Will tweet for food

Retail has changed forever.  

Offering unique selection or the best price while allowing for enough post-overhead margin to keep your doors open is more challenging than it was in the pre-Amazon.com days.  The modern day retailer’s silver bullet is leveraging the power of ‘now’. Customers gladly pay a premium for on demand.

Why not make their social media premiums immediate too?

• When we dine at Blue Coast Burrito: What if they gave us free guac if we tag them in our Facebook status while waiting in line.  Validate by showing status to cashier on cell phone.
• What if 9 Fruits gave me an extra punch on my free smoothie card  when I tweet: ‘About to down a Choc Full of PB from @ninefruits – Sooo much better than Smoothie King!’
• Pie In The Sky could take down their sign that says, ‘Follow us on Twitter’ (Why do I care?) and replace it with a sign that says, ‘For free soft drinks: Upload a Youtube video of your children building their own pizza’.
• Sweet Cece’s could give us free yogurt every time we upload a Facebook photo of the line going out the door and around the corner.

Customers are already tagging you.  And they’re certainly already updating their status while they’re in your store.  Why not give them a reason to do it more often?

Just for fun

• Let’s assume the average patron has 250 Facebook friends.
• Suppose 3 out of 10 customers took advantage of  your new offer
• Say you run a store that averages 15 walk in customers per hour at 4o hours per week (600 transactions a week)
• You’ll be putting positive brand association up for consumption to 45,000 sets of eyeballs every week.  Obviously not everyone who follows your customer will see the status update (at least the first time they do it), but 45,000 potential impressions certainly isn’t a bad hypothetical just for giving away some free guacamole.

Don’t follow me.  Talk about me.

Smart retailers are about to stop asking us to follow them.  Instead they will give us a reason to talk about them, and our friends will follow them as a result of our endorsement.

There’s room for retailers to encourage these conversations everywhere I look.

If I ran marketing for Publix Supermarkets I would offer a premium in the checkout line for every status that changes from ‘Picking up some snacks before the game’ to ‘Picking up some snacks @Publix before the game’.

I would start by explaining to the board why this is probably not helping our case: