Categories
Beer history

Several Years of Accumulated Rubbish

It occurs to us that we’ve put a lot of stuff on Twitter (@boakandbailey) over the years that, with minimal effort, we could easily have turned into blog posts.

If you’re not on Twitter, or you don’t sit there 24/7 monitoring it like Gene Hackman in The Conversation, here are a few bits you might have missed.

https://twitter.com/BoakandBailey/status/526741327288233984

Categories
Blogging and writing

Top Beer Tweets of 2014

For the second year in a row, here’s a list of some Tweets that tickled us in the past 12 months.

Because they told us something we didn’t know, expressed an idea efficiently, or simply made us laugh, we favourited, re-Tweeted, or included them in one of our weekly round-ups.

1. The Beer Nut observes an amusing juxtaposition in Bamberg.

2. There’s a lot of history encapsulated in this one photo.

Categories
Blogging and writing featured

Top Beer Tweets of 2013

These are some Tweets about beer we enjoyed in 2013.

1. Ed defines craft beer:

(He later expanded this thought in a blog post.)

2. Simon wins our nomination for Tweeter of the year:

Categories
marketing

Dear Brewery on Social Media

Blue Rider will talk loud
By Fabio Penna, from Flickr under Creative Commons.

So you’ve joined Twitter to promote your beer? Very sensible. After all, it’s free, and the potential is enormous. But we’re not going to follow you, and here’s why.

1. Your company has a long and interesting history and is full of fascinating characters. Your brewery, to people who don’t work in one, is an intriguing and mysterious place. But what do you Tweet about? Nick sums it up pretty well here:

https://twitter.com/Nickiquote/statuses/354600107028652035

2. Every time someone mentions you, or shares a photo of one of your beers, however banal their commentary or the image, you Retweet it.

3. You nag: Like this on Facebook! Go here! Use this hashtag! As the playground saying went: ‘Askers don’t get.’

What you ought to be doing

Share information which, if we weren’t following you, we wouldn’t get to see. Dig in the archives, explore strange corners of the brewery, introduce us to the characters in your business, take us away from our ‘humdrum lives’ (© Jorvik Viking Centre, via Richard Herring) with intriguing images. Give us the inside scoop.

Interact with people at a level beyond naked self-promotion: don’t react only when you see your brand name mentioned, butting in with a boneheaded shout-out for your latest product.

And that’s it.

Categories
opinion pubs

Why publicans need to connect

A friend of ours recently posted a status update on Facebook saying that a pub we follow on Twitter had ruined a special day — she’d been kept waiting for hours for food, the staff had been rude, and that no-one had apologised. She was never going there again. Her many Facebook friends piled in to sympathise and join her nascent boycott.

For once, though, we were able to do something about it: we dropped the pub a line to pass on the feedback.

Because the publican in question had previously acted like a human being, engaging us in conversation and answering our questions, we knew that our contact would be taken in the spirit it was intended.

Sure enough, an email arrived with a detailed explanation of what had caused the problem, their plans to deal with it, and a sincere apology. We were able to pass that on to our friend and, hopefully, convince her to give the pub (which seems, generally, to be doing all the right things) a second chance.

What went wrong really did go wrong, and the pub needs to look at why the explanation and apology we got wasn’t given to our friend on the day but, nonetheless, this shows why it is worth businesses investing time in social media and that it pays to really connect with people.