The Power of Social Media

September 7th, 2010

The words Social Media seem to be everywhere nowadays. In the Marketing and PR world, they are as common as the words “farm to table” are in the restaurant industry. While sites like Facebook and Twitter are great for advertising your business, they shouldn’t be a funnel for one-way communication. The goal should be to interact with your customers, engage and build a community. I wanted to share two recent experiences I’ve had with restaurants and Social Media, one a complete turn off and one who just got 2 more fans.

Back in July, a group of 8 of us went to see the Phantom of the Opera in one of it’s last performances in Atlanta. As the foodie of the group, it was up to me to pick the place. Since we wanted something in walking distance to the Fox (we didn’t want to have to pay for parking at 2 separate locations) we chose Publik, a so-called gastropub next door to the Fox. With it’s mediocre service and lackluster food apparent a short while into our visit, I began tweeting about it. That was over a month ago and I’ve not heard a peep or a tweet from Publik. Note: I wasn’t looking for a freebie, just an acknowledgment of the poor food / service and perhaps an apology.

Now just a couple weeks ago, I (well, really my friend Josh) had quite a different experience. I was on the Westside at the White Provisions complex, satisfying my appetite for King of Pops fix. In that same complex is Yeah! Burger, the somewhat new burger joint from Shaun Doty. I posted on Facebook about my delicious popsicle and Josh commented that he was at Yeah! Burger, noting the VERY slow service and the fact that they lost his order, although they were extremely nice about it. Mr. Doty himself saw the post and called the restaurant and had them comp Josh’s bill. Whoa! Was I ever blown away by that! FYI – Josh is a manager at a local Atlanta restaurant, so he’s all too familiar with customer service.

Now, both of these are extremes. I certainly don’t expect that every restaurant can keep tabs on their mentions on Social Media sites as well as Yeah! Burger. And it was probably just a fluke that Mr. Doty happened to see the convo on my Facebook wall. Or perhaps there’s some fancy doodle software for monitoring such mentions that I am unaware of.

But, on the other hand, when your customer clearly has had a bad meal and/ or experience, AND they are letting you know about it, it is probably a good idea to reach out and try to make it right, even it it’s just an apology. I know that you can’t satisfy everyone and some are just out to bash a restaurant in hopes of a free meal. However, I waited for about 3 weeks before posting about my lousy Publik experience, giving them an opportunity to reach out to me (which I would have happily noted in my post), but they never did. They haven’t unfriended me on Facebook either.