My name is Nubi Kay’ and I’m a foodie.
It’s pretty rare to watch interesting movies that have glaring lessons for small businesses and brands but this was not the case with the movie — Chef.
I’d recommend every business owner, marketing department, and aspiring start-up founders to watch the movie as soon as possible. In the meantime, here are 5 social media takeaways:
#1. It’s a Mobile world
We often think mobile computing is for personal stuff and expect to switch to a laptop, desktop, or workstation once it’s business or official. Well that’s so 1999. Throughout the movie, all communication (incl. marketing) was done from only mobile devices — tablet and smartphone. It’s indeed a mobile world but that’s no excuse to be offline when in motion. Good thing is that it’s now possible and affordable to be plugged in 365/24/7. This leads to the next point…
#2. Later is too late. Think real time
With a mobile world comes the need to be proactive: ready to push out information, respond to inquires, and engage, all in real time. Gone (or going away) are days of archiving content for future use — weeks or months down the line. You now have be creative in trend spotting (and sometimes news jacking), creating real-time content and sharing them immediately. While it is still important to have a plan, an editorial calender, and gather insight from analytics, it all comes down to execution and that my friends is now.
#3. Go-a-fishing
The movie shows the Chef’s kid pushing real time updates as the food truck made its way from Miami to Los Angeles. Perhaps what was more interesting was how it all started with Twitter and in no time moved on to Facebook, YouTube, and Vine. It is important to start with one platform and then move on to others as your target market may not be on one platform. Spread your seeds (or in this case, cast your baits). With the right content and effective management of those platforms, you’re bound to engage with more people and generate leads = $ales = money.
#4. Crisis Management!#/*$^?@
Keep it short and do it fast, but don’t lose your calm when it comes to averting or better yet managing crisis on social media. You don’t want to ignore negative comments, tweets, or messages from users/consumers, so relax (not for too long) and respond with an apology, correction, or defense. Important to note some people are just stupid (think they call them trolls) and do not deserve your response — by all means report, block, and delete their posts.
#5. Understand and Work it!
It is important to take time out to understand social media platforms and how to best use them. Chef’s son (who was named Head of Marketing for the business) did not just stop by tweeting about the business, upon arrival in New Orleans he sent out a geo-tagged tweet (including a photo) showing the location of the food truck; by the time they were back from lunch there was a queue of people waiting to get food from the Chef’s kitchen.
There was no need for an address as people simply looked up the location (linked to a map) from the tweet and found the truck — easily identified from the photo that accompanied the tweet. Bottom line — understand the platform and work it!
Here’s the trailer:
Once again, I strongly recommend every small business owner, start-up founder, and aspiring entrepreneur watch this movie as there are more lessons including team work, management, how to convince people to work for you, negotiation, and more. Yes, all from one movie for foodies. Enjoy.
This post was first published on Nubi Kay’s Medium as The Social Chef.
