I have met the top leaders from some of the country’s biggest restaurant brands here at the People Report Best Practices Conference in Addison, TX. It is day three of conference activities that will culminate tonight with a fun celebration that includes entertainment by one of my favorite local bands, Emerald City. For me, this is also the end of my first three weeks as a new People Report and Black Box Intelligence (PRBBI) team member during which we have released a major product update, and sped through the subsequent scramble to put finishing touches on this conference. Crazy and wonderful at the same time.
This year’s Best Practices Conference has been amazing. I’m not exaggerating when I say that PRBBI puts on one of the best conference experiences I have seen. I am, right now, sitting next to HR blogger pal, Mike VanDervort, who whole-heartedly agrees.
Aside from amazing networking, speakers, and the incredible experience of packing meal boxes for the hungry all yesterday morning, at the North Texas Food Bank, with 150 other volunteers from this conference, I have learned about some innovative ways that businesses are using my favorite social media tools to engage with customers. Tools like Twitter and Foursquare are getting interesting for things like tracking influencers.
According to Paul Barron, Chief Digital Brand Officer for Genghis Grill, and Founder of branding firm, DigitalCoCo, we are now looking at the value of social tools in terms of the social graph that they are creating. Social Graph is a term that Facebook started using a few years ago to describe their mapping of everyone and how they are related. It is now possible to easily track who the key influencers are in your niche on places like Twitter and Foursquare too. You can also track their likes and dislikes, And if you can track the influencers, you can engage with them and their networks.
Genghis Grill, for instance, discovered that social media users who like Genghis Grill’s brand, or similar brands, also are really into music. So they created http://www.genghisgrilltv.com/, where they are promoting the Genghis Live Music Tour, that allows users to vote for local bands to play events at some top Genghis locations, and a final event with a lucky winner at South by Southwest in Austin, TX.
They are also innovating with mayorship contests for Foursquare users, as well as tracking check-ins in some very inventive ways. There are some other really cool things that Paul is doing about which he swore us to secrecy. But, suffice to say, they are utilizing the powerful user data that can be derived from these social platforms to create very intimate customer relationships.
There is so much passion and compassion in this room today as we wrap up the 15th annual People Report Best Practices Conference. The theme for this year is People, Profits, Planet. The executives here are walking the talk. They care about their people, their customers, and the environment. I’m just happy to be here with them.
My new contact information, in case you don’t have it yet, is:
Craig Fisher
Vice President Business Development
People Report | Black Box Intelligence
Cell: 214.394.0909 Office: 972.733.6822
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