Another great guest post, this time from Amy in our purchasing team.
the alledged lemon-drizzle cake
The best part of social networking sites for me, is connecting with people who have the same interests – and listening to people that I think have important things to say. I can connect with people all over the world that are on the same slimming world plan or people that all have the same interests in films or books, simply by following them (without the nightvision goggles of course) and using #hashtags. Twitter a year ago to me was confusing and seemed pretty pointless, I didn’t understand it and anyone that knows me, knows that when I have something to say, it’s not going to be in fewer than 140 characters.
So when I was encouraged to join twitter, just to see what happens, I resentfully signed myself up… A year later and I prefer it to Facebook, I get more enjoyment ‘tweeting’ that writing a status, and no one gets mad if you send 5 updates an hour.. at least I don’t think my followers do.
The reason for this blog post is to think about just how influential things like twitter can be, for this, I’d like to give you an example of a Twitter conversation I had over the weekend….
Over the weekend I started following a local pub that I had heard good things about from some friends, this pub has a modest follower count of 140. They tweet a lot about their menu and offers they have, over the weekend I decided to Tweet back that they were always making me hungry and didn’t think anything of it. I got on with my Sunday dinner and baked a cake. My other half replied to my tweet saying the food sounds amazing, but it would struggle to meet the standards of my lemon drizzle cake…. And these are the tweets that followed:
The Pub replies to us both: ‘ we’ll happily steal the recipe if you’re sharing!!’
I’m a lot braver when I’m on twitter so I thought I would try being cheeky, ‘I’ll happily bring the recipe and a free cake if you swap it for a free meal ’
The Pub replies again ‘But that wouldn’t be stealing! ’
And in Kicks my banter ‘but you would gain two very happy customers, that would tell all their friends and twitter tweeps! Eh?’
Worth a try?
The Pub replies ‘you are proposing bribery are you???’
I think there is nothing to lose here, it’s just some friendly chat ‘I’d like to think of it as more of a friendly trade of goods, you get cake… and we get food ’
The pub didn’t reply after that… I guess they have better things to do than entertain customers that want a free meal, but hold on, I have 240 followers that can see this conversation, and my other half has 130.. that’s a lot of people the Pub have reached out to, that probably didn’t know about them before…
I got a reply from them this morning… ‘Friendly trade sounds good! How about a Sunday Roast for you both in exchange for your cake?’……….
………We are going to head over in a couple of weeks for a free roast now, and I’m taking them a cake…if the food lives up to its great expectations I might let you all know where this place is!!
Now this sort of interaction is quite a phenomenon to me… does anyone else have stories like this they can share?
Editor’s note: we thought that @TheTrooperInn should get a mention in advance and Amy can let us know later if their food matches their social media nous.
I thought this was a great post and a great idea. By coincidence, I blogged about the Trooper Inn myself recently: http://bit.ly/Blog_TrooperInn