Godby and Vahey leveraged social media to build a community around their barely two-year-old Humphry Slocombe ice cream shop, which retails dozens of exotic flavors like prosciutto and beet sorbet.
The shop now has 301,384 followers on Twitter vs. the 223,539 individuals who buy the print edition of the Chronicle on an average weekday, yesterday's new circulation data show -- or the 10,639 people who follow the paper’s website on Twitter, Mutter says.
Now, watch Godby and Vahey tell their story in the following video:
Earlier: Gannett launches new start-up focused on small, midsize firms
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I know of a local wine store that did the same early on with e-mails when they first appeared. The store used to advertise their wines on sale with quarter-page or eighth-page ads in the newspapers, but the owner said he built his own customer base by simply asking customers if they wanted to be on his weekly e-mail list. He said these are customers who are interested in his wines, and participate in sales, and that he gets a much better response than putting ads in newspapers. He no longer advertises in the newspaper and saved the advertising costs.
ReplyDeleteAs Mutter points out, newspapers slept through this revolution, and are sleeping through the new direct marketing approaches using Twitter, etc. "If newspapers continue tottering along as the staid, imperious and unimaginative institutions that many of them have come to be, then get ready for the third decade in a row of continuously shriveling circulation."
He's quite right. Gannett woke up to this much too late, and now the new technology is eating our lunch. When they write the history of this period in newspapering, books will show the consequences of a chronic lack of imagination.