Interesting quote from the owner of a San Francisco restaurant.

Weinberg says in her blog that: “With a bazillion places online to tell us how badly we sucked, we do take it very personally”. “We scour the sites, cyber-stalking our customers.” She isn’t joking about the cyber-stalking.

When they see a negative comment, Weinberg and her team will track the customer through cyber-space to see what other restaurants they frequent and how they have rated them, before determining whether the complaint should be taken seriously. If they get the feeling that something should change, they change it. “Both online comments and in-house feedback usually reflect if the menu needs tweaking,” she says.

It sounds like they take the comment seriously because they take the trouble to track the customer. Then they determine whether it is a false positive. What restaurants need like a behavioral index tool. In other words they could save a lot of time if they had a simple reputation engine that gave them a score for an identity based on a list of other restaurants with comments from the same identity. Then they wouldn’t have to take every negative comment seriously, only the ones from identities they “respect”.

Then again this indicates a serious logical fallacy as a filter. It begs the question of how they respond to comments from identities they can recognize even without tracking them. Do they think it’s wise to judge the person before they listen to the message?

What if they designed a filter instead to be based on details of an event? When a commenter gives specific feedback about a taste, a detail that only a real patron could know, then they would know to take the comment seriously. A generic comment would be ignored. The flip side of this is that the restaurant would have to accommodate change in their menu and/or service to allow comments to be unique.

If they serve up a hot dish of key management, so to speak, then they can easily track the day and time the customer ate, and they can focus on the facts of the comment rather than the person writing a comment. A win-win; valuable feedback for restaurants and freedom (from stalkers) for their customers.

And just for reference, here is the restaurant owner’s FAQ, which might give you some insight into what she really thinks when people comment…

Q. Wow, Anna did you notice how big this space is? That’s a ton of seats to fill…

A. Yes a#$%##e I noticed how big it is.

Q: It really doesn’t look like you will be done by September. Or even this year.

A. Yes a###%^^e I noticed we are a little behind.

Q: Isn’t it like, impossible to find this many good staff?

A. Yes a$%$&&hole. It’s very hard to find good staff these days.

Q: Is that where the bar is going?

A. Yes a$$%%@e, that’s where the obviously brand spanking new bar is going. It’s right there in front of you.