Glossary:

Cafe Degrasta: One of Notre Dame Food Service’s brands that operates out of the first floor of Grace Hall. Cafe Degrasta serves breakfast and lunch to the somewhat captive audience of Notre Dame employees whose offices are in Flanner and Grace Halls on the north east side of campus.

Twitter: A social network web application for micro-blogging.

Micro-Marketing: Marketing that targets your most likely customers on a direct, personal, hopefully permission-based level in the manner in which they most wish to be targeted.

Dear Cafe DeGrasta,

I had a stuffed pepper with mashed potatoes last Friday. You cooked said stuffed pepper and served it to me. It was very tasty, and I would definitely return to order more stuffed peppers in the future. Unfortunately, I don’t know when you serve stuffed peppers, and the only way I can find out is to go up to the Grace Hall lobby and read your specials board, hoping against hope that today is stuffed pepper day. Clearly…what we have here is a failure to communicate.

Now, I could, I suppose, go out to the NDFS website every day (presuming that your menu is posted there), and check the specials. I’m sure I could also remember to pick up a xeroxed copy of your specials for the month (just like my elementary school used to do for lunches in 1988!). Let’s think about that for a minute though, do you really want to base your sales on my ability to remember to do this?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a quick, easy, free way to send a tiny message (say…140 characters or so), to me every day around 10:30 a.m. that tells me if stuffed peppers will be available that day? What if I could choose whether or not I wanted you to send me this information, so you’d never have to worry about direct emails being deleted or ignored, or (worst of all) actually annoying me, a valuable client, potentially influencing my future decisions to patronize your establishment?

So here’s the challenge, Cafe DeGrasta…I want to follow you on Twitter. I want you to update your status once a day to let me know what you’re serving and I want to know this information before AgencyND’s daily waltz of the “where do we want to go to eat today?” starts around 11:15 every morning.

I do enjoy your food, and even without this tiny little investment in time (and literally no investment whatsoever in dollars), I do make the trip to the lobby just to be surprised by what you’re serving. Imagine how much more frequently you could have my business if you made it impossible for me NOT to know what your specials are from day to day. Even better still, there are at least eight or nine other twitterers just like me, right here in the same building who you could reach at no extra charge simply by trying to sell me a stuffed pepper or two. Heck…I bet if you put a little “follow us on twitter, username: degrasta,” sign next to the cash register you might even attract the attention of more people like us…and attention, my dear degrasta is the cradle of sales.

Most sincerely,

-oAk-