Magic Beans is Planting Seeds With Social Media

I have long been a fan of Magic Beans, a children’s store with five Boston-area locations, as both a marketer and consumer that shops in their stores. I have a great deal of admiration for Magic Beans’s use of email and social media marketing (and the integration of the two). I’ve been especially impressed by their willingness to experiment with and implement new platforms. Most notably, they created an app in partnership with AisleBuyer (click here for a video demo of the app) and worked with SnapApp on a 31 Days of Giveaways promotion that later won a MITX Award.

I sat down with Co-Founder Sheri Gurock for a chat recently. The following is a video of our conversation, in which she shares a bit of the Magic Beans history with me and provides some details about the creation of their app and the evolution of their use of social media.

If you can’t see the video above, click here to watch it.

I thought she made a very interesting point about the use of a mobile app for in-store payment enabling a business to re-focus their workforce and provide an even greater customer experience, whereas self-checkout has conventionally been thought of as a replacement for employees. I’ve always appreciated the customer-centric approach that Magic Beans takes and have documented some of their efforts to solicit customer feedback (see the tweet below).

https://twitter.com/#!/CutlerDave/status/136126549199044608

To read a Boston Globe review of the Magic Beans app (from when it first launched in 2010) by Scott Kirsner, you can click here.

Do you interact with a local business that you think does an excellent job with their social and digital efforts? I’d love to hear about it. Please share me with me below in the comments. Thanks!