On a recent trip to Hawaii, Nathan Kam, Noreen Kam, my husband Noel and I dined at Haili’s Luau lunch truck. The fifty year old restaurant recently lost their lease and now parks a lunch truck in a busy Honolulu parking lot. While we ate, we used Twitter to send tweets about our meal and photos to the Haili’s Luau twitter account. In response, Haili’s tweeted a question to me. I was asked what I had to eat for lunch. No pressure, no sales, just an engaging question to a customer. I responded back with description of our meal, sent the photos of our food and commented on how much we enjoyed trying local Hawaiian specialties. Great publicity for the outdoor diner that required about 15 seconds of effort from Haili’s tweeter. I’d say the payoff was well worth it for them.
I was so impressed by the fast and appealing tone of the question posed to me, I decided to find out more. Without too much work I found the tweeter is Ji Sun Chang. We exchanged a few emails and then talked on the phone about how she uses Twitter and other tools to market Haili’s. You may think established companies cannot keep up with new technology. At Haili’s this is not the case. Their website it built using a Ning platform. Ji Sun uses Klout to evaluate their influence and the influence of others. The account follows other Twitter accounts interested in food. She finds these types of accounts using Friendfeed and Search.Twitter.com.
She also uses Hootsuite to manage her followers and monitor the account. By using this tool Ji Sun immediately knew when I sent the tweet about Haili’s and was able to quickly respond to me. If people are talking about you online – good or bad – don’t you want to know right away so you can respond?
I look forward to meeting Ji Sun Chang in person on my next trip to Hawaii. You can listen to our call here to learn other ways to engage others using social marketing. Aloha till next week.
Tags: @buzzbunny, @HailisLuau, @JSCHawaii, @NathanKam, @noelfwilliams, Friendfeed, Haili’s Luau, Hawaii, Honolulu, Houtsuite, Ji Sun Chang, Klout, Nathan Kam, Ning, Noreen Kam, Search.twitter.com, Twitter