Today Focus Friday is on how Pretzel Crisps is using social media to connect with twitter users and bloggers. This experience was shared from a wonderful friend of mine, Jean aka @geekbabe that I’ve met on twitter, she actually blogged about her experience in her blog.
The tweet from Pretzel Crisps
What happened was, Jean saw a tweet on twitter from @PretzelCrisps asking her for her email address so that they can send her some of their snacks. It was those usual tweets where companies make contact with bloggers or twitter users to send out items. After giving her address, @geekbabe expected the snack to arrive in a week or two accompanied by a pitch, boy she got it wrong. Pretzel Crisp actually responded to her Dm back asking her if she would like to receive the snacks the same day, and if it’s alright for her if they delivered it.
The delivery from Pretzel Crisps
Within one hour, someone from Pretzel Crisps arrived in a car and with an open arm and bag of goodies. However, that wasn’t all, they even asked Jean if she had any favorite charity that could benefits from these free snacks. One of the recommended charities that Jean suggested was The Asperger’s Association of New England, and Pretzels went on to give them some too.
Personalizing Experience
I talk a lot about personalizing an experience and giving everyone a different experience many times on my blog before. In this case, Pretzel Crisps gave everyone a great personal experience by doing so. The downfall about this is that it is tough for you to do this. It requires a lot of time and cost at first since delivering goodies is not exactly FREE.
The best thing about this is that most companies won’t do this. Why? Read the downfall again. Moreover, most of this is a long term to build brand awareness and brand loyalty. According to a friend @jmodio, this wasn’t the only outreach they did. Pretzel Crisps even sponsored events like Digital Dumbo and Four Square Day, so I asked Joe about his experience and whether he would go out and buy some Pretzel Crisps in the future.
Joe said
“I met the girls working for @pretzelcrisp,they were really friendly, knew what they were doing, made the brand appealing. I’d definitely buy them when I saw them; the store around the corner has them. @PretzelCrisps are a great snack/brand.
If you ask me, I think this is an amazing outreach to people by utilizing social media, your thoughts on this?
photo credit: luckytastebuds
Well done sir. Prime example of social CRM in action.
Thank you sir!
Aaron, I am totally blown away by you honoring me by sharing my experience with your readers! You are correct when you say that the initial cost of engagement is higher when a brand goes for a more personalized effort and I also agree that the effort can really pay off or the brand.
In this case, Pretzel Crisps scored a 1-2 punch.. I’ll buy the product regularly.. but I’ll also continue to talk about them very favorably going forward ! The brand’s investment will continue
to reap benefits for them long after my snack goodies are gone.
This post totally made my week Aaron, thank you so much!
Exactly! this company didn’t require me to talk about them, they treated me so kindly that I wanted to talk about them! PR done well!
Aaron, I love these kind of posts that show proactive customer service in action. Great post!
Thank you Karen, just showing how amazing companies are using twitter and social media 🙂
My pleasure Jean, I love sharing and sharing cases and experience like this is a great way for other companies to learn. So lucky to be able to learn this from you. I got connected with some other people that Pretzel Crisps connected with too.
Hopefully after this, more brands would be more personalize in their message rather than sending automated crap to everyone LoL!!
Thanks for sharing the story with everyone 🙂
You should be on their best customer wall 🙂
Aaron, What a great story! It really does show how we can use social networking to brand ourselves in a positive light.
Because of your story, I wanted to know if Pretzel Crisps were available in Canada, so I checked it out.
Thanks for sharing.
Connie
Hello Connie,
Glad you were able to pick up something, hope they have Pretzel Crisps there, the amazing thing is… the contacted me via email after this post was published and personally thank me for the post.
Since they can’t send a little angel to deliver me some, they are doing it traditional way via snail mail, AMAZING. Thumbs up to them for doing all those and going all out.
Aaron
A athletic recruiting expert I follow from the University of Michigan, has posed to his followers an unusual twitter mystery he has, and a mystery he says is beginning to make him nervous. I told him I follow a twitter expert, and that I would pose the question to you. I’m going to copy/paste his tweets, so you can see what his problem is. I’ll start with the oldest related tweet first, and scroll down to the most recent tweet. Hopefully, you know how this is possible, and what’s going on. Thanks much. I will suggest to this person @TomVH that he follow you in the future. Here is his tweets, with one of mine thrown in as a question, to which he answers. The twitpic he posted in one tweet is very interesting.
Anyone else experience this? I have a follower that doesn’t have a username, and all it shows is “Mysteriously unnamed”
I’m pretty nervous about this “mysteriously anonymous” follower that I have on here. This is what it looks like http://t.co/tE0L26I
FROM ME @TomVH Tom, maybe you could tweet his id name like @TomVH, and we can all follow or investigate further
@JaggedMark that’s the weird part, there is no username or anything for me to tweet at. It won’t let me.
Aaron, did you notice on the twitpic how that person doesn’t have any tweets, nor followers, and only follows one person, @TomVH. Does he need to worry, or is this nothing. Sincerely, thanks for your help.