For those of you that don’t know, most of my career has had nothing to do with restaurants. I spent several years in retail management, six years in medical settings, and six years working for an information technology company. In those years I saw the advancement of technology in both home electronics and computer technology.
I was an early adopter, so I had a first generation laser disc player, a first generation cd player, one of the first Epson IBM PC clones (complete with a 5 1/4 floppy drive only), an S-VHS video recorder, and bought a dvd player when the whole divx temporary dvd technology was still considered a possible alternative to dvd. I was on the internet (such as it was) in 1994. Through my friend Phil Yanov (an early adopter’s early adopter), I was introduced to the first Palm Pilots, and how the internet could be used with all types of devices, including amateur radio.
As someone that enjoys marketing, I have watched with interest the efforts to use the internet as a marketing tool ( I sound like someone in the fifties saying that “maybe this television thing will make some money someday”). I watched the internet bubble burst while working with consultants from Oracle and hearing the moans from many of them who had invested in companies that really didn’t have products to sell or real plans to make money with the products they had.
Since then, a lot of internet products have come along that make the marketing options for a small business such as ours much more diverse. We spent the first four years placing ads in multiple print outlets, on radio stations and their related websites, on television (rarely and at very specific times), sending email updates to our customers that request them, and using our website as the main vehicle to get our name on the internet.
Over the last several months we have added a Facebook page for the Corner Kitchen, a twitter site for the Corner Kitchen, and this blog. While one of the attractions of these recent additions is the cost (basically my time), the other thing I like about these sites is that they give Joe and me the ability to interact with our customers. Joe has such a history with food and restaurants that he can supply interesting stories until the cows come home (thanks to my late grandmother, Grace Lackey, for that saying) and we can communicate special things to our guests with more immediacy.
Our goal is not to inundate our customers with information, and these sites allow access when people want it and can be ignored when people don’t want to hear from us. The goal is to give people the ability to interact with us. I have started posting our daily specials on twitter and using the Corner Kitchen facebook page to highlight events here as well as our staff. This blog will have more meat on the bones – at least that is the plan – and will let Joe and me write about things that interest us (and hopefully you) both inside and outside the restaurant industry.
If there are things you would like to see here or on one of the other sites, let us know.
