-
A sociable brand: Urban Coffee Company
5
December 17th, 2009Birmingham, VisualisationIn Birmingham, we are fortunate enough to have a variety of nice coffee places. Such as Hudsons, Saint Caffe and Urban Coffee. The later is one of the more sociable companies I’ve come across.
Sociable, in the sense of user engagement and interaction.
From a historic perspective, I was only aware of them as they had followed me on Twitter – before they had actually opened the shop. The fact that they were to be located around the corner from my office made me interested, and I awaited their coffee and also how they would use their Twitter account.
What I’ve spotted @UrbanCoffeeCo get upto:
-When people ask where they are – they respond back with directions, and even a map now and again.
-When someone got a new job – they were congratuated.
-If people visit, they ask how it wasThrough my circle of friends, I’ve only heard good things about it, but with the internet and their twitter account so have a lot of other people. The fact that people can say “I’m off to @urbancoffee” can lead to interest in their followers.
They also seem to ‘get’ how they can use twitter:
Looking from a ‘data’ perspective, we can see that through the last 50 tweets, which mentioned urbancoffeeco, 6,359 people were reached. As we can see a lot of the chat is people communicating to (or mentioning that they are at) @urbancoffeeco
I can’t quite remember exactly when they opened, but you can see a consistant tweeting effort by the company, that said, when I’m on holiday in Oct they did go a bit quiet
Now their target market is going to be the people in and around the Colmore Business area, or living in the locale. Which ties in with the tweeting occurring mainly in and around their hours, and key ‘peak’ times – like lunches and late afternoons on the weekends.
Yet it’s not all one way traffic, the brand respond, and also alert followers to things of interest. Whether it be the latest filter on, the soup of the day etc:
What it shows is that by simply engaging with your users, and they will engage back.
Lately they are offering whoever is Mayor of the coffee shop a free coffee once a week. Which is encouraging people to ‘check in’ with Foursquare, and when they do – their friends know exactly where they are – helping spread the word about the coffee shop, and of course you can only be mayor by visiting the most in the last 60 days. . . so a lot of coffee will end up being drunk.
They are encouraging people to use Foursquare, and it will be interesting to see how other Birmingham Businesses start to use Foursquare, and whether they have similiar customer interactions.
What are your experiences of Urban Coffee Co, and other businesses that have a web presence?
Visualisations from:
Tags: Birmingham, coffee, social media, urban coffee co, user interaction
Tweet Reach
Tweet Stats
Twitter Stream Graphs –May appear, server unresponsive.
Tweet Paste
5 Responses to “A sociable brand: Urban Coffee Company”
-
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by katehughes, Neil. Neil said: Blog: Sociable Brands – @urbancoffeeco : http://bit.ly/4S6aNd [...]
-
It’s good to watch a small business using these technologies. Often it can be difficult to encourage often sceptical website owners to use these technologies as they are seen as superfluous and fiddly, but if someone embraces the benefits of digital-fanism it can ultimately reap rewards – like UCC here.
For me, it’s a useful case study that I can give to my clients to sell the ideas and get them to implement the same approaches, but for UCC, it’s undoubtedly allowed them to reach a different audience that I think otherwise would have remained untapped. Success is likely anyway because of their brand values, but it is a strange draw the effect personal (valid) communication with otherwise remote customers can elicit. I honestly don’t think I would previously have been choosy about my coffee shops. Well, I wasn’t.
Really interesting to see the breakdown of figures here Neil, especially your quantifying of the user engagement and it’s made me realise how high the quality of the tweets are (e.g. they are not spam-like, which often is the downfall of small businesses experimenting with the technologies).
-
I actually think it’s great when businesses know how to harness the power of social media tools such as twitter. A lot of companies still see them as a waste of time and space (and bandwidth) but for small businesses (and large ones too if used correctly) it can yield far more than a positive bottom line – it can build brand and reputation much faster than any advertising and PR. Great little case study
-
Neil H
Andy – Some really good comments there.
There is also something to be looked into with how Dell treat twitter, and other social media outlets as being ways for them to drive revenue.Catty – Thanks, I can see a lot of smaller businesses being a bit savvy, for instance in London I see that Hawksmoor and Byron interact with their customers through social media routes.
-
Great to see some of the data you are using to support your theories.
Whilst its great to see coffee shops taking initiative, one of my questions would be, what happens if everyone did it?
If I tweet I’m shopping in Birmingham, and fancy a coffee, what if 5 coffee shops, all with equally plausible, equally engaging Twitter accounts @ me back? Directly marketing to me, as an individual in my own space. What if this goes beyond coffee, and I simply say I tried on a pair of jeans, and every indie retail-outlet in Brum tweets me their special offers? At what point does one shop offering a novelty become many shops actually become a bit of a nuisance or information overload?
Whilst I ramble my point is essentially will this still work, even if everyone is doing it?
Of course, with Urban Coffee Co taking charming initiatives such as the foursquare mayor getting free coffee, they are likely to remain our local social media embracing champions for some time. It helps that their coffee is yummy too.
