What are next steps?

Set up an introductory meeting

The first step is setting up an hour-long meeting at your store or elsewhere. At the meeting, you can ask any questions you want about Crème de la Crème service, other services, CSRA or anything else.

I’ll also explain in more detail how the service works and ask you some basic questions about your business goals and your Crème de la Crème customers. This enables me to help you pick a service to try.

You can change service levels easily

Since you can change services from one month to the next, your first choice is only the starting point. Once you see the interaction and engagement we initiate with your Crème de la Crème customers, you can decide whether you want more or less.

Get started here

---

Do you want to go behind the curtain?

Although Crème de la Crème experiential social media is offered as a simple service, it rests on rigorous insight, methods and tools. These have deep roots in my experience as a management consultant advising owners on business strategy, emerging technology and transformation.

I invite you to access my thought leadership on local business and large-scale retail to understand how the rules are changing. These articles help demystify things about the business environment you probably feel but may not fully grasp. Most important, they can give you unusual insight, so you can use disruption to your advantage.

Few local business owners realize the new advantages they have by helping people get what they want when their products and services are most valuable. Experiential social media can grow and deepen local businesses’ selling radius.

 

 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is drop-in-place? What are your services and prices?

Drop-in-place refers to Crème de la Crème’s unique design, which you can change or turn on or off, month to month, even though it’s a very sophisticated service. Here is our list of service levels and prices. Unlike CSRA’s consulting services, Crème de la Crème is offered in simple monthly levels of service.

We’re already doing social media, so what will this do for us that’s different?

Most local businesses use social media marketing to generate awareness using their Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest accounts, but awareness doesn’t develop profit consistently. Using social media marketing is complementary to experiential social media, which is most active on third party sites where customers are. Each business has its unique character and Crème de la Crème customers. We discover and stimulate the most unique, compelling connections between each business and its customers. Crème de la Crème is a better way to grow business.

I developed experiential social media for local businesses based on thousands of hours of client work in which CSRA teams studied behavior in digital social venues using ethnographic research. I developed the approach for local businesses because, as a business owner myself, I appreciate the need to build business profitably. At a personal level, I’m excited by local businesses’ new chance to seize the advantage because they’re literally close to their customers. I love helping people to change some rules.

We don’t do social media since it hasn’t produced business results in other businesses I know, so why should we do this?

Most businesses use social media like a digital sandwich board. Social media puts on its makeup and walks busy streets (Facebook, Twitter) at lunchtime or rush hour. Some business drive more business with promotions, but this business is less profitable. It’s inefficient.

Experiential social media takes a completely different approach. Over the last eight years, I’ve developed a method that fuses sociology, software development, psychology and digital tools that makes it very efficient to interact with people who have very specific motivations for doing business with local businesses. I work with them to map their most profitable products and services to these customers, so we aim to increase business from the most profitable customers, not all customers.

How long does it take to start producing results?

Each niche of your Crème de la Crème has its own character, and many other factors determine the answer to this question. For example, some niches are heavy online users of social media while others are not. Some require more attention before they start loving you back. During ethnographic analysis, we’ll guide your expectations for each niche based on its behavior. Another variable is how much experiential social media you do because the more times you touch people the faster attitudes change; a slow drip takes longer to get results. Expect different results for different niches.

In most cases, it takes a few months to interact enough so people start trusting that you really care (it’s not just marketing), but once they feel your commitment for a while, results build geometrically. It’s also important to avoid coming on too strong; CSRA will recommend an appropriate frequency for each digital social venue.

How can you increase business from such specific customer niches?

CSRA’s teams intensely study your Crème de la Crème customers, and we quickly learn about their motivations for and experiences with visits to your business, and we test our learning by interacting with your Crème de la Crème. We learn what stimulates them and what doesn’t. We learn what’s most valuable to them.

How do you decide where to engage our Crème de la Crème?

It’s a secret, but I can tell you that the most efficient venues are rarely the most popular to general audiences (i.e. Facebook, Twitter). We define the optimal venues by finding the ones that have the highest portion of conversations that’s uniquely relevant to your Crème de la Crème.

So what do you do in these “digital social venues”?

We focus on people’s motivations behind visiting your store and others like it, so we not only engage them with the pleasure of the store experience; we also help them be more successful when they use your services and products. You may have heard that people buy holes, not drills. It’s true, so we take that and run with it; we help people use your most profitable products and services to get the results they want. They soon associate you with being useful, relevant and caring, as well as pleasurable. It’s an unbeatable combination!

What are “extras”?

Each level of service comes with some hours of unbilled time, some at the store, in which we observe your customers and how you serve them, taking ethnographic research to the store level. This gives us insights into how you give people the most pleasure and add the most “value” relevant to their motivations. Through observation, we learn surprising things you’d never think to say and we’d never think to ask. We use these insights to engage your Crème de la Crème in distinctive ways.

Who is CSRA?

CSRA refers to me, Christopher S. Rollyson, and my global network of experts and specialists in design, management consulting, software development, sociology, culture and many other disciplines. I create teams from this large reservoir of people, so I get who is perfectly suited for your initiative, not only staffers that happen to be available at that time.

Do you have a question that’s not answered here?

Ask it in comments (“Leave a reply”) below. Or contact me.