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

OK, I have decided to be a tall, dark, handsome, virile, young, intelligent, rich, witty man! I can do that on the Internet. I might even steal a picture of one of the football quarterback brothers in the Manning family and use that on any profiles I fill out. I can do that too - on the Internet. Of all this flattery, I am tall and a male……

Of course, I can also be a nasty competitor, a disgruntled employee well disguised,  a jealous suitor of one of my employees or even someone I have offended in some way over the years. All of these are possible, while totally concealing my identity - on the Internet.

The freedom the Internet allows can have a dark side. A restaurant owner friend recently relayed a story to me about an experience on Twitter. He had a growing following for his four south Florida restaurants. The hype about “social restaurant marketing” motivated him to commit to building a presence and encourage feedback “tweats” about his operations. In the beginning he was encouraged while gaining several hundred friends.

Then it started. Negative comments started to come in. At first the restaurant owner responded with apologies and forthright answers. The nasty comments increased. He started to suspect one person was responsible for most, if not all, the bad reflections on his operations, staff and food. The “tweats” were strangely similar in use of terms, language and mis-spellings. Each used email addresses from one of the  free services such as gmail, yahoo and hotmail and others.

After a month he felt like a bear swatting bees while raiding the honeycomb. The time and effort trying to not only respond, but figure out who was creating this havoc wasn’t worth the effort. He abandoned Twitter. It could have been Facebook, MySpace or any of the other social marketing sites.

The Internet has a dark side, just like real life. The only difference is anonymity.

Even after removing his Twitter account, he had another problem from customers who enjoyed the good aspects of the communication. They wanted to know why he stopped and why they couldn’t “tweat” with the restaurant any more. Explaining wasn’t easy.

Remember the chains can have a few negative comments (they always do), but they use the social sites for coupons and promotions. Negative issues are discussed, but they are used to a few disgruntled guests. Independent restaurants have a much smaller following and rarely have to deal with a lot of negative comments unless you irritate an Internet terrorist who floods the social marketing sites, restaurant review sites and anywhere they can make a small business respond to false, derogatory references. Small restaurant owners don’t have an IT staff to handle Internet restaurant marketing.

Bottom line is if you own a new restaurant and are looking for ways to market your product, be careful about committing to the time and effort Internet social restaurant marketing requires to maintain your presence. The revelations about the horrors of social sites are beginning to emerge. Do your research to make certain you have the time to keep up with your communications. Is it worth the effort? In my opinion, there are much more productive ways to communicate with your guests without the risk and time commitment.

We are in the midst of building our social marketing blog for the new restaurant. The basic structure can be viewed at Maggie’s City Center. While the design, colors and other aesthetics may be slowly tweaked, the elements are pretty much static.

Now is when the marketing begins along with the real value of maintaining the blog. Our plan will include;

• Getting content for the site by discussing it with individual customers as they come in. We want to get business people listed in the reference sections of the blog. The communication builds loyalty and establishes long term connections.
• The second step is to visit the municipal offices of each community listed to get the accurate contact names and numbers of key officials. We also want emergency numbers for services. Each of these visits will include dropping off some of our menus and encouraging the city staffs to join us for lunch or breakfast.
• Next we will target each of the social groups such as Rotary, Sertoma, Optimists and various other business associations to encourage them to get us their event and charitable activities posted to advertise their community efforts. Again, it gives us an opportunity to invite groups of people to our restaurant.
• Concurrent with the steps above we will invite public cultural centers and their members and/or staffs to participate. That includes art centers, marine preserves, wildlife societies and similar facilities to keep their activities in public view by giving us releases on their activities.
• Finally, we will visit individual businesses to encourage them to list their names, addresses and services in our “Yellow Pages” of local business people.

After we have started to collect enough content for the site to have value to our guests, we will begin an advertising campaign to drive traffic to the site. This will include flyers and handouts for each guest and an email to our marketing list of over 1600 opt-in email customers.

This is our answer to the social marketing initiative. It gives us the ability to reach a greater percentage of our customers and prospective customers. We are trying to build long term personal relationships, not just a brand.