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Now You're Cooking in Bath, Maine is among those retailers curious about how social network can help business.

Social Networking Brings Both Confusion and Sales
By Perry Reynolds

If you find yourself wondering whether social networking sites can boost your sales or if you are trying to decipher the hieroglyphics that are links to those sites, take comfort. You are not alone.

The proliferation of names like Facebook, Twitter, Digg  and LinkedIn, has left many specialty retailers confused as to how best to use social networking sites for building business.

For smaller retailers any venture into technology adds man hours and complication to already hectic days. It is exhausting enough to upgrade a POS system, add a website or bring a gift registry online, but to navigate the ever-expanding universe of social networking sites?

“I’m 53 years old and I consider it huge that I have a website,” says Susan Green, owner of Birmingham Bake & Cook, in Birmingham, Ala. “I’m not technologically inclined.”

When the owner of a popular local restaurant wandered into her store this fall and noted that he was her “friend” on Facebook, Green was floored. “I don’t even have a Facebook account,” she says. Now she plans to get one.

“I know it is necessary because people are starting to say to me, ‘Contact me through Facebook’, where they used to say ‘Send me an email’. One of my best cooking school customers told me he only uses Facebook for his messages,” Green says. “He is 11.”

In Bath, Maine, Mary Milam, the general manager of Now You’re Cooking, says that social network sites are on her radar, but apart from a Facebook account, not as yet a commitment for the store.

“We have discussed it, but we haven’t done any social networking like Twitter as a way to communicate with customers or partners,” she says. “It’s a big time commitment to get things up and running.”

And it also takes time to manage a social networking account, as any parent of a teenager can tell you.

“To me Twitter requires a lot of attention,” says Heather Lamster, director of marketing for Broadway Panhandler in New York City. However, Lamster is a fan of Facebook, where the store maintains a company page. “We use it to promote in-store events as well as to put out to our fans various products that are featured in national magazines.”

Lamster says Facebook also provides a captive audience to retailers. “Among the things we like about Facebook is that people don’t become fans of the store unless they want to.”

She points out that Facebook is a more visual medium than some of the other networking sites, which promise mostly chatter.

“You can upload pictures of products that we are promoting, or pictures from demos so people can see what they missed or remember what they saw. Facebook is the new telephone in terms of word-of-mouth advertising.”

Shelley Young, owner of The Chopping Block in Chicago, has been researching social networking to try and figure out how best to make the technology work for her store. “It is an emerging way of doing business and one that evolves quickly,” she says.

The rise of social networking at the same time traditional media is in decline has led Young to rethink the way she markets her store. To that end Young has brought her public relations effort in house and dedicates 20 hours a week of an employee’s time as part of a social networking push. She views Twitter as a way to reach out to media as “a different type of press release” and Facebook as a way to reach the interactive community.

“You need to know what people are saying on line because you can do something with that information,” Young says. “You don’t have a choice, they review you anyway.”

That potential to drive word-of-mouth advertising is why specialty retailers continue to try and figure out how social networking can benefit their sales.

Sometimes customers lead the way.

 “We have Facebook and Twitter accounts, but I haven’t done much with them,” says Caroline Peterson, owner of The Kitchen Store on Tenth in Sioux Falls, S.D.  However, her customers have: Peterson says she’s had customers tell her, “People are tweeting” about the store’s promotions and events.

That sort of feedback encourages Peterson to redouble her efforts to master social networking. “I think social networking is a great tool,” she says.

Though she has a full-time staff person to handle the Internet, Peterson doesn’t want to delegate social networking to a staffer until she has a grasp of the potential for her business.  “I want to keep it hands on until I can see what the results are going to be,” she says.

Mary Moore, the founder and owner of The Cook’s Warehouse stores in the Atlanta area says Facebook and four different bloggers are among the top 20 traffic drivers to The Cook’s Warehouse e-commerce site.
“Facebook is an important piece of our whole dynamic,” says Moore. While she has found the experience in setting up the Facebook account frustrating, she also says that it has proven to be effective as a way to generate hits for the company’s e-commerce site.

Moore now is a blogger, writing about the retailer’s expansion on The Cook’s Warehouse Facebook page. The Cook’s Warehouse staff is involved as well: a staff member has taken the initiative to track social networking sites and Moore has recruited other staff members to write blogs linking to the store’s website.
That importance of a well-placed blog (read word-of-mouth) came after a run on $1.99 lettuce knives at The Cook’s Warehouse stores.

“We realized that those sales stemmed from a woman’s blog—she loved the lettuce knives,” says Moore. “Now if we could get the same excitement going for super-duper espresso machines, we’ll be all set.”