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An article in today's Telegraph.co.uk touts the recent adoption of Twitter by British-based Tesco's Fresh & Easy grocery stores. Although the article focuses on the rarity of a Brit business using what's more popular with American businesses, F&E's web-watchers Fresh & Easy Buzz point out that the Tweets are coming from California, not England:
Fresh & Easy's presence on Twitter.com isn't being maintained by a Tesco Fresh & Easy company employee based out of its Southern California headquarters or by a Tesco PLC employee in the UK. Rather, the Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market Twitter site is maintained on a regular basis by SallieB, who is a social marketing expert with Tesco Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market's public relation's firm, ABCO International.Regardless of where the Tweets originate, the fact is, businesses using Twitter to reach out to consumers is becoming a popular trend:
Though perhaps not gripping correspondence, Twitter does help to establish loyalty by giving customers an active way of communicating with the company's management. [...]What's the point, though, of grocery stores using Twitter? What do they talk about?This may be because the technology is in its infancy - the site only opened in 2006 - or because it started life with a different aim in mind - to enable friends to tell each other what they were doing by answering quick, simple questions.
Nevertheless, a recent survey - the Cone Business in Social Media Study - found that 93pc of those questioned expected to see companies online.
An article from August 2008 on What Makes U Click? posed the same question, and took a look at what people said on Twitter in conversation with Whole Foods Market. Mostly it's just shop talk--product talk, really--about what flavor of tea a Tweeter likes, or how great the salad bar was on a given day. From a business perspective, mining Tweets for corporate feedback is a wise thing to do; service reps can intervene and solve problems and answer questions and gauge how well a product is being received. And producing Tweets can alert customers to sales, recalls, events, or store openings.
So what local grocers use Twitter? Not Vons or Ralphs, and Albertsons' gets a big FAIL for their one-Tweet wonder. And Tesco--parent to Fresh & Easy? Nope. Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and Fresh & Easy (and the unaffiliated Fresh & Easy Buzz), yes.
Do you follow any grocery stores on Twitter? Or should the whole idea just head for the checkout line?
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I've been a big fan of Fresh and Easy for a couple months now. Actually, my brilliant self left a bag of groceries at the Hollywood Blvd. location and I tweeted this realization - to have @Fresh_and_Easy themselves try to ping that location and try to recover that bag for me. They hadn't fully integrated Twitter into their business model but did get back to me to let me know that hopefully the next time something like that happened they would be able to help me. I was happy that they were even that concerned via Twitter! :)
That's a perfect example of a really positive use for Twitter! I've had a major customer service problem solved through Twitter; what I couldn't accomplish over days of call center calls got handled in a heartbeat because someone keeps an eye out for Tweets about customer service issues. Brilliant thing to do. Glad to hear F&E is going to use Twitter as such. And, also, I went shopping in an F&E today--one I hadn't been to before, and months since I'd last been to one, period--and I must say, I was really delighted with the experience.
I've heard such great things about Fresh and Easy. I get my produce at the Farmer's Market, and everything else at Trader Joes (which is a block from my house), but F&E might be worth checking out. They keep sending me coupons and such.