching the same movie. Look for this to translate big time for fCommerce.  Think about the interesting (and some would say scary) possibilities: “Jeremy just bought a new couch at Ikea”, “Jeremy just enjoyed an ice coffee at Starbucks”.

4) Apps can now show up on the Timeline.
While this was mainly touted as a consumer feature, I fully expect fCommerce companies to think about fun consumer facing ways to engage their audience.  iTunes could show your top Albums for the year to drive more recommendations and purchases from friends, Nike can show you where you ran to drive more brand awareness, an airline could show you where you’ve flown, etc.  In the long run this is where I expect to see the most creativity and disruption in the fCommerce space.

Overall, really all of the major F8 announcements are positively disruptive to the fCommerce space.  As these new features rollout to consumers in the coming weeks, look for the major app providers to react with product updates that will surely be leveraging the new capabilities.

• After a four month experiment Facebook ends the program.

• via Facebook Kills Daily Deals, But Keeps Check-In Deals | TechCrunch.

• Yelp Follows Facebook in Scaling Back Daily-Deal Service

• via Yelp Follows Facebook in Scaling Back Daily-Deal Service - Bloomberg.

I tend to think they aren’t dead as a part of a larger marketing plan.  But as a stand alone line of business with a dedicated sales force?  Well that might not make much sense anymore.  Regardless, we tend to think there is a better way…

Stay tuned for some new announcements from us on that front!

This is an example of one of our customers that is using our Welcome Tab.

Build a list – the best way to think about this is similar to email marketing.  You are building a list, a social list. There are many ways to create programs and campaigns to engage an active audience. We encourage that for certain. But we’ve actually discovered the easiest way to get started growing the list is to implement a Facebook Welcome Tab.  The welcome tab provides a simple call to action with a reason to ‘like’ your business (e.g. ‘Like’ us to get access to exclusive offers and access to the latest news). For many consumers, this simple message gives them a reason to ‘Like’ your business.

So how does the LinkedIn network work?

Well people who you are friends, colleagues or other direct contacts are in your 1st degree network.  People to whom you are not directly connected to, but are connected with your contacts, are in your 2nd degree network.  People your 2nd degree contacts know are in your 3rd degree network. Like a fancy Rolodex that connects to your contact’s fancy Rolodex, you use the people in your 1st degree network to get introduced to people in your 2nd degree network, and see who they might know in your 3rd degree network.  Pretty simple right? And if you lookup your LinkedIn stats, you might find your network reach might look something like this:

In the example above it’s impressive to see LinkedIn’s estimates that 159 connections means I’m only an intro away from roughly one hundred thousand contacts.  That’s pretty cool.  And if we follow their thinking further, those one hundred thousand contacts could get close to 5 million people.  Now of course I can’t practically get to 5 million people, but it shows how quickly your social reach blows up by just a few a degrees of separation.

SocialGuides uses a similar concept of degrees of separation with your businesses fans on Facebook and Twitter.

You see, conventional word of mouth reaches only a small number of people. But on Facebook & Twitter  each of an estimated 600 million active users is connected to an average of 130 friends - translation: your fans can get you to a heck of a lot of people. In fact this is just like LinkedIn’s first degree, because after all, anything a fan shares on the Facebook & Twitter can be (and often is) broadcast automatically to all of those person’s friends. As an example, let’s look at typical local business using the SocialGuides Dashboard.

socialguides 1 degree of seperation network reach

In the case of Game On Ladera, 191 Fans on Facebook, connects them to 46,670 people. So basically, if a small business like this one could offer a compelling enough promotion, where each fan simply shared the offer with each of their friends on Facebook - this small business could get the word out to nearly fifty thousand people. Which interestingly means, a social campaign has a potential reach that’s the size of a medium sized newspaper circulation or a small radio campaign, wow!  And if you take it one step farther, three degrees away from this business is again a few million people, which is essentially Facebook’s user base for orange county. Basically this is what everyone talks about when they say something “went viral” on social. Because a small retail business like the one above could in theory get to everyone in their entire town within 3 degrees.

Now of course, just as you, for all practical purposes, wouldn’t ever get intro’d to a hundred thousand contacts on LinkedIn (let alone 5M), you probably aren’t going to see the corner business get everyone within there fans reach to share their cool promotion. But even so, knowing how word of mouth operates in the social era is a key step in realizing that as a small business, you’re not just taking care of 2oo fans on Facebook, you are working for the opportunity to meet their friends - and well, there’s a lot of friends out there!

I personally love the LiveChat concept. Anytime you have a question, idea, concern, or whatever while using SocialGuides you simply click the button on the right and someone will be there to talk you through things in a matter of seconds.  It’s so easy to do, and it’s really reassuring knowing help is right next to you.  Selfishly, of course, we love it too because by talking to our customers, it helps us make better products (well i guess that’s not completely selfish is it?). For now SocialGuides LiveChat is running 9am - 6pm pst (and you can leave a message if we aren’t online).  Hopefully someday we’ll be able to run it 24-7.  Right now though, its cool to know when you hit us up, you aren’t talking to some person in another country, you are talking to one of our engineers, product managers, or perhaps even one of the founders.

Of course you can also call us, because sometimes there’s no substitute for a good old fashion voice conversation. Did you hear that big silly internet companies? There’s no substitute for a good old fashion voice conversation.

Now, if you run an online company and jive with our mantra of trying to be always available for customers, you might be wondering how we run both services.  Well with LiveChat we use a product called Plupper, which offers both livechat and help desk type capabilities (support logging, faqs, etc).  We’ve used a bunch of the other ones and found that Plupper had the best balance of the features we needed and a great pricing structure.  Other online support tools we’ve heard good things about are: Banckle, GetSatisfaction, Olark, UserVoice, and Zopim.  For our phone support we use a great product called Grasshopper.  There are other good products that have virtual pbx features like RingCentral and Onebox but we haven’t used either system so you’ll have to check them out yourself.

Whichever products you choose, we can’t encourage you enough to look for as many ways as possible to be customer centric. Sometimes that will be with support products like Plupper & GetSatisfaction, sometimes that will be with social products like SocialGuides (shameless plug) & Assistly (a cool social help desk), and sometimes it will be with good old fashion voice or a handwritten note.  No matter what the method of choice is though (and we can’t say this enough) - we believe whether you are a growing bakery, a social software startup, or an established eCommerce company, helping people should be at the core of who you are and what you do.

There has already been a fair amount of M&A activity going down this year, so we thought it would be fun to track it here and make it available below:

• dunnhumby acquired BzzAgent
• Buddy Media acquired Spinback
• AVOC aquired Tap11
• IAC acquired BuzzLabs
• Mylife acquired Citizen Local
• Ebay acquired Where (which acquired LocalGinger)
• LivingSocial acquired SocialMedia
• Overtone acquired by Kana Software
• Spreets acquired by Yahoo
  
• Radian6 acquired by Salesforce
• North Social acquired by Vocus
• HauteLook aquired by Nordstrom
• ObjectiveMarketer acquired by Emailvision
• DealOn acquired by ReachLocal
• Plixi acquired by Lockerz
• LocalTwist acquired by BuyWithMe
• Tweetdeck aquited by Ubermedia
  
• JitterJam acquired by Meltwater Group
• BantamLive acquired by Constant Contact
• Pagemodo acquired by Webs
  

Did we miss any social marketing, crm, or commerce related acquisitions in 2011?  Send us a message on Twitter or Facebook to @SocialGuides. Also check back, as we’ll keep this post updated through the year.