How To:Combine Social Media & Traditional Media

I was recently fortunate enough to attend the FreelanceCamp in San Antonio,Texas. One of the sponsors for this event was an Austin based company called Sweet Leaf Tea.

While I was familiar with their product I had never actually tried it. No particular reason other than I am not a huge fan of cold tea. Coming from England cold tea has never been particularly appealing.

I decided to give Sweet Leaf Tea a try – after all it was free. Six bottles later I was hooked, it was both really refreshing, tasty and didnt at all remind me of cold tea.

So what has this got to do with Social Media?  Firstly, the disclosure – I am in no way associated with, being recompensed by or benefitting from talking about Sweet Leaf Tea.

So back to the topic. The Social Media piece comes into play because whilst at the conference I was using Twitterberry to update my thoughts on the conference or unconference as it is better described.

One of my updates was a comment on Sweet Leaf Tea and how much I enjoyed it.  A few minutes later Sweet Leaf Tea responded to me on Twitter.  They then Direct Messaged me and asked if I would like a coupon for a free sample to simply drop them an email. Free is my favorite price, so I emailed them and asked what did they need from me.

They said just my mailing address. They could have left it at that. But they didn’t, by this time I was in Orlando at another conference. April from Sweet Leaf Tea engaged me in a conversation about where I was, what I was drinking at that conference (Arizona Tea) and sent a couple of emails back and forth.

When I got back from Orlando a couple of days later, what was waiting for me, an envelope with Sweet Leaf Tea on it. I opened it expecting a coupon and maybe a compliment slip. Nope, not close. Sure they had sent me a couple of coupons for their product. But what really made the difference was the hand written note (Shown below) from April.  What a great way to combine Social Media with Traditional Media. They now have a converted customer, and an evangelist for their product.

Sweet Leaf Tea

So follow their lead, combine your strategies, reach out to your customers and drink Sweet Leaf Tea