A Primer for Restaurants
Twitter for Restaurants is a handly little eBook created by Lara Dickson, and which, full disclosure and all, I received for free. The price is $40. I am extremely happy to report that it is a fantastic and comprehensive primer for restaurateurs. I am strongly recommending the book to all of my clients, as well as any potential clients. This may seem odd as it would seem to conflict with my own goals to direct strategy on my clients behalf. If they can just buy this book and be done with it, why bother with a high-end consultant who is going to charge several thousand dollars?
Twitter for Restaurants doesn’t threaten me at all. In fact, I expect its popular success to increase the need for my services. Why? Because I design bespoke strategies that go beyond individual social networking platforms and incorporate “big picture” thinking that is as much philosophical as it is, “what should a business tweet about.” Or at least I’d like to think so. I like to get into a company’s culture, understand the people who work there, the ins and outs of the business, the particularities of it, and then work to make the most out of social media. It’s really a different game altogether.
The Twitter Basics: Install, Engage and Understand
I digress. Twitter for Restaurants is a nearly 30-page guide broken up into 3 main sections: Install, Engage and Understand. The Installation section runs through the basics like what is Twitter, why a restaurant would want to use the service, how to create an account as well as useful information about following people, broadcasting services as well as etiquette. For restaurant owners and managers, this is incredibly useful and cuts down considerably their learning curve. My history on Twitter, in contrast, was all about watching and listening and slowly figuring out how to use it. It took me months to get truly comfortable sharing, conversing, listening and “getting the most out of Twitter.” In fact, its a process that’s never done as I find Twitter to evolve very rapidly. The mass adoption of lists has almost totally revolutionized my Twitter behavior in just the past 6 weeks.
But restaurateurs don’t have the luxury of watching for months and months. They need to get read up, and they need to do it elegantly and quickly. Twitter for Restaurant’s is exactly the product they are looking for. The book, downloaded as a pdf, is excellently well-designed owing to its author, Lara Dickson’s graphic design background. No biggie there, but it really struck me how powerful the information became due to the way in which it was presented. And this brings me to another digression.
Web Design is Increasingly Important
Something that I have heard myself telling people of late is that the web is full of fantastic content. But often enough, that content is not well presented, and the reality these days is that design and layout, functionality and warmth are huge factors. I don’t care how great an essayist or blogger you are, if your site looks crappy, I ain’t sticking around. Clay Shirky gets a pass on this, in case you were wondering. But for the rest of us, well, hire a proper web designer. It really is worth it.
How to Tweet, How NOT to Tweet
Aside from the “Getting Started” tutorials, the book swiftly moves into “How to Tweet,” with myriad examples of promotions, stories, contests and general information and “storytelling,” that restaurants can engage in. There are even actual tweets that Lara embedded in the document, showing clearly and decisively how other brands have used Twitter. These are truly helpful as I am a big proponent of Show Don’t Tell, when it comes to social media training. One of my most valuable services as a social media strategist is the training part of my services. Actually sitting down with a client and setting up RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, Foursquare dashboards and showing them blogging and website infrastructure is when the real learning begins. And without those firm skills, social media strategy is practically worthless. Twitter for Restaurants can make my job a lot easier! Another huge reason for my promotion of this book. (I am not being compensated for any future sales of Twitter for Restaurants via this post)
The rest of the guide moves swiftly from the introduction to the tools that have grown up around Twitter. The scheduling services, desktop and mobile clients, search tools and finally the analytics; all are covered. And though some of the information is already outdated, by far most of the tools are still relevant and in use.
As value added sections, Lara also skillfully includes checklists and calendars in the eBook that are intended to be printed out and employed in the service of the restaurant’s Twitter account. From what I have learned of many restauranteurs, these simple tools can offer a programmatic and easy-to-follow approach that makes the most of their time. These, coupled with the all-important “What NOT to Tweet About” section, solidifies this book as incredibly useful.
But aside from the utility, what struck me about the book, beyond the design, the comprehensive nature of it, is the correctness of Lara’s Twitter philosophy. It’s clear she has thought about how restaurants will use Twitter, what kind of mistakes they might make, what kind of questions they may have along the way. She’s done her homework, so that you don’t have to.
So what are you waiting for? Go BUY IT!
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