This is my first post to the Grange Hall Media site. The basic idea behind Grange Hall Media builds on the notion that there is a basic relationship between the way people use social media and how they communicate about food. For example, when you eat at a great restaurant, where everything was perfect, the food, the service, the atmosphere, you want to tell everyone you know about it. Obviously, before the Internet, you’d share your experience with friends, but what they did with the information was up to them. Some might forget about your advice, while others might not tell anyone else about it, regardless of their experience. Today, your recommendations get saved in perpetuity and can be spread exponentially. With social media tools such as Yelp and Citysearch, you’ve become an ‘influencer at large.’ The amount of friends you have and can influence is not really so important anymore, it’s about how many strangers you reach.
The dynamics have also changed relating to how a restaurant can influence customers. They have an important new role in getting the word out about their restaurant. Great word of mouth has always been an effective a tool for increasing business, but there has never been a way to monitor it. Today, using Social Media, restaurant marketers must cull all the comments about their business and make them available online. There are bound to be negative comments, you can’t please ‘em all, but if you have 1000 comments and 5 are bad, well, you’re doing great and people reading the comments are 99.5% sure they’ll get a great experience rather than the .5% bad experience. Don’t forget though, those negative comments are a great way to address problems in your system that you may have overlooked.
So now, the opportunity for great word of mouth to be used by business is a two way street. Your customers can still publish their thoughts about an experience they had at your restaurant, but you are now no longer hostage to their comments. You have the power to respond (through quality improvement), leverage the number of comments you’re receiving (through greater online presence), and to highlight the best aspects of your restaurant (like ’10 best pizzas in boston’). If a lot of people are simply talking about your restaurant (even with a couple of negative comments), isn’t that the best possible marketing you can have? Wouldn’t you want to take advantage of that as much as possible?
Tags: citysearch, food, grange hall media, Social Media, yelp