Episode 11 features part 1 of our two-part series talking to people from the Better Business Bureau (BBB). In this episode Melanie McGovern and Lauren Kirchmyer share how they use data to improve their outreach and social media marketing and show their accredited businesses the value that they bring. By leveraging their backgrounds in journalism and communications and continuously improving through professional development and networking they are able to successfully communicate information to the multiple audiences that the BBB serves. Don’t miss part 2, which will be released November 1st, with Nathan Hall, an SEO analyst for International Association of BBBs.
(upbeat music) - [Announcer] This is,
Buffalo State Data Talk, the podcast where we introduce
you to how data is used and explore careers that involve data. - Hello, and welcome
back to another episode
of Buffalo State Data Talk. I'm your host, Heather Campbell, and we appreciate you joining us. We're going to be having a discussion with Lauren Kirchmyer and Melanie McGovern
of the Better Business
Bureau of Upstate, New York. Lauren is a Buffalo State alumni and the marketing and
outreach coordinator. And Melanie is a communications director. Thank you so much for joining
us today, Lauren and Melanie.
- Yeah, thanks for having us. - Thank you. - So I'm sure, basically everyone has heard
of the Better Business Bureau before or BBB,
but could you start us off by telling us a little bit of background
of what is the BBB and what do they do? - I will take that question. So the Better Business
Bureau has been around
for over a 100 years. We are an organization that
is not a government agency. We are a nonprofit, we accredit businesses on
13 factors of accreditation. The businesses do pay
for their accreditation.
That money then in turn,
goes to community programs, such as our dispute resolution services, you always hear people say, "I'm going to the Better Business Bureau." So what we do is we act
as the neutral third party
between a business and a
consumer to resolve a complaint. We also have a lot of community programs that Lauren and I manage, including a lot of wonderful
programs for senior citizens, identity theft education,
scam alerts, programming
for high school students, we work with Chambers of
Commerce across Upstate, New York to get BBB information
to all of our communities because we are a statewide organization. But we are based in Buffalo though.
So there's a lot of things that we do that people might not be aware of. - That's a lot of stuff
that you guys are doing. So Lauren, can you give us a little
bit of an overview
of what it is that you do for the BBB? - Of course, there's a lot of
different hats that I wear and Melanie will say the same thing when she talks about what she does,
but a lot of what I do
involves our social media. So we have a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. So if you're not following us,
be sure to give us a follow. I also work on our scam webinars
and scam prevention seminars when we are able to do
in-person appearances. I do our ethics presentations
with high school students to educate them on how to
live an ethical life now and how that can help them
as they go into their careers
or even into college. I do trade show management as well, so when trade shows are able to happen, we are able to go to home
shows, bridal shows, car shows, Melanie usually takes the car shows,
(Lauren laughs) but that way we can not
only talk to consumers about how to look for
someone that they can trust when it comes to their
home or their wedding, to make sure that they're getting the most
out of their money too, but also just to meet up with
our accredited businesses and see if there's anything
that we can do for them, not only for their event, but just to help their business grow.
- Yeah. That's a long list
of duties that you have. Lauren, how would you
say your time is split between working with others
versus working independently? - There's a lot of things
I do do independently, such as the video editing.
There are certain tasks that are more of an individual project, but a lot of what we do is collaborative, not just in our own department, but we also collaborate a
lot with other departments
in our building, because
at the end of the day, we're trying to expand the BBB brand, and that can only happen if
we work together as a team. - Melanie, as the communications director, could you give us an
overview of what you do
and what a typical week
looks like for you? - There's no such thing as a
typical week (Melanie laughs) in our organization. So as communications director,
I manage our department, you know, one of my biggest
jobs is to keep us in the news,
to keep us relevant, to make sure that if
there are trending scams, which we'll talk about a little bit later, we're getting the word out
to the public about that. I also manage all of our email outreach
and a lot of our website. Dealing with consumers,
getting their stories, getting their stories out
to the reporters, you know, talking to them on the phone,
working with them, you know, and listening to our
accredited business team
when they're talking to the businesses. You have your three
calls in the last hour, and they're all asking you the same thing, maybe we need to build an
educational piece around that. So there's that whole outreach, you know,
external communication portion, including our community partner program, where we reach out to chambers
business organizations, get them involved with
BBB on a grassroots level. It's funny,
I was just going through
a bunch of chamber emails, putting golf outings on my calendar, because it's great exposure
for us with bigger businesses to say, look, here's the Better Business Bureau,
you should support us and our mission. It's great for me to get
out there and network. So as the world reopens, my networking aspect of
my job is coming back, which I really enjoy meeting people
and getting to know communities. - It sounds like you
do a lot of networking. Could you maybe just give us a quick tip on your favorite networking tips? I know that a lot of the
time students find networking
to be quite daunting. So how do you go about
becoming better at it? - Huh! That's a really great question. A lot of it is just have that confidence to be able to walk up to
somebody and introduce yourself.
Sometimes I will call it sidling. I'll stand by a
conversation and listen in, and then just kind of work
my way into that little hemp semi-circle of people and
start talking that way. Sometimes it's great to have a colleague
or a coworker take you somewhere. So if they've got those connections, they can walk you around. Lauren and I do that, we used to do that with each
other lot before the pandemic,
but the biggest thing is just, feel the confidence when you
walk in the room, you know. If people can see that
you have confidence, they're gonna come up to you. They're gonna wanna talk to you.
So those are just a couple of things I can think of off the top of my head. Do not pull out your phone, (Melanie laughs) that's
the worst thing you can do. We actually did a webinar for
the International Association
of Better Business Bureaus last year and that was our number one tip to not do, is do not pull out your phone. If you're feeling nervous, just stand there and look around the room
and somebody will
eventually come over to you. Or if you see somebody
doing the same thing, walk over to them and
say, "Hey, how are ya? You know, I'm Melanie McGovern, with the Better Business Bureau."
And you know, sometimes you meet people
and sometimes you don't, but it's always just really good to put yourself out there that way. - Those are great tips. I love that.
I think it's a really great
idea to have a networking buddy, especially if you are a
little bit nervous, you know, don't maybe stick with them
- But don't hang with them all night.
- the whole time. Exactly, yeah.
But you know, maybe
you start off together, and then once you get that confidence that you said you needed, then you can go off
- Exactly. Exactly. - on your own.
- A great thing to do too after, or actually when you're
networking with that someone is see if they have a business card or at least get their
name, take down that name, so if you do pull that phone out, make,
if you don't have a notepad
with you or anything, then maybe write their
name down in your phone and put it away real quick. And then write on their business card. I think I might've
taken this from Melanie,
write down where it was
that you met them from or something from that conversation
that you had with them. So when you do want to reach back out, whether you connect with them on LinkedIn or you're calling them about something,
or you see them at a future event, you could say, "Oh, I
remember that person. I met them at this event." This is something that they like, so when you go back to them,
then you have that little bit of personal connection already, and then they'll feel more valued because you remembered something
about them in the long run. - That's such a great tip,
especially coming from someone who doesn't have the greatest memory, writing it down on the
business card, great idea. I'm gonna start doing that. Lauren, so you said that
you are heavily involved
with the BBB social media. - Yes. - So can you talk to us a
little bit about the analytics that you use to track
social media engagement? And could you also maybe
tell us about a time
where your results helped you to improve the BBB's social media presence. - Absolutely. Social media, every month what I do is I build a report
that is then sent to our
management team at BBB, but also our board of directors, and they take a look at
it and see what it is that we're posting, because maybe they didn't
get to see everything
that we've shared. And that report includes
not only how many people we were able to reach, but how many people
engaged with our posts, what our top posts were.
I also started including
engagement rate and link clicks, because that really gives us
a better idea of what people are doing with our data, not just saying, this many people engaged
with the post, well, that gives it a little
bit more of that in-depth,
kind of look and see
who's actually interacting with the links and reading
what we're sharing. And then we also do a annual audit to see how our 2020 numbers, for example, compared to our 2019 numbers,
and especially with the pandemic, that was an interesting report to look at, to see how things changed. What I do then with that data too, both monthly and annually,
is I see, okay, what
posts were doing great, and maybe what posts
weren't doing so well. And how could we take what was doing great and implement that into
what wasn't working. So one of those success stories was,
I was sharing articles that
are available on bbb.org about either scams and
how to prevent yourself from falling for them or
it's home improvement season. These are the things
that you should be asking your contractors before
you give them money
and have them start working on your home because you're gonna be in
your home for a long time, and it's an expensive project. These articles weren't necessarily getting that much engagement.
They weren't getting those link clicks. So we were like, okay, what can we do to get people
to still get this information because it's very valuable? So I went to Melanie and I said,
Can we create a video segment, still sharing the same information, but it's either me on
camera or her on camera, and we're just saying those
points that are in the article, but giving it a more visual appeal.
People like seeing other people, they like looking at videos
and I include captions on all of them too, because I know not everyone
could always listen to those videos.
And now, having the video segment, sometimes those are our most popular posts because people are seeing value in it. They're sharing it with
other people that they know that can connect with it.
Versus just seeing the
article link and thinking, "Oh, I don't have the time
to read that right now," and glancing over it or just
completely bypassing it. So having that video
segment really did help us. And now Melanie likes to say,
imitation is the most
sincere form of flattery. And a lot of other BBBs in the system are now taking those ideas and implementing them into their Better
Business Bureau locations.
So that's been fun to see, it's been a success all across the system. - It's great that you
were able to take the data that you saw from tracking your engagement and the likes and the clicks
and make actionable
results that have improved and then other people
are now following you. That's awesome. - Thank you. - So Melanie, you mentioned
before, Scam Tracker,
I know that's a big part
of what the BBB does, so could you give us a little
bit of background on like what it is and then tell us
how you use data in this area? - So BBB Scam Tracker was soft
launched in October of 2015 because we needed a way to
really report to the public
what's going on in their area. So it's on our website,
bbb.org/scamtracker. It's an interactive map. So wherever you live, you can move the map over
to your state, your region,
right down to where your, to your town, and you'll see all of these little dots, and those are scams. When you click on the scam, you scroll down to the
bottom, there's a list.
And it'll tell you what the
zip code is, what the scam is, how much money was lost. And when you click on it, you can see the description
of what actually happened, which is really important
because what we see with scams,
there's a lot of, you know,
words that are the same. Like I ordered this from
an ad on social media, or, you know, "I got a
call from," you know, insert national name brand here. So it's a really great way
for people to report what happened. We get the reports first,
then we analyze them here. There's two of us who do that. We make sure it really is a
scam 'cause a lot of times people will think it's the
place to file complaints,
and they'll put a
complaint in Scam Tracker. So it doesn't get published right away. We actually look at it,
make sure it's a scam, confirm it's a scam and
then it gets published. If we see what we call a pattern,
we will refer it to law enforcement, we'll work with any kind of
agency that might be involved, if it's regarding a certain company, we'll reach out to them and say, "Hey, somebody's spoofing your name."
So it's a really great way for us to get real-time cloud-sourced information on the scams that are going
on in any particular area. Especially when we had a lot
of phone scams a few years ago, the whole, "can you hear me?"
Phone scam that was going around, now, we're seeing a real
big uptick in texting scams because of the pandemic. So it's great for me as the
chief spokesperson to know, okay, I need to issue an alert on this,
or I need to find victims for that. But it's again, it's indexed by Google, so if somebody's searching for a scam that BBB Scam Tracker report it's gonna pop up and then they'll know,
"Oh, this is real. I better not answer that email
or answer that phone call or call that person back. - I definitely got one of those
can you hear me phone calls a couple of days ago.
- Yeah. I get a lot of them too. - Yeah. (both laughs) So can you tell me something
that was the most challenging part of your work and how you overcame it?
- Oh, I'll go first. I started here in 2014 and it's, I started as an assistant
and it was overcoming the, this is the way we've always
done it in a lot of ways with some of the staff
that's no longer here,
they've moved on to other things, but being able to evolve is
something, especially, you know, in my stage of my career, I see a lot of people who are
my professional colleagues with who don't understand like
how digital marketing is now,
how data-driven, how
analytics-driven marketing is now. You know, there's a lot of people
who just don't realize I have got like six spreadsheets
up, a dashboard here, and then a dashboard on my other screen
where I'm looking at numbers, I'm looking at data all day long. And I joked, I used to say,
I'm a Fredonia graduate, and I used to teach once a semester, like talk to like journalism
and marketing students.
And they're like, what's different when you
started this job than today? I said, I cannot believe how
much of my job relies on data. Like proving ROI every day. You know, having KPIs,
like key performance indexes, you know, indicators thrown at you
like, you need to do this, you need to do that. You need to hit this many
media mentions a month. Those types of things, again,
10 years ago, 15 years ago,
we didn't even have social media. So, you know, having that be such a
driver has been a challenge, but it's been an awesome
challenge because, you know, we always talk about like,
well, my degree is in
radio and journalism. I don't use either of those, but I do because of the
critical thinking you learn and being able to articulate, you know, your message through
the data that you have
and the analytics that you have. So being able to just evolve, I guess in my career has
been, it's been a challenge, but it's been awesome. - So it does sound like you
guys are extremely busy.
So are you able to set aside time for professional development? And if so, what kind of
activities do you do? - I'll go first. I am grateful that Melanie
allows me to take courses
or attend webinars and training sessions. So for that sprout social, for example, they recently did a summit
where they had people who utilized their platform, come on and talk about
how they're using it,
ways that they're using it to
message to their audiences. And then I usually come out
with an idea too, of things, even if it's not what they talked about, it's something that sparked an idea for me and then I bring that to Melanie
and I'm sure that's how our
Tip Tuesday idea came about because I'm almost positive they are talking about
videos here (mumbling) I was like, "Melanie, we should do this." To bring data back in too Melanie and I,
we meet with Nathan. We've a meeting with him, it
seems like every other week, sometimes even once a
week to talk about data and he's been training
us in Adobe Analytics so that we can use that data to see,
okay, this many people
were on our website, specifically looking up
businesses in Upstate, New York or businesses just in Buffalo. And these are the kinds of businesses that they're looking for.
And then using that data for us to then share with our
other teams in our office. So we're learning a lot about
data through Nathan too. So it's fun working with
people in other offices to continue growing kind
of like Melanie said,
networking with those other leaders and learning from them
and growing from them. So now we're trying to
up our analytics game to try and even become a
better marketing department. (Lauren laughs)
- Well, that actually leads
perfectly into my next question, because both of you guys, this background's in
journalism and communications, so I'm sure you didn't necessarily think that you were gonna be
spending a lot of your time
analyzing data and crunching numbers. So could you give some
advice to somebody maybe who is interested in
switching into a data field from a background like yours? You know, what advice do you have?
- I was a journalist for two
years for a local newspaper, and from that I learned
how to craft my messaging. What's gonna get people excited
about what we're sharing. Then from there, I went to do marketing
for real estate company,
and to me, that position I happened
to have at that time was very cut and paste. And that made me realize
how creativity really does have an impact on how people
are gonna be attentive to you
and the messaging that you're putting out. And then I did public
relations for a school district for three years before I came to BBB. And that helped me learn how
to share my messaging to quite a vast audience,
because it wasn't just
students you were talking to, it wasn't just the
faculty and the teachers and the administrators, but also the parents and
the community taxpayers. And being able to share
that messaging and take
that feedback from all
those different audiences and figure out what that messaging is. So now with adding data to
it through my role with BBB, I'm taking all of those
skills that I've learned in those other positions.
And now with that data, I can really make the impact go further because now we have
actual, real-time data, to share with people. So one of the things
you've been talking about
is if someone comes to us with a rebuttal, or if they're asking us well, how many people are even
searching my type of business on your website? We can say, oh,
we have that message crafted with them. Like this is our response and here's why they
should become part of BBB, or this is why they should
come use our services if they're a consumer who
become a partner with us.
So taking those skills of being
able to talk to that large audience, having that creative messaging, and now adding that data to
just further support what we're putting out there and
sharing our brand message. - I think it's so important
where you were saying that,
yeah, of course the data, super important. But you have to be able to
get that data across to people in a way that's gonna
be meaningful to them. And that's where- - Yeah, you don't want them to be bored.
- Yeah. And that's where your background comes in, and it works perfectly. So you guys both live in Buffalo. Could you tell me how
you ended up in Buffalo
and why you chose to
live in, stay in Buffalo? - I was born and raised in Buffalo and I'm a proud Buff
State alum, go Bengals, as well as a lot of my family members too. A lot of my family went to Buff State.
So it's for me, exciting to be on this
podcast with you today. But I was able to make
some great connections when I went to Buff State. And one of the events that
they promoted was a job fair.
When I was in my last
semester of my undergrad and I went to that job fair, I handed someone a resume and they said, we're not looking for anyone right now, but we'll keep your resume on file.
And next thing I know a few weeks later, I got a call saying,
someone actually just quit, "We really liked your resume,
we'd love to have you on." So being able to make those connections when I was at Buff State,
really set me up for success to start my career here in Buffalo, and then going to all those
different networking events through my different jobs, meeting other people helped
me continue furthering
my career right here in my
hometown, which is very lucky. And that as many people
are fortunate enough to say that they were
even able to find a job in their career. That they were hoping to go
for and that they studied for.
So to continue just finding
new opportunities here has kept me here and continue learning and meeting new people. And then Buffalo is just great. I feel like over the past several years,
starting with when I was
getting ready to graduate from Buff State, that it was starting to
become a more exciting city, that more things were happening here. People were really
investing in different areas
and making them more interactive and trying to get people
attracted to going to events in different areas of the city. And having that kind of uprising
has been exciting to see and witness, it just keeps
seeing the city grow.
So seeing all of that
growth and excitement has kept me here too. - Yeah. And I'm sure that's also
helped the BBB a lot, lots of new businesses for
you guys to partner with.
- I have a Lauren Buff State story. - Oh.
- Oh goodness. - So, like back when the
pandemic first started, we were trying to, like, we were scrambling, we were
trying to find content.
Lauren had a connection
that she went to school with and through talking with her
and some of her team members, you know, long story short, we were able to be the first organization to have lieutenant governor come on
to talk about what the state was doing in regards to closures, what businesses were essential, what businesses were deemed non-essential. I'm still convinced to this day
that it was our BBB accredited landscapers who changed their destiny with the state, by asking all the questions. But because of Lauren's
great networking connections that she made above state,
I think you bumped into Jessica
at an event or something and all of a sudden- - Now you're in Albany. Yeah? - Yeah. All of a sudden, you know,
here's what I do, "God, you
like the Lieutenant governor? Yes, please.
- Yes. - And that's, you know, Buffalo is the biggest
small town in the world. Every, you know, when I
talk to younger people,
I always say, never burn a bridge because you never know when they're gonna come back at ya. You know, that was one
of those moments of like, yay for alumni connections,
because it just really,
you know, helped us a lot. So yay, Buff State. - You never know when
somebody that you know might turn into a connection
that you can use for your job or your career in the future.
- Exactly. So before we let you go, is there anything else you
guys want our listeners to know that we didn't get a chance to cover? - I would just,
tacking onto what Melanie was just saying about, you never know what people are gonna come back to in the future, and that it's important
not to burn those bridges, especially since this
is a younger audience
that's listening to this, be careful with what you're sharing online and be careful with what you're liking and interacting with online, because you don't what businesses are,
what we call like farming, which means that they're
putting up fake profiles just to get people to interact with them, and then selling that information. There's a lot of different
things to worry about
on the internet. And then Melanie and I
do a lot of presentations about reputation management
and how important that is. And we value ethics and trust and honesty in the marketplace.
So starting that now, when you're still a student and going on and starting your career, having that positive online
reputation to begin with, people are gonna be looking
at what you're sharing online
and the image that
you're putting out there about yourself and who
you're interacting with, and that's gonna either
make or break your career. So it's really important to
think about what you're sharing now and what you're doing as
your personal brand online,
because it can again make
or break your future. - That's really important. And for any of our
listeners who are interested in learning a little bit
more about, you know, building your personal brand on LinkedIn,
go back and listen to
our previous episodes about internships over the summer and you'll be able to learn
lots more on that topic. Well, Melanie and Lauren, thank you so much for joining us today.
- Thank you for having us. This was great. - This was fun. Thank you. - And to all of our listeners, if you haven't already, check
out our previous podcasts. They're available wherever
you listen to podcasts.
And for more information
about starting your career as a data scientist, go to dataanalytics.buffalostate.edu. And don't forget to subscribe so that you get a notification
each time we release a new episode of Buffalo State Data talk.
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