Southwest is my airline of choice in the United States because it rewards thos who game the system.  Every seat is first class, so they’ll tell you, but really there is only one per plane located next to the over-wing exits. The row ahead has no seat ahead of you.

If you hit Companion Pass, their top tier, you get to choose someone to fly with you for free, even if you’re on a free ticket. It takes 110,000 points in a calendar year to hit this, so if you fly Business Select, which earns 12 points per dollar, you need spend just under $10,000 to hit this level. If you fly a lot of one-way, last minute flights, this isn’t hard.

Never buy round-trip tickets. Better to buy a series of one-way flights. If you need to change something, you don’t have to cancel the whole reservation. Sometimes, Southwest will have 40% and 50% off deals on roundtrip tickets– that’s the only exception.

If you don’t know when you’ll be flying back, book two or three of the options. Maybe one of your meetings is unconfirmed or you just need that flexibility for some reason. Cancel the ones you don’t fly on. I believe they will automatically cancel if you forget, but do it anyway. You save money by booking in advance, of course, and there’s no downside to canceling the unused segments.

Use miles for your friends and colleagues, not yourself. You may find yourself close to A-List or A-List Preferred at the end of the year, wishing that you had used real dollars on your flight segments, instead of real dollars on a colleague and points for yourself.

If the flight is less than 70% full, board last. Yes, when you have status, you get priority boarding. But would you rather choose your seat or choose who sits next to you? I’ve been victim to some 450 pound monsters that sit in the middle seat next to me– so big they spill over into you and need the wretched seat belt extender.

Don’t drink 20 minutes prior to landing. Descending will make that last drink hit you like a full six pack. “Macho” guys will pass out deboarding after just a couple beers. Don’t believe me? Ask a flight attendant. And at altitude, things taste different. People who hate tomato juice will often enjoy it when high (Harrison– not that kind of high), since your taste buds are dulled.

Wifi is free for A List Preferred. But you can also give it out to friends on the flight. I’ve not seen a limit.

Choose related cities to save money and time. Oakland is often cheaper than San Francisco or SJC– plus faster if you’re non-stop into OAK. Same for Newark over LGA or BWI over DCA and IAD. Southwest has been consolidating Airtran’s routes, which will increase prices, but also improve availability. Indianapolis, a 2 hour bus ride, is far cheaper than SDF. If you’re really on a budget, Buffalo is cheaper than Toronto, but you have a 90 min shuttle ride, which can be up to 3 hours with customs delays.

If your flight is canceled or you need to make changes while you’re in the airport, call instead of waiting in line with everyone else. You’ll get a faster response. Sometimes a few minutes is the difference between getting that last seat or being stranded.

Southwest is usually, but not always cheaper. Certainly will be if you book in advance or are hitting popular routes. If you factor in the rewards, no bag fees, no change fees– it’s the best business bargain. I use the FancyHands.com service to search for alternate flights in some situations. Southwest doesn’t do red-eye flights, so if you need to go coast-to-coast on a tight schedule, often JetBlue or Virgin will get you there in style for less. Their snacks are better– no question. But I like to save money.

I did 310,000 miles last year. Hotels and airports are just a blur. People ask if I’m like George Clooney in “Up In the Air”. I tell them I trust his travel tips as much as I’d trust his medical advice.

The reality of business travel is that it’s tough — a ton of mindless details. And that’s where you need a Fancy Hands. You’ll thank me later. Get 50% off your first month here.

So I lost my luggage on the way to an important business meeting. I sent an email to Fancy Hands and within 5 minutes, they were already on it — calling the airline and the airport, wading through the voicemail mazes, and getting everything arranged.

I’ve done other bonehead things. I left my cell phone at a restaurant that gives you 5% off your bill if you hand it to them (smart move, I think, to keep the place quiet). But I forgot to ask for it back, nor did they remember. I had one of our guys call and he said it wasn’t there. But Fancy Hands did — calling repeatedly to get the manager and got it squared away.

I had a nightmare experience at a hotel (if you travel enough, you know what I’m talking about). Fancy Hands made a series of phone calls and took care of every detail. I even got a night comped for it.

I’m speaking all over Asia on Facebook marketing next year. I forward the conference dates, listing when I need to get there by, and they book it for me, after confirming the best options.

I have a bunch of meetings in New York to set up. I give Fancy Hands a list of them and they not only schedule it, but put it in my calendar, making sure to account for the right time zones. And when I meet the clients, they say, “Your assistant called to reconfirm the meeting.”

The online meetings they go into our WebEx and schedule all the details. They call the client to let them know if I’m running late.

I smile at these things.

It’s $45 for 15 requests a month. I’m on the super duper plan of 50 requests for $130 a month, which is by request only, I’m told. Either way, just one or two saves pays for itself.

In the last 3 months, they’ve made 168 phone calls on my behalf, logging 536 minutes. That’s a couple days back of my life so I can do laundry and scout out the best wings in each city.

No, wait — they have arranged for my laundry to be done on the road and made recommendations for the best wings, too. It’s all done for me.

We do have a couple virtual assistants. For those folks who don’t know, you can hire staff from the Philippines for a buck or two an hour to do similar sorts of things. However, the Fancy Hands folks are in the US, well-educated, witty (you’ll see what I mean later and how important that is in problem solving skills), and super reliable.

So you could “save” a few dollars with a part-time VA (virtual assistant), but in the end, you’ll regret the headache of having to train them to know that, for example, there are 3 major airports in the San Francisco bay area — and one might have the direct flight you’re looking for. Their professionalism and courtesy is the same you’d expect from an executive assistant to someone in a publicly traded company.

In other words, no need to “manage” them.

I’m wondering how Ted Roden, the founder, does it. Maybe he’s secretly doing all this himself, enslaved an army of extra-terrestrials that work via a time-warp portal, or found a way to recruit intelligent, cheerful housemoms. I’m guessing it’s the latter, though I have seen one guy respond. Ted has replied a couple times to my messages — so we know he’s watching. Maybe he’ll leave a comment here!

I’m not going to repeat everything on their website — the features of their system, clever examples of how FH can give you time back, or how successful their company is by delivering service so WOW that I have to write about it here. But others gladly write about them, too.

THE PROS

• You can kick back and relax — they can handle any task that doesn’t require physically being there. For example, they posted an ad to Craigslist to help me find a maid. Then they followed up on the references to make sure they were legit.
• It pays for itself in one use. Just one emergency, one business trip saved, or an embarrassing moment avoided.
• They integrate with basecamp. I still prefer just sending an email to request@fhands.com, which automatically recognizes me.
• They are super reliable. Not sure how their internals work in assigning tasks to agents, but they normally reply within 30 minutes. Unlike contractors, they won’t flake out on you.
• They are super clever and cheerful. Once they conference called me in with Hotwire to get a booking changed. I was surprised and delighted. I heard they wrote a poem for someone else, bringing that person to tears (in a good way). I wonder if there’s a way to send a gift to the assistant that does the most amazing work.

THE CONS

• They can’t handle your credit card info. But that doesn’t mean they can’t book flights, hotels, etc. You just give them your logins. They can’t handle Verizon, since Verizon won’t talk to anyone except who is on the account.
• You can’t specify which assistant you want. At first, I thought this would be a big deal, since learning the nuances of travel planning isn’t easy. But their agents are surprisingly competent. Only once or twice did they not find the best fare– and international bookings are MUCH harder, as you know.
• There’s no unlimited plan anymore. I upgraded to the 50 request per month plan and am probably using 15 a month. I have the 50 just in case, I guess.
• The tasks are supposed to take no more than 15 minutes each. Very reasonable limit, of course. Once I asked FH to make a list of the top 20 publicly traded companies in Louisville, Kentucky with their websites and Facebook pages. Great work! Then I decided to press my luck and ask them to assemble a list of every beer, liquor, and alcoholic beverage on the planet. They declined that, of course, but suggested we break it into multiple tasks. Good idea!

Are you still reading this? Have you not signed up yet? Click here to sign up and I’ll get $5 off my next bill. But that’s not why I took the time to write this. I’m in love with your service, Ted!

Dear reader, tell me what you think or how it’s working for you in the comments below. I’d love to hear what you think.

VC’s and various strategy-minded folks ask me all the time what competitive advantage Blitz has versus a slew of other social analytics vendors. Hey, what if Facebook decides to build a real analytics tool? How about the other players that pop up every day?

Your competitive advantage is the quality of your people. Period.

I heard Bill Gates say that he was ultra picky about hires in the early days of Microsoft.  Even if you’re desperately understaffed, don’t make the mistake of letting your standards down, he said. You’ll regret it. “A” people attract “A” people, while “B” people bring in “C” people.

And man have I made that mistake many a time. Might as well have Dave Thomas of Wendy’s descend from the sky to brand “Quality is our Recipe” on my forehead.

You think high dollar pros are expensive? Try the cost of incompetence, when you lose projects, sleep, money, and sanity.

The great tech giants all started with their founders being ruthless about keeping the quality bar high.  I witnessed it myself in my days at Yahoo!, until they hit a point where the “C”, “D’ and “F” people snuck in, soon to be followed by what we all know has happened.

I look at the times where I’ve succeeded, and it’s when I’ve had a strong team that I would go to the mat for. And when I’ve failed, which is embarrassingly often, you can trace it back to low quality. The cynical will say that it’s really a management problem– allowing unqualified people to be in positions above their skill or not providing enough supervision. Yet I’ve found that if you have bright, eager folks, you can teach them anything.

Jack Welch, who is arguably the greatest manager to have ever lived, would fire the bottom 20% of his staff every year. In banking or consulting, they call this “up or out”. I felt it to be cruelly unfair, as it causes an adversarial work environment, plus penalizes the great teams. Yet if you believe in statistics, you’ll usually have a normal distribution in any of your classes, so the rule works.

So while you as a company founder or entrepreneur care about your baby more than any employee likely would, consider how to never let in unqualified people in the first place. No matter what they say about their skillset or how motivated they are. You will regret it later.

There are no shortcuts to quality. Do you agree?

And if you have the luxury of choosing who you want to work with, don’t you want to be excited to be around those who make you raise your game? I think it was Perot who said his hiring strategy was to find folks who were smarter than him. Or perhaps you can just hire away people from Google and Apple, like Facebook has done. Let others do the screening for you.

What do you think?

For each ad, you can get a detailed breakdown of actions by type, separated into post-impression (24 hours), post-click (24 hours) and post-click (7 days).

To get there, just click on the ad performance within the web-based ad manager, then “see full actions report.”

Some of us are still accidentally basing our Cost Per Fan reporting on the actions count. While actions used to be fans, they now include so many more things, such as the dreaded “other clicks” category. Just be careful that you’re measuring against the right action.

I wish they didn’t hide the impressions and spend figures per ad– but there are only so many columns you can fit, especially if they take conversion tracking to the next level.

Are you excited for when Facebook integrates ad and page analytics?

We grabbed 1,000,000 random posts from Facebook and tracked all interactions at a user level. We used the graph API, which is open to anyone. [Side note: if you'd like to learn how to pull this data, ping me.]

Highlights:

• Women tend to “like” more than “comment” on a post. Worldwide, 51% of post likes were from females, though this was 55% in the US.
• Women “Like”  comments.  In the US, 59% of likes on comments were female
• Males post on pages more frequently than females– at 51% vs 48%.  The difference is gender unknown.

For more on Facebook Analytics or to get your sneak peak social dashboard, head on over to BlitzMetrics. Or come check us out at facebook.com/blitzmetrics, where we’ll answer your questions!

I was chatting with a friend who has amazing online marketing skills and serves local clients. He wanted to grow his practice to include Fortune 500 brands. Here is my advice.

Don’t assume growing is automatically a good thing. Once you get beyond a dozen or so clients, you’ll have to bring on other staff—freelancers and then full-time.  Freelancers are usually horribly flaky (which is why they freelance), so you’ll be spending most of your time managing them, instead of doing what you love.

Do you love management? Better get used to it—managing payroll, contracts, accounts receivable, project schedules, hire/fire, and the operations of running a business that has more than one person. Get bigger and you have to deal with a physical office.

Big clients can be big headaches. With a small business client, you have one person to deal with—the business owner. But with a major brand, you have to work through multiple levels of decision makers, a contract process that may take 3 months, and a payment process that can take even longer. It’s sexy to say you have a global brand as a client—make sure you have the resources and stomach to handle it.

As a small agency or freelancer, you can develop closer relationships with clients. You don’t risk having so many clients that you’re working 24-7 to keep up.

At 2.6 million fans, they have almost double the runner-up, Champs, with 1.38 million fans.

But more importantly, Foot Locker has the lowest engagement rate of the top 5 retailers, at only 1.43%.  The average for athletic retailers is 2.14%.  Lady Foot Locker at 183,700 fans, has a paltry 0.38% engagement rate.

Our recommendation to the Foot Locker team is to leverage Facebook’s Sponsored Stories– to amplify word of mouth.  They can show messages relevant to what their fans want– those that like Air Jordans should see posts about the latest Air Jordans. Those that don’t like baseball shouldn’t be seeing posts about the latest Nike Diamond Turf II in red and black.  Fans within driving distance of a store should see what’s happening at just their store.  Yes, Facebook is that targeted.

Eastbay is also owned by Foot Locker, but tells a very different story. At only 1.1 million fans, this brand has 28,000 “people talking about” them– the same number as Foot Locker, which has 2.5 times more fans.  Why? They posted 122 times in the last 30 days versus only 79 times. And their posts are shorter, plus are more likely to have photos.

Their most popular post in the last 30 days is below, asking simply “Hot or Not”

94% of respondents are male, not surprisingly.

What if Eastbay or other retailers could look at what’s working well and then amplify it? How about seeing their top fans or what’s working for competitors? If you’re not capturing this data for your brand, you’re missing out. And anything that happened more than 89 days ago on Facebook is gone.  Facebook doesn’t keep your data for you.  Fortunately, Blitz does.

And you can try our dashboards for free, no credit card required. Go to blitzmetrics.com to get yours now, before your competitors do.

I noticed that the Best Western hotel chain had not only more fans than any other hotel chain on Facebook, but also the highest engagement rate.
So I took a snapshot from our social dashboard and tweeted it at them.  They retweeted it and also followed me back.

Now let’s figure out what other nice nuggets we can provide to other social media managers at major brands.  So few companies have solid benchmarks for their social performance. Who knows– maybe we’ll sell some dashboards at $500 a month here!