YO! Sushi, O2 and Starbucks were some of the major brands that took part in the launch of Facebook Deals
keting at YO! Sushi talks us through the restaurant group’s involvment in the launch of Facebook Deals. YO! Sushi was one of the brands selected by Facebook to take part in the launch of Facebook Deals on 31 January 2011. As part of the launch, we gave away 2,200 meals to diners who checked into
M
ark
McCulloch, head of mar-
CASE STUDY ONE YO! SUSHI
were huge queues out- side the doors of the participating YO! Sushi restaurants. What was especially exciting for me was the fact that schoolkids were tak- ing up the offer in their droves. At the moment
the Facebook Places application with their mobile phones at any of the 47 participating restaurants.
The launch of Facebook Deals was quite timely for us, as we’d recently decided to really start taking social media seriously, and had taken on a social media agency. As far as we’re concerned, Facebook is the platform, and we made a decision to put a lot of focus and budget into it. Facebook Deals came about from
an off-the-cuff remark made by some- one at our social media agency. We said ‘what’s the chance of getting in on that?’ and they had fantastic links at Facebook. It can be a very diffi cult organisation to infi ltrate. We were the exclusive restaurant
partner for the launch, and we decided to go in with a fantastic offer, which saw us giving away £60,000 worth of sushi. We went in really deep to try to create a buzz about YO! Sushi. I was in London in the morning on the day Facebook Deals launched and Nottingham in the afternoon, and there
ISSUE 2 2011 © cybertrek 2011
YO! Sushi is still quite a niche food group and it’s really important to engage with young people – they are the next generation of customers. The biggest positive from the Facebook Deals launch was elevating the brand to new heights. YO! Sushi has been around for 13 years now, and it’s a constant effort to keep it fresh, relevant and in the public eye. To be part of the chosen ones by Facebook – deemed as a great brand – was fantastic for us. We are already being used as an internal case study by Facebook, which is great. It was good to see that lots of peo- ple made an effort to go down to our restaurants and from a PR standpoint it was great. We had 520 articles writ- ten about us as a result and were mentioned on Radio 1. It was a great kick off for our social media strategy. This is only the start for us. We’ve looked around the industry and can’t see any other brand as right for social media as YO! Sushi. I don’t think any- one in the restaurant industry has
really cracked social media yet. YO! Sushi is all about innovation and cut- ting edge technology, so it’s perfect. For us, Facebook is the main social media platform, although we do use Twitter as well. Twitter is very different to Facebook; the users are older, a lot more cynical and very text-savvy. If you try to sell to them too overtly it just won’t work. We use Twitter for news, engagement, and customer serv- ice purposes. If someone tweets, for example: ‘I’ve been waiting in a queue in YO! Sushi for 15 minutes and I can see three empty tables’ we can react to that straight away. We can explain the reasons for what’s happening and maybe offer them a free meal. We take social media really seri-
ously. You can do all the marketing you like, but if people are complaining and you don’t have the right to reply, you can’t put things right. You want to be able to be part of that conversation. Last June we dipped our toe in the water by organising a fl ashmob, which saw DJ Jaguar Skills do an impromptu set outside one of our restaurants. We put it out on Facebook and Twitter and 900 people turned up – this really showed us that social media works. The most important thing when using social media is to make sure what you’re saying is worth listening to. Don’t just try to sell to people – engage with them and have fun.
Read Leisure Management online
leisuremanagement.co.uk/digital 33
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