Article
QSRs Face(book) forward
Social networking sites an emerging marketing platform.
August 4, 2008
When Carvel Ice Cream wanted to reach its target teenage demographic, the chain turned to social networking sites to capture the age group's attention.
The chain developed a page on the Internet site MySpace for its new mascot, Fudgie the Whale.
"We want our consumers to feel like he is someone they can relate to," said Rukmi Jangla, Carvel Corp. brand manager. "When companies try to sell too much online, it takes away from that whole experience we want our customers to have with this."
Two years later, Fudgie's MySpace site has 1,000 friends listed. The mascot has captured enough awareness that when Carvel created a Facebook site in May to promote its new beverage line, 4,600 fans quickly gravitated to view it. So that site became Fudgie's also, and more than 100 have since signed on as friends.
While social media sites do garner brand awareness, the point for Carvel and other quick-serve restaurants is to interact and entertain more than a hard sell.
"It's another form of word of mouth," said Linda Duke, owner of San Rafael, Calif.-based Duke Marketing. "If done well, you can create a buzz and word of mouth online."
That means posting blogs on the sites that are "engaging the audience with honest comments and accurate opinions" and avoiding anything that comes off as a sales pitch, she said.
And since the sites themselves have no fees, blogging is a cost-effective way to generate brand awareness.
"It's really more about time and effort than it is money," Duke said.
Site updates help create buzz
Carvel spends about one to two hours a week monitoring its social networking sites, including writing regular blogs for the irreverent Fudgie character. Readers do post replies, and Fudgie occasionally responds to those posts, Jangla said.
Keri Robinson, account executive for Vault Communications, handles all public relations, including all social media sites, for Rita's Water Ice. When the sites are not promoting specific events, Robinson checks the Italian ice concept's sites on MySpace and Facebook about once a week.
"How much time we spend on it really depends on what promotions are going on at that specific time," Robinson said.
In March when Rita's promoted its First Day of Spring event, Robinson checked the sites daily to read customers' postings. She responded to postings that required some type of action, such as letting a customer know that a store had opened in his area.
Setting up Rita's Facebook site initially and updating Rita's existing MySpace site also required some time. So Robinson spent about a month researching the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining the sites, as well as doing a competitive analysis of how Rita's competitors were using such social media.
Now that both sites are up, it's a matter of "consistently monitoring and updating" the sites, Robinson said.
In her research, Robinson found that MySpace and Facebook each have varying features. MySpace, for example, has a countdown feature that Rita's used to "add some hype" to its First Day of Spring event. Rita's Facebook site is set up to add fans rather than friends so that Robinson can create and send event invitations.
Robinson cites the responses to its spring event in which it gives away a free cup of Italian ice to customers as a measure of the social networking sites' success. Rita's Facebook site now has almost 8,000 fans, all of whom received an invitation to the March event. So many fans passed along the invitation that more than 115,000 people sent responses to Rita's.
The chain gave away 1.2 million cups of flavored ice on opening day this year, up more than 200,000 than last year, Robinson said.
"There's no direct way to say if it was a result of (using) social media, but we think social media had a really big part as to why so many more people came out . . . this year," she said.
Broadening the reach
Melissa Wilson, principal at Technomic Inc., said social networking sites are effective as additional or alternative media platforms for QSRs because they offer a way for consumers to interact with the brand and lend themselves easily to viral marketing. But QSRs do need to do their homework before setting one up.
First, the QSR needs to consider up front what content it will allow on its site. The nature of the sites allows the companies to control what they post, but not what others post in return. Chains, then, need to rethink their traditional brand management.
"That's a lot more difficult in this new media world, so what they really need to do as an organization is decide what they're willing to live with instead of reacting to everything that may be posted," she said.
Managing the sites also is important, including continually developing content for them.
When McDonald's developed the idea of its online Big Mac chant remix contest, the burger chain entered into a partnership with MySpace rather than simply adding the contest on its own corporate Web site.
Kent Voetberg, director of McDonald's U.S. marketing team, said the chain chose the MySpace platform because of its tens of millions of 18- to 34-year-old users, the burger chain's target demographic.
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"It gives us additional brand awareness from consumers talking about our brand among themselves in a forum that's designed to share information," Voetberg said. "We really were looking for high engagement."
MySpace created the framework and set up the site as well as promoted the site on its home page. McDonald's used traditional advertising methods, including TV commercials, to promote the MySpace-hosted contest.
Voetberg said the page drew 1.5 million profile views, 6,700 friends, and 1,300 video submissions in the seven weeks the contest ran -- exceeding the corporation's expectations.
Despite QSRs' success with social networking sites, Wilson warns that such platforms should not replace traditional advertising or a corporation's own Web site. Consumers are turning to corporate Web sites more frequently for information, while employing a social networking site "broadens the potential reach of the message," she said.
Robinson agrees.
"It's much more likely you'll reach (customers) via the social media outlet than for somebody to just say, hmm, let's go to Ritasice.com and see what's going on with the First Day of Spring."
