If you'd like to grab some attention for your business on social media, A&W Restaurants is currently providing a training manual on a fun-filled way to do it.
The venerable, nearly century-old chain has refreshed its brand for young customers with witty social-media campaigns that rely on humor, self-created insults, and obvious fakery featuring its revived '70s mascot Rooty Root Bear.
To sum up, someone on A&W Restaurants' media team has been reading Ryan Holiday's recent book Trust Me I'm Lying, and then taken the strategies to a new level of absurdity. By being transparently fake instead of sneaky, though, the chain makes it all for laughs. Meanwhile, A&W has slyly racked up a real Facebook audience of more than 154,000.
What exactly is A&W up to? Here's a trio of recent social/mobile promotional activities at A&W:
- The app that burps. Like everyone else in the chain restaurant industry, A&W now has a mobile app. But A&W's is of Rooty Root Bear burping. Gotta be a hit with the kids.
- The LinkedIn 'scandal.' Recently, A&W sent out press releases announcing that Rooty Root Bear was now on LinkedIn and handing out recommendations to friends (the one I was sent was for a member of the PR team, naturally). Since LinkedIn does not allow fictitious persons to have profiles, the move was no doubt made just so Rooty would get banned from LinkedIn. Rooty's ouster provides the setup for the faux protest movement now featured on A&W's Facebook page and #RootyIsReal Twitter campaign. A slick protest video with Star Wars-style graphics tips the hand that A&W knew that would happen. There's no chance LinkedIn will reinstate the cartoon bear's page, but the true mission -- rallying fans, having a laugh, and building audience engagement -- has been achieved. A recent Facebook post about the protest got 140 likes.
- The YouTube meme. Next, A&W hopped on the recent Harlem Shake dance craze, creating a video that purports to be 'antique' black-and-white footage from the '70s, showing dozens of Rooty Root Bears doing the Shake in front of an old-time A&W restaurant. We all know they had color film in the '70s...but it's still funny. And a canny way to get more views, since traffic from people searching for Harlem Shake videos may turn up A&W's version.
On Twitter, of course, where cartoon avatars are common, A&W has been able to give their own @awrestaurants handle the descriptor "Rooty the A&W Root Bear" instead of a corporate feel. Rooty is coming up on 4,000 Twitter followers.
This campaign also provides a primer on the different flavors of social media, and how brands need to present in a unique way on each platform. Interestingly, A&W doesn't appear to have a corporate LinkedIn profile, now that its bear has been banned. Search turns up nothing, and the company site pointedly plugs A&W's presence on Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
LinkedIn isn't a prime platform for building rapport with diners anyway, so it's probably no big loss, at least short-term. But A&W may long for the easy resume research LI provides if it's ever looking for workers to hire.
