College student, startup business partner, pest control salesperson and now a successful business owner!

Joe and the web geeks talk to CEO/Founder Mark Sorenson from Social High Rise.  Mark shares with the audience what steps he took on the road to social media marketing, and how his company helps restaurants succeed in today’s fast paced internet environment.

A few key points to take away

Social High Rise is comprised of smart compassionate people who hustle, and who aren’t afraid to get out of their comfort zone. We love social media, love local businesses, and we love people. We work our tails off to make sure our clients are represented honestly and authentically through social media. We work together as a team to create things people love.

Social High Rise was voted “Best Place to Work in Chico” two years in a row, by everyone who works at Social High Rise.

Joe: Good morning you’re listening to Joe’s web geeks. The goal this show is to make sense of the Internet for local companies and give you back your unfair advantage. Cloud Wise Joe. I’m your host and then I have my super geeks with me.

Joe: Oh no. OK so believe it or not we have a really good show today separate from the opening. So this guest we have on is a really neat guest. His name is Mark Sorenson. He’s a CEO of Social High Rise. Now at first when I was looking into him and what he does I was thinking it was mostly just social media, but it turns out that he’s got it looks like an application that helps restaurants manage social media. I found that there are all kinds of challenges restaurants face that are really specific. So, we’re going to have Mark on to explain those challenges. If you own a restaurant or work in a restaurant, you’re definitely going to want to listen to the show.

Mark Sorenson from Social High Rise joins the show

Joe: OK. Welcome back. I am really excited I think we’re going to pull back the curtain on social media and especially for restaurants. So our guest is Mark Sorenson the CEO of Social High Rise. Which is a social media management company and a tool? Hey welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark Sorenson : Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. Exciting.

Joe : OK Mark we’ve got you on the show and I want to try to pull back the green curtain on social media. I also want to find out more about your company because it’s super interesting but could you tell me a little bit about you and how you even got involved in social media or creating a company and a platform to support restaurants. How did you get here?

Mark Sorensen : So I grew up in Chico California. When I left I promised I would never return, because I felt like there’s nothing for me there. I was a terrible student. I didn’t care much for school but I did it anyways. I graduated high school after high school I went and lived in Venezuela for two years served a mission and basically served people for two years in that kind of opened my eyes and showed me that there’s a lot more to life than just skateboarding and wakeboarding.

I studied at Brigham Young University in Utah and then I still didn’t ever become a good student actually that never really happened. But I was always fascinated with entrepreneurship and I took a lot of those classes. I study. I got a minor in business. I got a degree in geography of all things which is totally fascinating and boring topic at the same time. Right. Well like city planning urban development.

So I studied that and kind of meandered my way through college. Towards the end of college I started a company with several other people. What we were trying to do is solve the restaurant loyalty punch card problem where you have 100 cards in your pocket. So we built this mobile app that was going to be like the digital version of the punch card, the customer could use it you know multiple different restaurants in their area. It’s a brilliant idea of course. There’s probably about 10 companies doing almost the exact same thing. We were a terrible startup. So I ran that company for about two years and ran it into the ground completely. We ran out of money. We found out that half of what we did build, nobody cared about it. So the company died.

In that process, we got really involved in interviewing multiple restaurants and we got really familiar with their marketing challenges and operation challenges. We saw first hand what they dealt with. Social media was a challenge mentioned that we never really touched on.

Joe: Can I ask you a question there is with social media one of the challenges that a lot of them didn’t even know was a challenge?

Mark :  Totally. Totally.

Joe: Yeah. Like you knew it was a challenge and maybe some would say it was a challenge but they didn’t all even fully digest the impact of social media did they.

Mark: No. No. No they didn’t. Not even close. Some of them understood that hey here’s this new thing that I know maybe it would be smart for me to pay attention to. What most of you know. We’re still trying to. They just got their brand new cell phone let alone understood that social media was you know really taking off this. And this was back in 2010 – 2011. So it was still more of a new thing back then.

Joe: I’m guessing that now I’m guessing that their understanding of the need for social media really didn’t go much further than the understanding of the need for reviewers even if that.

Mark: Yeah precisely. Yeah. They had a very very traditional marketing mindset when they thought about their as in social media. And when you get into this later it just didn’t really fit much into any of those traditional categories as well as much as they wanted to try.

When my previous business failed, Probably one of the best learning experiences I can point to. And it was hard. You know it’s not fun to dump your heart and soul into something and watch it burn up in flames. But. You know, I walked away from that. I wasn’t dead. So that was a bonus. Life goes on. And I worked for a startup in San Francisco. They were a startup at the time and they manage social media for all small businesses and I joined them because I believed in that cause.  I knew about the problem that could be solved and it needed to be solved. So I joined with them. I worked in their sales department.

I was kind of my how I got their college paid for college or took these different sales jobs I sold Pest Control door to door for goodness sake for like warriors. So I join their sales team and in my and I did really well I broke a couple of different records and they you know they thought that I was really good and I was. And so I started to manage for them. But I realized really early that their culture was one that I just really didn’t didn’t like I couldn’t buy into it. It was a lot of rule by fear and intimidation. You know you say one thing to another. You know the cultural values are like these things on a poster but nobody actually does them. You know that type of thing.

I thought I’ve got to start up with something where you know I could join early and contribute right. And that wasn’t happening right. Not even close. So I quit. I left. But I was passionate about what I did I looked at how they were going to get a better job so I ended up moving back up here to Chico and started off Social High Rise from scratch.

Joe: How long have you been running social for when you started.

Mark: We started in November 2012. So we’re coming up in five years.

Chauncey : Yeah that’s like positively venerable in the world of social.

Joe: I was just going to say here you’re basically a fortune 500 that’s been around for 100 years and I’m in the social media world.

Mark : Thank you for making that point. Yeah.

Joe : So here’s the thing. Let’s let’s pull back this a little bit because you know we manage and work on just about everything Internet and we’re more jacks of all trades at least my company. And you know social is one of those things that even I don’t always know that I understand her or get in so well. Jared’s boss me around again we’re going to come up to the break here. What I want to talk about when we get back Marc is why does social even matter. You know what is this thing that’s happened that social. And then typically Why does it even matter to restaurants and I want to get specific. You know I want to talk specifically what things are working and happening and so that’s what we’ll talk about we come back from the break. So that was a great teaser.

Joe: OK so we’re here with Mark Sorenson CEO of Social High Rises a restaurant social media management company an application. We want to find out what social media even is or why it even matters because I think it’s become something that just about every business I talked to says “I think we need to do it. I know we need to do it but I don’t know what doing it means. You know I don’t know what I should be doing or why.”

Mark could you shed some light on this? Can you get specific about what it is social media is doing for business or how they should work with it.

Mark: Yeah. I mean I can share from a restaurant perspective. You know candidly when we first started we manage social media for any type of small business. I mean we had Internet companies, mom and pop, heating and air conditioning and insurance. All kinds of stuff. We did get a lot of experience dealing with more than just the restaurant industry even though now we’re totally focused on restaurants.

Our philosophy is different than what we estimate maybe like 90 percent of the traditional marketing world would say their philosophy is for social media. A lot of them disagree with us. Some of them agree with us but they don’t necessarily do it. The difference is,  we believe social media is really all about relationships, customer service and people. Not so much about selling and advertising as in the traditional marketing.  It definitely has those components and it’s important to note that. However you know the goal is to get more customers. For social media, alot of marketers still try to apply some of the same traditional marketing strategies or principles that they may have used in like TV. radio, print, digital advertising and web marketing. A lot of those principles don’t work very well for restaurants in particular.

Everything that we do has to be from the lense of “How are we delivering customer service. How are we increasing the strength of the of the emotional bond or the relationship between our client and their customers.”  As we do our work through that lens we end up getting the things that give us more customers or that sell the products right. So it’s you know it’s not as it’s not as straightforward as a lot of people want to make it. It’s not a simple right. I mean it is a simple strategy. Its not “me make posts you see posts here eat my food.” It’s not that simple. Its more, I make a post. You may see that post and then you’re going to forget about it and then you’re going to go about your day and then you see something like a tweet and then eventually  after you have seen it a few times online you say “oh yeah I remember I really like that place. I’m going to go there. “ Right.

Joe: So it’s really interesting the way you’re saying that because that’s that’s how I look at Web sites. You know we get customers all the time who say well you know I want my web site to generate more leads and sell more stuff. I said well good. That’s really what everybody wants. But but is that what people are looking for on a Web site when they’re buying other types of products. Right. Are they looking for you to tell them how great you are or do they need technical information or are they looking for customer service. What are they looking for and you really got to start from the lens of your customer to build out your website or your online marketing. And so it sounds like to you and I totally agree with you that social media is more of an extension of your customer service or experience in how you relate and connect with your customers. I mean that’s something that I’ve been in a fairly accurate way.

Mark:  That’s precisely how we articulated that. This isn’t an extension of customer service except on online. You’re right, you know it does come back to a customer’s perspective and if you think about any how you use social media,  none of us go on Facebook or Twitter to get sold to. That’s not why we go there we go there. We go to connect with the people and the places and stuff that we love. So if I happen to know someone who loves a particular restaurant enough to like them on Facebook and follow them and want to hear what they have to say. I don’t need to be sold anymore I don’t need to be told. It’s like here’s the mistake that restaurateurs make.  The mistake that they make is they post just the really obvious “Here are my specials and here is when Happy Hour is and it’s just really obvious and just kind of sales and content. If you went to a cocktail party and there’s always that guy at the cocktail party who is trying to sell you on something and on his business cards and like trying to get you on his multi-level marketing scheme or whatever. It’s like the conversation is always about them. Nobody wants to talk those types of people. So don’t be that kind of person when you’re thinking about what to post on social media.

Mark:   social media we believe should always be a conversational thing and not a revolving keyboard it’s not a billboard. It’s not somewhere we’re just plaster your stuff in X and X and then expect people to be like super stoked and like come in droves.

Chauncey: I think you’re right. I think another reason why a lot of businesses fall victim to that is that they have a general distrust of online marketing and they want every dollar that they spend to convert to some sort of monetization. So why would I post anything other than something that’s going to converge? They don’t get sort of nebulous abstractness of how that works.

Mark: You’re right. And you know something the social media some of it is quantitative. There are metrics and numbers. Most of it is qualitative. It’s hard to measure the strength of a relationship on an individual basis. I mean it’s like you know people ask me what’s the value of social media. I stole this from Gary Vaynerchuk who I love. If you know who he is. But it’s like what’s the value of your mother. I don’t know.

“The ROI of my own mother is everything. The reason I am able to do anything I do now, have the success I have, is because of my mother. The way she parented me is the reason I have the confidence and passion to do what I do. I can’t show you a deck or slides or metrics on that. But I am proof that the ROI of my mother is enormous. So, when it comes to social media, I can tell you: it will prove it.”

-Gary Vaynerchuk

Mark: Whatever you’re doing at the restaurant and whatever you’re doing at the business should be reflected on social media. Not just the specials, there’s a reason why there’s so many TV shows that talk about “how it’s made” and “behind the scenes” and “how it works”. People love that kind of stuff.

Joe: Mark what’s interesting is. We’ve interviewed and had other restaurants on the show and there seems to be some of these restaurants who just naturally do a great job. They have no strategy. But we found that they’re doing exactly what you’re describing. They just looked at social media as an extension of themselves to talk with their customers they don’t have some strategy to sell or to do whatever it was just natural. Those are the ones who are succeeding and I see other restaurants and other businesses who have strategies and try really hard and they get nowhere.

We’ve got our guest Mark Sorenson CEO at Social High Rise, they specialize in restaurant social media management. Normally we only have a guest on for two segments but this is such a big topic and I’m so interested in making sense of this for our audience and frankly for me.

You know I think sometimes you know people think because we know technology or we know what’s going on in the marketing world that we’re especially experts in every little bit of it. And frankly, social media is not one of my personal specialties. That may not understand it as a specialty so we’ve got Mark. He stayed on for another segment we really appreciate that Mark. I think that there probably couldn’t be a more confusing term than social media management. Can you give me a high level of what it is that your company does?

Mark: Yeah. From a high level to our services we see ourselves going into partnership with restaurants where we are literally joining their team. So what we’re not is like this cookie cutter service where you sign up online. You don’t talk to anybody and then things happen. That’s not what this is. It’s very involved, we’re very hands. But yeah we do create posts for sure but there’s a lot that goes into it. So, if we were to bring on a new client we would start everything off with a kickoff call. That’s a 30-minute to 60-minute phone call with a single dedicated account manager. This is the person who would pair up with clients to do all of the work.

So there’s a lot of continuity and clarity. You know we’re not outsourcing the work, we’re not splitting up among a bunch of different team members. The kick off call there’s two goals. Number one we just want to make sure that we cover all the housekeeping things we need to get access to credentials and make sure that profile or fill etc. but then the other part of the call is where we really interview our client and ask them all kinds of questions and what we’re trying to understand and formally document the essence and voice and personality of their business. We want to know about the business owner and their background. We want to know how they source their food ingredients. We want to know in particular how do they get involved in the team.

Does the client donate to the “Boys and Girls Club” or are they dog lovers. Are they members of the Chamber of Commerce? There are a million ways that a restaurant gets involved in their local community. We want to know what those relationships are. So essentially what we’re trying to do is to learn any real relationships in the real world that exist between the restaurant and the surrounding community. That’s the foundation upon which we create content, respond to reviews and do all the work that we do, so that it sounds and feels like it comes from them.

Joe: I’ve been in this for a long time and I’ve paid for these services before I got into this business. You said some things that are exciting to me or at least show me that you’re a company that’s going down the right path, For instance you don’t outsource a lot of this stuff. It’s really easy to outsource. The fact that you have a dedicated rep work with clients to uncover things, it sounds like a really solid good foundation. Now let’s move on to the client has signed up and agreed to work with you. What are some of the activities that are going to happen now?

Mark: Yeah. So first off we will create the profiles update that makes sure the aspects match the brand make sure that the information is correct and then ongoing we just make sure that if there are changes to that like there’s holiday hours or there’s you know whatever changes in the menu but those are always updated and reflected. But the bulk of our work is on with ongoing content management. So we’re creating. So we work on Facebook. We work on Twitter Instagram and those are like posting platforms. The other side of it is the review side which is kind of you know we like we see social media as split between you know inbound and outbound. It’s kind of a way that we talk about it. In-bound being reviews that come in from customers of them being the message that you’re sending out to your customers.

For Twitter, Facebook and for Instagram we will create original post two to three times per week consistently ongoing. We optimize the times that we post. We pay attention to the type of content that gets the particularly good engagement to create more of that type of content. We’re responding to comments that come in directed towards the brand. So where we really are a customer service agency in a way for anything that comes inbound through through social media.

You know as I said earlier social media for restaurants in particular and for anyone really in the business it really is about customer service as first and foremost. When you get that right then the rest of the things fall into place much easier.

Joe:  Now I’m looking at your plan breakdown. I’m looking at your prices. I think it’s interesting because you’re being pretty consistent. You know,I hope our listeners are getting your perspective here especially the restaurants because I really like what you’re saying here about this relationship and really I am curious though how your team is able to ask or answer a question for a pizza restaurant in Southern Florida.

Mark Sorensen:  Yes. We’ll respond to every customer review that comes in and out or on Trip Advisor. We do those privately first because that’s the most effective way to actually connect with the customer on a personal level. If it wants a public response we’ll do that as well. With happy customers it’s typically easy to respond to them. What we learned in the kick off call is usually enough and there’s not a lot of issues that we’re dealing with. So those are just easier. Right. And that’s like the goal is to help that customer feel heard and know that there are positive reviews was appreciated and sends and endorphin hit off in their brain and makes them feel special and all that connects back to their loyalty for the brand. as for the negative reviews and every restaurant will get them. What we do is we’ll draft our best response, the way that we think that it should be addressed and give it to our client or manager who has feet on the street, who understands the day to day of what’s going on in the restaurant. We want them to understand that there was a customer that had a negative experience and here’s how we propose responding to them.

Joe: We’ve got about 30 seconds. Can you tell us how to get a hold of you or how restaurants can get ahold of you?

Mark Sorensen : You can go to our website SocialHighRise.com There’s a contact page there and you can submit a contact form. I’ll usually be the one who personally responds to those actually. So that’s neat. Or you can call our phone number which is   (855) 957-6242  thats (in announcer’s voice)  (855) 957-6242

Joe:  Hey thanks for coming on the show and I actually hope you come on the show again! if you’re listening, go to his website check out his prices. They’re great. They’re fair. I think this is definitely something that’s worth it.

Joe:  OK. So what do you think about that guest?

Chauncey:   I found it personally very eye-opening. When he talked about inbound and outbound social media marketing. Thats really kind of rare that somebody throws some sort of huge like cosmic concept at me like blows my mind because I normally think I’m out there in this cosmic realm. You know he simplified what is very potentially a complex topic. It really kind of blew my mind.

Sean:   You know that and that all made a lot of sense to get the customer involved and engaged and just work with what you’ve already got.

Joe:   Yeah. OK so man that was great segment. Great guest!