Protect & Strengthen Your Brand's Online Reputation

Wednesday, April 16, 14
Hello my name is Megan Longo. I am the marketing director for Flagship Restaurant Group. I am
here today with my assistant Jenn Brown, who will be helping me today with this presentation.

MEGAN: Flagship Restaurant Group is locally owned an operated. We started 12 years ago with our ﬁrst
restaurant, Blue Sushi Sake Grill, which is at the southwest corner of 144th and Maple. We have grown to 3
Blue locations in Omaha, 1 in Fort Worth and 1 in Denver. A location will be opening next month in the
Haymarket. We also own Roja Mexican Grill with 2 locations in Omaha. Blatt Beer & table, which is in north
downtown Omaha, directly south of TD Ameritrade Park. We will open our 2nd Blatt location out west this
Summer. And our last brand is Plank Seafood Provisions, which has been open nearly a year in the Old
Market.

MEGAN: Today we are going to talk about some of the ways that we protect and strengthen
our brands on a daily basis. And we have broken these strategies down to two categories:
Building the Face of your Brand. In other words establish your brand identity and personality.
And Saving Face when times get rough, which means having a crisis management plan of
action ready to do some damage control.
Our discussion today speciﬁcally addresses online activity. If your brands are not active on
Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Trip Advisor (if it’s relevant to your business) or even Instagram and
Pinterest...It’s time. And just having a proﬁle is not going to cut it. More and more consumers
are taking to these sites to discover new brands, talk-up their favorite brands, or... complain
about brands. There are many opportunities to reach out to these people and make
meaningful connections. So please, do not miss them!

MEGAN: Our ﬁrst strategy is to build the face of your brand. Because you cannot “save face”
in the case of disaster if you don’t have a face to save!

MEGAN: Here are 3 ways that you can build the face of your brand. 1. Establish your voice
personality (humanize your logo by giving it a voice and personality! 2. Speak their language
(understand your audience, and talk like them! 3. Build relationships (and create brand
advocates, which are the best kind of customers!)

MEGAN: Establish a voice personality. Give your logo a voice! Humanize your brand. We will
use our Blue voice as the primary example today, because it the most established, and our
brand with the most exposure. In the earlier days, Facebook was the place where we really
started to experiment with voice. We are still actively engaging on Facebook, but over the past
3 years, that focus has shifted to Twitter.

MEGAN: If we had to choose 4 adjectives to describe our Blue’s voice personality; It
would be: Clever (or Playful), Enthusiastic, Positive and Generous. And here are
examples of each of those.

JENN: Clever - mention Playful, too. Explain sushi-ologists

JENN: Clever (sushi-ologists 2 of 2)

JENN: Enthusiastic. Think happy. Bubbly cheerleader. And it wouldn’t be a tweet from
@BlueSushiOmaha without an exclamation point.

JENN: Positive. No matter the context, we always try to remain positive. Here’s an
example of how we reply to negative tweets. (Explain the situation, read the tweet).
We’ll have more on combatting negativity later.

JENN: Generous. Explain Kaitlin Harvey Lincoln tweet

MEGAN: So again, our voice personality for Blue is Clever, Enthusiastic, Positive and
Generous. (show all the 4 faces)

MEGAN: We’ve established our brand voice personality, but we also want to be
speaking their language. What this means is to know your audience and ﬁnd a
meaningful and relevant way to communicate with them. Our core Blue demographic is
women in their 20s and 30s. But overwhelmingly, the ones we engage with the most are
in their 20s, even their early 20s. Here are some examples of how we speak their
language. You’ll notice that all of these examples are playful, enthusiastic and positive.

JENN: guest: “I regret introducing my boyfriend to sushi because he deﬁnitely likes
Blue more than me. BLUE: “No way. You’re totes prettier.”

JENN: Reference hit songs. Our favorite play on words is to replace song lyrics with the
word Crunchy for our Crunchy Thursday promotion each week. “Crunchy along if you
know what happiness is to you!”

JENN: Quoting pop culture references: “Sushi in the morning, sushi in the evening,
sushi at suppertime.”

JENN: Miley tweet (timely with her concert) “La da di da di, we like to sushi!”

JENN: Give context of Justin Timberlake concert on Feb 10. “Everyone not going to JT:
at least it’s Bachelor Monday, and you can get your Juan Pablo ﬁx! JP can show you a
few things about love, too.”

MEGAN: To sum up “speaking their language”, If you have an audience like Blue, you
are going to be talking to millennials. But you don’t have to be a millennial to speak like
one. Spend a bit of time really paying attention to what is happening in mass media.
Watch an episdoe of the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, or Saturday Night live. Both
of those shows will bring you up to speed. Keep your ear open to celebrity gossip and
reality TV, listen to top 40 radio once in a while, and more importantly, READ the tweets
of those you follow, you’ll be speaking a new language in no time.

MEGAN: Build Relationships. This is another important piece to building the face of your
brand. And the purpose of building relationships is to foster a community of brand
advocates. A brand advocate is a fancy term for “loyal customer.” But brand advocates are
even better. They are spreading the good word about your goods or services in any way
they can, and inﬂuencing potential customers. These conversations are happening online,
maybe on twitter or their blog, or in general conversation with friends and family.

MEGAN: Some strategies we recommend for building relationships are: Do your
research, Reach out, and Go The Extra Mile. Here are examples.

JENN: Do your research. Kendra Poteet checked in on FourSquare. We did some
research and found out she wasn't from the area, so we welcomed her and asked about
her visit. She responded that she will be back next time! (brand voice: enthusiastic,
positive)

MEGAN: Brad Stoneking example (this involved research, reaching out and going the
extra mile) (brand voice: positive, generous)
Through our keyword monitoring, we also discovered a conversation that was relevant to us.
This guy was talking about his quest to quit smoking. He and his wife were putting the money
that they would have spend on cigarettes aside. And when they hit their goal, they were going
to use the money to get sushi. So after a little bit of research, we found this guy’s mailing
address. (It turned out he was friends of a friend of a friend). And we mailed him an
encouraging note, with a gift card. Here he tweeted a photo of our card with the tweet
“coolest surprise ever”.

MEGAN: Here’s another example from Denver. We noticed this guy, Ronald had been
visiting us quite a bit. So we looked him up on WhitePages.com. And among the 33
listings for Ronald Lewis in zip code 80202, we found his address based on his
proximity to the restaurant, approximate age we guessed him to be and other factors
we learned by researching him. For instance, his blog mentioned he used to live in
Detroit, which Yellow Pages had listed as previous places this particular guy had lived.
So we were pretty sure had our guy. And we surprised him by sending him a $50 gift
card.

JENN: Reach out. When I was at the Job Fair in Lincoln, I recognized the name of one
of our Tweeters - @MarinHartﬁeld. I let her know that I recognized her name and was
excited to meet her. She later tweeted about our interaction. (brand voice: enthusiastic,
positive)

MEGAN: We build relationships while maintaining our review sites. We reach out to
each and every person who leaves us a review on Yelp, Trip Advisor, Urbanspoon and
Google Reviews. We have a response strategy for bad reviews, and a response
strategy for good reviews. Our outreach catches people by surprise. And that
unexpected touch of correspondence from a brand you didn’t expect to hear back from
scores bonus points. In this outreach (whether the review was good or bad), our voice is
always positive.

MEGAN: Go the extra mile. We sell gift cards on our websites, and any
customer can go to our site and purchase a gift card. And on the gift card
ordering page, we list Jenn’s email address and direct line, so that guest can
speak to a “friendly human” if they have questions about our online ordering.
Jenn’s our friendly human! Often times people prefer human interaction when
they need help. So in this digital age, please make it easy for your customer
to talk to a friendly human, if they’d prefer.
JENN: A woman called me all frantic about ordering a gift card. The next day
was her nephew's birthday, and she was having trouble placing a gift card
order online. I provided further instructions, followed up to let her know that
her order was completed, and let her know that we would make a special trip
to the post ofﬁce so that he would get the gift card on his actual birthday.
(brand voice: enthusiastic, positive, generous)

MEGAN: In Denver I noticed a gal was tweeting that she was at our restaurant, but
would have rather gone to a competitor in Denver. I wanted to prove to her that we were
the better choice, so I offered to send her a gift card if she would agree to come back
again to give us another try.

MEGAN: So we mailed Mile High Fit Girl a gift card, and a few days later she posted
this thank you tweet. Hopefully she will think twice about choosing our competitor for
her sushi ﬁx in the future.

MEGAN: To sum up our 1st strategy, Building the Face of your brand: establish your
voice personality (put a human behind that logo!) speak their language (you don’t have
to be a millennial to speak like a millennial), and build relationships (pay attention to
your potential brand advocates, they’re just waiting for you to notice them)

MEGAN: So we’ve built the face of our brand. We have one more strategy for
protecting and strengthening our brands: And that is to Save Face When Times
Get Rough.

Main topic #2: Save Face when Times Get Rough
MEGAN: Our next strategy focuses on what to do in negative scenarios, more
specifically how to deal with disgruntled customers. In our department, we are faced
with small fires every single day. Our restaurants combined serve more than 20,000
people per week, and unfortunately we do make mistakes. Ideally, the restaurant
manager will rectify the situation before the guest leaves our restaurant. But that
doesn’t always happen, and that’s when we hear from these people, usually in the form
of an online complaint. These complaints happen on Twitter, Facebook, or review sites
like Yelp, Trip Advisor and Urbanspoon. If we are lucky, they’ll find our online comment
card and let it all out in the form of a private note. But that doesn’t always happen. We
will walk you through a few steps that we take to deal with disgruntled customers.

MEGAN: Save Face When Times Get Rough These are strategies to quickly recover
from small hiccups online. First things ﬁrst, Apologize. Then Gather More Information
so you can ﬁgure out where you went wrong and how to improve your employee
training and operations. Offer your Customer an Incentive To Return - get them back in
for another visit to show them what you’re really made of. Keep In Touch - follow-up on
their return visit. And as a result: WIN THEM BACK - and convert them into brand
advocates.

MEGAN: Approach your customer’s complaint immediately with an apology. Saying that
you are sorry out of the gates will show the guest that your guard is down and you are
willing to hear them out. Saying sorry does not mean that you are accepting blame. It
means that you regret that the guest is dissatisﬁed: An example apology might be
"We're so sorry for your disappointing visit.” And a positive spin to add would be: "We
appreciate your feedback as it offers us the opportunity to address our shortcomings
and improve our service." After this initial apology - try to move that conversation to a
private format. This is not a conversation that should happen on their rant they posted
on Facebook or Twitter.
Please do not reply to a disgruntled guest while in an angry or emotional state. And
avoid deleting comments or blocking users. This will not prevent them from raising
havoc on other public platforms.

MEGAN: When guests post a complaint on Yelp, Trip Advisor or Urbanspoon, our ﬁrst
step is to post a brief apology, and then move that conversation off the public forum to
resolve it privately. With want to be brief, but sincere. This serves 2 functions: ONE: so
that potential customers skimming our reviews will see that we took action and set out
to make it right for the guest. And TWO: we actually do care enough about saving this
customer that we want to learn more about their situation, so that we can make it right
for them... and as a result, set some changes in motion to improve our operations and
training.

MEGAN: On social media we reply with our brief apology and a link to our online
comment card. More on that comment card in just a second.

MEGAN: The next step is to GATHER MORE INFORMATION

MEGAN: That online comment card link that we give post on social media takes them
to this form on our website. This is just a screen shot of part of the form. With this
online form we can gather all kinds of information from the guest, including their name,
phone number and email. What location they visited and when. And then, these is a
message ﬁeld with that allows them an unlimited amount of space to tell us every single
thing we did wrong. When the guest clicks submit, this comment card goes direct to the
GM of that location, and our Director of Operations (who oversees all 9 of our
restaurants). These comment cards get high priority, and management will continue
that conversation with the guest via email or phone.

MEGAN: On Yelp, Trip Advisor and Urbanspoon, Jenn and I will continue the dialogue
through a private messaging system on that review website. We remain in close
contact with managers to be sure we are reporting correct information to the guest. As
an example: a reviewer might complain that our sushi wasn’t the freshest option in
town. Or that they are sushi connoisseurs and our sushi is nothing like they’ve had in
Japan or California. So within that private conversation, I’m going to repeat my apology
that I first posted in the public response. And then I tell that person a bit about our
incredibly high standards for quality and freshness. And that we source our fish from
the finest seafood purveyors in the world. The same purveyors as the sushi restaurants
on the coasts. We are overnighting our fish from Alaska, Japan and Hawaii, to name a
few regions. And after I make that little plug of information, I will ask what items they
ordered and then assure the guest that we will review our quality reports from the date
of their visit to be sure nothing was amiss in our daily protocol. From there, I take that
information to our management staff, so they can do their own internal research and
follow-up with daily operations.

MEGAN: The next step is to OFFER YOUR CUSTOMER AN INCENTIVE TO RETURN

MEGAN: Thank your customer for the opportunity to improve. And Invite them
back. Give them an incentive to give you another try. As a result of the dialogue
that happens privately on review sites, or from our online comment cards, we end
up sending what we call a “winback” out to the guest, in the mail. Jenn is well-
versed in apologizing to our guests. She writes a hand-written note to a guest
several times a week on our fancy stationery. Enclosed in that correspondence is
the note, a gift card and her business card so the guest has someone to contact.

MEGAN: And then, we follow-up after that guest comes back. For us, this is usually a
step that seals the deal for our customers. Any company can send you a letter with an
apology and a few freebies. But how many actually follow-up after your return visit.
This is how we do it. Jenn keeps track of all those gift card numbers that she mails. And
each week, she checks our list of “winback gift cards” to see who redeemed one. She
can see if that guest returned by tracking the card. She can even pull up the entire
ticket from their visit, learning what location they visited, who their server was, where
they sat, and what they ordered. This makes follow-up easy. She will then reach out to
the guest to inquire about their visit. "Hey John, we noticed that you returned to Blue
this weekend. Thanks so much for giving us another try. Saw that you ordered the Itchy
Salmon, my fav, what'd you think? Did you have better service this time? We'd love
your feedback. If you have an opportunity, please shoot us a note.

MEGAN: This program wins hearts. As a result of our outreach, some guests will
remove their negative comments or update their reviews. We get comments from
people about how impressed they are that we cared to reach out, or even
bothered to reply. This approach to customer service will impact brand’s
reputation in a positive way.

MEGAN: Here’s a tweet from a customer who was happy with our outreach after a
disappointing experience. She was charged a whole $1 for 1 extra lettuce cup that we
shorted her in the ﬁrst place. As a result of reaching out to her, gathering more
information, sending her an incentive to return, and then following up, she was happy
with how we handled the mishap. And our service and kitchen staffs learned from the
mistake.

MEGAN: Here’s a tweet from a customer who was happy with our outreach after a
disappointing experience. She tweeted a picture of the note Jenn mailed her.

MEGAN: Here’s an email Jenn got from a customer. This one happens to be from a bad
experience at Plank. “Jenn, I am writing you as I sit in Plank, satisfied and converted...
Thank you for the gift card, and thank you for convincing me to come back. I will
definately recomennd Plank to my traveling co-workers and future students.” Our
response to his bad experience impressed this guy, we established a new relationship
with him, and now he is officially a brand advocate.

MEGAN: To sum up our 2nd strategy: Save Face When Times Get Rough: apologize to
your customer (and then direct the conversation ofﬂine), gather more information (and
use the blunder as a learning opportunity), Offer your customer an incentive to return
(show your customer that you are eager to make it right and win back their business),
keep in touch (follow-up with these people, this is often the step that impresses the
most) and Win Them Back (with a consistent crisis plan, you will do effective damage
control for your brand, and win a few brand advocates along the way.

MEGAN: If you take the time to Develop the Face of your Brand and Prepare yourself
with a Plan of Action for Negative Scenarios, you will strengthen and protect your online
reputation. That’s all we have for you today. Does anyone have any questions?

MEGAN: We brought gift cards for everyone!

Protect & Strengthen Your Brand's Online Reputation

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