Specialty Coffee’s Social Problem
Why are coffee companies so afraid of connecting with their customers on a personal level?
I’m tired of the noise, and I bet many of your customers are as well.
What noise, you ask? This noise:
Or maybe not that noise specifically, but the mindset behind that noise. It’s the idea that we, as passionate coffee professionals, need to be perceived as being so fully and completely enamored by beans that we will talk about nothing else. The daily latte art photos, funny “addicted to coffee” captions and comic strips, repeated brewing guides, and sentimental stories of farmers in far-away lands all help to solidify this perception, but that solidification is coming at much too high a cost.
There’s a reason why we’re called “coffee snobs”
Before you object, just because you say “I’m not a coffee snob” doesn’t mean you aren’t one. We say we care about our customers, that we’re more community-minded than our big name competitors, that we’re more direct in our endeavors to help the struggling coffee communities of the world. How many of us are actually making an effort to break beyond the subject of coffee and have real life discussions with our biggest supporters, though? How many of us can say that we are the biggest supporters of… well… anything else at all instead of always demanding that our “biggest supporters” become even more supportive?
I’m finding that some of the coffee professionals that complain the most about their lack of support from their community, or that are struggling the most to keep their doors open, are also the ones that act the least human. They talk only about themselves or their passions or their activities that they are involved in, and of course they complain openly about their struggle, but then don’t offer anything of value back to the people that are supporting them. They are indirectly punishing their friends and fans because of something someone else is or is not doing, or because they don’t know how to even pretend to be interested in other people’s lives. That’s not cool.
I love what the guys at The LAB (same folks that run the Caffeine Crawl) do. In every email conversation that I’ve sent to them, or every life-changing situation I share online, these guys send me a private message asking me how I am or what kinds of projects I’m getting myself into, and they do this same thing for all of the people in their community. I’ve met only two of their team members a single time last year, and still they make me feel incredibly special and engaged with. That’s why I’m buying two tickets to an upcoming event they’re hosting (just to give away) and why I drove 13 hours one-way to go meet them in the first place. I’m literally spending my money on their business because they showed me they were interested in me as a human being.
That’s what we all should be aiming for.
Something Different
I follow a lot of coffee companies and professionals online. It comes with the job, since I’m the CEO of a company that is building tools that will one day serve many of those companies and professionals. In all of my time following these hundreds of coffee shops and roasters, I can’t say that I’ve found too many that are willing to look human and build true relationships with their customers.
Just because someone likes your latte art photo doesn’t mean they care. Just because someone shared a link to your photo blog of your recent visit to a third-world country and coffee farm doesn’t mean they looked at it. Just because someone is following you doesn’t mean they’re engaged.
“Just because someone likes your latte art photo doesn’t mean they care.”
The key to getting interaction (and thus revenue) from your followers is to be engaged and interacting with them yourself first. That means talking with them about the subjects they’re interested in and asking them how they’re doing. You can’t expect that they’ll always be 100% willing to talk about the coffee subjects you are so passionate about — that would just be exhausting.
My team is committed to creating better coffee experiences for people, but in order to do that we have to go beyond coffee. We’re gonna start trying a few new things on social networks to see how people respond, and that includes cutting back on the vanity posts and start spreading the word about cool things we see other people doing. Taking a few lessons from my friend JZ, I bet this change will go over pretty well.
Want to see what kinds of changes we’re talking about?
Follow Guddina Coffee on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Instagram.
If you have a comment you would like to share on this article, send me an email at tim@guddina.com and I’ll see about adding it in down here.
