<H1 BIG>Maggiano's Magic Marketing by Twitter</H1>

by Hank Trisler

My wife and I celebrated our 31st wedding anniversary on April 2. (We felt the day before was too obvious.)

We decided to go to Maggiano's, as the food is good and the service pleasant. There are several Italian restaurants closer to us, but we like Maggiano's. We invited another couple to join us.

While waiting for the wine to arrive, I tweeted on my iPhone: "Dinner at Maggiano's celebrating 31 years married."

Now why did I do that? Hell, I don't know. No one really cares about that or the fact that I play bad tennis, but someone told me I should tweet every time my dog rolls over, so I do. Besides, the wine hadn't arrived and I had nothing else to do but politely converse with my guests and I sure wasn't going to do that, so I tweeted.

Dinner was all we expected it to be and we went away happy. When I got home, I checked my messages on my desktop computer and found this from Maggiano's. "@trisler Congrats. and a very happy anniversary to you and your wife! Enjoy your evening."

WOW! Now how did they know? We had told no one, as we didn't want singing dolts bearing lighted cupcakes or any other sort of civil disturbance. We just wanted a quiet evening, which we had.

AHA! I'll bet they used Google Alerts, or something similar, to monitor Twitter for mention of the word, "Maggiano" and when I put it in my idiot tweet, they picked it up and responded.

Now that's powerful marketing. Notice they didn't ask me to go to their web site, they didn't offer me any special deals or discounts, they didn't yell at me or pitch me on anything. They just wished us a Happy Anniversary like one human being to another. I really liked that and I'll guarantee you that I'll be back and I'll tell my friends (both of them) about it.

How have you effectively used "soft skills" in your marketing?