Twitter Rules: NakedPizza's experience

We join the conversation midway, as Robbie Vitrano, chief Branding office at NakedPizza, a health-minded New Orleans pizza franchise (follow @nakedpizza), speaks about why Twitter is the best platform for their business model (fast-food pizza a la a Domino's that is good for you). They are franchising, so if you are interested visit the link above.

Steve: When you say you put up a Twitter sign in your location and that’s what started it, could you expand a little bit on that?

Robbie: Sure. Because again, this is probably the most important part I think, the media works a hell of a lot better if you’ve got something to say, and that’s sort of obvious. But also something that is interesting to talk about by other people. So you can do that in any number of ways. But I think if you want some legs to it, you better be offering some kind of benefit or some sort of insights that people find beneficial in their lives. So again, if you understand the concept, you understand there's a perspective that allows us to engage in fairly provocative ways. Also just been a pretty loose sense of humor in the company, so it allows us to kind of reveal ourselves, and that’s been appreciated as well. So it's not too stiff and too overly-managed. So we'd already started to engage with people on that basis through some of the existing, you know, emails, etcetera. So Twitter was kind of a natural. And when we realized it was a terrific platform and it fit the style of the company, we said “Let's just go with it.” So you say “Pizza” or you say “World’s Healthiest Pizza”, before it was Naked Pizza it was it's name. And we put up a giant Twitter sign that says “Follow us on Twitter with our Twitter.”

Steve: I'd like to comment on a couple of questions here. Would you say Twitter has been successful than Facebook as a marketing tool? You said you had some platform items, and if so or if not, why not or why so? I think it would be interesting to talk about these two social media from your perspective, what they do and what's been the most successful?

Robbie: Right. Well, I think it's more of a style thing than it is necessarily a platform thing. Because Facebook is still, from a penetration standpoint, is still very valuable. But the Twitter I mean, with the tools that we have at our disposal and just the inclination of the company itself, in terms of what we like to do and since we enjoy talking with people, has made Twitter useful. So it's sort of a case of, it becomes more successful because it's the one that you use and the one you like to use. So it kind of becomes selected by virtue of it being one that you have a preference for.

Steve: So when you say preference, you mean, the preference of the principles or the company?

Robbie: Yes, the preference of the company. So from a marketing and from a business perspective. So again, the reason why we use it is because we like to use it and it sort of fits in our lives fairly easy in terms of the tools and the mobile applications, etcetera, are all things that make it pretty easy for us to keep it fluid and flowing and engaging with people on a regular basis. That’s why I like some of the things that are coming out, they're not there yet for us in this local market, but I think nationally Gowalla and foursquare are going to be a part of our world as well. But yeah, everything’s locked together, so our Facebook, our Twitter, the track -- they both are integrated. And we also obviously blog fairly regularly as well. So the ability for Twitter to link up to a blog that is holding an interesting content is a system that just works really well, and we can actually Tweet on it regularly so we don’t fall behind on it. And it works out pretty well.

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