Red Robin Takes Bite of Facebook

Gourmet-burger chain Red Robin is using GoRecommend from customer-satisfaction vendor Empathica to encourage Facebook users to post recommendations on their pages, AdAge.com reported.

How it works, according to AdAge.com: Empathica asks Red Robin customers to fill out an online survey at the bottom of their restaurant receipt. In return for possible cash prizes, they answer questions about their experience and if they would recommend Red Robin to others, and they are invited to recommend Red Robin to their Facebook profile pages. Users’ friends aren’t notified of the wall posts unless they’ve requested notifications on all wall posts, and Red Robin can use the comments on its own fan page.

Empathica vice president of product management Andrew Datars told AdAge.com:

We don’t go the fan route, we go the recommendation route. People can become your fans, but the challenge with that approach is that it doesn’t leverage the social graph. Just because one of the people is a fan of your brand, it doesn’t get to their friends or people who aren’t fans of your brand.

Red Robin chief marketing officer Susan Lintonsmith told AdAge.com the chain received about 1,500 recommendations since Empathica launched the service in April.

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