Social Media Guru Josh “Shua” Peters gives you some tips and tricks on implementing Social Media/Marketing into your startup. Somewhere along the way, it also becomes a Twitter “how to.” There is some top notch name dropping, and the secret is out: I admit that I have a man crush on Gary Vaynerchuck. Oh yeah, and I get hit with a frying pan…
Starting Up a Startup - Profile: Josh Peters from Royal Ants on Vimeo.
This is part of an ongoing series about social media and small businesses I’m doing at Shuaism and that I’ll be sharing here as well. Living in Salt Lake City, Utah I’ll be using examples from the beehive state but obviously the ideas I’ll be presenting in these article will work anywhere. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy so if you know any SB owners that might benefit from this article please send them a link to this information.
CB For the most part I like where I live. It definitely has it’s problems and has quite the controversy surrounding it currently but there is a lot of charm in this salty city. We have plenty of underground culture and a lot of it seems to revolve around the local coffee shops, so I thought it was only right that I start my new ongoing series about social media for small businesses using these bastions of caffeination.
I don’t know what it’s like in other locations around the globe but here in Salt Lake City, Utah coffee shops seem to have a theme to their clientele. Nostalgia seems to invite more of the business professional book club and student types. Nobrow coffee attracts a bit more of the artsy / hipster crowd, and Salt Lake Coffee Break is probably the trendiest place to get your coffee. The place is usually packed on the nights and weekends with kids and students of all kinds. Most have a steady flow of customers but when I talk to the business owners (something I always try to do at some point with any local business I frequent) they all seem to have the same concern. How to get a more diverse crowd and get more people during certain times and days.
Most of the coffee shops have a MySpace profile or website (which I’ve listed below for reference), and that’s awesome and all but most of them don’t really leverage it very well. So outside of what we’re developing with RoyalAnts I wanted to help with a few ideas for these local shops of java love.
Create a Twitter account and advertise it on your MySpace account. Then get something like TweetDeck so you can see separate your DM’s, replies, etc and start taking To-Go orders from your followers. I can’t tell you how many times I wish Nostalgia or NoBrow had this kind of a setup so I could just walk in, pick up my latte, pay and go. This would be a boon to your more tech savvy, in a hurry business types.
If you have a social network presence, like MySpace, why not start leveraging it with some coupons? On notoriously slow days send out a “coupon” using a bulletin to your friends. Send out a message saying that from 2-5 on Tuesday anyone who comes in and says “I saw this bulletin thing on MySpace” gets $1 off a latte. Pretty soon your dull Tuesday afternoons will be booming.
Use your hobbies to leverage your business. Are you book addict, a philosophy nut, or a knitting superstar? Find where these groups hang out online and engage them. Then next time they want to have a meet up somewhere offer up your coffee shop. Maybe give a discount to members of the group during the meeting. This will expose your shop to new people and gain some new clientele based on mutual interests.
Are you already a social person by nature? Do you have some form of communication skills (you better if you own a business)? Know any of the other coffee shop owners around Utah? Start a group online! Make a MySpace group for the owners of local coffee shops and then invite them all to join and talk shop. Once you get your group going start having weekly or bi-weekly meetings at your shop, or even rotate with the other owners of local coffee shops. This is a great way to meet other local business people and trade war stories and strategies used in your specific business.
Utilize the social networking platform of your choice to track down local talent to perform at your shop. I’ve seen plenty of great acts like Calico at local coffee shops. Finding them on a social network has 2 main advantages in that you will be able to tell all your friends about the performer and when they’ll be there and so will the performer. Doing this you have just leveraged 2 groups to help bring in the dough, your friends and theirs.
These are just 5 quick ideas I came up with for these purveyors of delicious trimethylxanthine. What ideas do you have? How would you use social media to help a coffee shop market itself online? Leave a comment below with your ideas.
Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters
p.s. If you know a coffee shop owner please send this article their way, thanks. If you are a coffee shop owner please feel free to contact me with any questions you might have and if you need some help with any of these ideas I’m usually willing work in trade 
When making a web 2.0 site that will be part of the social web what methods should be executed to make it the most social it can be? Badges, widgets, mobile apps, social networking platform apps, open API, Open Social platform, etc. The list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and you get the idea. We have so many ways to make a site social, get the name and the product out there that it’s hard to decide where to go and what order you want to develop things.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? What’s the best way to quantify the usability of a certain platform? That’s the subject of our next meeting, we have so many places where a social events site like ours becomes so useful. Our ability to share events and use a calendar like this has never been done before. We watch the competition come and go and we see the rise and fall of calendaring trends and how people have used them before and how people are trying to use them now and every time we analyze and breakdown an events / calendaring site we can’t help but think “there has to be a better way”.
A better way to get your name out, a better way to be used, and a better way to make yourself more useful. This is what we think about as we develop, prepare marketing strategies, social media and adoption strategies. As we are creating our ad campaign and the ability for businesses to advertise with us it’ all in such a unique way that it’s going to be like nothing that has been done yet, we will have a better way to organize your life, promote your event, promote your business, sync your life and keep on top of what’s going on. I don’t want to give too much away but It’s truly going to be something awesome when we launch. I’m so excited about it and so amped to show the world what we have been working on. Stay tuned, it’s going to be worth it!
Microblogging can be very important communications tool, but as many people have said in numerous conversations I’ve had online (not using Twitter or it’s ilk) those services are worthless. I was one of those people when Twitter first emerged, and I thought it was the dumbest thing that had ever happened, that was until I “got it”.
The value of microblogging (like any form of social media) is in how you use it and the value you create with it. Microblogging comes in many flavors and each one has featers that make it unique. If you are looking for something that gives you the ability to create rooms go look at Utterli. If you are more into video check out Twitter.
Communicating in this manner is great for friends and it’s a nice and easy way to share links and other media with anyone who is “following” you. But how can it be used for business? You can promote your blog, do customer service, or even use it to get information on a certain subject. That’s just the beginning.
There are a ton of microblogging services that are popping up to fill the niche of enterprise level microblogging, for a list of possible candidates you can see my list of both enterprise and consumer serviceshere and Jeremiah Owyang’s list of strictly enterprise serviceshere. Here are 5 ways implementing a microblogging platform can help your companies productivity.
Communication - Need to get a message out to your whole group all at once? If you’re whole office is on a service like this you can broadcast out a message and instantly have dialogue with the people in your company.
Sharing - The nature of this microbeast allows you to quickly share information with a whole group of people, and discuss what you’re sharing. This is great for research teams or people collaborating on a project.
Collaboration - Depending on which type of implementation you go with you can keep everyone connected, including remote agents. Most services just require an internet connection and then you your agents in Japan, Turkey, Europe, Canada, and the US can all communicate, collaborate, and share information at the same time.
Problem Solving - Run into a snag on your latest project? Using one of these services you can instantly have the whole company working on the same page to help bring about a creative solution quicker.
Accountability - Most services keep records of the conversations for later review or to keep track of how a certain thought, solution, or product evolved.
Email is static, it’s slow, and if multiple people reply all at once it can get confusing really quickly. Microblogging is dynamic and keeps everyone on the same page (literally and figuratively). As the needs for communication change within a business utilities like these will get more and more prevalent, and there will be a need to consolidate some platforms, luckily there are some enterprising individuals out there already making great strides in consolidating many services under one roof. I’ve tried several different ones but my favorite by far has been Twhirl. This wonderful piece of software makes it possible for you to use an enterprise implementation of Laconi.ca along with your other microblogging favorites like Seesmic, Identi.ca, Twitter, and FriendFeed.
Microblogging can add productivity to business, and tools like Twhirl can add productivity to microblogging. With a setup like that why wouldn’t you want to implement a tool like this? I can tell you that we at RoyalAnts will be implementing something like this. I’m rooting for laconi.ca because of my strange love for Twhirl, but when it’s all said and done it’s ultimately up to Coat because he will be doing the installation. Me, Ill just be little voice in the back ground saying “make my life easier, install laconi.ca”.
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