Fit Fuel Twitter Use in the Wall Street Journal

Posted on August 6, 2008
Filed Under Chief Health Officer (the CEO)

So it seems that my tweets on Twitter about crazy Vegas nights, being stuck in airports or my desperate attempts at cooking are finally becoming appreciated by someone, somewhere out there. Recently, the Wall Street Journal contacted us because we are one of only a handful of companies that truly embraced Twitter on the corporate level. They wanted to learn more about our use of Web 2.0 and social media tools to enhance our business.

Here is the resulting article and blog post that accompanied it:

Wall Street Journal Fit Fuel article:
Wall Street Journal Blog:

Since the articles didn’t have enough room to capture the full essence of why we all go out of our way to tweet at Fit Fuel, I thought I’d expand a bit on the reporter’s comments. Here are some of the main reasons Fit Fuelers tweet:

1. Internal Communication - it builds culture by encouraging our employees to interact in ways that they might not normally interact. This is, after all, how twitter was first conceived. It happened to grow into a social networking tool or micro-blogging tool, but it still has tremendous application at the corporate “intranet” level.

2. Relationship Building with our Customers - what kind of relationship would you have with your girlfriend if you saw her once a month? it’s hard! as a business, we’re not into long-distance relationships. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of relationship that most businesses have with their customers - the customers might interact with them once every 2 months when they need to make a purchase. Twitter helps us interact with our customers on a daily basis (or, in my case, sometimes 5x per day), and it’s much easier to establish a healthy relationship that way. Long distance relationships entail having as much sex as possible on every visit (read: purchases), and sometimes that becomes the central focus (of the business); ours is more like vines winding and weaving their way around each other - we end of building solid, long-lasting bonds. We have a vision of a Fit Fuel 10, 15, even 20 years down the road. Will we still have some of the same customers that we have today? I think so.

3. Feedback - often times, we ask our customers and twitter friends for feedback on ideas and business decisions. And we take the feedback that we get seriously! We like our customers to drive our business, so when we are considering a new idea, our customers are the first place that we look. We are customer-centric in all of our processes, and twitter helps us in those efforts.

4. Personal Stuff - yes, twitter is 90% personal. I use it because I’m the type of person who enjoys sharing his experiences with others and hearing about the experiences of other people. That’s why I follow so many people on Twitter - I’m curious about the world, curious about what people are doing and generally interested in life and ways that I can improve my own life and our company.

The Wall Street Journal seemed surprised that I would tweet about being hungover and worried that customers might view that negatively. I responded that most of our customers, even the healthy ones, know what it feels like to be hungover, and that’s something we can all relate to. At the end of the day, isn’t being able to relate to people one of the most important parts of any kind of relationship building, even that between a business and its customers?

5. Find People - Twitter helps us vet potential employees and develop relationships with people who want to be involved with the vision of our company. We have hired at least one person from Twitter thus far, and we always give twitter inquiries strong consideration. Why? Because even though we are fundamentally a health company (that happens to have an online store), technology is a big part of what we do - a large portion of the back-end work that we do is engineering and tech related. So, if someone is having a hard time learning twitter (or video-conferencing with us on Skype, for that matter), we can safely assume they aren’t tech-savvy enough to work here. Twitter is also something that tends to attract the kind of forward-thinking, adventurous and extroverted people that we want to be a part of our team.

6. It gives us something to do while we’re waiting in lines.

I’ve been asked why I would waste my time with something so trivial. My 800 followers, after all, (at the time of this writing) is a seemingly immaterial part of our customer base. Those 800 followers are among our best, though. And I believe that relationship building takes time. I probably spend 10 minutes/day twittering. I value my time more than anyone I know, and am constantly looking for shortcuts or ways to free up more of my time, so I would not be twittering if I did not see a tremendous benefit for the “cost” of my time. That benefit is not easily measured in dollars.

At the end of the day, if one of my friends sees a tweet from me that I am at the Wynn playing poker and he shows up to join me, that alone is worth every tweet I’ve ever tweeted. The more I can spend time with people I enjoy being around, the better. If it enhances our company in any way, that is like icing on the cake.