How to Manage Your Restaurant’s Online Reputation.
3inShare
1Managing your online reputation is imperative to the success of your restaurant.
You can find out who’s discussing you, if it’s positive or negative, who is saying things and so much more. There are a lot of free tools to help, but you really need to set aside some time to check this on an ongoing basis (I know, like you need more work) and set-up some alerts so you know what is being said about you (and your competitors). With the advent of Google Glasses (yes they are real glasses filled with technological wonder), mobile, check in sites like Foursquare and most importantly how Google has partnered with Zagat - you need to keep your restaurant’s reputation almost perfect, but definitely positive.
If you don’t monitor and maintain your reputation online your business could close it’s doors simply due to malicious competitors and something you weren’t aware of. The review sites are getting much better at recogonizing spam and non-legit complaints, but you are the ultimate master of your universe.
What do you do if someone says bad things about you? Whether it’s on your own Facebook or on someone else’s Facebook - you have to be transparent. No business is infallible, we all make mistakes or hire the wrong people. How do you respond to negative critisim? Be honest. “I’m sorry we made a mistake, let us make it up to you. Please direct message me.” Try and take all of the negativity offline. If you feel someone is being ridiculous you can take an educated gamble. Sometimes the community will jump in on your behalf and tell them they are being ridiculous and/or discuss the positives. Do not get a “fake profile” to mitigate this. People are generally happy when two things happen a) they’ve been heard and feel important b)when you give them free stuff. By free stuff you don’t have to comp their whole meal, you can gauge what their beef is and how you make them happy by using the chicken wing theory. (If you get your staff involved in social media you can print it out and empower them to make decisions.)
The first thing you do is register your restaurant’s name with a domain provider, such as 1and1.com or GoDaddy.com, with the word sucks at the end e.g. www.YourRestaurantNameSucks.com. Buy all of them - the .info, mobi as well as the .com. Register it as private. There are people who think this redundant nowadays, but I’d rather grab it now than fight it later. For the $20 bucks it’s worth the money in the long term, in my opinion. Grab other ones if they make sense too. For example if your restaurant name has a “the” in front, buy them with and without. Also if there are other restaurants with your name in the US get www.YourRestaurantNameSuckLocation.com (while you’re there you may want to grab your own with your location and without the sucks part). In my opinion, you don’t need all of the bells and whistles except the website address (domain), the private registration and it’s up to you if you want to protect it. I’d buy it for a couple of years at least. You can just buy them for one year, but it’s a hassle to remember to renew (they remind you a lot!).
Here’s how you can do some quick checks to see what is being said about you. First you need to understand the keywords involved. Make sure you search your business name as one word as well as with spaces, as the website, as the chef, the owner, all the variables you can think of. I set some up daily and weekly. If you don’t know what an alert is look below.
For example (and you only need to set these up once) our business is ColdTech Commercial (best warranty - shameless plug), so I check and set-up alerts for these:
How to set-up an alert in Google:
Places you can monitor what is happening
Here is a really great long document from a great company about what other things you could be doing. It is long, worth a read and a bit technical.
Download it here: http://outspokenmedia.com/downloads/ORM-Guide.pdf
If you have any questions please ask. info@coldtechcommercial.com please put attention: ColdTech Kerry in the subject line.
1Managing your online reputation is imperative to the success of your restaurant.
You can find out who’s discussing you, if it’s positive or negative, who is saying things and so much more. There are a lot of free tools to help, but you really need to set aside some time to check this on an ongoing basis (I know, like you need more work) and set-up some alerts so you know what is being said about you (and your competitors). With the advent of Google Glasses (yes they are real glasses filled with technological wonder), mobile, check in sites like Foursquare and most importantly how Google has partnered with Zagat - you need to keep your restaurant’s reputation almost perfect, but definitely positive.
If you don’t monitor and maintain your reputation online your business could close it’s doors simply due to malicious competitors and something you weren’t aware of. The review sites are getting much better at recogonizing spam and non-legit complaints, but you are the ultimate master of your universe.
What do you do if someone says bad things about you? Whether it’s on your own Facebook or on someone else’s Facebook - you have to be transparent. No business is infallible, we all make mistakes or hire the wrong people. How do you respond to negative critisim? Be honest. “I’m sorry we made a mistake, let us make it up to you. Please direct message me.” Try and take all of the negativity offline. If you feel someone is being ridiculous you can take an educated gamble. Sometimes the community will jump in on your behalf and tell them they are being ridiculous and/or discuss the positives. Do not get a “fake profile” to mitigate this. People are generally happy when two things happen a) they’ve been heard and feel important b)when you give them free stuff. By free stuff you don’t have to comp their whole meal, you can gauge what their beef is and how you make them happy by using the chicken wing theory. (If you get your staff involved in social media you can print it out and empower them to make decisions.)
The first thing you do is register your restaurant’s name with a domain provider, such as 1and1.com or GoDaddy.com, with the word sucks at the end e.g. www.YourRestaurantNameSucks.com. Buy all of them - the .info, mobi as well as the .com. Register it as private. There are people who think this redundant nowadays, but I’d rather grab it now than fight it later. For the $20 bucks it’s worth the money in the long term, in my opinion. Grab other ones if they make sense too. For example if your restaurant name has a “the” in front, buy them with and without. Also if there are other restaurants with your name in the US get www.YourRestaurantNameSuckLocation.com (while you’re there you may want to grab your own with your location and without the sucks part). In my opinion, you don’t need all of the bells and whistles except the website address (domain), the private registration and it’s up to you if you want to protect it. I’d buy it for a couple of years at least. You can just buy them for one year, but it’s a hassle to remember to renew (they remind you a lot!).
Here’s how you can do some quick checks to see what is being said about you. First you need to understand the keywords involved. Make sure you search your business name as one word as well as with spaces, as the website, as the chef, the owner, all the variables you can think of. I set some up daily and weekly. If you don’t know what an alert is look below.
For example (and you only need to set these up once) our business is ColdTech Commercial (best warranty - shameless plug), so I check and set-up alerts for these:
- ColdTech Commercial
- Cold Tech Commercial
- ColdTech Appliances
- ColdTechComm (our Twitter account)
- ColdTech Kerry (me)
- Coldtech Comm
- Cold tech comm
- Cold tech Kerry
- Coldteck (misspellings are good)
- Domenic Dotto (our GM)
- Coldtechcommercial.com
- www.coldtechcommercial.com
- Danby coldtech (our parent company)
- Danby cold tech
- Danby commercial
- I set up alerts for our competitors and also for industry information
How to set-up an alert in Google:
Places you can monitor what is happening
Here is a really great long document from a great company about what other things you could be doing. It is long, worth a read and a bit technical.
Download it here: http://outspokenmedia.com/downloads/ORM-Guide.pdf
If you have any questions please ask. info@coldtechcommercial.com please put attention: ColdTech Kerry in the subject line.