An Apology to the Dessert Professional Community

Open Letter of Apology

I have a personal and professional apology to make.

Yesterday I attended the open house grand opening of Water Avenue Coffee in Portland, Oregon. I have been witness to the process my friends Bruce and Matt Milletto and the Bellissimo Coffee InfoGroup/American Barista Coffee School have been through to birth a coffee roastery and roasting school with coffee bar for several months now.

While there, Brandon, their head roaster, knowing my background as a fine-dining executive chef, shared with me a cup of coffee truly fantastic. He had taken green Sumatran beans and stored them in old oak wine barrels for two weeks, then roasted them.

In blunt honesty, this cup of coffee is the best coffee I have ever tasted. I got really excited about it.

In my excitement, I sent out a tweet from several Twitter accounts; @jeffreyjkingman, @coffeefestshow, @chalkboarder and from my client Dessert Professional Magazine‘s account @dessertpro. My failure is this – I used the acronym “OM*G” in the message.

To all the followers of @dessertpro and to any other followers of the other accounts who are offended by the use of this acronym, I deeply and sincerely apologies. I most definitely did not mean to offend with my excitement. My passion as a culinarian and gourmand spilled over.

I appreciate that a couple of you following @dessertpro took the time to call the magazine’s office to complain. The energy expended in doing so I cannot repay, but it indicates that you care about Dessert Professional Magazine. To Matthew Stevens, Tish Boyle and the rest of the staff at Dessert Professional, my sincerest apologies for mis-representing your brand.

Please feel free to message me anytime about content that I distribute over any social network, from my accounts, Chalkboarder’s accounts or any of our clients accounts.

Most sincerely,

Jeffrey J Kingman
CEO, Chalkboarder

Higher Grounds Coffee Roaster (NJ)

We met Higher Grounds Coffee Roaster virtually after Coffee Fest Meadowlands. I’d received 1200+ email addresses of Show attendees from Coffee Fest and emailed all of them describing Chalkboarder’s services. HGCR replied within a few days in query.

Interestingly, we experienced a .02% return on that mass emailing, further reinforcing my belief that email just sucks as a direct marketing tool, even when it isn’t really “cold-calling”. I’m not sure how to assess if it was content or that it came directly from info@chalkboarder.com and got blocked or ignored. We’re assessing if email could be better if it came from a service like iContact or Constant Contact.

Over the last few weeks we’ve been chatting with HGCR about a social media strategy for them. Its been a great conversation with detailed questions from Mark Devlin, one of the partners of HGCR. I appreciate the depth and breadth of his inquiries and have been contrasting this experience to others that simply said “I don’t understand this Social Media stuff – can you just get started and go do it?”.

Suffice to say, this post is a thank you to Mark – for your critical insight and questions. I enjoy being challenged like this.

Jeffrey J Kingman, CEO

Client Case Study: Coffee Fest

This past weekend Chalkboarder headed over to Meadowlands NJ to provide social media coverage of Coffee Fest’s first of three 2010 tradeshows. We were fortunate to meet some truly outstanding people within the specialty coffee and tea industry, from growers and suppliers, to roasters, coffee/tea shop owners and baristas. There seemed to be a fair number of folks attending who were planning to open a coffee/tea house.

Coffee Fest NYC Barista Competitor Megan's Signature Drink

Our mission at the Show was to journalize – to capture as much of the activity as we could to share with the friends of Coffee Fest and hopefully – that they would then share the high energy of Coffee Fest with their communities.

We’ve got some blogging to do – some retrospectives of the show. We were able to capture a large number of videos, create a Youtube Channel for Coffee Fest and engage a lot of the attendees and exhibitors through Twitter.

You can find all the videos over here at Coffee Fest Youtube, search the Twitter archives by using the hashtag #coffeefest, and stay tuned for the blog postings over here on Jeffrey Kingman’s Leaf & Berry Blog.

Small Biz Social Media

I’ve become really fascinated with how small independent businesses can take advantage of emergent social web tools. Much of my professional experience has been in the non-corporate world (except for Ritz Carlton, Hyatt, GTE Sprint, and some early career positions); independents generating less than $5 million in annual revenues.

The growth challenges posed to independents are, I believe, much more difficult than that for larger organizations. With larger organizations comes economies of scale. The independent organization manager has so many more hats to wear and not nearly the time or educational resources available.

How can these organizations take advantage of the new tools of the social web? The social web research firm Wetpaint/Altimeter found that organizations with total social media engagement were able to grow their businesses by 18%. It’s no secret that the social web offers organizations opportunities, but these players aren’t able to afford the market rate for social media strategists and community managers ($100/hour and $60/hour respectively).

**Please do not think you can conduct good social media by hiring a kid with a large Facebook account – that will FAIL miserably.

How does an independent restaurant, inn or coffee house effectively compete against the multi-units in social media? This question has been rattling around my brain for the past six months and I think there is a minimum of three answers:

Do It Yourself.  Doing it yourself offers the operator complete control. It also means significant time in learning effective strategies, tools and methods. In addition, it means significant time involvement in maintaining your social media activities (production, distribution, monitoring, engagement).

Outsource To A Large Firm. Outsourcing to a large firm can be attractive because of the automation offered in distribution, monitoring and analysis. In addition, you don’t have to invest time and money in learning effective strategies, tools and methods.  The disadvantage is that your organization will still have to do the content production and the engagement, requiring your time and attention.

Hire A Small Professional Creative Company. I posit that this is the best option for the independent small business. The creative company brings all the resources for production, distribution, monitoring and engagement – crafting and executing a sound and highly individualized strategy. Time requirement for the organization is minimal, requiring meeting in person or through technology for the creative professional to gather some raw content and give reports/feedback. It’s personal and accountable.

I’m going to forecast here that 2010 will be the year we’ll see an explosion of small creative social media providers catering to small business. Market rates will be reasonable, ball-parking in the $500 to $1000 per month range. With small business being the backbone of the American economy, I believe these social media providers will become the norm.

Brave New World

Illustration by Kathy Boake

A great article on how foodservice and hospitality operations can use social media, written for the Canadian hospitality industry by author Lesley Young for Foodservice World Magazine.

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She quotes our CEO Jeffrey J Kingman in several places.

Yelp & Urban Spoon Comments

Guest Experience Staff Training

I’m researching a study of the restaurant industry, using Yelp and Urban Spoon as the main viewframe. While I’ve written in the past about how operators could use these two sites to their advantage, I feel compelled to share a different observation tonight.

Does your team need a refresher on what makes great experience for customers? I bet if you spent one hour with an all-staff meeting, asked them to all bring their laptops in for the meeting, then gave each staff member ten restaurants in Urban Spoon’s “Affordable Fine Dining” Category to view – that you’d have one hell of a good meeting discussion.

The trick to this is having your staff read the comments of these ten restaurants, then share the outstandingly good and bad comments with the team as a whole and then to look at yours.

Not only is this good training on excellent guest experience, it will give your staff the direct feedback of the dining public in your area; what they think about you, about your competition and what their expectations are of a good or great experience.

I promise you, it will be an eye-opener for your team.

The other thing it will do (bonus) is provide your staff with real-time competitive analysis of the other teams that they are directly competing with in your area. What a great way to bring your team even more together towards a common goal!

By the way, it’s so easy for operators to get their basic information on these sites. I am completely clueless as to why any operator would stuff these two sites with pictures, the menu, etc.

Also, it’s extremely rare to find an operator responding to the negative comments (much less the positive ones) on these sites. How much time a night does that take – to look for a comment from the night? Thirty seconds? And then to write a reply? Another five minutes to increase guest loyalty so they’ll tell all their friends about your place?

Yelp and Urban Spoon should be the most basic of social web management for a restaurant. An operator should visit them daily – that would take maybe two minutes, tops.

Disaster Culinary Management Teams

This is an alert seeking Chef Volunteers willing to work in field kitchens in Haiti.

Over the past 72 hours I’ve been networking with:

U.N. World Food Programme
American Culinary Federation
FohBoh (Michael Atkinson, CEO)
Share Our Strength (Billy Shore, Deb Shore and Ashley Graham)
People Report (Joni Doolin, CEO)
Fast Casual (Paul Barron, CEO)
U.S. Department of Defense (Col. David Lapan, USMC, Chief Public Affairs Officer)
U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps (Lt. Col. Samuel Russell, QM, Chief of Commanding Generals Office)
Sodexo (USA and China)

I’ve had direct conversations with the above entities. Some of these conversations have led to this call being shared with the Executive Board of the National Restaurant Association, McDonalds Corporate Office, Chefs for Humanity and the U.S. White House Office of the First Lady.

The next two to three weeks in Haiti will see prepackaged ready-to-eat meals being distributed. Then, transition will occur to actual food preparation in the field. The field will be extremely challenging.

Specifics have not been solidified at this time – but I encourage anyone interested in volunteering to leave a comment here to this blogpost.

Please read comments for Updates (I’m updating in the comment section as developments occur)

Announcement: If you are a Chef that can volunteer for Haiti or might be able too, please leave a comment so we can get back to you.

The chefs and restaurateurs of the USA, particularly those affected by Hurricane Katrina, offer vast management experience in efficiently feeding large numbers of people. We’ve demonstrated this ability to hit the ground running, quickly take collaborative command of culinary management (in partnership with various government and NGO organizations) and lend our significant skill and financial resources in a large scale humanitarian response.

The combined networks of the National Restaurant Association (including its partner state hospitality organizations), the American Culinary Federation, Share Our Strength, and other entities such as FohBoh.com (largest social network for the industry), Nation’s Restaurant News and Fast Casual – represent the ability to quickly notify and mobilize volunteers and donors.

Haiti

The sheer scale of the earthquake disaster in Haiti will require mass-feeding on a scale similar to the needs facing the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I believe there are numerous talented professionals that would be willing to respond to an organized response in the field.

I also believe there are logisticians who can quickly coordinate such an effort, facilitating organization, placement and distribution of Disaster Culinary Teams in Haiti.

Much as SAR Disaster teams are fielded, the restaurant industry in the US has the ability to provide critically needed knowledge and practical experience, in addition to the financial generosity this industry is particularly known for.

Initial Actions Taken

I’ve contacted the following and have received immediate and positive feedback:

Office of First Lady Michelle Obama, the White House – waiting on a callback.

People Report, Joni Doolin, CEO

FohBoh.com, Michael Atkinson, CEO (largest social network for the restaurant industry)

Fast Casual Alliance, Paul Barron, CEO

The Customer Service Dialogue

The last three weeks I’ve been working with Marsha Collier on a small project called The Customer Service Dialogue.

This is a Twitter based chat every Tuesday night at 9pm EST on anything Customer Service. Well, we do have a weekly subtopic on customer service: it’s not a mosh pit 🙂

I had originally posted the transcripts here on Chalkboarder, but after Marsha and I gave it thought, it just made sense to give the Dialogue its own blog site.

I invite all of you to come check it out. We already have transcripts from three weeks of chats on different topics.

Next week’s topic is Online Customer Service Centers. See you there?

2009 Holiday chalkARTblast 006

Strategic Relationship Engineering Both On & Offline

chalkARTblast 006

As we wrap up 2009, we wish to extend sincere holiday greetings to each of you. In addition we want to welcome new relationships; thank our stakeholders, clients and partners and generally give thanks to a very intriguing first six months.

Chalkboarder.com Client News

It’s been a very busy six weeks since we last released a chalkARTblast. We’re busy with some new clients and had to dive right in. Here’s some of the more intriguing things coming up on our calendar for the first quarter of 2010.

Filming “Deadly Claws” Aboard An Oregon Dungeness Crab Boat

We were approached by a Dungeness Crab fishing vessel the F/V Harvester sailing out of Coos Bay OR, to sail with them, blog about off-shore crab fishing and do some cooking dockside with the freshest Dungeness Crab you ever had. Well, one thing has led to another and its become a full-fledged video documentary. Now we’re planning (and writing the storyboard for) an hour long production for WebTV, telling the “farm to table” history of off-shore crabbing, the canneries and the danger. They’re going to put me to work as a deckhand in February catching crab for a day in the cold wet swells and then I’ll don a chef jacket and do some cooking at the cannery. The Captain states that this is twenty times more dangerous than “Deadliest Catch”. As an adventurer and complete extrovert, who is passionate about where our food comes from and cooking – its right up my alley.

I hope the Coast Guard Rescue stays close by!

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Marsha Collier Requests Chalkboarder.com Research Collaboration

Marsha Collier, author of “eBay for Dummies”, with over 1 million copies in print worldwide and the top-selling eBay author, requested Chalkboarder.com’s assistance and collaboration through two methods.

Marsha has been commissioned to write a book due in June 2010 on Customer Service, with a chapter on restaurants. After reading our “10% of USA Restaurants Using Social Media” study (September, 2009), she requested us to redo the study in March 2010 for inclusion in the restaurant customer service chapter.

Additionally, Marsha and I are launching this next week a Twitter-based discussion on customer service. This discussion will be weekly on Tuesdays at 9 pm eastern – you can participate by following #custserv.

FohBoh.com Conference on Social Media

We’re still waiting for confirmation of this one – but Michael Atkinson, CEO of the largest social network, FohBoh.com, for the restaurant industry internationally, invited me to participate as a panelist in a conference sometime in 2010. If the conference is confirmed, I’ll be joining Guy Kawasaki and the founders of LinkedIn and Ning.com on-stage to discuss how the social web can and does impact the restaurant industry. I’m extremely humbled and flattered by the invitation and do hope the conference happens.

“Branded” – The Legacy Five Generation Montana Rancher

We’ve been in dialogue with the oldest cattle ranchers association in the USA, Montana Stock Growers Association, for a long time. I started this relationship in 2007 when we were talking about bringing a line to the national restaurant industry of natural Montana beef, raised and processed from birth to box in-state.

Over the past three months we’ve been in dialogue with them about their social media strategies. Again, one thing has led to another and now we are talking about another hour long documentary exploring “farm to table” and what it means to be a five-generation Montana rancher. More danger! The ranchers want to bring me and the filmmaker out during spring branding, put me on a horse, make me handle a rope and possibly make a few Rocky Mountain Oysters (yes, cutting). At the end, after documenting the history of Montana cattle ranching and exploring the myriad issues they face today we’ll do some cooking of beef.

We have much more news below…

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The Oregon Truffle Festival

Seattle’s top food blogger and restaurant consultant, Traca Savadago (http://seattletallpoppy.blogpost.com) and I are headed out to the vineyards of Oregon at the end of January to blog the Oregon Truffle Festival. Willamette Valley Vineyards just seeded 16 acres of truffle spoor and Oregon truffles are rapidly edging out European truffles for reputation. Traca will be with the chefs in the kitchen over the two days while I am video-blogging the two day “Train Your Dog to Hunt Truffles” workshop.

Coffee Fest

We just started a year long relationship to handle all of Coffee Fest’s social media. As part of this, I’m seeking certification as a barista. Coffee Fest is the most respected tradeshow for the specialty coffee and tea industry internationally, with shows in Meadowlands NJ, Minneapolis and Seattle.

We’re launching an internationally comprehensive social media strategy for Coffee Fest, to increase attendance, exhibitors and overall show experience. A very intriguing part of this relationship is that we’ll be live web streaming the Barista Competitions at all three tradeshows! We decided to call this “bean-casting” (instead of sports-casting) the competitions. In addition, I’ll be speaking on the social web at each Coffee Fest Executive Summit during the tradeshows.

Renaissance Gourmet

We’ve been working with Renaissance Gourmet (British Columbia, CAN) on clarifying their casually elegant lifestyle brand and market the past month and finding them sponsors. As part of this, we’re helping to create and develop a strategic brand/concept in WebTV, e-Books, blogging and other content. The market for Renaissance Gourmet is international female 25 to 55, with significant existing traffic (over 125,000 views per

month) coming from the USA, Australia, Canada and the UK. This project also involves international strategies in social media to grow viewership and further monetization of the brand.

Renaissance Gourmet offers casually elegant lifestyle advice, simply upscale gastronomy, travel, farm-to-table documentaries and just shot a pilot for a non-exclusive series on the Australian Lifestyle Podcast Network.

Challenge Issued to USA Restaurant Industry

We’ve tossed a challenge down to the restaurant industry in the USA. With 945,000 restaurant operations in the country, we think we’ve got a great challenge.

We asked the industry to put over 100 marathon runners into the 2011 Boston Marathon, each sponsored with over $1000 in pledges. The fund-raiser would benefit Share Our Strength, a twenty-five year nonprofit working to end childhood hunger domestically by 2015.

We caught the interest of Share Our Strength, which referred the challenge to its Great American Dine Out steering committee and other C-Level industry leaders. Really, all this is my effort to get myself running again J. Just teasing… I’ve been involved with Share Our Strength since 1994.

Rewarding Feedback

Strategic networking on behalf of Rewarding Feedback (Toronto, CAN) continues. We’ve introduced them to several potentials on both coasts of the USA and are waiting for the crush of the holiday chaos to end to close these deals. A very intriguing inquiry occurred from an 87 unit restaurant outfit with four brands from South Africa. It’s really tough to coordinate communication between North America and South Africa.

Event Mingle

Event Mingle is a social web based community platform for trade shows. With extremely robust metric analytics and structure, it empowers tradeshows to largely expand the return on investment for both attendees and exhibitors participating. We’ve crafted a relationship with Event Mingle to introduce and refer them through our deep proprietary networks off line.

Great American Spice Company

Great American Spice Company is a large web-based retailer of spices. We’re spreading the word about them to consumers through a social media strategy.

Social Grub

Social Grub is a robust Facebook application for service industry businesses. This application has powerful back-office tools and empowers businesses to use the social web to offer promotions, coupons and broadcast of events and news both through smart-phones and personal computers. We’re in a mutual relationship with Social Grub, referring their product while they refer us.

Other News & Pursuits

In the first quarter of 2010, we’ll be combining our two identities (Chocorua Group and Chalkboarder.com) into one brand under the Chalkboarder.com logo and identity. We’ve asked a few diverse peers to provide us critique during this process.

We’re waiting for a yea/nay decision on a pitch we made a few weeks ago to the PR firm handling 1800 Tequila (a brand of Cuervo), 5WPR in New York City. This proposal laid out a six-month global social media strategy. The PR firm indicated to us they were taking the proposal to Cuervo and we’re standing by.

We’re in negotiations with a former client in KennebunkportMaine, Old Vines Wine Bar, to strategize and execute their social media.

We’re in negotiations with Wind Horse Coffee in MilwaukieOregon to strategize and execute their social media.

While there are other negotiations underway across North America and internationally, we just don’t feel comfortable yet sharing them.

Well, that’s all the news that we see fit to print this month. We’d like you to know that chalkARTblast will be distributed monthly from here on – distributed sometime right after the 15th of each month.

Peace On Earth and Goodwill To You!

Jeffrey J Kingman

Happy Holidays from Judith, Bill and Jennifer – partners.

chalkARTblast is produced and distributed by Chalkboarder.com

Copyright Ó2009 Chalkboarder.com LLC

(503) 305-6397

info

Debate About Customer Contact and Feedback Systems

Debate About Customer Contact/Feedback Systems

Social Web, Email, Paper Comment Cards, Tableside and Blogs

Technology is completely changing the game for service industries. You would not be reading this post two years ago if it weren’t for the atomic explosion of the social web.

I believe paper comment cards are dead. They have zero value today. For reasons enumerated by several sources here in FohBoh and my own observations, I declare the paper comment card an archeological relic of an earlier age. If you are still using paper comment cards, you’re a dinosaur.

I also believe there is limited functionality communicating with customers via email. Do you really think a customer is going to provide their email address to you – just so you can send them advertising and marketing? My email inbox is flooded with relevant content: Clients, Peers, LinkedIn discussions, about twenty different Smart Briefs, Peter Shankman’s Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and my favorite blogs that I want to see; not to mention the tweets I want to save. I don’t have time to open your advertising and marketing junk (especially if I opened it once before and that is what it was).

Blogs that are written well, contain intriguing imagery or video with compelling content, are informative of the life of your business (meaning your people, your passions, where you source your materials, or what fun-filled special event is happening) are going to interest me. I’ll probably follow you – either by RSS feed or asking you to directly email me with it. I know it’s a blog. I know that you’ve put time into it. It’s succinct, relevant and visually compelling.

But I’m here today to argue something tried and true. Visiting tables. You know this works. Just as you know that if the POS system fails, you can always write chits.

I wonder how many operators keep old-school blank ticket pads in the office for that emergency?

There’s no more effective customer contact and customer feedback system than the owner or manager spending time on the floor visiting tables. Chatting up regulars and greeting new faces is the simplest, easiest and most direct personal contact an operator can implement to build relationships and get feedback, discover customer concerns and let the customer know how much you appreciate their business. It’s at this point that gaining effective feedback happens, whether that is verbal communication or using digitally based survey collection/reward systems.

Now Immagonna give you a twist, before I give the microphone back to ya.

The social web, with it’s different networks like Facebook, Twitter, Urbanspoon etc., is virtual tableside. Customers find it much easier to “friend you” through social networks than they do to give you their email. They find it much easier to post comments on restaurant search sites, than they do to (risk their security) provide you their email. And you get to draw them into conversations. Just as there is a virtual front door to your restaurant – there’s a virtual tableside chat waiting for you.

If you want examples of this, go follow Rick Bayless of Frontera Grill on Twitter (@Rick_Bayless) or Ron Zimmerman of the Herb Garden ($190 pp dinners) on Twitter (@Herbguy). They’ve been doing it for a year. The customer feedback they receive is astounding.

Over on Facebook, search out the Boston restaurant Myers & Chang – they do it as does Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse in NorthamptonMA (owned by a socialmedia rockstar).

These case studies prove that restaurants across the dining option spectrum use social media to engage existing and new potential customers by visiting tableside – virtually – and on the floor.

Do you disagree with any portion of this post? I’d love to hear it and debate you…

An interesting find:

A few days ago I received a tweet sharing a 20 minute video by the Executive Editor of WIRED magazine, Kevin Kelly, titled “The Next 5,000 Days On The Web”. Did you know that the web is only 5,000 days old now? That’s only thirteen years. We’ve only had email for less than fourteen years. We’ve only had Facebook since 2004. We’ve only had Twitter since 2006.