In my honest opinion, the constant attention that is illustrated in Kimberly’s case is way too much attention paid to one person who may or may not say something nice about you on her twitter. She’s not committed to writing something nice about you, in fact she could say something downright nasty about you. This is not a way to run a social strategy, by buying good reviews. This is actually frowned upon! Throwing free drinks around will set a bad example and will result in shooting yourselves in the foot!

As they say actions speak louder than words. don’t count on someone’s words. Count their actions and reward them for their loyalty.

Cindy

It was HER loss for not having checked in by name with the hostess, but our process was in place . . .her photo to the hostesses would have helped but what if the avatar is a cartoon or logo or something unrecognizable once the person walks in your door? Anyway, raincheck . . .

Yes, there are obstacles and many scams to watch out for, but until we take the risk that other companies have done before the internet even existed what with duplicates of coupons and such, typos in an ad or other promotion in print OR broadcast, all we can do in this increasingly Social Media Connected Environment is try to SURPASS the JONES Inc. we vy with for guests, clients, customers.

Marshall was there to nag me about Kimberley that night, but we at Havana Central had already been showing special treatment to those who tweeted they were there or going there as evidenced by our visit that night to check on one such table. The point here is that it was even more impressive when you are in the same room and someone is connecting to the community-at-large with no notion, for now, that the business was listening.

Yes, this has been accomplished before without gadgets, but the gadgets make it oh so much easier, n’est-ce pas? As an owner of restaurants since 1998, I can tell you that the hundreds and HUNDREDS of guests who pass through our 3 and soon to be FOUR locations are NOT that easy to track all in one system. There are general managers, shift managers, junior managers, servers, and bussers, who canNOT know everyone of our guests, although they do recognize many who come often or are just especially memorable.

Now that geolocation services have gotten so much attention, (Hey @foursquare guys, I saw you preening in that NY Mag layout-Apr 26 issue. Niiiice.) people are seeing that they CAN get discounts, free product, or service or at least special attention if they check into a business, or at this point TV channel, movie screening. . .anything where you can show you care and you are participating, if only virtually, in the community experience. This behavior will only increase or morph into something not too dissimilar . . .I like that EZ-pass idea! ANY one wanna jump on that?

Mr. Steve Baker, who responded to this post with a post of his own,

http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=582

you can downplay or rather upwork??? the way people use this checkin to their advantage and somehow end up costing the business lots of money trying to catch up with all of those checking, but as Marshall says, the way this market is moving, what is scammable today, is already another social media product or service tomorrow. Remember Friendster? Hell, remember MySpace? Your move, Steve.

Good points and feedback – and bringing up A/B testing in this regard – though hardly new, seems refreshing “Analytic
in fact, I agree with you – we ought to do a case study and prove what the effect of giving Kimberly819′s a drink vs. giving anyone a drink … and if there is a lift because we have someone on Twitter, Facebook or FourSquare a drink.

Of course, we’ll have a tracking issue – how are we going to gell across three locations and staff/technology not yet adept to track or adapt to such requests to know a referred customer came in? I’m suspecting if we give coupons to those customers to give to their friends and do the same on 4SQ, Twitter and FB we will have the information we need.

Any other ideas? I am all ears and like your suggestion – let’s continue the dialog.

Marshall
Webmetricsguru.com

I’d be interested to compare ROI on giving free drinks to clustomers found via social media with giving free drinks to randomly selected customers in the restaurant.

Converting a single-instance customer to a loyal customer through the use of rewards is not new, and locating customers who are currently in the restaurant is not new either (just open your eyes and look around the restaurant).

The value would be to see if Kimberly819′s tweets start driving her friends to the location – if a social media active customer has a measurably greater influence on peers than a less SM active customer.

The $30K/month increase in sales is great, but I’m not convinced that social media measurement/tracking would be required to see these results. All her tweet told us is that she enjoyed the free drinks.