Joe Sorge, who has boosted business at his four Milwaukee restaurants by mastering social media as a way to engage customers, recently diagnosed a problem he was noticing among his Foursquare-loving regulars at his burger joint AJ Bombers: “check-in fatigue.”
“Because I’m with my customers so often and we’ve developed a lot of these social-media tools together, they’re open to sharing how they feel about certain programs,” Sorge said.
Many of his guests stopped checking in on Foursquare when dining at AJ Bombers because they felt like the rewards for doing so were out of reach, he said. The “mayor” of the restaurant, Jim Simon, averaged 16 check-ins per month, making it all but impossible for anyone to dethrone him and robbing others of the incentive to engage via Foursquare. Even Simon seemed to be getting bored with checking in, since his reward for becoming mayor, a free burger, was redeemed long ago.
So Sorge expanded the pool of people getting rewarded, using Foursquare’s dashboard feature to track the three people besides Simon checking in at the restaurant most in the previous month. Deemed members of “The Loyalty Royalty” club, the winners then get to suggest items that will be added to the “Mayor Menu” available only to them. Once a month, the club members share their special menu with the rest of AJ Bombers customers.
Within weeks of implementing the program, check-ins doubled and some old faces returned to the restaurant, Sorge said.
“I thought, let’s take that same principle that’s made AJ Bombers grow, the concept of the customer as owner, and apply that to our mayor campaign,” he said. “Because Foursquare gave us this dashboard and we know who checks in most in a month, let’s use that information to spread this out. We added a further twist for those people by allowing them to open their item of choice to others one day a month.”
Giving those frequent customers a say in the menu development process not only made them R&D chefs, but also enthusiastic brand ambassadors.
“We had a bunch of customers taking ownership of the products they created, and they had the ability to drive business that day because their item was featured,” Sorge said. “It all starts to come together nicely.”
Sorge said that while the doubling in check-ins since the promotion started may not correlate exactly to an increase in foot traffic, the word-of-mouth and media coverage the offer generated did bring more people through the door.
“It may have been the case that the customers checking in were going to be there anyway, so it’s possible that the offer didn’t drive added traffic,” he said. “But as this story’s developed, it is something that drives traffic. Our use of social media causes traditional media coverage, which causes further social-media coverage, and they roll into each other.”
The menu items Simon and the Loyalty Royalty club members suggested ended up being completely different limited-time offers, like a pulled short-rib sandwich, which engaged the restaurant’s chef and renewed many customers’ interest in participating in Foursquare. Sorge admitted that sourcing ingredients the restaurant normally doesn’t use created a little extra work for him, but it was worth it to offer his customers some perceived control over the menu.
“It’s a scary thing to give customers control of your brand, but that’s the age we live in,” Sorge said. “Empowered customers rule the day.”
Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].