I found this Slideshare presentation below via an awesome designer friend, Hoshi Ludwig. It is an awesome wealth of knowledge put together by Paul Adams of the Google research team. It is a great resource for social media marketers. I especially loved slide 39 that shows how businesses start a Facebook page and then don’t maintain it. This is by far one of my biggest pet-peeves and I have addresses a perfect example of this below.
Just recently, a local Orange County restaurant just recently made the same mistake and I am sharing it here because it is the perfect example of how NOT to manage a Facebook page. Upon noticing that 3 Thirty 3 in Newport Beach, which happens to be a local and personal favorite restaurant had put up a page and left it astray I reached out and offered assistance. A couple of weeks later, and after no response, I noticed a customer had left a negative review of the restaurant. This comment has been up a couple of weeks now and no response has been made by the restaurant. This is a perfect example of poor community management.
Hopefully the restaurant will soon address this problem. If they had someone managing this account the problem could have been addressed and the customer would have been contacted and responded to openly on the page for all to see how the restaurant takes care of such incidents. Businesses cannot assume that a page will take care of itself and should have someone monitoring and maintaining these social networks on behalf of the restaurant. Some great examples of restaurants in Orange County that are doing it right are The Alley Restaurant, Sol Cocina, and DX Peruvian. Fast Food Mavin of the OC Register is also a great resource in Orange County to find local deals and restaurants that are marketing correctly online. This post by Sukhraj Beasla further explains the implications for your brand in abandoning your online efforts and lists more failed attempts by restaurants in Orange County.
