souffle' potatoes from our tweet-up last night at the Hermes Bar
One of the easiest things a restaurant or bar can do to use social media is to make their place available for a "tweet-up" gathering. It's easy, do $1 draft, spring for a couple of 1.5L bottles of chardonnay and merlot, maybe put out some appetizers, the sort of thing any bar does for happy hour. Once people are there, make sure they get on Twitter, Brightkite, and Foursquare and generate buzz.
The trick is to keep the buzz going beyond the event itself. It's great that folks tell their friends/followers where they are while at your place, but twitter messages and facebook status updates are a fleeting thing. Many of the people who will come out to a "tweet-up" event are also bloggers. Still others post lots of photos to their Facebook pages. Make sure they do this for your tweet-up. For example, we gathered last night at the Hermes Bar at Restaurant Antoine in the French Quarter. It was a totally "organic" get-together, in that it wasn't promoted or sponsored by Antoines in any way. Ryan, Pontchartrain Pete, and I are all fans of the restaurant, so it went on the tweet-up location list. The Gustes don't have to pay us to eat their food, but if they want to buy us a drink next time, we won't fuss. I blogged about the gathering this morning, so now Antoines and the Hermes Bar have a positive, "organic" item that will show up when someone uses search engines to check them out. That's extremely valuable, and not as simple to pull off as it seems.
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- Edward Branley's blog
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