What are next steps?

Set up an introductory meeting

The first step is setting up an hour-long meeting at the restaurant or elsewhere. At the meeting, you can ask any questions you want about Crème de la Crème service, other services, CSRA or anything else.

I’ll also explain in more detail how the service works and ask you some basic questions about your business goals and your Crème de la Crème customers. This enables me to help you pick a menu to try.

You can change menus easily

Since you can change menus (level of service) from one month to the next, the first menu is only the starting point. Once you see the interaction and engagement we initiate with your Crème de la Crème customers, you can decide whether you want more or less.

Get started here

---

Do you want to go behind the curtain?

Although Crème de la Crème experiential social media is offered as a simple service, it rests on rigorous insight, methods and tools. These have deep roots in my experience as a management consultant advising owners on business strategy, emerging technology and transformation.

I invite you to access my thought leadership on local business and large-scale retail to understand how the rules are changing. These articles help demystify things about the business environment you probably feel but may not fully grasp. Most important, they can give you unusual insight, so you can use disruption to your advantage.

Few restaurant, café, bar and club owners realize the new advantages they have by extending their unique personal touch online. Experiential social media can grow and deepen your selling radius.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is drop-in-place? What are your services and prices?

Drop-in-place refers to Crème de la Crème’s unique design, which you can change or turn on or off, month to month, even though it’s a very sophisticated service. Here is our list of service levels and prices. Unlike CSRA’s consulting services, Crème de la Crème is offered in simple monthly menus.

We’re already doing social media, so what will this do for us that’s different?

CSRA developed experiential social media for restaurants based on thousands of hours of client work in which teams studied behavior in digital social venues. I developed “the recipe” for restaurants because, as a former chef, I’ve known the frustration of high capital, marketing and service costs, and I appreciate the need to build business profitably.

Restaurants’ corporate groups often practice social media on behalf of many their restaurants, and this can be a very efficient way to generate awareness using their Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest accounts. It’s also very complementary to experiential social media, which is most active on third party sites where customers are. Each restaurant has its unique character and Crème de la Crème customers. We discover and stimulate the most unique, compelling connections between each restaurant and its most valuable customers.

We don’t do social media since it hasn’t produced business results in other restaurants I know, so why should we do this?

Most businesses use social media like a digital sandwich board. Social media puts on its makeup and walks busy streets (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) at lunchtime or rush hour. Some restaurants drive more tables with promotions, but these tables are less profitable. It’s inefficient.

Experiential social media takes a completely different approach. Over the last eight years, I’ve developed a method that fuses sociology, software development, psychology and digital tools that makes it very efficient to interact with people who have very specific motivations for visiting restaurants. I work with restaurants to map their most profitable services to these customers, so we aim to increase visits from the most profitable customers, not all customers.

How long does it take to start producing results?

Each niche of your Crème de la Crème has its own character, and many other factors determine the answer to this question. For example, some niches are heavy online users of social media while others are not. Some require more attention before they start loving you back. During our analysis, we’ll guide your expectations for each niche based on its behavior. Another variable is how much experiential social media you do; a slow drip will take longer to get results. Expect different results for different niches.

In most cases, it takes a few months to interact enough so people start trusting that you really care, that your care is not a marketing gimmick, but once they feel your commitment for a while, results increase geometrically. It’s also important to avoid coming on too strong; CSRA will recommend an appropriate frequency for each digital social venue.

How can you increase business from such specific customer niches?

CSRA’s teams conduct ethnographic analysis of your Crème de la Crème customers, so we quickly learn about their motivations for and experiences with restaurant visits, and we test our learning by interacting with your Crème de la Crème. We learn what stimulates them and what doesn’t. We learn what’s most valuable to them.

How do you decide where to engage our Crème de la Crème?

It’s a secret recipe, but I can tell you that the most efficient venues are rarely the most popular to general audiences (i.e. Facebook, Twitter). We define the optimal venues by finding the ones that have the highest portion of conversations that’s uniquely relevant to your Crème de la Crème.

So what do you do in these “digital social venues”?

We focus on people’s motivations behind restaurant visits, so we not only engage them with the pleasure of the dining experience; we also help them be more successful when they are planning corporate events, weddings, romance or special family gatherings. They soon associate you with being useful, relevant and caring, as well as pleasurable. It’s an unbeatable combination!

What are “sides”?

Each menu comes with some hours of unbilled time, some at the restaurant, in which we observe your customers and how you serve them ethnographically. This gives us insights into how you give people the most pleasure and add the most “value” relevant to their motivations. By observation, we learn surprising things you’d never think to say and we’d never think to ask. We use these insights to engage your Crème de la Crème in distinctive ways.

Who is CSRA?

CSRA refers to me, Christopher S. Rollyson, and my global network of experts and specialists in design, management consulting, software development, sociology, culture and many other disciplines. I create teams from this large reservoir of people, so I get who is perfectly suited for your initiative, not only staffers that happen to be available at that time.

Do you have a question that’s not answered here?

Ask it in comments (“Leave a reply”) below. Or contact me.