Know your RSS from your elbow

Adam posted a few days ago about the new Starbucks initiative. An excellent post from Todd Defren highlighted some of the ways in which Starbucks will be gaining even greater customer loyalty from something that I bet some execs inside the company felt was a risky operation. To be fair, given its history and background, Starbucks is perhaps more open to this sort of project than many companies. But there would still have been the ‘wise heads’ warning of doom and destruction as people weighed in with complaints and gripes, moans and abuse.

The plan, of course, is not to encourage new customers directly but, as Todd implies, to increase existing customer loyalty. However, a serious by-product of eliciting comments from your best customers will be a raft of suggestions that will make the ‘product’ more appealing to a wider range of people. So, new customers will arrive and become loyal customers. Try mapping that process out in a spreadsheet for ROI.

I’m not sure why but Starbucks here in the UK is a second best to coffee shops like Costa and Caffe Nero. Most of the Starbucks I visit are soulless, the tables full of used cups and plates, the food unappealing, and, worst of all, the coffee generally tastes weak and has little flavour. I’ll gladly walk another half mile to reach a Costa or Caffe Nero. Both Starbucks and Caffe Nero have recently opened in my high street. The Starbucks had a head start of about three months and was packed every day. Since Caffe Nero opened, Starbucks staff walk the street with free samples to try to get customers to return. Tells you something.

However, it’s not all good news for Caffe Nero. Although I was pleased to see them opening locally, simply from the point of view of coffee quality, I was also keen to use their wi-fi service, which I’ve always been able to use ‘free’ as part of my Skype Zones subscription. Disaster struck, however, when I discovered that they have gone over to the BT enemy. No more cheap and cheerful wi-fi. Why they can’t provide free wi-fi, I don’t know. Buy a Fon, for goodness’ sake.

At the moment, there is no way to let Caffe Nero know how I feel. As a loyal customer, this doesn’t exactly make me feel great. Perhaps if I complain to a barista, I’ll get an extra stamp on my wee loyalty card. Mmm, that should do it.

Starbucks may be losing the coffee taste battle but should they install free wi-fi on the back of their social initiative, I may just have to switch to hot chocolate while working.

Over the last week I’ve been immersing myself in Twitter. It can become addictive but for all the right reasons: there is a lot of valuable information and insight to be had. One of the guys I follow - Igor Poltavskiy (known to his Twitter friends as Scabr) - just tweeted a link to this BBC article from Bill Thompson, which makes some great points about Twitter. At the same time, Bill shares my own disappointment about missing SXSW - next year, definitely! - but points out how following the tweets on Twitter were a fairly good second best.

Last year I waited for people to blog about SXSW: this year I was following them ‘in action’.

Jeremiah Owyang over at the Web Strategy blog has put up a podcast and post discussion here about whether companies should roll their own social networks or exploit an existing application to create a community.

It’s an interesting debate but the conclusion, as you may expect, really comes down to what Chris Heuer of the Conversation Group defines as horses for courses. In other words, it depends…..

The danger is in creating a social network of your own for all the ‘wrong’ reasons but it’s important to remember that those wrong reasons may seem the right reasons to the people making the choices (and paying the money). If there is one guiding principle when it comes to making this choice, I think it has to be: what does your community want? As always, this brings us to the question of listening. Ask them first.