All images from the 4Food Facebook profile

A new burger joint is opening in two weeks in the corner of 40^th and Madison in Midtown Manhattan. And while a new fast food establishment opening in New York is hardly news, especially in this non-foodie blog of ours, what easily caught our attention is that the restaurant seems to have been built with both tech and social media at the forefront.

Like most restaurants and destination stores these days, 4Food was established with its roots deeply ingrained with the latest technologies for greener operations, efficiency, customer convenience and a hefty push for developing and maintaining an online fan base. Promising to “de-junk fast food” with green tech for fresh organic ingredients and a state of the art waste disposal system, the fast food touched base with an online presence that seems to go beyond your usual brand-audience engagements.


The New [Social Media] Wave
Leveraging on social media for your business is admittedly not a new concept, this you may already know if you’ve been reading this blog, especially if you’ve been on any kind of social networking site in the past few years. Nevertheless, the value of having an online presence on the social streams offer up a wealth of marketing, sales and customer engagement potentials; and 4Food is one of many real-world establishments that appears to have a tight grip on social media and knows its way around it.
Months even before the actual launch, founders Adam Kidron and Michael Shuman took their brand to the big two of social media platforms—Twitter and Facebook. There, their marketing engine began plying their marketing schtick, personally talking to the followers they managed to draw in and using the platform to make announce updates and contests. As of writing, their social networking profiles are each a few hundred followers short of their 2000^th mark—pretty impressive for an unknown brand, considering that the store caters to just the NY-based crowd (as of now) and it has yet to officially open its doors to welcome mainstream customers.


Traditional & Online Marketing Mashup

Like many brands before it, 4Food is a great example of how both traditional and online marketing can be merged into a kick-ass campaign for greater results. Mashing these together with the value added by the product being offered delivers the benefits of both platforms to create a solid resonance from your brand’s targeted audience.

4Food serves food and tea-based drinks of every type and caters to different dietary restriction. Aside from the usual beef patties, they have lamb, pork, turkey, salmon and egg as options—yes, they also have vegan/vegetarian burgers. They also offer a large variety of ingredients like different types of buns, fillings and condiments that can purportedly produce more than 140 million possible combinations.

Burger configurations can also be accomplished on their Web site (www.4food.com), where customers get to also name their creations, share them on their Facebook and Twitter accounts, and market them through ads on YouTube. This premise is highly appealing for those in search something less pedestrian than McDonalds or Burger King.

Aside from these, the entire three-floor space looks to have been built and tech-riddled with social media in mind. Right off the bat is free Wi-Fi which works well as a tech atmosphere-bolstering add-on that, along with the food and the orders taken via iPad for speedy service, will keep the patrons coming back for more. Meanwhile, a huge 240-square foot screen displays tweets of 4Food mentions and Foursquare check-ins.


Customers As Marketers

Traditionally, the quality of food establishments spread either via word-of-mouth or through media coverage and reviews. As you may know, social media, not only operates under those same channels, but it also largely builds on and modernizes the way message is delivered. For establishments like 4Food, online marketers can pop open a conversation starter, join discussions and capitalize on mentions across the social Web to measure the effectiveness of the overall campaign. In both their Facebook and Twitter profiles, the 4Food people actually address their followers individually, enhancing client relationships and works as an extension of the customer service hotline.

The popularity of social networks as the number one time sinkhole online plus the readily-available in-store Wi-Fi and the ubiquity of Internet-enabled mobile devices push the social mentions further. These drive the customers to announce through tweets, Facebook status updates and blog posts where they are and share their comments or praises about their dining experience. Naturally, with 4Food being a new brand in town, their followers would chime in with comments, questions and soon an organic exchange of opinions is developed. Here, the marketers can address negative concerns and appreciate the well wishes; meanwhile, the entire conversation can boost curiosity for those yet to visit the new Manhattan burger joint. Then there are the check-ins through location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places.

Also, as we mentioned, you can name the burgers you create and market them online and every time that specifically named burger is ordered, 4Food grants you 25 cents in store credit. This is a very interesting element to their social media trails; ensuring word-of-mouth without investing on expensive product ads. And by giving their clients the power to customize the burgers they created, the company is building on the culture of ownership.

Their burgers can cost somewhere between $5 to $10, which, by NY standards, isn’t really very cheap and so the in-store credit becomes all the more appealing. Oh and add the probable influx of creativity from customer-crafted videos marketing their burgers, and the 4Food brand could be huge.

Tags: Facebook, Food, foursquare, internet marketing, social media marketing, Social Media Strategies, Twitter