PJ's & Coffee

Becoming a Social Restaurant

What started out as a love affair with food, has become a journey through “social food.” Three years ago, a good friend and I embarked on a journey to showcase the area’s best places to eat. Our goal was not to highlight only the BEST restaurants, but the BEST food offerings in our community. While we ate our way through Philadelphia and it’s burbs (gaining 30 pounds along the way), we discovered that our mission, though incredibly valuable to diners, was an uphill battle in terms of profitability.

Neither of us had much internet sales experience. Having been a retail buyer for 20 years, I had never had to cold call before. For the love of food, I tried my best to pursue sales as a means of working with restaurants. Have you ever tried to locate the decision maker of a restaurant? It is painfully difficult and nearly impossible in center city. You cannot bother a chef during peak dining hours, and when they are not cooking, they often flee to handle other aspects of running their businesses. None the less, we continued on building a site that had honest, sincere and credible information on Philadelphia area restaurants. Slowly we built something we could be proud of, and we just needed to market the product to our audience.

I knew that we needed to use social media, but did not have a facebook page and had no idea what twitter was about. I jumped in feet first. Having no SEO built into our site, at the time, we used Google Adwords for marketing. $30,000 later, our business model did not seem so solid. Yes we had visitors, but no we hadn’t made any real money yet. Through that first year our social media presence grew. After finally taking the time to analyze our site traffic, I realized that we had received thousands of hits from twitter alone. This lead to my “ah ha” moment.

I canceled Google adwords and beefed up my social media efforts, building relationships with other food bloggers and diners along the way. While we were still focused heavily on our website, The Best Of Food, we couldn’t ignore the implications of social media marketing. When we approached restaurants about the reviews that we had written about their venues, the subject of social media was a constant topic. Restaurants knew they needed a social media presence, but with the demands on their time, they just couldn’t manage it themselves. ~~~ Enter Pj’s & Coffee Social Media.

Logo design by Andersen Communications

Before we knew it, our food business had become a social media business as well. At first we had only restaurant related accounts, but as the word spread of our accomplishments, referrals started coming in for other types of businesses. 18 months later, we have been featured in newspaper and blog posts. The most recent today by Kikscore.

Interview with Chris Visco of Pj’s & Coffee Social Media

As we have grown into a social media firm, advising all types of businesses, the passion for food and local restaurants still remains. While we believe strongly that all businesses need a social media presence, we also know that for restaurants to flourish in a quickly evolving social world, they MUST have a social media presence. This does not mean creating accounts and expecting the world to come to you. Instead, restaurants must engage, listen and learn from their customer base. Social media isn’t simply about promoting yourself, but building long lasting relationships with your customer base. Excellent customer service is the best ROI you can achieve as a social restaurant!

Follow on Twitter:

@pjsandcoffee

@thebestoffood

Facebook:

The Best of Food

Pj’s & Coffee

Food Spotting:

The Best of Food

Email:

Chrisv@pjsandcoffee.com

A year and a half after we launched our original website The Best of Food.com, we have launched a new, improved and updated website. Why so soon? Why, indeed!

When we set out on this path, we had grand plans of creating a website that would be a diners best friend, a non-diners guide to better food options, and an all around reliable “go-to” site for dining in the tri-state area. The #1 priority of the site was to be user friendly. In certain ways it was, but for the most part, not so much!

We wanted users to be able to pick as many features as they wanted and have our website “spit” out exactly what they were looking for. For example: The best French restaurant for outdoor dining, with kids, in center city would be ~ Click a button. In our old site, you had to look up outdoor dining and child friendly separately, although that was not what we requested.

In keeping with our theme of “local” businesses, we picked a web developer that was in walking distance from our homes. Great idea, right? Sure, if the developer had any interest in meeting face to face. We met once in a year and a half. After that, everything was via conference call or email. Nothing about the site ended up being what we wanted and after being live for 2 months, we started to search for a new web host/developer.

Thanks to twitter, we found a new web developer in Lancaster and they were willing to travel to Philadelphia to meet with us as needed. We now have the flexibility to do anything with the site we wish. On our old site we had to send an email to have them change everything. Talk about a complete lack of flexibility!

So, thank you for your patience with us for the last year as we have moved toward our goal of being the Philadelphia area’s most comprehensive restaurant guide for the BEST places to dine. We can now get back to the business of building our database to add, add, and add some more great places for you to visit. Please take a look around at our new search features, our new bakery, gourmet and catering pages, and know that we will be adding great new places each and everyday! Also, we now have restaurant’s specials on some pages and we are loading them daily too!

We would LOVE your feedback with ideas, suggestions or questions!

Have a delicious day!

It really all comes down to the mussels…that is where it started!

Granted, we have an about page, but as we evolve, we want to make sure that our readers, “fans,” and “followers” truly understand from where it is that we have come.

There are so many websites that mislead the consumer into believing that mediocre food is not only to be accepted, but that it is all that is available. As a lifelong Philadelphia area resident, I for one, am proud of my city and of our area restaurants and know that we have great restaurants here. I also refuse to believe that we do not, and cannot achieve great things in the culinary arts in our suburban communities. But, alas, once again, I have gone off on a tangent to be saved for another day….

Today’s topic: MUSSELS and our quest to locate them.

So once upon a November day, a trip was planned to New York City. A city that I know, love, and have eaten my way through, for years. We would take my father there for the weekend and, while I had a wonderful Sushi dinner planned, and an extravagant  birthday dinner planned, I wanted to have a casual Italian lunch with his favorite dish, mussels.

My father is a simple man, with one of his favorite places being Chick’s Tavern in Bridgeport where a local family cooks simple, yet delicious food in a family setting. Because I spent my time in New York on business, most of the restaurants we frequented were “the best,” and not neighborhood, casual spots. My search began to find a “Chick’s” in New York!

I spent 3 exhausting days! Of course, there were plenty of blogs out there. There are more today than existed then, but who has time to read through them all? Who are these people anyway? Besides, once you do get a recommendation, then you need to research the recommendation on several more sites to see what it looks like for setting, location, menu, etc. Exhausting.

I decided it shouldn’t be this hard! I personally subscribe to Zagat, but that now costs $24.95 a year to get reviews and they do not rate most lower end restaurants. You would never find a place like Chick’s with their “all you can eat mussels” in the Zagat guide!

So, we decided we needed a site that would compile the area’s “best” in many specific categories beyond just the cuisine type, that was user friendly, and that was unbiased and reliable. Our lists would include all types of restaurants, not just the 5 star variety and searches would include all most anything someone might be craving!

Are we there yet, HELL NO! We have thousands of restaurants still missing! We are working our fingers to the bone to get there, and we will! Until we do, we have the concierge service. If you don’t see what you are looking for, just drop us a line and ask! We will figure it out for you! No One should EVER have a bad meal in this fine city!

There are many other reasons for what we do here and to keep posts simple and to the point, we will break those reasons up into separate issues of “What we do.”

Let's eat together....

The idea of our first blog post is equally exciting and stressful, invigorating and debilitating! After dreaming of this moment for years and working for over a year designing, brainstorming, developing, screwing up and repairing the screw-ups on this site, we’ve entered a “make you or break you” type of moment.

Well, as an “under-promise, over-deliver” type of person, I’m going to warn you now, Craig LaBan, we are not! Nor do we pretend to be or aspire to be, okay, maybe we aspire to be, but that’s not going to happen, so let’s just say, we know our limitations. We  love food. We love to eat food. We love to cook food. We love restaurants, chefs, the culinary arts, and Philadelphia. We write about all of the above, simply, but hopefully interestingly enough to inspire conversation.

From here on out we will post about all things food, and Philadelphia, and beyond! We have drawn our inspiration from the amazing chefs, restaurateurs, and bloggers in this city and we will highlight them here in the days, weeks and months to come.

Also note: unlike most blogs we hope to chat with you and respond to your comments, so if you have questions about any of our posts, ask….we will respond!