Yelp’s recent announcement that it has added a video feature to its review website brings up important issues and concerns facing restaurant owners in an increasingly visual, viral and connected environment. Although visual and social media can be used as tools for wreaking havoc on business, they’re also powerful tools for promotion and customer service. Let’s take a look at both the good and the bad.

How Image Affects Your Business

We know the impact that a positive or negative review can have on a business. In the restaurant business, a negative review can ruin a restaurant’s reputation as quickly as a good review can send business through the roof. Like it or not, Yelp is here to stay. With the addition of video, customers have yet another way of making your restaurant visible to the public.

That’s a good thing, right? Sure, according to Yelp, whose users have been uploading photos of restaurant interiors for years. By adding video, Yelp users can share positive features of your restaurant, such as its interior design, ambiance, service quality and cleanliness. But what about your other customers? How will they feel about being filmed inside your restaurant? That’s where things get tricky.

Privacy Concerns

Your customers are the backbone of your business, and keeping them happy is vital to the success of your restaurant. While positive images and videos of your restaurant on a site like Yelp is free promotion, it could be detrimental if your customers are uncomfortable with the situation.

We’ve seen how some people react when they’re filmed without their consent. Recently in San Francisco, a woman claimed she was attacked for wearing Google Glass in an area bar. According to the woman, she was showing a curious bar customer how Google Glass worked, when two men who believed they were being filmed became irate and tore the device off the woman’s face.

This story may sound unique because Google Glass is a new product with relatively low use. But with camera phones in the hands of more than half the population, there’s a lot of amateur photography going on across the country.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Visual and Social Media

The impact of social media on restaurants can’t be understated. With more than 100 million active users, Instagram is one of the most popular free marketing tools for restaurants on the market. But it’s not only restaurant owners who are using Instagram to promote their businesses: Customers are doing it too, unintentionally becoming PR reps for the restaurants.

Restaurants and customers are also sharing photos, videos and reviews on Twitter and Facebook. By utilizing these social channels, you can promote your restaurant across the globe, essentially for free. The bad news is that customers are also sharing photos of cold, undercooked, overcooked and poorly executed dishes, not to mention dirty tables and floors and images of bad service. To successfully navigate in the social realm, you’ll need to respond to both the positive and the negative.

Social Media and Customer Service

With social media at your disposal, it’s never been easier to keep tabs on customer feedback and to respond to customers in a timely manner. Businesses that don’t respond to customers on social media are taking a major risk. In a recent article inForbes magazine, Dennis Stoutenburgh of Stratus Contract Solutions remarked that businesses that don’t respond to customers on social media “will have a black mark against them.”

According to Edison Research, 42 percent of consumers complain on social media, and 25% complain on the same day. This presents you with the opportunity to respond to complaints, answer questions and, perhaps most importantly, recover customers who have had negative experiences. At Pedanco, we understand the importance of this opportunity and provide a set of tools that will help with customer engagement and increase your guest recovery rates. Because, the important thing to remember is that although negative experiences have the potential to go viral, positive experiences have the potential to go viral too.