KEVIN COLLERAN director of national sales, Facebook
There are many ways to go about getting Facebook fans – followers – whether it be advertising, putting up signs in your stores, utilizing your external email list, or just promoting your restaurant. However, fans are subscribing to show some sort of interest – they are only just giving you a chance. It’s up to the restaurant or the brand to take advantage of that chance and turn it into a relationship. Most users don’t return to fan pages – they wait for a brand to talk to them into their newsfeeds on their homepages. So, in the middle of conversations with friends, they’re also getting messages from the brands they have chosen to follow. People can see right through those brands that try to entice the user to become a fan only to then just send “buy-now” messages. Or a lot of brands put their page up and may not pay attention to it. You’re not offering any value to the relationship, so therefore they are going to click the “remove” button, and that relationship is gone. Responding to fans in real time is important because it gives people the feeling they can actually talk to a brand. Ten years ago, it might have been calling an 800-number or writing a letter to customer service. When you see low engagement scores or people falling off your fan page, so often it’s because you’re essentially using it as a constant stream and not a dialogue. Ask your market research questions, ask about what specials you should have; test your ad creative. I hear that a lot of brands outsource social media – Twitter, Facebook, etc. – to their agencies, but they miss all the value of having that dialogue. If you are going to have your agency, marketing people, or PR teams involved, make sure that someone who’s a decision-maker in your company is following just as closely. There’s just so much market research you can gather from this opted-in group of people who want to actually engage and want to give feedback.

ETHAN LOWRY co-founder, Urbanspoon
When you look at the way that people interact with social media, there is a “push” and a “pull” mode. When you want to push something out to your diner, to your consumer, you use tools like Twitter and Facebook, and it’s essentially this fantastic megaphone to reach your fans. Urbanspoon is really part of the pull strategy. When consumers are looking for a restaurant, they are going to use tools like Urbanspoon, Google, and Yelp to help them make their decision. Your own Web site is also a powerful tool for people who are trying to find a place, but you need to make sure you get the basics down right. You’d be shocked at how many restaurants mess up on the simplest things. Make sure your menu is up to date, that it’s online and readable. Make sure that your site, sites like Urbanspoon, and those across the Web are sprinkled with high-quality photos that you’ve taken or that you’ve had a professional take instead of what someone like me has taken in a restaurant with an iPhone.

We’re definitely learning that people still care about the difference between the editorial voice and that of the random stranger. I think a lot of restaurants get nervous that a bad review by Joe Schmo is going to ruin their reputation and make them look like a bad restaurant. That’s not true. At least on Urbanspoon, people click much more often on the critics and then next in the hierarchy, they’re clicking on the bloggers – the semi-professional people who are passionate about writing about food.

We have thousands and thousands of restaurants that post their tweets directly to their Urbanspoon page so they can talk to people at the moment when they are considering going to that restaurant. More than the restaurateurs, consumers themselves are saying they want to have this information available.

NIKI LEONDAKIS chief operating officer, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants
What we do with Twitter – both our brand Twitter account and the one I do personally – is talk to our customers, and not just about this hotel has this kind of a guest room and this restaurant has this kind of a menu. We talk to them about their experiences. We use Twitter to create value for those followers, not just sell to them.

One of the greatest values of social media is as an opportunity to do some intense customer listening – gathering information about what our customers are saying about us. What are we doing really well? What are we doing not so well? If you compile statistically what people are saying, you can’t dispute the fact that, maybe, you need to rethink some things. This is an amazing tool for customer listening and then improving your operation. We use Google alerts, but beyond that TweetDeck or through our Twitter account to search our brand name and our brand name in conjunction with certain adjectives to pick up what people are saying about us. If anybody is tweeting about a bad experience, I can go in and do service recovery – it can be an opportunity to surprise and delight them. Sometimes, when we’re out there searching, we pick up that someone is going to celebrate a special occasion at one of our restaurants, for example. We have the opportunity to make it really special, and they don’t even know. Or someone tweets that they can’t sleep because there’s noise outside their hotel window. I can jump on that and get the hotel to give them a different guest room. So, we can not only add value to that customer by either turning around or enhancing their experience; we’re also reinforcing the reputation of the brand to all the people watching that publicly. If you are going to have a team of people, however large or small, speaking on your business’s behalf they have to be trained in how you talk to your customers – what kind of language, what kind of tone you want to be using to represent your brand.

While it may just take a couple of minutes to compose a tweet, you really want a comprehensive social media strategy for your business, and that’s a time commitment. Be aware that you have to have your content – your posts, your updates – fresh. And if you’re not able to dedicate the time, have outdated content, and you’re not being responsive with customers or fans talking to you, it’s worse to be on social media than not.

For us there have been some revenue-generation opportunities, but that’s not really the reason we do it. If you try to calculate an ROI just on revenue, it’s not there. But customer relationships, customer listening, the opportunity to position your brand in the marketplace, the cost of not being present when your competitors are – those are all things we look at. If you look at pure revenue generation, no.

CHRIS COSENTINO executive chef and co-owner, Incanto and Boccalone
I think Twitter has become a very interesting media platform. People can instantly connect with you as a business, with you as a chef, with you as a company. I’ll put up a dish, and people can see immediately whether or not they want to come in for dinner tonight. Then they ask me “How did you make that? Where do the clams come from?” There can also be a direct response from media. It’s breaking down a barrier that I think for many, many years was there. There was a wall in the kitchen, and chefs were behind the wall and nobody could really get to them.

We do a thing at the restaurant called Old Man on a Station. When I work the station, we get busier, and they only order from my station. I will not take help from my crew and I want to show my team that I can still cook, that I am still part of the team – it just builds so much fun in the kitchen. I can literally get feedback on Twitter from people in the dining room: ”I see you,” “You’re not that old,” and “You’re still teaching the kids what to do.” I’ll get 25-30 a day sometimes when I’m working a station.

We never offer deals at Incanto, ever – we feel it cheapens the brand of the restaurant. But we notice that when I use Twitter, we can see the instant reaction to our Old Man on a Station game. Say we had 60 reservations and we do 140, and they’re all ordering from the station that I’m cooking at… then obviously there’s a direct correlation to the tweet I put out about the station I’m working. When we had our annual Head to Tail dinner, we had ten open seats at the bar. We weren’t taking any more reservations, so I tweeted it out, and we had 20 people standing at the front door within five minutes, wanting to sit in those seats.

Chefs follow local farmers and suppliers to see what’s available, and other restaurants as a taste barometer. You can also use Twitter to find dairy prices, fish shortages, what’s going on with hiring. I’ve hired two cooks off Twitter. I link my Twitter to Facebook; I have a Facebook fan page and a Facebook personal page. It’s really amazing how you can feed everything through one and basically you’re hitting your friends, your customers, and you’re hitting your staff. I’ve made it mandatory with my dining room staff to follow me on Facebook or Twitter because I change the menu everyday. So as I put up new dishes, they are getting updates on the food, even when they’re off. The next day, when they walk in they aren’t behind the eight ball.

You can’t ramble on; learn to be smart, abbreviate using @ and & symbols. I try to send photos with tweets – 140 characters and a photo goes a long way to reach a lot of people who really care to know.

The most important thing I’ve learned since doing social media is to just be yourself and be honest. I think that people gravitate to that.