Cha-ching! (2-9)

Calloway’s Nursery, headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, has had a long reach for a long time. With 17 stores in the Fort Worth/Dallas region and another couple of garden centers in Houston going by the name Cornelius Nursery, the Calloway's extended family is just that -- very extended.

Now, thanks to a relatively recent shift in marketing philosophy, Calloway's has grown some more -- at least in terms of its customer base. In 2009 the company started targeting younger, techno-savvy prospective gardeners by launching a social networking project that tapped the resources of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.

The move was the brainchild of Kimberly Bird, Calloway's vice president of marketing. Working with Kara Roberson, another marketing specialist at the company, Bird convinced Calloway’s management that the store needed to be in the virtual places these potential customers frequented. Suddenly, the chain had new “fans” in places they had never dreamed of visiting. The company uses the social network to share news, pictures, videos – the works. In the process of getting the word out, Calloway’s began bringing new customers in.

Bird takes special pride in the project. “Take a quick glance at the pages, and you can see that we’ve regularly and routinely updated content, and our network continues to grow.” she said. “We have links to our social networks across the bottom of our micro-site, mytexasgarden.com (there are plant tags in soil with the social network logos). Other than a $3,000 investment with an outside programmer who helped us, we did this all in house – during a lot of late evenings trying to get this up for Spring.”

The result: Calloway's reinvented itself to become the "in" garden center in the area among Gen X and techno-conscious Baby Boomer customers. The other result: A lot more "Cha-ching!"

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