Social Branding

Craigie On Main is a very good restaurant in Cambridge, MA.

Like all great restaurants, it is defined by a point-of-view, rather than a dish:

Chef Tony Maws combines French-inspired “nose-to-tail refined rusticity” with a ”no exceptions” commitment to local, seasonal, and organic or natural ingredients.

The menu is printed nightly on an inkjet. As the web site says:

Our menu changes daily so we can be sure we serve only the very best the market has to offer that day. These menus show the types of selections that diners have enjoyed recently. There are always meat, fish, and vegetarian options.

All of our food is organic whenever possible and always natural.

The restaurant itself delivers on the promise of refined rusticity. And the food… right down to the lowly hamburger on the menu… is utterly consistent with this point-of-view.

The Role of Social Media

Their Chef’s Blog, while not written by the Chef, focuses on recipes which reveal an encyclopedic knowledge of ingredients (“¼ pound Honshimeji mushrooms…”), and an obsession with the details that make a dish truly special:

“The Perrier in this recipe gives the soup a nice brightness and effervescence that makes it dance on the tongue. This is nice because come dessert time, your palate is often a bit dull after all that wine and food.”

Hungry for a more personal connection to Mr. Maws and team? Check out his how-to YouTube videos, which reveal a warm, unpretentious and skilled craftsman willing to experiment with the medium.

The restaurant’s facebook status is as fresh as the sablefish (when they have it,) and its Twitter presence may be the single best example of how to build a brand through objectively valuable content that I’ve seen since the Obama campaign.

Why Is This Important?

Consider the effect of all this, particularly on a generation of “consumers” who think 90% of what they see on TV is bullshit. Can you really fake all this? I think not. So will they.

Social media is where the next generation of great brands will be born. To see how, even the big national brands would do well to study how these guys do it.