From left, Spencer Taylor, Redmond Deck and Stephen Churchill display various social media accounts held by Handy's Lunch on Maple Street. Owner Earl Handy says social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and Urban Spoon have helped his business expand into an online version of the lunch counter. / ELLIOT deBRUYN, Free Press
Written by: Lynn Monty, Free Press Staff Writer
Printed in Burlington Free Press September 8, 2011
Tweets with a hashtag might seem futuristic, but they really equate to the casual street-corner exchanges of yesterday.
In Twitter’s online community, hashtags can also be like local watering holes or office watercoolers, places to visit where valuable information for businesses can be found. Take #BTVLunch, a Twitter stop where people share the best noontime eatery in Burlington.
“Everybody knew my dad through word-of-mouth,” said Earl Handy, third-generation owner of Handy’s Lunch, of his late father Robert Handy. “It took us 45 minutes to get from one street to the next because he would have to stop and talk to everybody. Twenty-five years ago, that was tweeting. He was shaking hands and waving. He was tweeting in person.”
Eighteen months ago, Earl Handy, 36, was just like many business owners, reluctant to get online. He thought Facebook and Twitter were for people who were stalkers. “I wanted nothing to do with it,” he said.
A few tech-savvy friends gave Handy a lesson in social media, and since then,@HandysLunch has sent out almost 5,000 tweets and has more than 1,000 followers and customers frequenting his 65 year-old family business, up 15 percent, he said.
“If you’re in business, you gotta do it,” Handy said. “I have had to be innovative to keep business coming in. Everybody’s on the go and everybody has a smartphone. I’m taking what I learned from my dad and applying it to today. Word of mouth is now the word of tweet.”
Sure, Twitter is the latest form of written currency in the Burlington business community: A Burlington Social Media Usage Survey in July indicated Burlingtonians use Twitter almost as much as they use top social media tool Facebook. But does it make companies money, or is it simply great fun? And how do you measure Twitter success anyhow?
Instead of accumulating friends, Twitter success is usually measured in the number of followers. Twitter is a community of companies and individuals who micro-blog 140 characters at a time. At its best, it’s not about relentless self-promotion but about engaging in many different conversations, experts say.
Carolyn Bonifield is an associate professor at the University of Vermont’s School of Business where social media has become a part of the curriculum. As marketing goes, Twitter is a much less expensive medium than broadcast advertising. Brand messaging can go out one tweet at a time, but social media is not used by businesses solely as a promotional tool, Bonifield said.
“Twitter is used to increase the buzz about brands, but businesses are using Twitter in more of a customer service manner,” she said. “It’s a way to interact with current customers and reach out to potential customers.”
As for companies reluctant to create a Twitter account, Bonifield said the reasons center around the uncertainty on how to proceed and about whether efforts will produce actual results.
“Social media is a positive development and can be used in exciting ways for some brands, but company objectives need to be taken into account,” Bonifield said. “There is not a one-size-fits-all model.”
No time to tweet
Family-owned and -operated Willard Street Inn in Burlington does not have a Twitter account and has no plans to open one any time soon. Marketing director Jordan Davis said the medium would work if the inn had a larger capacity.
“Turnaround time on Twitter is quick,” he said. “It’s all about instant gratification. Planning is farther out for a small inn like ours. People tweeting about availability would be disappointed.”
Davis said the inn serves breakfast, and using #BTVBreakfast could bring in more business, but tweeting would take time away from preparation.
“We all work at the inn,” Davis said of his family. “Tweeting would pull us away from the work that has to be done. It really comes down to balancing out time. Social media is not a good fit for us right now. Our time is at a premium.”
Some not only take time to tweet, they have integrated it into their life. Avid tweeter Gyllian Rae Svensson opened a fashion and sustainable design studio called, The Bobbin, four years ago. Today,@TheBobbin has more than 2,000 followers.
“I benefited greatly from knowledgeable bloggers and our very active local Twitter community. Burlington, Vermont, or hashtag #BTV, boasts one of the more engaged and active Twitter communities in the nation,” she said. “It is my go-to news source for local, global and minute-by-minute information. If I want more knowledge about a breaking news story, or want to know our local restaurants daily lunch specials, or even check the weather, my first stop is Twitter.”
Svensson said, in business, Twitter provides her with a platform to connect with customers on multiple channels. She tweets about upcoming events, shares photos of her latest sustainable fashions and tweets direct links to her website and blog posts.
“For a creative mind, this multi-media platform provides endless opportunities to promote your brand,” Svensson said. “Twitter has allowed The Bobbin, a boot-strapped, mama-owned Vermont artist’s business, to build a brand with a global audience. I am able to connect with professionals in my industry, emerging designers, local artists and fans from all over the world. Folks who have never been to Vermont are able to learn about my business and purchase my product lines, while simultaneously my neighbors can come to my studio and have me design their custom garments.”
Burlington web developer Bradley Holt has been tweeting since 2007.“I was already familiar with social networking, so using Twitter came naturally to me,” he said. “However, I didn’t truly understand how useful it could be until using it at a conference in 2008.”
Three key properties of Twitter
Bradley Holt, a web developer in Burlington, offers these three descriptions and tips about Twitter and how to make it work:
• Twitter is decentralized and not a broadcast medium. Think about how your tweets are helpful to your followers.
• Twitter is about people pulling information from you, not you pushing information to people. Don’t shove information down people’s throats or they’ll stop following you.
• Twitter is about people and individual connections. Consider having individual organizational members tweet as brand ambassadors.
The Zend PHP Conference, or #ZendCon, accumulated 1,500 tweets during the technology conference. Holt said that was when he noticed for the first time how Twitter provided an effective way to learn about what was going on in conference sessions, to hear opinions about sessions he had attended, and to meet new people. Now, every national conference has its own hashtag, he said.
As @BradleyHolt, his Twitter handle, he is often introduced to newtechnologies and became an author of two books through a conversation that started on Twitter.
“Consumers don’t use Twitter, people do,” Holt said.
Innkeepers Tim and Amy Brady are pros at thinking this way. They bought Forty Putney Road Bed and Breakfast in Brattleboro in 2007 and started tweeting regularly in 2009. @InnKeepers has more than 6,000 followers. It was one conversation in particular that gave them an incredible attention boost.
“A big group of our followers stemmed from a story that TechCrunch did about a Twitter exchange that we unknowingly had with their editor,” Tim Brady said.
TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld was in Vermont and sent out a tweet asking for a good place to eat lunch, Brady said. @Innkeepers casually recommended two spots and consequently got mentioned in a Hot Topics blog post on the popular tech site.
“We’re not particularly noisy tweeters,” Brady said. “One or two tweets a day for us is a lot. We post something at least a few times a week and always respond to any queries or correspondence right away. We have booked a few rooms via Twitter and many current and prospective guests connect with us there, so we have certainly realized the value in participating.”
@InnKeepers’ Twitter correspondence has brought in guests from as far away as Holland.
“A few really good followers, that have a bunch of their own followers, will spread your message better than having a large number of unengaged followers yourself,” Brady said.
Follow Lynn Monty on Twitter @TheFullMontyVT
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