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All types of businesses to reuse various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Foursquare. Social media can help various types of businesses in different ways-engaging in conversations with consumers, driving sales, finding more prospects, bringing in more traffic etc.

Big businesses like Starbucks, Virgin, and Levi’s have been using social media for business for quite some time. Now, the small businesses are too embracing social media and the rate of adoption is increasing. A recent University of Maryland study, found that social media adoption by small businesses has doubled from 12% to 24% in the last year.

Here, we will discuss about a few local and national businesses using, which are using social media effectively. Below we are discussing a few case studies about adoption of Social Media by various businesses.

The Creme Brulee Man

Food from street carts is popular in San Francisco. These carts travel from one neighborhood to another and offer their foods to their customers. But there is the problem with these carts. They keep moving and do not always stand in a particular place. So, how do they inform their customers about the location?

Well Creme Brulee Carthas found a way-Twitter. Curtis Kimball, the founder of popular Creme Brulee Cart in San Francisco, at present has more than 12,000 followers within a little over a year. By following him on Twitter, he’s customers know the location of the cart for the day. Most of his business comes from his Twitter followers. Kimball is a former construction worker turned creme brulee expert.  He says -“It gives people a valid reason to follow me,” he says.

The other use of Twitter for Kimball –

He informs his customers what flavor of creme brulee he is serving on a particular day.

He has developed a personal relationship with his followers (customers)

He keeps his customers engaged by asking for their suggestions on the type of custard to serve in the parking place for his cart.

Twitter has helped Kimball a lot. He doesn’t have a marketing budget and Twitter allows him to get fans and customers. He doesn’t have as much of a presence on Facebook. He thinks- “Twitter can absorb more than Facebook with very little effort,” Kimball adds.

He also has a presence in Yelp. In Yelp his business has 224 reviews with a rating of 4 and a half stars and it has also been a valuable source of referrals for his business.

Joie De Vivre

Joie De Vivre is a company that runs 33 luxury hotels in California. It uses different social media platforms for marketing and driving sales. As a marketing strategy, it offers deals and coupons to followers and fans on Facebook and Twitter.

Every Tuesday, Joie De Vivre’s Twitter account tweets an exclusive deal and it’s grabbed by its nearly 10,000 followers. The company offers only a few hours for booking of the rooms at a steep discounted rate. Joe De Vivre sometimes offers $79 rooms at the group’s different hotels in different times of the year. Similar deals are offered to its 5,000-plus Facebook fans on Fridays.

Within a year, Joie De Vivre was able to book more than 1,000 room nights through these types of deals. These rooms otherwise would have stayed empty.

The company has formed a partnership with coupons site Mobile Spinach through which it offers coupons for the group’s restaurants. It has found another partnership with Foursquare to offer deals for check-ins at its various restaurants.

In terms of flash sales, Joir De Vivre has done a number of deals with travel sites like Gilt’s Jetsetter as well as RueLaLa.

Social media has helped the company to drive sales along with building loyalty among the customers.

As part of its social media marketing, Joie De Vivre encouraged consumers to enter its Road Trippin’ California contest. This contest allowed people to submit videos on YouTube that talks about why they love California. The contest got 270 video submissions. The three winners got all-expense California road trips with stays in the company’s hotels.

Stone Korean Kitchen

Chef Terry Lin, and LinkedIn employees Robby Kwok and Dan Yoo co-founded Stone Korean Kitchen.This restaurant offers modern Korean cuisine in San Francisco.

When the restaurant was started, they acted fast to create their presence on social media sites, including Twitter, Yelp, and Facebook. Yoo interconnected content between the various profiles in different social media sites, which helped it in gaining Twitter followers and Facebook fans. At present, the restaurant’s Twitter profile has 65 followers and its Facebook page has 107 fans.  Even though the numbers seem to be low, but many of them are repeat customers and for a small restaurant like Stone Korean Kitchen these many loyal customers are enough for a good business.

Yoo consistently Tweets links to comments and reviews on the Facebook page. He also manages the Yelp reviews and responds to customer complaints on social media platforms. According to him, this helps in getting customers and keeping them.

When the company decided to use Groupon, it never thought that the move could be so successful. The restaurant got significant traction in both sales. It also got lots of traffic to its Yelp sites and Facebook page after they offered a deal through Groupon in April.

Stone Korean Kitchen sold 2600 deals through Groupon in one day. This resulted in a houseful restaurant for two months for both lunch and dinner. A good number of people who took the Groupon deal became their loyal customers who repeatedly visit the restaurant.

The Groupon deal also resulted in many Yelp reviews. Before the deal, the restaurant got 80 reviews on Yelp, but after the deal, it could manage to receive 90 reviews within 3 months.

Yoo and Kwok are both LinkedIn employees and try to find out how they could use the professional social network for driving sales. LinkedIn has specific ad targeting capabilities and using that Stone Korean Kitchen started placing ads targeting lawyers and bankers in the San Francisco area. The result- increase in foot traffic and corporate catering requests.

Yoo says that they will soon have a promotion with Foursquare and are thinking about featuring a deal on the social network’s new Earlybird venture.

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Even though this article is written for writers (as they do the maximum writing work), but the tools can be used by any business. As a business owner (or even as a manager), you can always use these dictation tools, voice recognition tools, transcriptions tools for aiding your business and day-to-day activities.

Freelancer writers understand that time is very much valuable. It is especially true when you have several projects at hand or when you have a deadline very near. Also the more time you invest the possibility of increasing your income also increases. You need to use your time wisely so that not only you earn good money but also you get time do what you like including more time with your family.

Here’s how increase your writing productivity without increasing your writing time.

Step 1

Purchase a digital voice recorder. With this, you will be able to record the words and articles. The recording can later be transcribed to create the article. A digital voice recorder can be used anywhere. You can use when you are driving, travelling, out of your house or anywhere else. You can utilize the time you have to wait for something.

Step 2

Start dictating. You can dictate in the digital voice recorder. It is also possible to dictate in a voice recognition software. You can dictate your articles in the digital voice recorder and can record the first draft of the articles. You can also record your thoughts with the help of the recorder.

It needs little bit of practice. With practice, you’ll be able to write your articles faster and better with the help of the digital recorder.

Step 3

In this step, you can transcribe the articles you have recorded. You already have your articles dictated in the digital voice recorder. Now, it is possible to transcribe the recorded articles and convert them to written words. The transcription is done by the voice recognition software (like Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred version). The processes little slow but once the article is transcribed, you just need to edit it.

Invest in voice recognition software. This is very important. Many of these software work really good. I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred and it is good.

When you can dictate directly in your computer in a MS Word or in a digital recorder and get it transcribed into words, you can save lots of time. In general, speaking is 3 times faster than writing. So, you can complete your articles at about 1/3 of the time or you can complete 3 times the number of articles you are writing presently.

That’s about 300% increase in productivity.

Step 4

Practice prudent proofreading. You have increased your productivity by using a digital recorder and a voice recognition software. Your articles are transcribed into word files. Now, you need to go through these articles and edit them to eliminate all the spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes. Initially, the error could be more but after some training, the software will understand your voice and speech pattern and will make lesser mistakes. However, from the point of view of quality, it is very important to edit your articles which a sharp eye.

Some of the situations when you can use this method to increase your productivity by many times-

For example,

1. If you need to write several letters in your office, you can always dictate your letters. It will save you lots of time.
2. Suppose you had a meeting and you want to keep the discussion in record. You need the soft or hard copy of the meeting or discussion, then you can get meetings transcribed by yourself without paying anything to a professional transcriber with the transcription tool.
3. Voice recognition tools work with word, excel, PowerPoint, Internet browsers, emails clients and can save you lots of time.

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If you want to find out where you rank as an entrepreneur, you can do that now. The Founder Institute is offering the test to anyone interested for the first time. You will get to know how you rank against other applicants.

Founder Institute is a very early stage startup incubator. Only a year ago Adeo Ressi launched it. The program has now expanded well beyond Silicon Valley.

Affiliated programs for it are now available in 11 cities around the world. It will be now available in Houston.

The applicants of Houston Program will need to take an aptitude test which will rank them against other applicants. The test will judge IQ, aptitude and personality of the applicants. In Silicon Valley, about 250 applicants applied for the program and only 79 of them were ultimately approved. From that 41 companies were formed.

It seems that the test is reliable in predicting high quality entrepreneurs. The results of the class-

27% of accepted entrepreneurs perform worse than expected in class.

57% perform as predicted, and

16% perform better than predicted.

Take the test here – apply now and the test will be sent out on August 3. The test lasts about 40 minutes. It has an associated cost of $50.

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