Wing Zone is an Atlanta-based restaurant chain selling deep-fried food. From its creation on the University of Florida campus by founders Matt Friedman and Adam Scott, it has gone on to have around 100 Wing Zone franchises across 25 American states.  The founders have won awards for their food and kudos for their marketing.

What’s it got to do with T-shirts?

Well, when they started out, Matt and Adam wanted to reach an audience nobody else had much interest in – college students. Now they reach out, through social media, to every kind of consumer on what they describe as ‘[using] the power of Social Media to connect with our customers on a personalized, interactive basis’.

So in mid December, they used their Facebook Fan Page to send out this message: ‘Christmas is next week? We need to get in the giving spirit some more! For every 5 fans that like this before today is over, we’ll give away a t-shirt to a random liker!’ One hour later they had 101 likes and 10 positive comments – all vying to win a T-shirt bearing the legend: Wing Zone Poked Me, And I Liked It. And if you don’t know what that means, you should be using Facebook more often!

What it adds up to is the way that innovative brands are using the scope of social media not just to connect with their consumers, but to create advertising, through items like T-shirts, that go where the company never could. One winner was a grandmother in her seventies, spotted wearing her new T-shirt to a senior citizens’ bowling club dinner.

Adam Scott says, ‘Before we launched our Social Media strategy, we had to have a plan in place. We were preparing to add a human side to our brand, and interact in our customers personal spaces. We had to be ready.’ Wing Zone intend to give away a thousand T-shirts before the end of January and to extend their ‘hard’ advertising with ‘soft’ methods. ‘While we still hit the streets hard and post fliers all over the communities we interact in, we can now send out a personalized message within seconds, at no cost, and build a better bond with our customers’ says Friedman.

So the message for other businesses, especially SMEs with small budgets, is to use the cost-free capacity for networking and engagement that is offered by social media, but to back it up with gifts and incentives to those who engage with you, so that your ‘soft’ marketing in virtual media is supported by the ‘hard’ evidence of those wearing your T-shirts or carrying your message in other ways in the real world.

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