Interview:Horsefeathers' Ben Williams

Earlier today, I was interviewed by Ilana DeBare a Business Reporter and Columnist for the SF Chronicle.  She wanted to know about small businesses--not consultants who are using blogs. I gave her a list of companies that are often well-publcized and a couple who are not, including, Horsefeathers, a standalone restaurant in a New England ski area who uses blogs to maintain loyalty in the face of increased competition from franchises and chains.  Following is the text of our interview with Ben Williams, a partner in the enterprise and the company blogger.

1. What's your position with Horsefeathers? Can you tell me a bit about the restaurant's history, size and competitive environment? How seasonal is your business?   

Horrsefeathers is a mature independent restaurant, that my partner Brian Glynn and I opened back in 1976. We're a neighborhood type of place, in a four-season resort area marketed as the Mount Washington Valley. North Conway, NH  and the surrounding towns have a year-round population of 7,000 but the population swells to half a million on peak weekends with skiers in the winter, hikers, climbers in the summer and leaf peepers during our New England foliage season. In recent years, the area has also become a regional retail destination. We have  a large number of shopping outlets (off price retail, it's politely termed) in a state without a sales tax.
   

2.  When did you start blogging and why?

We switched from a standard web page about a year ago. The idea was marketing, but more specifically loyalty marketing. We were already  spending most of our promotional energy and money maintaining the customer base we had. We had a loyalty points for purchases program in place, as well as, a monthly HTML newsletter. All of this in hopes of maintaining the good customers more then trying to attract new ones. 

Our area is just starting to see the influx of chain restaurants. We felt we needed another tool to differentiate Horsefeathers and stay in touch with our regulars, before they wander off to the new place down the street.  We hoped the blog format would better match our strategy 

3. One of the miracles of a blog is global reach. But Horsefeathers is a standalone restaurant.  How do you localize  a business blog?   

We certainly don't sell sandwiches via Pay Pal. And, restaurant marketers will tell you that no one will travel more than 20 minutes for a hamburger.  But we do use the "global reach" of a blog effectively.

First a major portion of our customer base are second home owners. Our blog gives these folks a way to stay in touch with their vacation community. They see the kind of things we're talking about up here and feel comfortable and "up to speed" when they show up on Friday night.

Second, we are part of a destination resort area. We get good response from search engines when key terms about our area are entered. We keep this visitor in mind, and post timely information about local events and conditions (ski reports, river reports, etc). We feel this helps put us on the tourists "must see' list.  Every tourist wants to feel like a local. The blog helps our guests feel that way.

   
 
4.The  blog references Horsefeathers very little.  In many ways, it looks more  like an epicurean site than a restaurant blog.  Why is this?

Our blog is subtitled " Restaurant Conversations & Bar Top Debates". For the longest time food services had no idea how to use the internet, Al Gore so graciously gave us. Previously restaurant web sites (ours included) were all dull and static. Busy operators would put up a menu and a few pictures and that would be it. Customers would look at the site once and, seeing nothing new, never return. Once the site was up the operators seldom returned either. The web site was forgotten and the information became stale. The blog format has allowed Horsefeathers to have a web presence that stays current and relevant to the types of things our guests are interested in.

On the blog, we talk about about the same things we talk about at the table or behind the bar. Naturally, food is a big topic. So is sports, currents events and anything with local color. The "conversation" has to stay topical and fun. We assume our readers already know that we're a wonderful restaurant. No one wants to hear how wonderful we think we are.

5.How does your blog impact customer loyalty?

Our newsletter goes out to 2,000 members. Spam is killing our newsletter, making the blog the best way to talk with our guests.

Last week, the visitor counter on our blog rolled over 50,000. For us, this is a huge number. On an average day 150 to 200 people will electronically check-in at our home base. We realize these aren't Amazon numbers but we do have as many people visiting Horsefeathers.com every day, as we have seats in the dining room.
When we check our stats, the busiest day of the week is always Thursday and the heaviest traffic occurs right around lunch time. You have to think that these are our customers checking in to see what's up for the weekend.

6. How else do you market Horsefeathers?

Right now, we're doing less-and-less traditional placement advertising, We're concentrating on in-house, retention promotion. We're also trying to figure out how to better market the blog, which we feel is the vehicle that markets the Horsefeathers experience the best.  As you mentioned before,  our effort is more regional so SEO will only do so much.

7. How has blogging changed your business?

We're waiting to see the large scale adoption of blogs and RSS by our customers that we believe is still to come. However, because we've adopted the  blog format, we do have one of the hippest web sites of any restaurant out there. People constantly comment about the blog and we hope it's bringing in some additional business. Like all blog believers, we believe the best is yet to come.

8 How has it changed you?

Blogging is time-consuming, fun and rewarding, but very time consuming.

9. What advice do you have for other smaller businesses regarding blogging?  What warnings do you have?   

Use different posts to target different potential customers.  Using the category feature available on most blog software, you can set up an area for everyone. We've had particular success with a "Women & Horsefeathers" category. This way women can find their way through all the inevitable male ambiance and see that  Horsefeathers is a restaurant for them.

Comments

[Dave Taylor]

Interesting interview, until I read this comment: "For the longest time food services had no idea how to use the internet, Al Gore so graciously gave us." No offense (well, hey, take offense, whatever) but this is a stupid sentence that should be edited out of this interview, in my opinion.

It doesn't convey any useful information, it demonstrates that irony (?) or sarcasm (?) doesn't convert well to blogs and print media, and it's just going to stick in the craw of readers who either support Gore or are savvy enough to understand what he *really* said before his comments were taken out of context and misconstrued by popular media, Shel.

[Steven Streight aka Vaspers the Grate]

Hey Dave my friend, cut Ben some slack. After all, he's been around me, Vaspers the Grate, Whispers the Grape, the Leper Guru, Leopold the Told...

...and my venom has infiltrated his molecules.

Ben asked one of the most amazing and challenging questions I've ever heard:

"How do I influence my employees to join the blog converstation, post articles, and post comments? They have colorful pasts, interesting lives, but they refuse to post anything."

I gave him some suggestions. Robert French gave him some great ideas. I wonder how the implementation is going? Or is it going?

Anybody got any ideas?

I said: email the employees a Question A Week, then post the best replies.

Most folks like email. Most folks also (98%) never post content to the web. But they will respond to an email question.

Any other brilliant ideas out there to help my friend Ben?

Come on geniuses. Lend a hand here. Or I'll drink another Becks and really tear into you.

[Paul Woodhouse]

Easy there, Dave. You managed to be able to recognise it as a spot of sarcasm and so might somebody else. God forbid we should all conform to a relatively mundane and uniform voice.

All that sentence demonstrates is that you obviously haven't gotten over Mr. Gore being mugged in 2000.

[Timothy Shanahan]

Horsefeathers (Ben) is on the bleeding edge of the most important marketing method of all - building community. They are doing an excellent job of it and Horsfeathers is a must go to when in North Conway.