Finding and Keeping Customers in a Social Media Age

This is the first article in a two-part series.

Michael Muratore does nothing with Facebook, neither personally nor professionally. A co-owner of Rose & Eye, a West End women's boutique, Muratore finds the increadibly popular social media site too impersonal, including for business.  

"There's still a phone and there's still talking with people face to face," Muratore said at his store last week. "That's how you make connections. A computer is not a relationship."

Across town, a fellow retail store-owner has a considerably different take on using social media. "Facebook has been the best," Carlos Ferreiro said about promoting NY Threads, his men's clothing shop on East Park Avenue.

Ferreiro and his business partner, Joseph Amoroso, advertise in local newspapers, mass email customers about new and sale items and text message them passwords tied to exclusive discounts. Yet nothing brings in business like their Facebook page. "It blows everything else away," Ferreiro said.

Muratore and co-owner Stefano Malluzzo opened their boutique, which aims to price everything from jeans to wrap sweaters to party dresses no higher than $100, in March 2007. While they have a bare-basics informational website and advertise in local papers, they rely mainly on strategic emails to promote discounts to more than 2,000 customers. They email once a month and just three times during the holidays: days before Black Friday, Dec. 1 and the week before Christmas.

"If you send too many emails out for every new item, it gets annoying to people," Muratore said.

Ferreiro tracks the customers who open or delete his emails; otherwise he finds the medium fails to attract customers the way Facebook does. "Unless someone is looking for that particular item that we're pushing," Ferrerio said about emailing, "they're probably going to pass by it."

He and Amoroso opened NY Threads in August in the new storefronts on East Park, after the originals were lost to a fire. Their racks are stocked with everything from $20 T-shirts to $500 jeans to $199 custom suits, featuring brands such as Michael Brandon, Citizens of Humanity and Polo Alfieri. To further push their wares, they're also using mobile texting as a supplement to emails.

"The good thing about texting is that people always have their phones with them," Ferrerio said. "I think it's the future of advertising."

Both Rose & Eye and NY Threads reflect the broader transition, or perhaps an uncertain limbo, that today's advertising world finds itself in. That world shows that traditional means of marketing still have significant strengths despite that social and digital media grows exponentially and seemingly threatens to render them obsolete.  

Mitch Tobol, a partner in the Amityville-based marketing firm CGT Marketing, who lectures on social networking, is a proponent of businesses using the right balance between traditional marketing and new media.

"It's very important that they understand that today you cannot exist solely on print or solely in social," Tobol said. "You must play them with each other. The critical piece here is not just going on Facebook and using it, but using it in conjunction with all the other things available to you."

While Tobol recognizes the importance of branding, pricing and purchasing patterns, he integrates them all with what has increasingly become the marketing world's major focus: the Internet and youth. As the relevance of the baby boom generation and traditional marketing methods — particularly advertising — wanes, interactive technology and the new generation of "millennials" are on the rise. By 2015, this generation, generally acknowledge to have begun in 1977, will become the U.S.'s largest demographic segment.

In an Internet world in which younger people communicate with everything from text and instant messages to Facebook and Twitter updates to smartphones and sites, such as foursquare and gowalla, that use GPS technology, Tobol encourages businesses to make use of at least some new technologies, starting with a website as the bare minimum.

"Instead of trying to push it away, embrace it," Tobol told an audience of business owners last year at a social media workshop he gave at Hofstra.

The second part of this series can be read here.