Tag Archives: Food industry

June 13, 2014 · 10:13 am

Cooking Trolls.

Our Foodie Friday Fun this week deals with cooking trolls.

English: Troll Federlandese

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course I don’t mean actually cooking them but then again those evil creatures don’t actually exist either.  Restaurants – and every other business – have to deal with negative reviews in social and other media.  Sometimes they’re warranted and sometimes they drift over into troll-dom.  Today’s screed is about how one restaurant owner handled a troll and hopefully we can all learn a little something from his method.

As the folks at ABC reported:

After a customer posted a review on UrbanSpoon — which has since been deleted — requesting that the servers show more skin, owner Daniel McCawley took matters into his own hands.

“It was brutish. I was upset. I’m a father of a 12-year-old girl and I’ve got five sisters,” McCawley said. “The way that women are treated is pretty personal as far as I’m concerned.”

He did show more skin by offering a potato skin special. 100% of the proceeds will go directly to the West Virginia Foundation for Rape Information Services.  Clever, non-confrontational, and it generated a ton of positive buzz for his business.  That’s the right way to handle this sort of thing.  Suing the trolls (if you can find out their real identities), forcing review sites to delete the negative reviews, or responding in kind with defamatory comments about the poster do nothing but make you appear small.  My lawyer friends would tell you that it also opens you up to a series of legal issues when you start making allegations.

We forget sometime that if we serve 10,000 people and make 99.99% of them happy, there is still one unhappy customer.  In fact, some people who post these reviews had a great experience but, like the idiot above, find something about which to complain.  You can ignore it (which is probably what I would have done in this case) or use it to do something smart to cook the troll (which is where the owner proves he’s smarter than me!) or choose to jump down into the mud with them.  Your call.

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May 30, 2014 · 9:07 am

That’s Just Rude

Foodie Friday and I hope you had a chance over the past week to go out to eat.

Waiter

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Maybe it was to a holiday barbecue to begin the Summer or maybe you just needed a night off from the kitchen.  I’ve spent the week dining out a lot and it gave me a chance to reflect on something I see as a truism in life and in business.

Have you ever dined out with someone who is abominable to the server?  They treat someone who is doing their job with indifference at best and outright rudeness at worst.  Most servers, as you might know, are working for minimum wage plus tips.  It’s obviously in their best interest to keep their tables happy and I find it rare that a server warrants anything but polite, respectful treatment.  If you don’t like the food, the server didn’t cook it (or order it).  If they hover and you find it distracting, they’re probably just doing as their manager is instructing them.  Yet some people treat the wait staff as indentured servants, ordering them around without a “thank you” or “please.”  It embarrasses me, but it does something else.  It tells me a lot about the person with whom I’m dining.

You know that I subscribe to the “customer is almost always right” theory.  That “rightness” ends when they stop behaving like a reasonable adult.  I find that the people who need to demean other people generally have issues themselves – insecurity, low self-esteem among them.  So why is this on a business blog?

Bad managers can be like bad customers.  They treat their staff as “that guy” does a server.  Instead, just as you won’t get fed without a server doing their job, managers forget that it’s the work of their subordinates that makes their job necessary.  Just as servers can make a meal memorable or a disaster, staff can make the boss look great or incompetent.  I’ve always felt that we get what we give in both instances.  Which will it be for you?

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May 23, 2014 · 10:24 am

Sick Reviews

Today’s Foodie Friday Fun finds us at the intersection of food, data, and social media.

New York Skyline

(Photo credit: CJ Isherwood)

Yes I know we’ve been here before but today’s tidbit concerns an article in the NY Times the other day. The NYC Health Department conducted a pilot study using Yelp reviews to see if they could identify unreported outbreaks of food-borne illness.  Despite what some may think, not everyone calls the city to let them know they got sick eating someplace.  What many folks do, however, is post something on social media.  Since Yelp is the go-to site on dining out, it would make sense to start here.  One can easily see the effort expanding to other likely places – Twitter, Trip Advisor, etc.

So what did they find?

Using a software program developed by Columbia University, city researchers combed through 294,000 Yelp reviews for restaurants in the city over a period of nine months in 2012 and 2013, searching for words like “sick,” “vomit” and “diarrhea” along with other details. After investigating those reports, the researchers substantiated three instances when 16 people had been sickened.

Doesn’t sound like much but it’s a start.  Maybe you’re aware that Google tried something similar to help spot flu outbreaks.  There is a bigger business point here.  What the city is doing is growing big ears.  They’re learning to use the vast amount of self-reported data to eliminate problems in some cases before they’re actually reported via the official channels.  The three instances they found were open for business with no complaints on the official record.  Inspections turned up unclean conditions at all of them.

The real question is how are you going to do something similar in your business?  Maybe you’re watching your Facebook page for negative comments or responding to people pinging your brand account on Twitter.  What are you doing to get beyond those quasi-official channels?

I wrote the other day about the need to improve data quality.  Sure – in theory a bunch of vindictive people could trigger a health department visit by writing up negative posts containing keywords or phrases.  In theory, I could win the U.S. Senior Open.  Neither is likely to happen.  What is likely to occur, however, is that your competition will find new ways to seek out and use information to drive their businesses forward.  Will you be there with them?

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