Business Coaching

Marla Erwin helped Whole Foods master social media.

Think you’re busy trying to constantly update your own Twitter page? Imagine handling more than a million Twitter followers.

Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods, is credited with Whole Foods’ social media success. In its first year on Twitter, Whole Foods gained a million followers. Since starting with Twitter, Whole Foods now has several separate accounts for users who have more specific questions about the store’s products — a Twitter account for cheese, one for Whole Foods recipes, etc.

How did Marla garner so many followers? She incorporated user-generated content onto Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook accounts. Recipes, product ratings and reviews and comments on the Whole Foods’ blog all went onto their Twitter feed.

Marla then went on to use Facebook and Twitter for different uses: Facebook she uses for more editorial content and to start discussions among fans and friends (since users can see others’ comments on Facebook, it’s easier to have a discussion), and Twitter she uses for Whole Foods promotions, information for customers, to answer customers’ questions and tweet out links to Whole Foods’ blog.

Read the whole article here,  and see if any of what Marla did for Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook can be used for your business.

When it comes to search engines, do you use the reliable standby Google, the newer Bing, or any of the other search engines out there (Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, etc)?

Here’s something interesting that may sway some die-hard Google users to start using Bing: On New Year’s Eve, Times Square was evacuated when the bomb squad was called to investigate a suspicious van. Don’t worry – it was nothing. But what was interesting was what the two search engines turned up as people in the city were scrambling about for information.

Search engines pull up all sorts of websites depending on keywords, including results from Twitter and Facebook. Simply typing the generic “Times Square” into Google turned up news results that were two days old about New Year’s Eve events and preparations for the upcoming festivities. When typed into Bing, however, yielded real-time headlines from various news outlets like ABC and CNN, thus giving the scrambling Internet searchers information they were looking for.

Now, this isn’t to discredit Google at all. In fact, Google was showing real-time results, too..theirs were just hidden. Google’s real-time updates page under “show options” and then “updates” with any search, had all the good stuff; headlines, tweets, everything that described what was going on in real-time was on that page.

If Google just moved its real-time results to its main search page instead of hidden on another page, it’d not only be better for Google, but it’d be great for search engine users: less frustration because they find what they’re looking for.

Use this Google/Bing example to think in terms of your own business…is there anything that your company could improve upon and beat competitors to?