The Pizza Factory Social Media Campaign

The Pizza Factory

One of my favorite things to see is a local company reach out to communicate and reward their customers… especially when it involves social media.  This past week I saw just such a thing.

Local restaurant, The Pizza Factory in Provo, Utah started a Twitter account.  They found and followed all the locals in no time at all.  Then, suddenly, they started Tweeting about some incredible giveaways.  Every day, about twice a day, Pizza Factory managers were giving away free large pizzas, family size pastas and entire pies for dessert.

The boys here at the office picked up on the scent of free food and decided to test the offer.  Sure enough, of the 100 or so followers that receive The Pizza Factory’s tweets, they were the first to arrive on location to collect the winnings.  They ordered their free Chicken Alfredo Pizza (which I know from first hand experience is delicious) and were ready to walk out the door when the manager asked them if they would like to claim the other two prizes that had been announced earlier that day, (a family size pasta dish and a fruit pie) because nobody had come by to claim them.

Apparently, despite offering to give away entire family-size meals, few people were actually coming by to try to claim the prizes.  This can be attributed to a few different reasons.

1. Free food is tempting. Very tempting. But if I’m not guaranteed the food, do I want to chance going in to claim it? What if the only reason I’m going is the fact that I’m going to get a free meal? Imagine the shame of turning around to explain the situation to your hungry family and friends as you walk out of the establishment. Crappy thought, no?
2. There is an unwritten law of social media stating that the main purpose of social networking is increasing communication between two parties with a mutual bond or interest.  Currently The Pizza Factory is not talking directly to anyone. They’re not engaging their fans. And, they’re not doing what is possibly the most important thing…
3. They aren’t getting anything out of it!  What good is a marketing campaign if it has significant value to your customers, but very little or no value to you?  Let me answer that for you. It is not good.

So, rather than put effort into giving your product away, why not design a quick marketing campaign that gives away food on a daily or weekly basis for people who blog about you and link to your site. (SEO 1o1: Google likes you more when you have links pointing to your site.)  This encourages involvement of lots of people at once, and doesn’t put a strange and insecure time constraint on the contest, ie: Will I make it in time to claim the prize before everyone else?

All in all, props to The Pizza factory for making a positive move in the right direction.  With a little tweaking, not only will they have great interaction with a thriving fan base who loves delicious pizza, but they will also be getting something out of it! (I’d blog for free pizza any day.)

By the way, here are some deliciously free Breadtwists on me.  Thank me later!

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