Coffee Beans and Crowdsourcing

12. Nov, 2009 View Comments

Cup of Crowdsourced Coffee
One of the benefits of working from home is that I don’t always have to work from home. I can pack up my laptop, plug in my iHeadPhones and head off to the nearest wifi hotspot. In most cases, that takes me down the street to the local (non-Starbucks) coffee shop. I usually spend some of my “working” time observing the shop’s space, staff, customers and how they all interact.

On this particular day, I was wondering how the shop could bring in more customers. Specifically, how could crowdsourcing and social media help drive up their customer base. The following is one idea and the grand plan to achieve it.

1. The Crowd’s Cup o’ Joe
Most coffee houses have the stereotypical chalkboard with their coffee offerings of the day, which usually consists of a standard blend, a flavored blend and a decaf. I’d like to add a fourth called the “Crowd’s Choice”. Each week, run an online competition that selects what coffee blend will be served based on the votes collected. Services like CrowdCampaign are great for crowd voting and various social media outlets could be used to get the word out.

2. We Have a Winner (or Two)
Select two people a week to win – a local winner gets $5 gift card to the coffee shop and an online winner gets a $5 Amazon gift card. This encourages online discussions about their shop and brand as well as increases local word of mouth, which translates into additional sales.

3. It’s All About the Bean
Next, have people guess what the final vote count will be at the end of each week like the old “count the gumballs in the big jar” contests. Get a big jar and fill it with one coffee bean per vote. Make it even more fun by having each person who votes in the coffee shop place their own bean in the jar. The winner gets a free cup of coffee and the shop gets many more paid cups of coffee.

4. Shout It Loud. Shout It Proud.
Add that winning coffee flavor to the chalkboard, proudly serve it to your patrons, post the final vote count and display the online / onsite winners in the store. In other words, promote the heck out of it.

As you can probably tell, this idea is based on providing results with minimal cost. If the owners wanted to spend a little more, I’d also suggest the following:

Set up a computer (with a cool flat screen) where patrons can vote right in the coffee shop and see the votes tallied in real time.
Set up a webcam focused on the big jar of coffee beans so participants online can also guess the final number.
Gather the voter’s email addresses (optionally, of course) in the store and online at the time of voting. This is a great opportunity to accumulate a strong customer mailing list.
Expand the coffee shop’s website from a simple online brochure to an e-commerce site. Most coffee shops sell mugs, trinkets, etc along with the coffee, so why not do it online? The $5 online prize could then add to their bottom line instead of Amazon’s.
And the most important thing … give me a percentage of each sale. Oh, and free coffee.

So what do you think? Go for it or get back to work? Comment and let’s discuss.

Crowdsourcing, Social Media

business, competition, customer, marketing, promotion, sales

An Hour of Focus for Coca-Cola and Crowdsourcing

Respecting the Three C’s of Crowdsourcing

http://MetaSpring.com Case Ernsting

Hey Jason, thanks for some great reading material for my late lunch hour. I like the way you’re thinking. There are TONS of ways for brick & mortar shops to get positive results with online/in-store crowdsourcing…but not all are maximizing their potential.

My favorite suggestion you made was suggestion 3. And it was elevated with your integrated webcam idea. I could see that simple idea becoming very competitive and really catching on with the regulars. It’s amazing how the smallest things can evolve to develop a personal connection, and I think this idea has that potential.

Along those lines, did you consider the up-and-coming social networking site “FourSquare” for any of these ideas? Another seemingly mindless network that is transformed with a small dose of competitive atmosphere.
http://www.jasonspector.com/about Jason Spector

Case,

Thanks. I certainly agree that there are so many different ways businesses could leverage crowdsourcing and social media. One of the things I wanted to get across in this post, which you touched on, is that most of them don’t require a significant investment of time or money to be successful. One creative idea, like the coffee bean jar (which is my favorite too), could grow beyond anything originally imagined.

I did think about FourSquare during my initial “coffee breaks” but the coffee shop, like so many others, is filled with a variety of customers – students, young families, older professionals, senior citizens, etc. My intention was to create a promotion that utilized crowdsourcing and social media without making it seem like a “social media promotion”, which could add some hesitation, confusion or disinterest to a percentage of their customer base.

Thanks, as always, for your readership and great comments.
http://crowdcampaign.com Chris Bucchere

Hi Jason,

Thanks for mentioning our new product in your post. We’re launching on Monday and if you’d like me to give you some CrowdCampaign discount codes for your readers, please let me know. I would love to help your local coffee shop set up their own CrowdCampaign, too — please let me know if they want to do that.

–
Chris Bucchere
http://twitter.com/bucchere
http://www.jasonspector.com/about Jason Spector

Chris,

No problem. CrowdCampaign is certainly one of the stronger solutions for the type of promotion I described in this post. I appreciate the offer and good luck with Monday’s launch.

Thanks.
http://www.hevlacoffeeco.com/ Low Acid Coffee

Very nice article. I love reading the 4th part. I had a lot of fun reading this.