Mom-and-Pop Operators Turn to Social Media
Published: July 22, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball
opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger
among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered
the cart? He had read about it on
Twitter.
For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the
purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was
immediately clear. He signed up for an account
and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current
location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like
lavender and orange creamsicle.
“I would love to say that I
just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty
essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a
carpenter to keep up with the demand.
Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast
use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions.
But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free
microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful
tool for them.
For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget,
Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to
set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And
because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in
a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them
well.
“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like
Coca-Cola and
McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said
Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.
Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers
through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital
manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140
characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people
to spread news to friends in their own network.
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