“Voted Milwaukee’s best new burger joint, smoke free and loads of p-nut bombs. Where everybody knows your name, well, at least your twitter name.” (AJBomber’s Twitter Bio)

Joe Sorge (pictured left) is co-owner  of AJBombers. I connected with Joe on twitter after watching a video blog he did with the mighty Chris Brogan and struck up an immediate friendship.

Joe is a great example of a small business harnessing the power of social media to build brand, connect and communicate with customers and grow without having a huge spend.  In fact the tools such as Twitter and Foursquare that Joe uses are free!

An important point however, that Joe makes in the interview is that in the wrong hands or without these tools can be dangerous and can damage your business.

Let’s see what he has to say:

Jaime Steele: Before using social media, how did you promote your business? What was it that made you experiment with the tools of social media and what was the light-bulb moment?

Joe Sorge: Previously we relied almost solely upon an email newsletter.  This was sent to our subscribers from each individual restaurant’s guests as well as visitors to each individual restaurant’s website.  Our view was and always will be that of permission marketing.  I am only interested in putting information in front of you about our company if you are interested in seeing it.

The lightbulb moment can be best explained this way:

It all started with a conversation with a guest after a night at Swig, albeit a short conversation as we had to communicate within a 140 character message and it was viewable by anyone who cared to see it. This guest had tweeted that she had thoroughly enjoyed herself the night before at Swig, I was new to twitter and happened to be doing a search for our restaurants to see if anyone had mentioned them. I replied with not much more than a simple thank you for her business and within minutes she had rebroadcast (RT’d) my
thank you to her personal twitter world of over several hundred twitter followers, many who then turned and decided to follow Swig on twitter.

It was at that instant of one-on-one communication rebroadcast to many, many others that I realized we were onto something that could be great for our group of businesses that try so hard to foster this sort of personal connection.  And now, the guests could speak directly with me about their experiences and thoughts about our restaurants.  It seemed this medium was created to perfectly complement our company’s overall marketing strategy of permission style marketing as opposed to the traditional style of interruption marketing that most companies employ.

Jaime Steele: What platforms e.g. twitter do you currently use and how do you use them?

Joe Sorge: Currently we use these platforms:
Twitter
Facebook
Youtube
Ustream
Tumblr
Wordpress
Foursquare
Yelp
LinkedIn

All serve the same purpose, to continue to create conversation and develop relationships with our guests.

Jaime Steele: What platform have you found to be most effective at engaging your customers?

Joe Sorge: It seems that Twitter is the most engaging platform at this stage.

Jaime Steele: What effect has using social media for marketing your brand had on your bottom line?

Joe Sorge: Most noticeably in the form brand awareness and equity, but we can in fact draw a 30% increase in sales of items that are featured as user generated content at Foursquare. See this article for some more details on that.

Jaime Steele: This is a more difficult one to answer but what has social media done for the value of your brand? Has it increased the perceived value of AJBombers in the eyes of the clientele?

Joe Sorge: I think it’s largely increased value for our “top of the mind” awareness of
our product when our guest are making a buying decision.

Jaime Steele: Who has influenced you the most in this sphere and what you learned from them?

Joe Sorge:

Seth Godin: Business principals and marketing
Chris Brogan: Creating relationships via Social Media
Tim Ferriss: Effectiveness and drive
Kevin Rose: Technological and Entrepreneurial drive

Jaime Steele: I bet you wish you could deal on a global scale now, but being a bar/grill it makes it more difficult. Have you any ideas how you can trade globally on the back of what you have done?

Joe Sorge: Hah, more to come with this, I do think it can/will happen.

Jaime Steele: Is there any particualr piece of advice you would like to offer our readers?

Joe Sorge: One the most important pieces to the Social Media puzzle is deciding how to utilize it. That decision MUST be first guided by the faith and confidence you have in your own product and it’s ability to be remarkable.  Without them, Social Media could be dangerous for your business.

Joe thanks you so much for sharing your experience. We all know you will go from strength to strength.

Joe can be followed on twitter @AJBombers and you can check out his website here