So, I check it out. Moments later, I have an email from Adam Wallace, their new media marketing guy telling me that they’d love to have me at their hotel, and that the winter blogger’s rate is $125 a night. (Remember, this is in Manhattan). Cool, I write back, and ask if I can book a room.

Not only do they give me a room. They have an upgrade available to a suite. So now I’m in heaven. But we don’t stop there.

They throw a TWEETUP for all the Twitter folks who want to come by. (pictures start around here). This is hosted by their other social media star, Brian Simpson, who between the two of us, gathered up quite a crowd of folks to an event where they bought the drinks, and where we had a little space just for us.

Why Do This?

Some of you already know the answer. Where will I stay the next time I go to New York? Who did I talk about every time someone asked me where I’m staying? Heck, I even brought them into my presentation at the O’Reilly Tools of Change event.

Heck, I even shot a video of my room!

So, ask yourself: if you could equip your customers to be excited, passionate carriers of your story, why wouldn’t you try a few things and see what worked?

Applebees Isn’t Lying

The bartenders at the Applebees where I ate knew everyone who came in, many by name. There were clearly lots of regulars here. But I was treated every bit as warmly, was brought into the jokes, and felt very much like a valued part of the evening. When I finished my meal and got up to leave, the bartender wished me a great night and invited me back. I felt with all my heart that he meant it.

The people working at the Applebees where I had my dinner truly lived the spirit of making it a neighborhood grill and bar.

Cafe-Shaped Business, Again

That’s how I first got to know Carolyn. That’s why I like buying comics from Mick. I think the purpose of us all figuring out blogging, figuring out twitter, accepting friendships in Facebook relates to this notion. I think the idea of putting a social network around our conferences so that you know the people before you get there is part of it.

We like to feel known. We like to feel wanted. We like to feel like we belong to something. It’s part of being human. And that’s where it comes back to you.

You are Important to Me

I try in many ways to make this obvious. I try to show you by speaking with you, by commenting back when I can, by responding to your messages and reading and commenting on your blogs, when I can. I friend you on the various services, and in general I connect.

To me, that’s the crux of what we can all do with these various outlets. We can reinforce that we appreciate someone, that we want to connect, that we like interacting with them, that we appreciate their business.

Are you using social media in that way? Are you using your blog to connect and to reach out and to tell people that you appreciate them? Look at what John does at Simply Gourmet. He has a customer of the day blog post.

Will it Scale?

No. No, it will not scale. You cannot — I cannot — maintain a 1:1 relationship with every single person who interacts with me. But I will go down trying. I think the same is true of using these tools within an organization. Only, the beauty is this: inside an organization, you can spread the connections out a bit. Not everyone has to talk with Tony Hsieh at Zappos. They might want to, but they will find that there are plenty of other great folks there.

Ditto Comcast. Ditto Dell. Ditto every brand that’s trying to figure out these tools and this space.

It will not scale, but if you want the bottom line return on investment value, you’d best remember to remind people that they’re important to you. And that’s what these tools do best. Lucky us.

John has a customer of the day post on his blog. See what he does? He brings the customers into the light. He makes the people in his space the star.

How simple. How perfect. I love the whole blog.

There are other small cafe blogs out there now, each with its own personality.

Are we seeing cafe-shaped businesses already? Learn from these people. Oh, and read Becky McCray. She lives and breathes this stuff where I dabble.

Not unlike my friend, Carolyn Jordan, Mick runs what I call a cafe-shaped business. He responds to small, personal interactions, and he has the loyalty of several nearby towns worth of nerds and parents as a reward.

The other day when I stopped by, Mick mentioned that he’s still thinking about his 3 words for 2009. He’s a regular reader of the blog. Do you know how rare that is? I live in northern Massachusetts, not Silicon Freakin’ Valley. The fact that Mick and I even know who each other are is rare.

Personal. Small. Cafe-shaped. Mick Galuski is the kind of guy you want to buy from.

And you? Have you written about the stars in your town?

But first, I have to tell you a bit of backstory about Carolyn Jordan.

The First Store

Imagine walking into a really small town bookstore, asking for a book, and realizing it’s not there. (Mind you, there’s not enough store to have the selection one would need). She offered to order it for me, and that it’d be in two days hence. Perfect, I said. I gave her my contact info, and then I left.

I came back a week later, as I walk in the door, Carolyn says, “Hi Chris. Your book’s here. I found something else you might like, too.” She remembered my name.

First important lesson: knowing someone’s name is a powerful magic for success.

Next, Carolyn had a suggestion for something else I might like. She knows books. She knows people. She did this repeatedly over the next several months. It’s why even when I had a great full time job, I’d work there over the holidays, because she was a book lover like me, and she loved hand-selling books to people who appreciated the reference.

The New Cafe-Shaped Store

Carolyn runs a very small store, You Are Here Books. It’s actually physically in the dining room of her home on a small country road. She has a tax ID. It’s a real business. Only, she hasn’t put up a website yet. Carolyn is actually selling directly to people like me.

We went there today to buy another $200 books for Toys for Tots (or whatever you call the teen segment of that program). She helped me find a whole bunch of great books, and as always, had lots of great conversational information about books she had out.

But not only that, Carolyn had out some crackers and brie, some grapes, and those kinds of things. Her husband, Tom, came home and I had a beer with him and talked even more about books. We spent another $100 of our own money for our own books with Carolyn.

And Social Media and Business Relates to this How?

That is the feeling I want from social media and how companies interact with it. It’s not huge. It’s like… 1915 sized. It’s this thing where people can spend a few extra moments to make a human connection instead of an “off the shelf” connection. I can buy from Amazon, and that’s sometimes convenient, but I can’t get the human touch of what I got with Carolyn.

That’s the time to use social media, when you want to reach people on a more personal and more connected way. It’s not always the path to more revenue. In fact, it’s definitely not as easy as just pushing a few clicks and having books sent to the house. But when you need a more personalized feeling, a more human experience, cafe-shaped is what social media does best.

What say you?

Oh, and if you want to talk books with Carolyn, you can call her – 978.257.3279 or email her: youareherebooks@gmail.com

Disclaimer First

Dear Ev and Jack and Biz – I am not in the Twitter needs lots of features camp. I am not. We saw what that did to the others. You made the right move, even when every pundit was clamoring for more. So, please, it’s okay to disregard this advice along with the rest. Maybe I’m just using you as a placeholder for *.next-wave-of-what-Twitter-has-shown-us-should-exist.

Two Channels: Commons and the Platform

The commons is all the @ messages, all the “I love Newman’s Own Organic Coffee at McDonalds” tweets. It’s the place where the real relationship building happens. The platform is where one says those things that might be of value, or of informational impact, of serious-ish and worthwhile note.

This permits people to opt into one of three types of feeds: commons only, platform only, or everything. It’s similar to the “only show me @ messages for people I’m subscribed to” option.

Some people love the commons. There’s a whole lot of people who want to have the full-featured conversation inside Twitter. I do. I love it all. I like the variety.

But others don’t want to use Twitter this way. They want it to be a very powerful platform for conveying data. That’s fine, too. Nothing wrong with that. I think there are lots of different ways people are looking to use the service.

Why This is Harder Than Just Satisfying Me

• There’s no mechanism in SMS for this. So a tweet from SMS would get dumped into whatever the default was (presuming the commons).

• It means a rewrite to the API.
• It means more rows in the database.
• It means a lot of app changes, and some usage changes.

Why It Just Might Be Worth It

Because the same functionality, some kind of “gate” factor, would allow for on-the-fly groups, would allow for “team-only” messaging, and would allow for some features I haven’t even really considered in this post.

One More Thing

How I would do the Commons and the Platforms segregation would be as follows:

• Tweet without a prefix: commons.
• P [body of tweet] – Platform
• C [body of tweet] – Commons

Similar to the DM function, D, and the @ function, @chrisbrogan. Just give a P and a C function call.

**Update: Per Howard Greenstein’s comment, I had another idea. What about “E” for emergency information. Used like:

E They just bombed Mumbai!!! (which should pop to the “alert” status) or whatever. Things like Amber alerts and the like would be in this category.

Throw stones. Agree. Disagree.

Photo credit, Gabu Chan