Nothing comforts a broken heart like food. Punch Pizza, with seven Twin Cities locations reached out to passionate Vikings fans on Sunday on various social media sites offering a free pizza the next night to help them deal with the devastating NFC Championship loss to the Saints.
The result was nearly 10,000 pizzas given away (number from Punch Pizza), customers lined-up out the door, local TV news coverage and thousands of mentions on the web. Genius.
Few restaurants in the Minneapolis / St Paul area have been as savvy or active with social media as Punch Pizza and their latest interaction produced some incredible results.
Let’s look at a few of the ingredients to Punch’s most recent online success (they’ve had a few).
The Method: Punch has been socially active on the web for some time now. They use Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, Flick and their website. With over 5,000 Twitter followers of @punchpizza and 7,000 Facebook fans, Punch has plenty of customers to interact with.
Timing: I loved the fact that they were prepared and jumped into the mix at a time when social sites were busting with chatter from the game. Overtime has just ended, fans were crushed and Punch offered a small bit of light. Timing matters, Punch knew this.
The Offer: Punch was ready to roll with 2 offer options, one to celebrate a Vikings win, the other to comfort the masses with a Vikings loss. The Vikes lost and so Punch sent out a tweet and posted the offer to their Facebook page, free pizza was the cure.
The offer/coupon was posted to their Flickr page. All you had to do was print or show it on your phone to get a free pizza for dinner on Monday night. Punch has carried out multiple marketing campaigns that integrate all of their social tools together, which is always a great move.
Conversation Effect: Punch leveraged their community, network and customer base to turn a ripple into a wave. One offer, one tweet and one Facebook update created well over 3,000 clicks to their coupon.
This Twitter mention graph from Squawq shows how they generated over 370 tweets in 2 days, a massive spike form their normal mentions and activity.
Their Facebook status update gathered interaction from a few hundred in the form of “Likes” and comments. See a few of them below, wouldn’t you love this conversation about your business?
You can also factor in they gathered new followers and fans on these accounts thanks to the mentions and interaction.
Traditional Coverage: I haven’t been able to pin down from Punch Pizza if the local media was contacted or they picked up on the buzz from the social networks themselves, but Punch was featured on the 10pm news on KARE11. 30 seconds of air time showed sad Vikings fans getting cheered up waiting in line at Punch Pizza locations. (photo below from Kare11)
As one Vikings and Punch fan shared on camera: “I am really sad about yesterday because I thought this was the year and the pizza will definitely help because there is no better pizza. So, I’ll get over it real quick and we’ll put on our purple for next year,” says Tere Haas as she waited in line in the cold.
Outcome: I don’t know how you could ask for anything more out of a promotion like this. Social interaction, branding, traditional media coverage and 10,000 pizzas in the hands of your faithful and newly found customers is a huge win. I think you can measure this social media marketing and I’d bet they are pouring over the data generated past what I’ve outlined. 
Punch Pizza and their marketing minds (agency and/or internal) are commended for putting together a great social promotion. My only issue was that I wasn’t able to get to the Wayzata location last night and get my free pizza.
