Since I’m on a roll with Starbucks and coffee, (I had my double cappuccino this morning with non-fat milk-see last blog at www.whywebpr.blogspot.com), I thought I would research how Starbucks Coffee Company is using social media.

            Starbucks already has a strong presence in social media. You can visit their Facebook, or if you are a Twitter fanatic you can find them there. Starbucks Twitter account has over 185,000 followers and the Facebook page has nearly 1.5 million fans.

            Starbucks has recently launched “the biggest marketing effort it has undertaken,” according to the New York Times. The coffee company is displaying posters in major cities, and then challenging people to be the first to find and tweet a picture of their posters. Starbucks has other social media initiatives planned for this campaign. One is a contest for store employees to submit headlines for future ads and YouTube videos with coffee experts talking about Starbucks coffee. Starbucks’ social media presence gave it an advantage over competitors with gigantic ad budgets because its fans wanted to talk about it online. The idea for the Starbucks photo contest came from watching what people already do on Facebook and Twitter.

            The reason for companies building this presence, I observed, is that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are ways of reaching many of your clients and building a relationship with them-and that’s what we call PR. It’s the building of a relationship with the public. You want to engage in interesting topics with blogging and microblogging using sites like Twitter where you have to express an entire thought in only 140 characters.

            The largest coffee company in the world seems to be catching on.