Category: Activism

Social media is everywhere in our culture. We are constantly aware of it and have become increasingly accepting of its overreaching bounds into our personal space. We as marketers know this all too well. In today’s modern world of advertising and customer relations, it’s paramount that companies connect with their customers on a social and interactive level. Long gone are the days of simply advertising to consumers and expecting the to purchase products just because we told them to. Instead, now we are faced with new challenges of interacting with customers on a one-on-one level. Never before has the consumer held such high power and influence over what companies do and what they make. One bad review or one horrible tweet can expose a company to tons of bad PR and require them to spend millions in explanation stories. To us, this fact is obvious, but to many old school company executives, social media is nothing more than a game and a rat hole. How do we actually show the value of social media to corporate America?

The first thing that you need to understand when talking with companies is that they view things through a business mindset. They want to see the financials and understand the accounting behind transactions. They want to know how much customer acquisitions costs are and how social media can improve that. This subject of accounting and finance is where many social media marketers tend to fail. It’s important to be able to speak their language if you want to convert them as clients and help them grow their businesses. For instance, it’s not a bad idea to brush up on your accounting theory and financial vocabulary. Understand financial ratios and know how to use them to sell your services and ideas about how to market to customers appropriately. A good example of this is using the accounts receivable turnover ratio formula. This financial equation measures the amount of times a company and collect money from customers. If social media is used to attract better customers, the receivable ratio with increase as the company is being paid back faster. Explaining this to a company executive will make them value their social media efforts much higher.

Another key measurement in the marketing space involves the accounts payable turnover ratio calculation. Directors and accountants like to look at this financial ratio to measure how well any marketing campaign is doing because it shows them how able they are to pay off all of their vendors on time. At first this might sound kind of counter intuitive, but it isn’t. Being able to pay off your creditors is a by-product of collecting money from your customers on time. To put it a different way, when companies attract quality customers, they are paid back faster. In turn, the company has the cash to pay back its creditors on time. It’s all one big cycle.

As you can see, this is how companies and executives tend to value social media in the marketing space. It’s important to keep that in mind when you are out trying to sell your services.

One of the greatest things about DC that is almost universally loved by everyone who lives here is the DC Food Trucks. Everyone knows about them! When tourists come in they see all of the hotdog and egg roll trucks down by the mall. Unfortunately they generally don’t see any of the awesome selection of trucks that frequent McPherson Square and some of the other areas. You can literally get just about any type of food from anywhere in the world right out of a truck. Even Chick-Fil-A has a truck that travels all across the city.

Long story short, everyone loves the food trucks in DC, but even the town’s universal love for them doesn’t stop the city government from trying to make them harder to operate.

Do you remember a few years ago how cheap it was to eat at food trucks? You could really get some sweet deals. After all, this only makes sense. How much overhead can there actually be in a tiny little truck? They don’t have to pay for a building or property taxes. They don’t have any servers, so their labor costs are pretty low. But recently the cost to eat at a food truck has gone through the roof, and it’s basically no cheaper than going to a regular restaurant.

Increasingly the cost to operate and run a food truck in DC is rising. There are strict health regulations that operators must follow and there are tons and tons of fees involved with getting licenses. There are also special food truck taxes that you must pay as a consumer each and every transaction you make at a food truck.

Worse yet, many brick and mortar restaurants don’t like the competition that the local food truck bring to them and they are trying to squeeze them out of operations. This is one of the biggest problems and where anti-food truck people seem to have been gaining the most ground. Brick and mortar restaurants would rather see the food trucks go away because they have less businesses to compete with then, so they go to local governments and complain that food trucks don’t “play by the rules,” because they have low overhead and aren’t traditional restaurants. Some cities have ordinances on the books now that say food truck must be a certain number of feet away from any brick and mortar restaurant, thusly limiting competition nearby. Thankfully DC hasn’t done something this silly yet, but neighboring cities in Virginia have.

This is yet another example of how we can use social media to our advantage. If we start talking to our local councilman about the problems that this presents for our city, they will probably listen to us. If we go to all of the various food truck owners, asking them to promote the #FREEDCFOODTRUCK hashtag, they’d be more than happy to do it because it’s their business that’s at steak (see what I did?)

We need to keep food trucks in DC and we don’t need to set up any more crazy rules that they need to jump through.