A thought on the concept of a "good customer."

I was doing some informal research for a piece of content I'm working on, and researching local businesses within the area I am writing for.

I came across a review a customer left for a restaurant, essentially saying that the restaurant was too busy to provide the service he was used to as a regular customer. While the food was not bad, his experience was, and because of this anomaly in all of the times he has been a patron at the restaurant he would not return, and that the business had lost a "good customer."

If you are willing to leave a bad review on a locally run business, you are not a "good customer."

Reviews are critical to local businesses who don't have the budgets to pay for mass marketing. Leaving a bad one can be damaging. A "good customer" who had a poor experience would take the time to pull the general manager or owner aside and share their experience, and offer the business a chance to make it right. The complaint would be made privately.

This would allow the customer to leave a review sharing how much they love this restaurant, and even when they don't nail it, they do everything they can to ensure their guests leave feeling appreciated. <<That is the review, right there. Not that the local business, who is already being pushed to its absolute limit based on inflation, staffing and affordable housing issues, and weather can't be as attentive as the regular customer is used to on a busy vacation night.

When I work with small business owners, I'm struck by a similarity between them all: Each one of them feels as though they have to it all. They think they need to have a Yelp profile, be on Tripadvisor; create content for Youtube, Facebook, instagram, and TikTok; update their hours across every single page that Google tells them they need to create; AND provide the best customer experience in-person.

Here's the thing about this mindset - the more you create, the more you have to manage. And I have a feeling you're already overwhelmed by everything you're managing. My advice? Choose three online platforms that work for you as a business owner to control.

Find the cross-section between creating content for platforms you enjoy, and platforms your customers utilize the most. This may mean updating Google Business, creating content for instagram and responding to reviews on Facebook. Or providing hours on Tripadvisor and Google, and filming clips for instagram stories. Or making funny shorts on TikTok and Youtube, and encouraging reviews on Google. Once you determine that equation, forget the rest of your options.

Feeling as though you should do everything and be everywhere is EXACTLY what online platforms want you to feel. It only behooves those sites for users like you to constantly create on them. The motives of the engineers behind those sites aren't altruistic; they're rooted in driving more users to it in order to charge more for the user data they're selling on the backend.

When this conversation comes up, I like to remind my business owning clients that their work transcends the power of these platforms. Many of them started businesses before social media even took the world by storm. Their success doesn't rely on posting, and word of mouth referrals still hold as one of the strongest factors in business growth. Social media and sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor, only have power because we give it to them.

You get to decide what works for you and your business. And if it means you get a frustrated customer because they searched you on Yelp, when you're really only "live" on Google - well they weren't really your customer to begin with, and they definitely wouldn't have been a "good" one.