Offline example of social media marketing by the local Chinese takeaway

Back in November 2007, I wrote about a new Chinese takeaway restaurant in Peterborough which was doing a great job of making an impression by engaging with it’s consumers.

Kung Fu Kitchen explained its belief in a letter sent out with vouchers and other goodies, and then followed up meal deliveries to check everything was OK – and funnily enough, we’re still ordering regularly from them 12 months later.

Which is how we spotted something new:

kungfukitchen

(Excuse my crap photography – I was full of the Salt and Pepper chicken wings and Roast Duck curry).

It’s exactly the sort of thing being recommended by marketing experts like Chris Brogan, for example.

And the brilliant thing was that it wasn’t just a big sales pitch – the biggest spaces were given to details of Chinese New Year, the martial arts grading of the owner’s daughter, and a plea for help due to problems with the owner’s Sky system.

The details of some sales vouchers and a spicier curry after consumer feedback was approximately 1/8th of the total newsletter.

It’s no wonder they seem to be getting more and more popular – and yet they still seem to deliver great food incredibly quickly. The only strange thing is that they have an email address to contact them, but haven’t put a website up on their domain yet.

I wonder if I should offer for some free food!

Some real proof of social media transactional revenue

Respected Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson often talks about the action taking place in the comments of his blog.

So I’m surprised more people haven’t picked up and reposted his comment from a post at the end of January.

fredwilsontransaction

If it’s a bit too small – Fred is revealing Twitter is the 3rd biggest referrer of transactional visits to handmade marketplace Etsy, with Flickr at number 2, and Facebook at number 4.

And Etsy is generating over $1 million a month in revenue, with $100 million worth of goods sold in 2008.

Now this might not convince everyone – after all, Etsy sales are by a large number of individual and small retailers who will be promoting their items individuals through Flickr, Twitter and Facebook – and the scale is the aggregate of those referrals – the ‘Long Tail‘, if you will!

So essentially there are 100s, if not 1000s of people handling social media marketing and customer service for their products, which doesn’t tackle the scale issue of large companies changing the way they do business, and utlising social media.

But there were 300,000 people in the California Gold Rush, and noone continued to deny there was gold in those hills.

If you can see this message…

Then you’re one of the lucky ones.

Pic by delta407 on Flickr (CC Licence)

Pic by delta407 on Flickr (CC Licence)

At some point on Friday it appears something has caused a number of people to find this blog inaccessible.

And the same problem is also causing a tidal wave of spam to slip past Akismet and flood the pending comments section.

I’ve notified my hosting company, and I’m looking into the causes and solutions – meanwhile I’m marking every spam message as spam, but with one message every couple of minutes, it’s extremely frustrating.

As a result, I’m probably going to find it tricky to post until the problem has been resolved – however, you can still find my latest posts appearing at TheWayoftheWeb.net for social media marketing, digital publishing, journalism and other stuff.

Incidentally, if anyone is interested in partnering or collaborating with me here (once the access problem is solved!), let me know…

Adding some new functionality despite spam problems….

For some reason, Akistmet and IP blocking doesn’t seem to be countering the tide of spam comments I’m getting – I’ve had some good suggestions for causes via Twitter, but not solved it as yet.

So while I delete 101 really, really obvious spam messages, I’m also playing around with some more functionality – you can see an early start on the monetise Twitter/Jobs page.