Kara’s Cupcakes is a small business founded by Kara Lind in 2005 that sells cupcakes at six locations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. I first enjoyed these cupcakes at a birthday party and had to find out where to get more. Then I happened to watch an episode of Cupcake Wars on the Food Network, in which Kara competed and almost won. I had to have some cupcakes after that, so I visited the San Jose store and confirmed that hers were the best I’ve ever tasted (and no, I don’t have a relationship with the company; I just love their cupcakes!). So I decided to find out more about how this small business is using social media.
What’s the buzz?
To find out what people are saying about Kara’s Cupcakes online, I began by using the social monitoring tool, Social Mention (www.socialmention.com), which resulted in 176 mentions.
The following scores were calculated for Kara’s Cupcakes: 1. 1% strength which supposedly indicates the likelihood that a brand is being discussed in social media; being that Kara’s is a small local business, this score is not surprising; 2. 70:1 sentiment which indicates the ratio of mentions that are positive to those that are negative; this ratio fits with the majority of posts I read about Kara’s; 3. 16% passion which indicates the likelihood that those talking about a brand will do so repeatedly; and 4. 15% reach indicating how many unique customers are discussing the brand. Although this tool lists a breakdown of many different sources, I focused mainly on Google Blog Search, Twitter, and Facebook.
On the first page of 50 Google Blog results, 10 different blogs over just two days mention Kara’s Cupcakes and the enjoyment of them, so it appears that people like the products enough to blog about them. A direct search for Kara’s Cupcakes on Google Blog itself resulted in 17,400 hits. Randomly skipping to pages 10 and 28, I found more mostly positive comments about eating the cupcakes. I’m guessing most people who blog about Kara’s Cupcakes on their personal blogs do so if they like the cupcakes; I didn’t come across many negative blogs at all. Regarding specifics about what customers are saying about Kara’s, the majority of statements are similar to the following examples: “Nothing better than a cupcake at Kara's. I had the coconut filling + chocolate cake and it was divine!” “We left the store with four different cupcake flavors: fleur de sel, neopolitan, banana caramel and passion fruit cupcake. They were as awesome as we remembered it to be.”
Using Social Mention’s results, I also browsed 14 recent customer tweets, basically all of which mention trying Kara’s Cupcakes and liking them. Although only six Facebook entries were listed for the last two weeks, they were all also positive regarding the cupcakes.
Next I checked out the social monitoring tool How Sociable? (www.howsociable.com). This site provides an overall visibility score (unsure about the value of this), as well as a number of boxes representing various social media tools such as Twitter, that show a brand’s social media activity. Yahoo Images contains 1,500 images, many of cupcakes, posted by customers; Flickr contains 108 images, mostly cupcakes posted by customers; YouTube contains 12 videos posted by satisfied customers enjoying their cupcakes on camera; the Twitter results showed only six recent tweets in which those tweeting appear to be doing so using other social media including Foursquare and LikeList to originate their tweets. (I also tried searching Tweet Scan for customer tweets but it produced zero results.) Overall I did not find How Sociable? to be as helpful a social monitoring tool in this case; perhaps it would be more valuable for a company with a larger online social presence.
Finally, I reviewed recommendations on Yelp for “kara’s cupcakes” but since there are six locations, I chose the San Jose store to review more closely. Out of 581 reviews for this store, the average rating was 3 out of 5 stars. Most lowered starred comments centered on the priciness of the cupcakes and the taste (too sweet, too dry, other cupcakes were better); there were also some complaints about this particular store’s service, its tininess, and a smaller selection of flavors. The five other locations all had an average of 3 ½ or 4 stars each. With the volume of local reviews for each store on Yelp, this tool may be the best indicator of what people really think about the bakery and its cupcakes, and something for the company to keep an eye on.
Kara’s Cupcakes has a website at www.karascupcakes.com. The home page is uncluttered so the links to their Facebook and Twitter pages are easily noticeable, as well as the option to subscribe to their email list. This is the extent of social media actually present on the website.
Kara’s Facebook page shows close to 11,000 “people like this”. There is at least one wall posting a day (sometimes two or more) by the company that advertises an event or just the cupcakes in general, e.g. “Don't fumble and forget to pick up your Super Bowl 6-pack. Pre-order your Steelers or Packers logo cupcakes today!” Every posting has at least three or more comments, and they seem to be from customers usually praising their cupcakes. There are also daily postings by customers, the majority of which are positive. When a question is asked either in a posting or in the comments, an employee does respond back most of the time though this could be more consistent. When there are complaints, Kara’s does respond back in a positive way, as shown in the following example: “Kara's Cupcakes so sorry to hear that.... We will take your input and keep baking more! Thanks for the info....”
Kara’s Twitter page currently shows 3,781 followers. The company’s daily tweets are basically the same as their Facebook postings, with additional tweets about where the Karavan, their mobile cupcake bakery, will be stopping next to sell cupcakes. This serves as a way to get the word out and excite followers about the Karavan.
Facebook and Twitter are the only two social media tools that Kara’s Cupcakes seem to really be proactively using to communicate with customers. I think for a small company such as this one, it represents a good start. Customers do seem to be responding and creating content of their own regarding this company, I think mostly because they like the cupcakes. But while both social media tools are updated at least once daily, I would like to see a company blog created or a bit more personalized postings on Facebook and Twitter (rather than event listings) to help create more of a two-way conversation between Kara’s and their customers. Because Kara’s is small and local, using social media and more of it, could be very effective in boosting business in the future.
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