Casey Cheshire

This weekend the Cheshire Family, minus puppy Charlie, was in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.  We were happily surprised to find out that our weekend get-away was the same weekend as Quebec City’s Winter Carnival.  It’s like Carnival in Brazil, just with snow pants, ice sculptures, and a dancing snow man named Bonhomme.

It’s during this festival on a windy, snowy, cold afternoon that my wife and I entered a footwear store.  We were looking for hiking boots for her.

A quick (customer) background on this boot search: We’ve searched “everywhere” for Tina’s hiking boots.  She’s tried on practically every boot at both Eastern Mountain Sports & LL Bean- none have fit properly.  Hiking boots are one of those kinds of footwear that you need to spend a little time (and money) on getting it right.  Five miles into a trek, you don’t want your foot to fall off from killer blisters and sprains.

In summary, if we actually (and finally) found the right boot, we’d pay almost any price.  My Asolo boots were $199 and are the best boots I’ve ever had.  After all this frustration in searching for boots, we were ready to buy!

Tina had yet to try on a North Face boot, and gave one in this store a shot.  Unlike all of the other boots, she had no immediate pressure or pain points on her foot.  Soon both boots were on and she was walking around the store fighting a smile. The boots were $139 and had a 20% discount.

With the sale basically in the bag there was only one step left.  Naturally, you want to try the boots on wearing the thicker hiking socks you’ll likely be wearing.  We went over to the socks rack.  Would you believe it? They were out of Smart Wool size small hiking socks.  I’m a big fan of Smart Wool, but they were also out of the rest of the size small socks.

“Do you have kids sizes?”

Sorry no.  The mediums would be way too big, and there was nothing smaller available in the store.  With a purchase price of over $100, there was simply no way we’d just guess-timate how the boots would feel.

The sale went from “Go to No” in the 2 minutes it took looking for socks. The lack of a $20 product blocked the sale of a $140 product. Amazing!

It’s a beautiful example of friction points in the sales process.  Every product and service has it’s own unique elements of difficulty.  Physical retail stores would do well to examine how long lines, dressing rooms, and yes- supporting products generate friction and potentially prevent sales.

Found this project through AnalyticsPros blog Analytics Prose and it pointed me to this blog post on Yoast.

It’s a quick little Google Analytics project that shows you what page your site was on when someone clicked to your site from the natural search results.

Image via CrunchBase

So someone searching for “Casey Cheshire” would find CaseyCheshire.com on the first page and in the first position.  Google Analytics won’t be able to tell you position, but with this filter setup, it’ll show you what page you were on.  Testing on your own will give you different results because Google has personalized search.

Step 1: Create a new profile. (Always do this so you don’t screw up your main profile. Once data is filtered, it cannot be reversed.)

Step 2: Create a filter that Includes only Organic traffic. (Instructions here.)

Step 3: Create a filter that Includes only Google traffic. (There are fixes to include Yahoo and MSN, but you’ll need to already be properly tagging this traffic with custom utm data.  It get’s more complicated, but is doable. ) (Instructions here.)

Step 4: Create a filter that does the Magic (…grabs the page result from the url).

Click here for a photo of what the filter should look like.

An important fact about what you’ll see in the results.  If you don’t see a result it means it was on the first page, 20 means it was on the third page.  Below is the page number & what result will show up in results.

1. no result
2. 10
3. 20
4. 30
5. 40
6. 50

Not perfect or Apple iPhone user friendly, but provides a glimpse into the SEO effect on your organic search.

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In a previous post, I introduced my two Twitter lists which identified the superstars and blooper-stars of Corporate Social Media.  These follow on posts detail how a company has earned it’s place on either lists.

A recent Domino’s Pizza television commercial really impressed me.  The staff of the mega-chain acknowledged the complaints about their pizza.  After coming clean, they introduced a little wow-factor into their new pies.  Extra love on the crust, legit fresh ingredients, and more.

Great job on the campaign and great job with social media.

We ordered pizza the other night and wanted to give Domino’s a shot at it since their “makeover.” It turned out great!  Today, I sent them a message about their great job:

@CaseyChesh: @Dominos Good job with the Pizza Upgrades!

Six minutes later I received a response:

@dominos: @CaseyChesh Thanks so much!

Excellent use of Social Media and it’s more than a quick response to a compliment.    It shows that they’re actually listening.  I feel confident that if I had issues they would have easily been cleared up.  Literally, Social Media, done right, is as simple as this.

In the highly competitive pizza world, Papa John’s started making waves with taste and freshness.  It became trendy to order that over the “old expensive standard.”  Domino’s is quickly regaining the trend points with excellent use of technology (Pizza Tracker) and now, a Social Media win.

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The entire world is abuzz with videos and commentary about the new Apple iPad.  There was quite a bit of speculation before it came out, much of it surrounding the name.  I’m not usually one for following the crowd, but I’ve decided that not writing about it just because the entire world just doesn’t work.  So I’ve decided to allow myself 5 minutes to inspect, think, and ponder about the Apple iPad.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Name

A lot of people are disappointed with the name.  iPad? Lots of jokes go towards that.  And there’s a hilarious video of Hitler Responding to the iPad Release.  Long story short, he didn’t like the name either.  I think a lot of the let down with the name is that most people, myself

included, expected the name to reveal the future of computing.  Like watching monkies use bones to fight in the movie 2001 Space Odyssey, we all wanted the (iPad) to land on Earth like a gigantic monolith of futurism.

iPad makes too much sense and was probably way too obvious looking back on the situation.  Everyone called it ‘the tablet‘ during the speculation phase.  A part of me wants Apple to respond to that and call it the Apple Tablet.  Some thought “slate” but that’s too stark/dark.

iPad is a big iPod. Okay I get it.

The $499 iPad

I don’t think I need one.  It’s that simple at face value.  My iPhone totally rocks, and I’ll take AT&T’s weirdo network if that’s what I have to do to use it.  My home laptop is a PC I got a few years ago from Circuit City (Best Buy had bait & switched me.)  I haven’t transitioned to any larger Apple products (yet?).

So it can be an e-reader/book/magazine.  I can’t see it saving the print industry, but it’s still early.

A clever friend of mine in Boston brought up the point that releasing the technology will allow users to come up with new ways of using the iPad.  Cool way of looking at it- time will tell!

5 Minute Conclusion

In short, I don’t need an iPad right now.  Either that or Apple/My Influencers haven’t convinced me of this need.  I won’t be buying it today, but I don’t think I’d be opposed to receiving a free one.

It’s a large iPod and won’t fit in my pocket.  It’s also bringing us one step closer to the 3 screen idea: small, medium and big screen.  I’ll write about that next.

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In a previous post, I introduced my two Twitter lists which identified the superstars and blooper-stars of Corporate Social Media.  I also invited everyone to send me suggestions- and send you did!  This report, however, is of my own personal experience with Panera Bread (@PaneraBread).

This was a tough one!  I am a huge fan of Panera’s “Pick Two.”  I always get the Grilled Chicken Caesar and the bowl of Broccoli Cheddar Soup.  It’s quite literally my quintessential lunch, and I’m the Mayor (on FourSquare) of my local Panera. For those not on FourSquare, it means I go there too much!

So what happened Casey? Nothing major, nothing dirty or disgusting.  I called in on my way and got lunch to go.  Did the Pick 2- of course!  And while the soup was tasty, this is what my salad looked like:

Click here to see a larger image.  From my CSI photo with pen for measurement, you can see that the Chicken Ceasar Salad should have a small “c” for chicken as there is barely any there!  This is not routine for dining at Panera Bread.  When eating there, my salad bowl is full of goodness and yes, Chicken (capital C!).  I have however noticed that the take out salad is usually a bad value.

Normally I just put up with the salad’s issues, but this particular day the chicken was so spare (and thinly sliced) that I decided this is it! Rather than call up and complain, I had previously found & followed Panera on Twitter and decided to use Social Media to inform them.

I took a photo with my iPhone, uploaded it to TwitPic, and Tweeted:

@panerabread my chik cea salad frm Nashua makes me sad. And I’m the mayor! http://twitpic.com/x2mbs

Would you like to see the response I got?

Their response was:

What was that? You can’t read it?  I didn’t type it?  Oh, so sorry!  Here’s a graphical version:

No, they didn’t send me a t-shirt.  They didn’t respond at all.  Crickets! Chirp chirp.

I wasn’t mean, didn’t demand a refund, and actually took the time to take a PHOTO of something they should probably fix.

For their lack of response, Panera Bread earns a Social Media Fail.

Let that be a lesson to all of those responsible in Corporate Social Media.  Twitter is all about a 2 way conversation.  If you don’t want to hear from your customers- and respond back, stick to your print mailers and avoid Social Media.  Because it’s not about what you say back as much as it is about you responding at all.

This blog is a second test of Panera’s Social Media program.

Nothing would please me more to hear from them because they saw this article- which means they’re out there, and listening.  I’d be happy to take them off the fail list and post an update.  But until that time, until you see an update below these words, Panera Bread will remain in the list of companies who have failed at Corporate Social Media.