How Bakeries Use Twitter

Chapter 10 in “Real-Time Marketing & PR” by David Meerman Scott is one of the most informational chapters I’ve read in a long time. Entitled “Real-Time Customer Connection,” this chapter covers a wide-range of topics from marketing to your existing customer base, hotel email blasts, how Rizzo Tees uses Twitter to test T-shirt designs, how to successfully assemble a crisis management team, CEO’s blogging and inhabiting multiple communication channels and their life cycles. Scott cites many case studies along the way to give examples to these topics.

I especially related to the section entitled “Embracing the Tweet.” He gives examples of companies that use Twitter to engage their customers.

His first example was a bakery that tweets when they have fresh baked goods right out of the oven. They use a tool called BakerTweet to send these tweets. I looked a little more into this and now I wish I worked at a bakery. BakerTweet is a system of a box (installed on a wall of a bakery) and an app. From a mobile device, you can set up tweets to send out when different baked goods come out of the oven. On the box, there is a dial to select between each baked good. Once it is selected, you just press the button and the tweet is sent! Watch this video to see it in action:

How cool is this idea?! It is great for the bakers because they don’t have to take time out of their busy day to write up a tweet and send it out. It’s great for the customers to engage with the bakery in real-time and get some piping hot treats from their favorite store.

I also enjoyed reading about Kenko.com and TKTS. Kenko.com is an online drug store that uses Twitter to sell its pharmaceuticals that are about to expire. My Capstone is about this exact field and thought this was a genius way to get rid of pharmaceuticals that are about to expire and be destroyed anyway. TKTS is a service that offers discounted Broadway tickets the day of the show. They tweet what shows still have tickets available. I used TKTS when I went to New York City last fall and found it so helpful that I could plan my night before I even got to the ticket booth.

These were some quality examples of how companies use Twitter in real-time to engage its customers. From a customer standpoint, it is great to see companies use Twitter and other tools in real-time because it shows they care about their customers and want them to have the best before everyone else.