Mecca was opened in 2005 when owner Paul Geshos took his love of coffee to a whole new level.
He opened a roastery in 2006 and a second espresso bar in Sydney in 2007, all in the quest to create premium coffee.
The bars offer espresso and other coffee brewing methods, each chosen to suit specific roasting styles and origins.
In addition, the business imports green coffee from top boutique growers around the world, which is roasted for use in Mecca’s bars and sold to wholesale and retail clients.
Mr Geshos and his team of crack baristas are constantly working to keep their satisfied customers up to date, improve roasts and blends, and research and source new beans and suppliers.
He reveals the blend of communications tools and social networking technologies that help them achieve the ideal coffee hit.
Coffee hit 1: Keep notes
Mr Geshos and his team use their Apple iPhone smartphones to take tasting notes of new coffees.
"When we get new coffees in we taste them and their log different attributes," he explains.
"That information is stored on a web server and can be accessed anywhere."
Mecca also uses Google Docs, a free web-based word processor and spreadsheet, to log their roast times.
"If we’re in the coffee bar and taste something that’s not quite right we can use our iPhones and a computer to track different roast times that may be affecting the taste, so it’s a great quality control tool."
Coffee hit 2: E-commerce and e-research
Mr Geshos travels a lot to source green beans, but also buys them via the online auction service Cup of Excellence.
In addition, Mecca’s baristas do all their coffee research online.
"There’s a forum called coffeed.com and that’s where professionals come to talk about their latest ideas and thoughts on coffee," he says.
"That’s quite a busy place."
Coffee hit 3: Keep it Tweet
"We use our iPhones to Twitter for the business, which is proving to be a great way to let our customers know what coffees we’ve got on offer," Mr Geshos enthuses.
"Twitter is also a great way to keep in touch.
"For example, I was recently at a trade show in the US and I could maintain contact with people associated with the coffee industry there, the guys here, and anyone following us was also kept up to date.
"We have 90 followers on Twitter so far and I see that as good.
We also just got the following vote on Twitter: Recommended to Mr Tweet, great in roasting circles as the innovator!"
Coffee hit 4: Create layers to interact
"We started using Facebook to keep our customers up to date, but Twitter is more user friendly. I like that it’s brief and in the moment.
"Our customers can also interact with us at the level they want. For example, they can come in for a coffee, but if they want to know more we have our website branded on our coffee bags and our business cards so people can visit those and engage on deeper levels."
And the web site is run like a blog to keep the content dynamic and interesting for the customers.
"We’re constantly changing our coffees because we buy our coffees seasonally, so a blog’s great for that," Mr Geshos explains.
"It allows us to differentiate ourselves and the customers can really drill down to who we are."
No comments:
Post a Comment