Social Networking – The Downside for Restaurants Starting to Appear
You probably don’t know this but I am a 35 year old, tall, dark and handsome gentleman. I have homes in Florida, France and New York, two airplanes and a 200 foot yacht. Now if you believe that, I will write a review about your restaurant too!
As you can easily determine, you can be whatever you want to be on the Internet. You have the complete literary freedom to write what you want, be who you want and be as mean, nasty and underhanded as you want. Therein spotlights a major issue for restaurants who actively get involved with social networking. Your competition, disgruntled employees, unhappy and unreasonable customers can create havoc if they choose to write untruthful reviews about your business.
Once you have committed to participate, problem number two is finding the time necessary to spend responding to comments (good or bad). After you start getting involved with sites like Yelp, MySpace, Twitter and dozens of other Internet social networks, discontinuing your participation is difficult without the appearance of not caring or, even worse, ignoring negative reviews may suggest that the comments are accurate.
Even more frightening is the recent accusations that Yelp is manipulating the results if you pay fees for advertising presence. There are charges made by restaurant owners around the country that sales people for Yelp are offering higher ratings if you sign up for their services. True or not, the freedom to do this on any review site always exists.
Arguably, these sites have limited value. In fact, as more abuse reports start to become common, they may even lose all value as a marketing tool. Pure restaurant review sites are already useless since many restaurateurs flood these with flowering reviews of their operation. I have seen restaurant reviews with duplicate wording for the same restaurant on several sites. Very unlikely that someone unrelated to the restaurant would take the time to post these glowing reviews on multiple sites.
Remember a relatively small number of your customers use these networks as a method to choose a restaurant. If you are squeezing 25 hours a day into a 24 hour clock, your time might be more productive with other forms of marketing.
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Hey! You look a lot like a Baldwin brother
I do agree with you that social networking can be a huge time sink, but it really depends on your target audience. The local casual eatery that caters mostly to seniors and families can forgo Facebook and a blog, but a hip brewpub in the city might HAVE to spend time establishing a presence on social media to be taken serioulsy by tech-savvy 20-somethings.