We came across this story here in the office about our favorite coffee spot, Tim Horton’s.

In it, Pete Blackshaw breaks down the fall of Starbuck’s vs. the rise and intense loyalty of Tim Horton’s customers. While regional chains like Tim Horton’s have their charm, Blackshaw uses an interesting metric to track the positive reputation Tim Horton’s has relative to Starbucks, even though both experienced rapid, wide expansion: Facebook.

It’s worth asking here whether Tim Hortons is executing what Starbucks is trying to rediscover. Even though it’s a chain, the brand — its mission, its people, its community ethos, even its interaction-rich and user-friendly website — comes across as uniquely authentic. And the appreciation for its authenticity shines in the Facebook forums in particular. Yes, brands like McDonald’s and Starbucks have more fans in total, but Tim Hortons takes the cinnamon donut when you look at total fans relative to total outlets*. And the fanaticism is notable, if not a bit scary.

It’s an interesting take on using Facebook and other social networks – instead of quantifying numbers of people interested in a topic – music, restaurant, ice cream flavor – Blackshaw is using social networking as a way of gaging the qualitative value of a customer base.

It’s an interesting interpretation, one backed up both on the Internet by the unabashed names of these Facebook groups -

Tim Hortons for Our Troops: 15,500 members
Biodegradable Cups at Tim Hortons: 10,300 members
Addicted to Tim Hortons: 9,000 members
Tim Hortons Rules of Ordering and More: 5,600 members
Addicted to Tim Hortons #2: 5,000 members
Tim Hortons Is Like Religion to Me: 1,900 members

- but it’s also reflected in the customers at the Timmy Ho’s themselves, an experience we North Coasters are already quite familiar with, but one Blackshaw only recently discovered.

The Buffalo franchise was mobbed, and the drive-through line in particular brought back Southern California high-school memories of the congested, almost-communal In-N-Out Burger line. But in full pursuit of the “total” experience, drive-through would not do. So I kissed the wife and kids goodbye and walked inside, only to encounter an equally long, yet somewhat impressive, line. So with time to boot, I started quizzing folks around me about the “secret sauce” of the brand’s success.

“Good food — always.” “Great menu.” “Friendly employees.” “You mean, you haven’t been to a Tim Hortons?” “The coffee is addictive.”

While we’re all about Tim Horton’s, it’s interesting how social networks can be used more as a qualitative barometer rather than simply a quantifying tool. It’s something we’re looking into with our own web marketing campaigns – sometimes building a small rabid fanbase leads to bigger things down the road.

* Emphasis is ours

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

There is only so much search engine optimization techniques like keywords, content, metatags and meta descriptions can do to raise your website’s profile. The real trick – and the method search engines like Google and Yahoo use to measure a website’s “relavancy” – are links, particularly incoming links.

Links, in human terms, show that like minded people are seeking out and reading your site content, whether its an online store, a blog, or some other type of website. Social networks and social bookmarking sites and indexes like Digg or Myspace are great places to drum up that important related traffic.

Incoming links are any link on another site that points to your site. Search engines index sites and their outgoing and incoming links – the more you have, the better. But while almost any incoming link can help your search engine ranking, the best links come from high-traffic sources related to your website topic. For example, this blog discusses web design, web development and web marketing strategies. Good links for us are similarly focused sites – a post on the Blogdesignblog about good blog design is related to our web design topics. A post about the future of search engine optimization on the Search Engine Roundtable relates well to this particular post.

The above links both to our own site and the blogs and websites I mentioned will all be counted by search engines as topical, related incoming links to those sites, and measured as topical, related outgoing links from this site.

But, as a blog author, I had to actively search for those above topics. I used the Google Blog Search to find them, but there are other ways to get those types of incoming links.

Social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook are good places to post links and material related to your particular industry or topic so people looking for that type of information can find them. For those types of services, you can create a profile and post links to your site, with categories that people with related interests can see.

Social bookmarking sites are similar in that shared interests can draw attention to your website, but sites like Digg, Technorati and Reddit target specifically news-style articles. That might mean you have to go through the work of generating your own content, but that content in turn is put into a feed read by over 500,000 (in the case of Digg) users who rate, read, and discuss your article. Those comments might be full messages, but users also “digg” or give your site “authority” through links. The more links or diggs you get, the more eyes will see your article, and in turn your site.

One important note: People – particularly the savvy Digg community – can see through cheap tricks, black hat tactics and spam like X-ray. Don’t cheat with duplicated, plagiarized content or BS links. It’s not cool, and could get you blacklisted in the long-run.

So get out there – make friends, discuss your business, industry or hobbies – it all can track back to your business.

PS – Digg this article! Click the icon below!

HT: Lorne Fade Design for the pic

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites