Franchise Update Magazine Issue II, 2011 | Page 33

Turning purchases into conversations
By Robbie Vitrano

I

n launching Naked Pizza, our argument has never been
that a healthier pizza is going to save the day, but rather
that every “new” business should and can have a social
strategy—a strategy that positively affects someone or
something along the continuum. If you don’t, then maybe
you don’t have a business. To us, mission, profit, and scale are
inseparable. So far, so good.
Our thought process has been that as long as we execute
on the disciplined business end of the arrangement—operations, operations, operations—coupled with a social consciousness and some science under the hood, customers will see a
benefit. Combine this with cool technology and something
we call “Cha-Ching 2.0” and purchases can now immediately
be turned into conversations. At a minimum we would have
a business that makes money, and possibly a new business
meme altogether.
Naked Pizza was the first company to remove its name from
the sign out front and replace it with its Twitter handle. That
catapulted us onto blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable. It
was part of gaining the backing of two billionaires (Mark Cuban and Robert Kraft), more than 6,000 franchising inquiries,
and today, 18 months later, we’re opening stores at a clip of 5
per month with more than 400 in the pipeline.
The velocity gained by having a mission and model that fits the
social platform wins us investment and media interest, powers recruitment, sells pizza, and equally important, allows for a relatively small
company to gain necessary leverage in establishing its supply network.
Remarkably, we have become an international case study
for use of social media, featured in hundreds of blogs like Socionomics.com and even on Twitter.com for business alongside Dell, Starbucks, Levi’s, and JetBlue for social media proficiency. We’ve received similar recognition for our embrace
of social media from The New York Times to Entrepreneur and
most recently QSR magazine, which named us the fourth
most-influential brand in the category—an entirely new level
of absurdity given that Starbucks with almost 20,000 more

Grow Market Lead

Case study:
Naked Pizza

locations than us was ranked number one. So does that mean
we’re a more viable and thus valuable company? We think so.
Our view is that all transactions are conversations—social.
In addition to what you sell, there is an equally intense interest in who you are—mostly because people are interested in
what a purchase or brand association says about who they are.
To facilitate this level of interaction we’ve created a rich
publishing platform that works across social sites ranging
from Facebook to Flickr to YouTube, which allows us to post
a variety of content that reveals our story and allows our customers to comment and contribute. These are contextually
linked across a digital platform that includes our website and
our blog, as w