What's the 411? Food Social.

The Glowbal Group isn’t a restaurant. It is a collection of restaurants in the Vancouver area including the Glowbal Grill, Sanafir, Coast, Italian Kitchen, Trattoria, Society and Black and Blue. With its rich, delicious and visually appealing food, the Glowbal group targets the young, affluent professional market. With the opening of the Black and Blue restaurant recently, Glowbal’s broad scope across many different culinary choices certainly has a strong influence on the Vancouver culinary scene today.

The Italian Kitchen on Alberni is one of their more well known restaurants. Oddly, I didn’t happen upon the Italian Kitchen through any sort of e-marketing effort. My co-worker’s Thursday routine consisted of walking to IK, ordering some amazingly good Italian food, bringing it to our lunch room and proceeding to provoke jealousy as he ate it in front of us. He would never, ever tell us where he got it from. So one day we followed him and found out where the restaurant was. After a quick search, I found www.theitaliankitchen.com – replete with videos, recipies and dish pictures that would make anyone gain a few stone just by looking. I noticed that all of the Glowbal Group restaurant websites have the same unified interface – a video at the top, with a showcase of several pages of food, complete with the Glowbal Group banner at the bottom with a hyperlink to their other restaurants.

Their website template is a very effective way to showcase not just one restaurant, but all of the restaurants together. Each of these restaurants, while different in the type of food they offer, cater to the same target market. So if you like one restaurant, and want a change in the type of dish, you merely go to the other restaurant and experience the same level of service with the same types of people surrounding you. This experience extends to the website – and it works well. If you like what you see on one website, you will find the other websites of the other restaurants in the group equally as appealing and enticing – albeit with a different type of food.

The Glowbal group has extended this philosophy to their twitter feed. Oddly, they don’t have individual twitter accounts for each of their restaurants. While they make an effort to consistently tweet and respond to all of  their users like La Taquiera does, they rely on a single twitter feed, @Glowbal_Group, to showcase all of their restaurants. I find this quite ineffective for the following reasons:

1. I haven’t even heard of the Glowbal Group prior to visiting the Italian Kitchen. If I wanted to follow the Italian Kitchen, I would look for @ItalianKitchen or something similar. I would not search for the Glowbal group
2. Having one Twitter feed for seven restaurants results in a disjointed experience for most users and reduces the ability to conduct two-way communication between the user and Glowbal. For example, on the feed, you’d could have several different conversations regarding different restaurants happening within the span of a few seconds. This makes it difficult for a reader to follow the conversation.
3. By combining all of the restaurants under one feed, you reduce the choice for the client to decide what restaurant they really want to follow. What if a user has no interest in Italian food? They will be forced to read about the Italian kitchen and will likely unfollow the twitter account.

While having the one website template works well for the web, having one twitter account for the seven restaurants does not. I would recommend having a separate feed for each of the restaurants. Having the more targeted, more specific tweets would make it easier for the clients to communicate with them.

So What’s the 411?

• The Glowbal Group: Great websites to make you drool, a twitter feed that could use some slicing and dicing.
• Twitter ID: @Glowbal_Group
• Website: http://www.glowbalgroup.com
• Locations: Several. See site for details
• Definite must eat: If you’re downtown during the day, and aren’t dressed for the occasion, visit the Italian Kitchen’s take out kiosk – the one that my co-worker so desparately tried to hide from me.  If you’re on Alberni, the entrance would be just to the left of the main restaurant. You can get almost everything that those sharped dressed people are eating in the sit-down portion of the restaurant for much more reasonable prices. The Spicy Kobe Meatball is huge sphere of Italian meaty goodness, despite the Japanese name.

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