Earlier this week, I was getting on my blog soap box to talk about not one, but two unfortunate experiences I had with restaurants last week - both which overcharged by adding extra entrees to our bills.

As someone who is in the field of Word of Mouth Marketing, and even more importantly, a consumer who felt “wronged”, I did what many are now doing these days and chose to speak about my experiences online - on Facebook, Twitter, and even this blog.

I challenged both restaurants to keep in mind that consumers now have the ability to not only share their opinion, but amplify their negative experiences on review sites such as Yelp, CitySearch, TripAdvisor, etc.

According to a recent study by the Society for New Communications Research, 59% of consumers use social media to vent their frustrations about service experience, and research other consumers’ experience with service before dealing with them.  Furthermore, 81% say blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice regarding customer care, but less than 33% say they believe that businesses take customers’ opinions seriousl.

I had thought the same about the two restaurants last weekend. But I was wrong.  One of them- Taste on Melrose - listened and responded here on this blog.

I was impressed not only that they listened to what one of their customers said, but they turned it into a positive by making it right.

I couldn’t be happier- as this is one of my favorite restaurants, a place I’ve taken family, friends, co-workers and have recommended to others. I’ll keep doing so.

Thanks for paying attention Taste and righting a wrong through social media.

It appears the naming rights to the tallest building in the western hemisphere (once the tallest building in the world) have been given to a London-based insurance broker that will rename the tower The Willis Tower.  The Willis Tower???

While I don’t live in Chicago anymore, when I did live there the Sears Tower was as familiar to me as a good Chicago Hot Dog. It’s a symbol of the city.  From Facebook updates I’ve seen from family and friends, I’m sensing that others are as disturbed about this as I am.  Which is why I’m happy to see that you can get your Sears Tower venting out on Twitter, as the @SearsTower twitter profile is happily responding to your complaints.

In a mildly snarky fashion (similar to my beloved @thesnuggie), this inanimate object is responding to your tweets with such bitter comments as “Willis Tower is following me. And that’s exactly what you’ll do, Willis. Stand in my 1,450.58 foot shadow”, and “Ahem. Mr. Plumeri. Moving into an awesome building like me isn’t a “bold move.” A bold move is deciding not to wear pants to work,” and the best one yet, “Sticks and stones may break human bones, but new names will never come to define me.”  Good one Sears Tower, good one.

So while the name Sears Tower may be going away, its Twitter profile lives on. I’m looking forward to following my new Twitter friend and seeing it all unfold.

Need some helpful SEO tips for your blog?  Check out these four basic tricks:

1. Categories — when you are adding a post to a category, pick one category. Putting a post in more than one category creates duplicate content and search engines will think you wrote the same thing multiple times.
2. Tags – use as many possible to describe the content. Always use names, places, events, etc. if they are relevant. When you publish it, it will cross reference with those names/etc.
3. Page Title– 60 characters or less. Be descriptive and tight, anything beyond that is dropped.
4. Description — 160 characters or less. Make sure your title words are repeated in your description. It ranks better and weighs heavier. Also make sure that the URL reads with words in the title and description.

Aside from these four basic guidelines, there are many more ways to get your voice heard by building awareness and word of mouth around your blog.  Stay tuned for more from KML…

Yes, that happens to be KARMA’s tagline.  But it also defines Word of Mouth — and much like KARMA, it can be both positive and negative.

As a business, individual or company, you want word of mouth to be positive, but the reality is through new social media platforms and exchanges, consumers have more ways to amplify their experiences– the good, the bad and the ugly.

Take, for example, my recent restaurant going experiences over the weekend.  Not one, but two restaurants (that shall remain nameless for the time being) slipped in extra entrees on our bill, hoping we would not check.  And we almost didn’t.

In the first instance, since we were taking a family member out for their 65th birthday, we didn’t want to cause a scene and just ate it.  Annoying.

In the second and far more annoying instance, a restaurant, where my husband and I are considered “regulars”, slipped in an extra entree, the entree we usually order when we’re there but didn’t this time.  Was this a random error?  No, they figured since we usually get the same thing every time, they’d try to sneak it in.  When we called the waitress over, body language had “oops we’ve been caught” written all over it.  We won’t be going there again.

My point with the above, is as an irritated, frustrated, and somewhat direct consumer, my first inclination was to go wherever possible online to warn people not to go to these two restaurants.  My Facebook and Twitter updates mentioned this annoyance, and look, here I am blogging about it.  I’ve decided to not name the restaurants, but if I truly wanted to cause some damage and give these two places the consumer F%&* YOU, I’d be a little more specific.

Consumers like tell others how much they like or dislike products, services and experiences. eMarketer reports that 65 million adults in the U.S. are talking about products and services and 27 million of them are doing it online via forums, blogs, consumer review sites, social media sites etc. That trend is only going to increase.

Sure, businesses should try to do things right in the first place to garner positive reviews, but they shouldn’t be afraid of the bad ones.  It’s possible many of them can turn this around to be a positive by connecting with their target audience, hearing feedback, and understanding their audience’s perception.

So I’m not sure if Pace in Laurel Canyon or Taste on Melrose will do anything about my experiences to make it better, but if they were smart, they’d not only keep in mind that consumers like to blab about shifty practices, but they should pay attention to what’s being said.

Oops! I slipped the names of the restaurants.  Kind of like how they slipped in those extra entrees.