Friday was a fun and interesting day for me.  Julio Ojeda-Zapata (tech writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press) summed up the day’s events nicely.  For the sake of this post, I’ll just say that a movement was started centering around the idea of Chipotle opening their doors a little earlier, and serving Breakfast Burritos (I know right?).  I thought I would recap from my point of view what was a cheap, and easy way to facilitate a social media movement, which could be applicable to infinate other ideas.  Here goes:

Step 1: Find the influencers

Social media buzz is difficult to create on your own.  However, with a few of the right people, you can quickly reach a wide audience who will in turn reach their audience, and so on.  In this case, I mentioned Chipotle Gift cards as currency on twitter, and I have a relatively small following (about 175 people).  But Jon Mierow, who is active in the Twin Cities Social Media Scene, has more followers (218), but more importantly is connected to some bigger influencers.  Within minutes after Jon proclaimed his desire for Breakfast Burritos at Chipotle, Mike Keliher (1600+ followers) and Julio Ojeda-Zapada (1100+ folowers; the guy is writing a book about twitter, not to mention being a burrito connoisseur) were chiming in and bringing our movement to the eyeballs of 2,000+ people (their followers probably have some overlap).

By myself, I really don’t pull much weight (no seriously, I’ve tried).  But with the right influencers on board, a movement was born.   Find the influencers to help create buzz, and get them in on a movement before you start spending your press.

Step 1.5: Share it, don’t sell it.

(since this is a 3 step post, I had to squeeze this in as a half step).  In the case of #chipotlebreakfast, none of us have any commercial or monetary interest in the movement.  We just all happened to agree that this would be completly awesometastic.  If you are running a business, and looking to leverage Social Media for profit, get creative about what “movement” you want to start.

An example from my day job: I don’t don’t think I could easily get people on board with a “5 Alarm Music” Movement.  Getting people to commit to a brand is very difficult (but bravo if you can accomplish this).  I might have some luck, however getting people on board with “People Against Sucky Spots and Promos” (PASSAP) movement.  Don’t aim for the sales bullseye with your movement, aim for the fringes where people might join you, and then ask themselves “who is this company anyway? What are they all about?”

Step 2: Act quickly

In the case of #chipotlebreakfast, Mike called for a “full court press” at 9:22 am, I purchased “chipotlebreakfast.com” at by 9:55 (this was the only thing I spent money on: $18 for private regestered domain), setup the twitter account by 10:06, opened the site for registration, and invited the influencers to write by 12:17pm, and finally I setup the facebook group around 2:00pm.

This quick movement allowed the buzz to trickle out from twitter, to the blogosphere, to facebook, and beyond very quickly.  I might have suggested getting all of these things in place ahead of time for a pre-planned movement, but honestly–the impromptu nature of this, and keeping the followers posted along the way seemed to add to the excitement.  I think if this got started, and suddenly the blog, facebook group, etc were already up and polished, users might smell a sales pitch and be less likely to commit to the cause.

By Saturday morning, I had 3 blog posts (two of which were not written by me),  15 blog comments (I’m lucky if I get 2  comments on a post here!), over 90 “tweets” about #chipotlebreakfast, a facebook group with almost 100 members and growing, AND (get ready) an official response from Chipotle!  That’s right folks, after less than 24 hours, we few Minnesotan, burrito lovers got the attention of one of the fastest growing fast food companies in the world!

Step 3: Social Media Tools are cheap and easy; Diversify.

As I already mentioned, the only money I spent was buying the domain name–and even that wasn’t a must.  I could have set up the blog on wordpress.com (actually, I did at first, then I changed to self hosted wordpress b/c I like it better), or blogger.com.   Facebook and twitter were also free.  I could have used any number of other outlets to spread the word, here is a short list of free online social communities that could be effective in creating buzz:

• myspace (annoying ads aside, this still has a huge reader base, and is still a big player in social media)
• ning.com (very easy way to start an online community)
• plurk, pownce, tumblr, etc (these are all micro-blogging sites similar to twitter)
• last.fm, or pandora.com (music sites for a burrito movement? Sure, why not? Music is an easy way to connect with people.  Create a channel which represents your movement.  For example, “The 90s were so mint” by rockworms.com –does anyone want to volunteer to make “breakfast burrito radio”?
• Youtube, Vimeo, or Blip.tv (if you have means to do it, bring some video content to the table.  Our attention spans are much too short to read long-winded blogposts like this one.

The point is, use more than one avenue to reach your audience.  Twitter is a fantastic online community, but 3/4 of my friends either haven’t heard of it, or if they have, they just don’t get it.  Diversify your channels of exporting information to the masses (or in this case, the hundred(s(ish)).

I will keep you (both) posted on #chipotlebreakfast.  The “probably not” response from Joe @ Chipotle HQ took a little wind out of our sails, but overall it is apparant that this touched a nerve with hundreds of people, and more than likely there are thousands more that would hop on board too if they heard about it.