You’ve watched this by now?
And you’ve guiltily enjoyed the social media “meltdown”?
You never win a fight with the internet. That’s a rule for all of us—but to fight with such spectacular lack of awareness, such complete blindness to how this was going to play out. Delicious.
News today from Eater announces that these Kitchen Nightmare rejects are going to open again after a sullenly shutting their doors and chasing away reporters. They’ll donate proceeds to a cyber bullying charity.
Wow, Amy. Wow, Samy.
Okay, I’ll grant that in a reality TV show edit room, with a skilled and snarky editor, footage can be manipulated to tell more than one story. And I grant that the Kitchen Nightmares reality TV show staff is always going to make host Gordon Ramsey look firm-even-fiery-but-ultimately-fair. Still. You can’t deny that this is a good example of how not to behave when you know there are cameras.
Still, the focus should probably be on the social media response, captured thoroughly here by BuzzFeed.
They got up the next morning and decided to claim they got hacked; so did Representative Anthony Wiener. And him, I wanted to believe.
Learning to navigate efficient food prep, personnel management, cost control and other demands of the restaurant biz often leaves smaller places like Amy’s Baking Company with very little time to think through their marketing plan.
But make this a rule: if you’re not sure how a particular social media site tends to function, proceed with caution: Don’t hurl insults. No caps lock, no threats, no invocations of whichever God is on your side. Don’t whine you’re being bullied. Be unfailingly civil.
In absence of a plan, that’ll be the plan.
Thank you, Amy and Samy, for providing the latest teaching moment for social media advisors.
And for your sake, I hope that soon you may echo the first words out of Gerald Ford’s mouth here: