Cafe Reconcile Serves Up Delicious Food and Intelligent Marketing. Mmmm, tasty marketing.

Louisiana’s Online Lagniappe Covers Food, Music, and Penguins!

It’s time for another issue of Louisiana’s Online Lagniappe, where we highlight organizations around our state doing a great job marketing their businesses through non-traditional means. This week’s three are a bit of a hodge-podge, so there’s something for everyone!

Café Reconcile

Cafe Reconcile Serves Up Delicious Food and Intelligent Marketing. Mmmm, tasty marketing.As much as we’d like to pretend that everything was digital nowadays, businesses can still get great coverage and results from more traditional news sources, like magazines, and newspapers. But when you do get that, make sure that you capitalize on it with your non-traditional sources! Café Reconcile is doing a great job of just that. Their re-opening this week was covered by nearly every major paper in the region, and they’ve been sure to include links to all of these positive articles through their social media channels. It helps drive traffic to the news, and I’m sure is something that the writers themselves appreciate (particularly if the rumors are true that they’re soon going to be “graded” on how well their articles do online.) By highlighting the articles, they’re making it more likely that any reporter will be happy to do a story later on about the organization. Are you using non-traditional media to boost your company’s traditional media results?

Taceaux Loceaux

Lots of companies outsource their social media (full disclosure: My company does handle social media profiles for several clients, though I don’t mention them in this column.) It’s typically simpler, easier, and more cost-effective. That being said, we’ll always tell a manager or owner, that if they’re enthusiastic and are trained in the best practices of how to use each social media channel properly – they’ll do a better job than we do. That’s because even with all of the pictures, videos, quotes and other files we could make with our production team, there is absolutely no replacement for someone who is at the business 24/7, and who knows the customer’s names and orders. Taceaux Loceaux is a great example of the power social media can have, when a business owner realizes its potential, and takes the challenge on. Constant tweeting, responding, and building conversation  – all directly from the business itself – allows it to connect with their customers on a level that even the greatest of contracts wouldn’t allow an agency to do. And we say that humbly. If you’re ready to make the time commitment, and training commitment, to have the knowledge it takes to run your own social media, then give it a shot. But make sure you really know what you’re doing first!

Essence Festival

We do love highlighting mom & pop shops, but sometimes, you’ve got to look at the big players to see what you can be doing right. Essence Festival’s website is gorgeous, full of large, clear images, custom graphics, and interactive sliders (although whoever’s doing their webpage may want to check for some canonical issues from the slider, hint hint.) But our favorite part is the top right: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and yes, even Google+. All updated with interesting and unique content. What can you learn from the big competition in your industry?

And the Lagniappe’s Lagniappe

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. If your organization combines social media and cute animals, you’re probably going to be included in Louisiana’s Online Lagniappe. This week, we thought we’d send a couple of our readers off to follow @kohlthepenguin. Enjoy some of our favorite tweets below.

Ok, we know there is probably a person behind these tweets, but we're going to pretend it's a penguin anyway. Wonder how he has such a water-proof phone to tweet from...

Send In Your Lagniappe                                     

Is your Louisiana-based business doing absolutely stupendous things online? Send Flynn Zaiger of Online Optimism a note at Flynn@onlineoptimism.com and it just might be included in next week’s column.

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