Yesterday, Tyson Goodridge reached out to me. He’d double-booked himself and asked if I could cover for him at the Boston University PRSSA’s social media contest. It turns out Tyson asked several people, so both Jeff Cutler and I showed up in his place. No worries, BU PPRSA Vice President Eric Leist had another chair put up at the judge’s table for me, alongside Jeff, Bobbie Carlton, and Fama PR‘s Jeff Benanto and Zach Servideo.
The contest was to organize a social media campaign for Pavement, a coffee shop that’s opening next month here in Boston. Pavement is going to be Boston’s first coffee shop to feature slow brewed coffee from multiple roasters. They’re going to offer tastings and classes similar to a wine store.
The four teams offered a variety of strategies, aiming at a range of coffee drinkers, and using a variety of social tools. Each strategy was presented with the enthusiasm befitting the PR industry — or caffeine-addicted college students — particularly team 3′s DJ Capobianco! In the end, team 4 won the contest, and gift cards to Pavement.
From each of the groups, a few lessons rose to the top:
Find your niche – Slow-brewed coffee is a higher quality coffee, and it takes longer to make than what you’d get from Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, or most other coffee shops in Boston. It’s going to be a very particular person that buys from Pavement. Instead of going after the majority of coffee-buying public, find this person. They’ll be your first, most loyal customers.
It’s not about the tools – The strongest hammer won’t do you any good if you don’t have building plans. Figure out what you want to achieve; then think about what tools you need to use to get there.
Whichever tools you do use, make sure they’ll get used – Flip cams and laptops are great, but when you’re 20-deep, brewing individual cups of coffee, they’re not getting touched. Make sure the tools fit the environment they’ll be used in.
Focus on your launch, with an eye on continued growth – You want the biggest push as you can out the gates, so make it count. But once you’ve made that first impact, keep working to find more discerning coffee drinkers. This is where it transitions from “campaign” to “long-term strategy”.
In all, the evening was a great success, and there are a group of young adults at BU that are shaping up to be killer PR professionals. Thanks to Eric Leist, Professor Stephen Quigley and the rest of BU PRSSA for giving me the chance to take part.
