Build a page and profile for absolutely everything

Summary: if you have multiple locations and/or multiple products, you need to create social media channels for every single one of them. If you have several 9Round franchises in Northern Virginia, you need to have a Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and Foursquare/Swarm profile for each one.

Why? People are mobile.

Nobody wants to tag a 9Round gym in Courthouse when the one they’re using is in Penrose Square off Columbia Pike. If you don’t have a profile for each discrete location on every germane social network then you will lose a majority of the magic associated with real-time social media mentions and tagging (live tweeting, instagramming, and Facebooking, generally) — magic that will promote that particular gym.

Each and every store, gym, yoga/Spin/solidcore/pilates/barre studio — even if they’re part of the same brand — will have it’s own unique culture based on the people who go there, the neighborhood, the true-believers, and the super-influencers like my 9Buddy Jeanne Boone, in the case of Pacers and 9Round.

Both Pacers and 9Round Northern Virginia do it wrong: they have one brand account for the region.

I want to argue that it’s better to find ways to allow each and every shop to have both their own voice, but also the voice of their owners (with as much help from corporate as possible.)

As you all know, I am a freshly-converted 9Round true-believer. I am also a social media marketer would would really like 9Round as a client because I can help them, be it 9Round Corporate, 9Round franchisees, or both.

So, when I had the chance to meet the local 9Round franchise owner, Rob “Big Daddy Thunder (BDT)” Graveline, and operations god, Daniel Albrant,

I knew I was barking up the right trees. Well, I met Dan yesterday for coffee at Northside Social and we chatted about social media, SOCi, and all the other thoughts tinkling around in our heads.

Let me reiterate what I believe: most local venues are live-tweeted and checked into locally when they’re there, on the move. Insta is even more time-sensitive because not everyone has the patience to #latergram.

So, if you want someone on Instagram to tweet, Facebook, tumbl, Swarm, and Flickr you while also inline @tagging (crossing over to Twitter) and tagging you (for Insta) while also checking in to you (via Swarm or Facebook), then you had better get you ducks in a row.

I bandited @9RoundPenrose because I want to mention my new 9Round Gym. Today I might bandit and set up pages on Google+ and Facebook as well. We’ll see (with the intention of giving the keys over to Rob and Dan ASAP (unless they want to pay me to get these going, wink). That said, I’ve already handed the keys of the Penrose location Twitter handle to Dan, so how banditty is it, really?

My reasoning is solely based on my own personal behavior as well as the behavior of my 9Round 9Buddy, Jeanne, who is a maestra of of tagging, @tagging, and #tagging, so I have been stalking her behavior a little bit and while she is always mentioning both @9Round Official and @9rndcourthouse AKA 9Round NOVA AKA the catch-all for the four or so 9Round locations owned by Rob Graveline and his posse.

That’s just the point: Jeanne and I are always tagging every tweet we share, and we always live tweet before and after whenever we leave everything on the mat every time we spend our 30 at the Penrose location.

But, the place we have to tag is not promoting this brand new gym in a brand new location–that’s not in view of the street, tucked rather out of the way between a dry cleaners and a hairdressers, in the basement, near the entrance to the garage, under a Giant grocery store.

In a world of Swarm (it seems to be catching on some, at least Jeanne’s using it, which is the next-gen Foursquare, which means that anybody checking into Swarm alerts all their friends and the people around them that you are at 9Round Penrose, under the Giant, on Columbia Pike, and not in Courthouse near the Metro) and in a world if live-tweeting (where most people who tweet only have 300+ friends and those friends live around and near them) and on Instagram and Facebook, where Checking-In is really built in and is not only super-popular but highly location-aware, all these location-aware apps would never suggest places that are at least 2.9 miles away.

So, that’s my advice to you, gentle reader, and not only Rob, Mike, and the founders of 9Round, Shannon Hudson and Heather Hudson — I am making the same recommendation to you. It’s not about feeding all your users, members, prospects, and friends away from their own personal favorite store, shop, studio, or gym, it’s about meeting the needs of people like Jeanne Boone and me, people who spend a lot of our time living our lives online, which includes at lease one free earned media shoutout every single day, except Sunday.

Now, I won’t even go into the responsibility that every single owner, staffer, investor, and member has towards tweeting, sharing, liking, retweeting, and checking-in every time you clock in or check in at your locations or in general. In addition to your branded pages, you all need to get off your duffs, get off of your LinkedIn-only high-horses, and make sure you start messaging about your brand and your gym and your raison d’etre on your own personal profiles and pages as well. Life is like Amway: your first and most loyal customers are your loyal friends and followers — why are so many of you afraid to share your passion, your vocation, your calling, and the thing that’s tying up your kids’ college money? They should be the first people you spam! Right?