Building A Web Presence: Works For Cosi Cafe
September 6, 2008 – 8:18 pm | by Daryl TayOne of my favourite franchises in New York is Cosi Cafe, and I spent quite a bit of time at their outlets while I was there. One thing Cosi does well is maintaining a good web presence.
Their website is divided into the US States, with individual addresses of the outlets listed. This means one can enter it on Google Maps and find it fairly easily. Or, even easier, typing “Cosi Cafe, New York” in the Google Maps search bar turns up the various locations in Manhattan, so all you have to do is choose the one closest to you.
What really blew me away was when I was trying to find this one particular Cosi Cafe outlet that I particularly liked. I didn’t remember anything about it, other than it was near the Natural History Museum. I had walked out a different exit last December and it was dark, so I randomly walked in one direction and stumbled upon the place. So I did Google Map search and looked a a couple which were rather close to the Museum, and chose Google’s Street View and saw this
Maybe you can’t see it from the image, but it’s next to a hair salon called “Curl Up And Dye”, which I remember from my previous trip (how do you forget a name like that?).
The lesson here? In a place like Manhattan, or Tokyo, or Hong Kong, or Singapore, where choice is endless, you may have people like me who adore your brand, or just a random tourist searching for “coffee in New York” or “shoes in Hong Kong”.
Unlike Kingston, you can’t afford to not be reaching out on the web with a website, a blog, a Facebook account, pictures, videos and other user-generated content, because people will be searching for your vertical, and if they can’t find you, you can bet they’ll find your competitor instead.
Tags: cosi cafe, curl up and dye, google maps, google street view, hong kong, manhattan, natural history museum new york, new york, Singapore, tokyo
