Social Media and the Bakery

So.... today's twist and turns inspire me to talk about the computing age and the impacts to the food industry. When I first began working, right out of high school in the summer before I entered culinary school, no one knew or could predict the radical changes we would undergo to draw, attract, and maintain clients interest and loyalty.

Long gone are the days in which shoppers visited the 'neighborhood's' local bakery for their bread and sweets. The smaller bakeries first felt the squeeze on their ability to retain customer loyalty when the grocery chains incorporated a bakery department with in the stores. Opening the day before 6 am for business offering fresh baked bread, danish and donuts was usurped and firmly belongs to the chain outlets followed by a loss of the cake and cupcake business. Shoppers traded quality handmade products for the convenience of one-stop-shopping in an effort to save time and money, or at least that was the chant of the commercials we watched. Soon the family owned outlets with talented staff were hard pressed to price match the grocery stores therefore many sold or closed the businesses.

Those outlets that remained were ones that quickly adopted new styles and techniques, especially in the wedding cake, sculpted or carved cakes, and fondant enrobed cakes and other unique items. Bakeries could no longer only offer buttercream and whipped cream cakes which meant they were in need of hiring staff who could work with the new skills or retrain themselves to met client demands that the grocery stores did not offer. It should not surprise you that the chain stores added these offerings as well.

Now, any company that survived or was opened after Facebook became a household name with million of users, must use social media often in order to keep their business in viable competition in the marketplace. The showcase window, sign hanging, and a ad in the yellow pages can't keep you in the running to have a great wedding and holiday baking season. This monumental shift, while popular and accessible, brings negatives and positives.

So to the negatives, as I tend to like my bad news before the good news. Small business owners now have to either rely upon the tech savvy to make their online presence and maintain it, or learn new skills and keep in constant contact with their fans and customers. Knowing how to make a business Facebook page, using Instagram, Periscope, and maintaining a business web page, can take a significant amount of time especially when you aren't literate in the first place.

Success in this arena can attract new clients and concentrate your marketing funding to speak to those people in your most profitable demographic, but until the business can spend monies to have a marketing department or a dedicated staff member to handle these activities, the time that keeping up with social media marketing can be time consuming, especially as a new way to communicate are being developed every day.

The good news is that these activities are not expensive, especially if you do them yourself. Advertising your business no longer requires owners to hire publicity, advertising and marketing companies spending money on door tags, sale flyers, hand out brochures, print ads in newspapers, and issuing coupons. All the needs of small business owners to get the word out and keep the attention of customers can be done from your laptop while sitting on your favorite chair.

 I'm currently sitting in my recliner, reflecting on recent events, which prompted this conversation. My clients favorite way to reach out to me is on social media or email. This gives us the unique ability to talk with clients, decipher their requests, devise a design, and take a deposit all remotely. Keep in mind, that's when it all works, but when dealing with technology or learning new tech skills, we all have experiences where either the user or the program has failed to work effectively or not at all.

So over the weekend, I attempted my first podcast recording. I was excited as the conversation was quite interesting but, needless to say, something went wrong. Failing to create a usable recording made the effort as detectable as teardrops in rain. I am hoping that a second attempt to replace that interview will result in success but I know that the second attempt will not be exactly spoken as the first. I want all of the recordings to be very conversational, I do not feel the need to edit or sensor them, nor to have them sound as polished as a television episode.

Efforts to set a second appointment for a taping will have to wait. If it is not confirmed quickly, I will have to create another interview with someone else. C'est la Via, time waits for no one.