The Cinco de SoLoMo Rumble
Five Mexican restaurant chains see customer engagement at the point of sale vary dramatically on Cinco de Mayo.
This year we decided to apply our Cinco de Mayo excitement to a study that would provide some very interesting insights about the difference in customer engagement on a big restaurant day based on varying levels of promotion.
The Study: We analyzed the increase in customer engagement at the local level via Facebook, foursquare, and Twitter for five Mexican restaurant chains on Saturday, May 5 compared to the engagement levels at the same locations from the previous Saturday, April 28. We also looked at the campaigns or promotions each of the five restaurants were running for Cinco de Mayo to see if the promotional efforts had any impact on engagement. The restaurant chains were Chevy’s, Chipotle, Moe’s Southwest Grill, Rubio’s, and Taco Bueno. Customer engagement tracked included Facebook check-ins, foursquare check-ins, Facebook place page likes, foursquare photos and tips, and tweets tagged to each location.
The Results: Chevy’s had the highest increase in engagement – 240% compared to the previous Saturday. Moe’s Southwest Grill was a close second with a 224% increase. Both ran strong promotions with free gift cards and t-shirts plus food specials as well as hashtag campaigns on Twitter. Interestingly, when we isolated out Facebook place page likes, Moe’s Southwest Grill actually had the highest increase – 223% compared to 103% for Chevy’s. Chipotle and Rubio’s also redeemed themselves to some degree with more likes than Chevy’s – 143% and 147%, respectively.
The Conclusion: Running solid campaigns and promotions around special occasions like Cinco de Mayo increases customer engagement at the point of sale, and campaigns with social media components in particular increase this type of engagement. Chevy’s and Moe’s Southwest Grill are clear examples of that. Additionally, combined engagement data across Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter tends to correlate very closely to actual sales, which suggests that Chevy’s and Moe’s Southwest Grill saw a significant increase in sales as well.
View the cool infographic that summarizes this study here.
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MomentFeed Integrates Instagram and Releases Curation and Publishing Tools
Local marketing solution provides scalable management of Facebook place pages.
Today, we’re excited to announce our integration with Instagram and the release of new publishing tools that lets brands aggregate and curate their best customer-generated content for distribution across corresponding Facebook place pages, providing the first scalable solution for local content publishing available to multi-location brands.
Many brands are realizing exponential fan growth across their Facebook place pages, due in part to recent Facebook algorithm changes that prioritize them over brand pages. This creates a unique opportunity to reach and engage customers at the local level. Research from Mainstay Partners shows that fans of local pages are 40 times more engaged than those of corporate brand pages. However, scaling local page management is a significant challenge.
MomentFeed brings Facebook, foursquare, and Twitter into a unified solution for multi-location brands. MomentFeed’s new curation tools enable brands to publish their best foursquare photos and tips to their corresponding Facebook place pages with a single click, complete with attribution and a “thank you note” sent to the customer via Twitter. The same can now be done with place-tagged photos from Instagram.
“Our customers are creating and sharing authentic content on foursquare, Instagram, and other mobile apps that is unique to each of our restaurants,” said AJ Sacher, Regional Manager at Barney’s Beanery, a chain of gastropubs in California. “We use MomentFeed to curate the best photos and tips and distribute them to our Facebook pages as a way to acknowledge those customers while engaging our fans. As a result, we are seeing a significant increase in engagement across all of our Facebook pages. And it makes sense, because this is content created by fellow customers.”
“Thanks to smartphones and ubiquitous social networks like Facebook, global-local marketing is becoming a scalable reality,” said MomentFeed founder and CEO Rob Reed. “The MomentFeed platform enables marketers to leverage Facebook, foursquare, Twitter, and Instagram in a holistic way to engage a brand’s most valuable customers and drive sales. The tools we’re launching today take this to a new level by maximizing the value of earned and owned media at the local level with stunning efficiency. For a brand with 1,000 locations, it takes all of 10 minutes per day to curate and publish the best foursquare and Instagram content to the corresponding Facebook place pages, and the return is huge. This is a lot like Facebook’s Sponsored Stories, only instead of connecting with a user’s social graph, the connections are made with a brand’s customer graph. This takes place at the local level on a global scale and facilitates a new type of social connection—customer-to-customer—which is uniquely valuable to the brand.”
These new tools are enabled by MomentFeed’s PinSync™ service, which optimizes and synchronizes venues across Facebook, foursquare, Twitter, and Instagram. PinSync provides centralized control and management of brand venues, which can also be decentralized to local representatives.
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Customer Engagement Increases by 275 Percent on Foursquare Day
The third annual Foursquare Day (4sqDay) was celebrated on April 16th (4/4^2) which coincided with foursquare’s announcement that it has surpassed 20 million users and recorded a staggering 2 billion check-ins. This year, in preparation for 4sqDay, over 700 meetups were planned in communities around the world at local plazas, cafes, pubs and bars where friends and fans of foursquare came together to socialize, network and check in!
Being a proud partner of foursquare as well as users of the platform ourselves, we decided to measure the engagement levels at a sample (86) of the 4sqDay meetup locations using the Momentfeed platform. The primary objective was to monitor the increase in engagements at these locations and track the potential social reach and media value of 4sqDay.
The 4sqDay meetup venues monitored saw a whopping 275% increase in engagements (check-ins, Tips, Photos, Likes, tweets) compared to the previous day.
Besides receiving a huge influx of engagement at the point of sale, an increase in the social reach for these locations was also observed. Tweet Café was the official 4sqDay venue in Milan, Italy and registered a massive increase in the total number of followers for the location from 19 to 62,315. Similarly, The Caulfield in New York saw an increase from a social reach of 618 to 134,211. These locations also saw an increase in their average visitor Klout scores of almost 600% and 65%, respectively, demonstrating that 4sqDay attracts highly influential consumers.
Foursquare campaigns continue to be an invaluable tool to local businesses and multi-location brands. Increased customer engagement at the point of sale equals greater mindshare among customers, resulting in a competitive advantage for the business and ultimately increased sales and customer loyalty and frequency. 4sqDay serves as another reminder of exactly that.
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Cinnabon Sees Nearly 700% Increase in Customer Enagement via MomentFeed
Company delivers PinSync™ to solve universal venue optimization challenges for multi-location brands on Facebook and Foursquare.
Today, we’re excited to announce the findings from an eight-month study we conducted with Cinnabon, Inc., which saw customer engagement increase by 671 percent across its 400+ U.S. locations by leveraging the MomentFeed platform. The engagement was measured across Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter.
Cinnabon’s primary objective was to increase customer engagement at the point of sale. The company worked with MomentFeed to register and optimize its venues on Facebook and Foursquare as well as to measure the impact of its location-based marketing efforts. MomentFeed utilized PinSync, the company’s proprietary venue optimization process, to merge duplicate venues, adjust inaccurate geocodes, correct address information, and update venues with consistent branding. This one-time process synchronized Cinnabon’s location data across Facebook and Foursquare by using MomentFeed as the central hub.
In the month following PinSync, engagement at the point of sale increased by 43 and 86 percent on Foursquare and Facebook respectively. This was followed by a charitable check-in campaign with Operation Gratitude on Foursquare.
“The significant increase in customer engagement from working with MomentFeed exceeded our expectations,” said Rachel Hadley, PR/Corporate Communications Manager for Cinnabon at FOCUS Brands. “By simply optimizing our venues on Facebook and Foursquare and running one campaign, it became clear how many of our customers actually want to engage with our brand. Tapping into that engagement potential clearly represented an opportunity for us – one we are glad we pursued.”
“Cinnabon is a superb example of how brands can measurably increase engagement at the point of sale through a few simple steps,” said MomentFeed VP of Product and Client Relations, Derek Browers. “Through the PinSync process, we removed many of the barriers to engagement and made it easier for customers to both find a local Cinnabon and to check-in when they arrived. On a universal basis, we find that 40 percent of locations have multiple, unauthorized duplicate venues and more than half show inaccurate geocodes. This undermines customer engagement, search, and discovery, which results in lost opportunities to connect with customers and generate sales.”
PinSync was developed by MomentFeed to solve a ubiquitous problem for multi-location brands – ensuring all locations (venues) are accurately and comprehensively registered on Facebook and Foursquare. Before PinSync, there was no seamless solution for optimizing, synchronizing, and centralizing venue information on these platforms. In addition, MomentFeed solves the problem of keeping these platforms up to date when new locations are opening and old ones are closing.
The Cinnabon case study further demonstrated that customer engagement achieves higher plateaus following both PinSync and a well-designed campaign. At limited cost and with minimal effort, multi-location brands in the restaurant, retail, hospitality, and banking categories can increase customer engagement at the point of sale simply by optimizing their venues across Facebook and Foursquare. Well-executed marketing campaigns can further boost engagement.
To download the full Cinnabon case study, visit www.momentfeed.com/case-studies.
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MomentFeed Releases v1.1 With Major New Features
Marketing platform combines social, local, and mobile (SoLoMo) to increase customer engagement at the point of sale via Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter.
Santa Monica, Calif. – February 13, 2012 - MomentFeed, Inc., the first location-based marketing platform for the enterprise and a leader in the SoLoMo space, announced today it has released version 1.1 following the company’s initial rollout with brands in the restaurant and retail categories. New features further empower large, multi-location brands to maximize consumer engagement at the local level via Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter.
With version 1.1, MomentFeed introduces the following capabilities:
- Real-time Twitter feeds from the point of sale: Monitor and respond to customers while they are in-store, in the buying moment
- Sort actual customers by Klout Score to identify, engage, and reward influencers
- Measure the reach potential and media value of tweets, check-ins, and other location-based engagements
- Advanced venue management tools centralize company location data and dynamically synchronize with Foursquare and Facebook
- Comparative analysis between custom location groups to measure regional performance differences and enable sophisticated A/B testing
- Rank Foursquare Tips by the “Done” metric to see which are most popular at the local, regional, and global levels
- Measure customer sentiment at the local, regional, and global levels
“Version 1.1 represents a huge step toward our goal of providing a universal and comprehensive location-based marketing platform,” said MomentFeed Founder and CEO Rob Reed. “These new features add tremendous value for brands at the corporate and local levels. We’re providing the real-time intelligence to respond to customers in the buying moment, while providing the deep insights and analysis that generate dividends over time. For multi-location brands, this is the crème de la crème of social data.”
MomentFeed is adding a unique dimension to Klout as an influence metric. By tracking Klout Scores at the local level, MomentFeed shows brands which locations have the most influential customers and, therefore, which are generating the most value from social sharing at the point of sale. These same metrics can be leveraged through MomentFeed’s competitive intelligence tools to determine influence levels for a competitor’s customers at the local, regional, and global levels.
Brands can now also leverage the MomentFeed platform for important A/B testing of campaigns, multi-channel messaging initiatives, and other efforts to increase engagement at the point of sale through comparative analysis features. By creating custom location groups in the MomentFeed dashboard, brands can, for instance, run Foursquare Specials for a specific group of locations and measure lift in engagement at those locations compared to a similar control group. The sophisticated analysis capabilities help brands to optimize campaigns and more efficiently allocate resources based on location-specific engagement data.
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The Location-Based Engagement Stack
And how MomentFeed brings together the SoLoMo ecosystem as an integrated solution for multi-location brands
The central premise of The SoLoMo Manifesto is what we term the Location-Based Engagement (LBE) Stack. This is a cutaway view of the SoLoMo ecosystem. The layers are as follows:
1. Location Data-as-a-Service (L-Daas) Platforms
2. Location-Based Engagement Platforms
3. Location-Based Engagement Applications
4. Distribution & Awareness
5. Point of Sale (POS) Data
In the following, I’d like to expand on how the LBE Stack functions holistically. To be clear, the goal of this is the very top of the pyramid: driving sales, revenue, and profits. This is the ultimate measure of success. With that in mind, we can work our way through the stack in an effort to ring that register and realize value.
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