Cafelicious: Serving coffee with a tweet
Oct 20 2009 By Anna Latif, Birmingham Post
Big news at Cafelicious – we’re going to be a case study at tomorrow’s Hello Digital Conference at Millennium Point!
The conference is called “Being competitive in a digital world” and our Digital Birmingham mentor, Donato Esposito, is delivering a presentation all about Cafelicious and our digital journey.
Because the conference is aimed at ordinary small businesses who might not normally use technologies like Twitter and blogging, it was thought the story of how an “average” local café is hoping to transform itself into a digital hotspot for new customers would be an interesting and hopefully inspirational one.
I’d love to get to the conference myself but we’ll just be too busy here at the café. Can’t wait to hear from Donato how it went – watch this space!
Another bit of excitement last week was a “shout out” for Cafelicious from Heart FM’s Ed James show. We tweeted Ed to say we were listening in the café and he gave us a mention – a great way of getting our name across to loads more people in the West Midlands.
We’re finding that Twitter’s a great way for people to get to know about us. We currently have over 800 followers, which is great. Apparently our blog and Twitter page are both in the top five on Google when Cafelicious is entered into the search box – that means that people can come direct to our blog and Twitter page and find out about Cafelicious straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
Another top five link is the www.birminghampost.net article on us in September.
It’s possible that the Cafelicious name is now big news on the other side of the world too, after we had some Australian customers who were attracted by our wi-fi sign.
They were visiting Rubery for a football match and our wi-fi connectivity meant they could get some business done online while they enjoyed our great Cafelicious hospitality.
Word of mouth is the original form of social networking of course, and we found a new customer the other week when one of our regulars recommended Cafelicious to his son as a place he could go to surf the web. Sure enough he came along and hopefully will recommend us to his friends too, whether it’s by digital or actual word of mouth.
We’ll be doing some informal customer research over the next few weeks to find out what people’s opinions are of our new online presence and how valuable social networking is proving to be in building our reputation in the online community.
We’re also looking to test it as a marketing tool by running exclusive offers that are only available online, and by organising events that we promote online, to see how effective it is.
* Cafelicious is at New Road, Rubery and is run by Anna Latif. Digital Birmingham is helping the café build new business via the use of digital technologies. You can follow them on Twitter.com/cafelicious
