Starting, Owning and Marketing A Restaurant Blog|Starting and Owning a Restaurant - Construction, Planning, Marketing, Opening and Managing a New Restaurant

In a previous post (April 3, 2009 - Restaurant Social Networking), I wrote about sites like Twitter, Facebook and Yelp. These social networking tools allow you to build personal relationships with people who share your interests and want to talk about the same subjects - hopefully, your restaurant.

The key point I was trying to develop was that a restaurant owner only has a relatively small amount of time to devote to social marketing (and/or networking). Running a restaurant consumes a huge part of your day, leaving only small inconsistent amounts of “free” time to work on marketing projects. Large restaurant chains embrace social networking sites as a method to build their brand. The chains have staff they can assign to this part of their marketing plan. Independent restaurants rarely can afford such a luxury.

In the case of our new restaurant, we want to use Internet social networking, but achieve these goals:

• Reach as many of our customers and potetial customers as possible.
• Use as little time as possible to commit to the long term project.
• Get the community involved including groups, charities and municipalities.
• Interact with all segments of our demographic.

The location of the restaurant is in a small suburban town adjacent to one of the largest commercial markets in Florida (Tampa Bay area). The location happens to be within several blocks of the intersection of several other communities, which all have their own identities. This crossroads location can be a networking nightmare or we can use it to our advantage.

We are going to research the development of a blog to tie the whole area together as one marketing community for us and our other business networking users. Sound complicated? Not really. A blog could;

• Keep track of events in all of the surrounding small communities.
• Allow our business customers to offer their services online.
• Become a focal point for charities to advertise their events and fund raising projects.
• Become a focal point for new residents to find information about the multi-community area.
• Allow our guests to have interactive comments about our food, service and dining experience.

Remember that all of the businesses, charitable groups, social clubs and similar organizations have employees, members, sponsors and participants that we want to reach. That allows us to have a broad communication approach to a large part of the potential customers and existing guests located in a wide radius of the restaurant.

The downside to our plan is the time commitment initially is significant, but in the long run, customers, business partners and community social groups will supply fresh content on a routine basis. It takes only minutes to update a blog, leaving more time to other operations of the restaurant.

More about our research, plan and progress coming in future posts.