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Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
www.richter10point2.com

Starbucks uses Twitter in their online/offline Social Media Campaign

Since I’m on a roll with Starbucks and coffee, (I had my double cappuccino this morning with non-fat milk-see last blog), I thought I would research how Starbucks Coffee Company is using social media.

Starbucks already has a strong presence in social media. You can visit their Facebook, or if you are a Twitter fanatic you can find them there. Starbucks Twitter account has over 185,000 followers and the Facebook page has nearly 1.5 million fans.

Starbucks has recently launched “the biggest marketing effort it has undertaken,” according to the New York Times. The coffee company is displaying posters in major cities, and then challenging people to be the first to find and tweet a picture of their posters. Starbucks has other social media initiatives planned for this campaign. One is a contest for store employees to submit headlines for future ads and YouTube videos with coffee experts talking about Starbucks coffee. Starbucks’ social media presence gave it an advantage over competitors with gigantic ad budgets because its fans wanted to talk about it online. The idea for the Starbucks photo contest came from watching what people already do on Facebook and Twitter.

The reason for companies building this presence, I observed, is that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are ways of reaching many of your clients and building a relationship with them-and that’s what we call PR. It’s the building of a relationship with the public. You want to engage in interesting topics with blogging and microblogging using sites like Twitter where you have to express an entire thought in only 140 characters.

The largest coffee company in the world seems to be catching on.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
www.richter10point2.com

Starbucks Latte Abuse: Enough already!

We all know that hardly anyone can survive the workday without their morning coffee. For me and most of the people at the office, nine-thirty rolls around and it’s like clockwork that we get up and make our daily trip to Starbucks.

I was picking up a hazelnut cappuccino, not my normal order, but about once a week I decide to go all out and also added a cheese croissant on top of that. Anyways, I realized that I spend approximately $1,500.00 a year on coffee. That’s with only one cappuccino or latte a morning, if I add a cheese croissant one morning a week I end up spending an extra $200.00 a year. Now, some other people in the office are more dependent on the caffeine to get them going and end up having about three orders a day at Starbucks which winds up in them spending approximately $4,350.00 a year on coffee orders from Starbucks-cheese croissants not included.

There is also another point, and that is the calories that add up in these drinks. Weigh your options and keep in mind that a grande cappuccino with non-fat milk is only going to cost you 93 calories, compared to a grande latte with non-fat milk that is about 168 calories. Every pump of flavored syrup is 20 calories. So, by this point you may be thinking you will just go with an iced Tazo chai-think again. A grande iced Tazo chai with non-fat milk is going to be about 213 calories.

So, it’s not all bad, by cutting down to one order from Starbucks a day and being smart with your options, you can consume less than 100 calories and you can save.

The morale of this short story, and the real point of this all is: cut down on the caffeine, not only because it can be hazardous to your health, but also to your wallet.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
www.richter10point2.com