This is the complete transcript of Restaurant Online Outrage: A Crisis Playbook — JD Miller, RTG Ep. 361. JD Miller, PhD is a go-to-market operating advisor, TEDx speaker, and the author of The CRO’s Guide to Winning in Private Equity and The AI Handbook for Sales Professionals.
Episode summary
JD Miller has spent 25 years in tech as a chief marketing officer and chief sales officer, including years at a company doing smart scheduling for hospitality and retail — work that put him on an Obama White House task force on how retail workers get scheduled. He chairs the board of a Chicago homeless services organization that serves roughly 150 hot meals and keeps his food sanitation license current to cook there. He is also, in his own words, the head chef of the Chicago Bell Garden, which is a fancy name for a 110-square-foot rooftop deck.
A joke Instagram post about serving vegan burgers on that balcony got picked up by AI sales-prospecting tools, which wrote him into their databases as a new Chicago restaurant. Within a month vendors were shipping unsolicited samples: vegan cookies, five pounds of kimchi, and 120 pounds of steak rub from a spice vendor in London. In this conversation JD uses that story to explain the machinery — why algorithms optimize for slowing your scroll rather than for truth, how the Cracker Barrel logo boycott moved a stock price 14% when researchers later found roughly half the calls came from bots, and what a bot farm actually costs. Then he gives operators a concrete crisis playbook: name the team before the crisis, build an advocate list, press pause for at least two hours, designate one spokesperson, and make your primary response somewhere other than the platform. He closes on evaluating influencer pitches and why a human has to stay in the loop pressing send.
Jump to a section
- Meet JD Miller and the Chicago Bell Garden
- How One Vegan Burger Post Triggered 120 Pounds of Steak Rub
- Why Online Information Moves Differently Than Offline
- The Cracker Barrel Logo and the 50% Bot Problem
- What a Bot Farm Is and What It Costs
- When a 30-Table Restaurant Gets Caught in the Algorithm
- What to Post Before Anything Goes Wrong
- Finding the Audience That Actually Belongs to You
- The Crisis Playbook, Step by Step
- Who Is Allowed to Talk to the Media
- How to Evaluate Influencer and TikToker Pitches
- What Actually Went Wrong in the Sales Algorithm
- Put a Human Back in the Loop
- Closing Advice for Operators
Meet JD Miller and the Chicago Bell Garden (0:00)
Jeremy Julian: Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us. As I like to say each and every time, I know you guys have got lots of choices out on the internet. So thank you for hanging out with us this week. Today is a fun story, and I’m excited to introduce you guys to JD. We just met online in the last week, but I’m really, really intrigued about his story. And it’s kind of fun — we’re not going to get more than two minutes into this before we use the word AI, but it’s really not in a negative way, because I know a lot of people have some negative connotations about what AI is. JD, why don’t you give us a little bit of a background and then we can dig into the topic, because it’s going to be a fun one. I think you’ve got a lot of educational pieces for our audience that I want to dig into. After I took time to research you, I was like, dude, this guy’s got to be on the show, because more and more people need to know about what you’ve been teaching out there.
JD Miller: Thanks. So I’ve spent the last 25 years working in tech companies, generally as chief marketing officer, chief sales officer. It’s been a variety of different kinds of tech, but in the restaurant space, I spent a number of years working with a company that did smart scheduling for hospitality and retail organizations. That work actually had me on an Obama White House task force where we looked at how do retail workers get scheduled. I’m sure your folks in California have heard about the retail workers’ bill of rights and the San Francisco labor codes there.
JD Miller: And then here in Chicago, I do cooking at two places. The first is that I’m the chair of the board of a homeless services organization. We serve about 150 hot meals, and so I maintain my food sanitation license and restaurant license in Chicago. And then also, I think the story that you and I connected on, is I’m the head chef of the Chicago Bell Garden, which is a fancy name for my little rooftop deck just off to the side of me — but one that had viral internet fame.
Jeremy Julian: Well, I guess why don’t you tell that story? Because it is kind of a funny one, JD, of where it came about. It intrigued me and it made me think back. I know we’ll dig into some of the other stories that we’ve heard and seen around the space, but why don’t you tell the story? Where did your Bell Garden come from, and tell me a little bit more about it?
How One Vegan Burger Post Triggered 120 Pounds of Steak Rub (2:17)
JD Miller: Sure. So when I first moved to Chicago, I bought a condo that had a little tiny wooden balcony. It was about 110 square feet. And it overlooked power lines and trash cans in an alley. But I had a little baby Q grill out there, and I could squeeze about four chairs in around the table. And I hung some bells from the roof because I had them from different jobs. And I used to entertain friends with small plates, because I was growing little tiny pots of herbs and vegetables and things like that.
JD Miller: And so a few years ago when the vegan meat trend started to come, I saw a package of vegan burgers at my grocery store. I took it home, I grilled one up. But because I always make burgers that are slathered in grilled onions and cheese and bacon, I put that on this vegan meat patty. And as a joke, I shared with my friends on Instagram, the Chicago Bell Garden is now proudly serving this particular vendor’s version of vegan meat.
JD Miller: And I didn’t think anything of it, because I don’t have a huge online following. It got like three comments and four likes. But two days later, my phone rang, and it was a competitive vegan meat producer who said, have I reached the Chicago Bell Garden? And can I convince you to start serving our burger on your menu instead? And I thought it was just a little funny thing that happened on the internet, and I explained, it’s just this little tiny garden and my baby Q grill.
JD Miller: But then the next month my doorstep started to fill up with all of these unsolicited samples of restaurant products. And so there was a case of vegan cookies, there was five pounds of kimchi, and then 120 pounds of steak rub came from a spice vendor in London. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen five pounds of kimchi, but I am still working my way through these industrial-sized containers.
JD Miller: And so it got me thinking — what happened here? And professionally, I work with sales and marketing teams to talk about online marketing and how do you get things going viral. And I wrote a book about AI in the sales process. And it really got me thinking about what is the thing that got messed up in the algorithm that made all of these vendors think I was a real restaurant. But also, more importantly to your listeners, it sent me down this path where we see all of these things where the mechanics that run the algorithm get people thinking all sorts of things about your restaurant, sometimes good, sometimes bad. And we really need to have a better way to be ready to deal with online outrage and online thoughts when people start talking about our brand online. And so that’s really what I’m looking forward to talking to you about today.
Jeremy Julian: Yeah, and I think it’s an interesting topic, because we live in this attention economy. I keep hearing that word, attention economy, because it’s hard to get people’s attention nowadays. The marketing that you did 20 plus years ago when you started is probably very different than the marketing that has to get done today. So I’d love to have you dissect how does something get viral? How does it get into the algorithm — to lay a framework for those people that are like, I don’t know, man, I just posted something. Which is a little bit of your story. You just posted it, but I know that you’ve taken the time to dig into where did it come from, how did it get to the place that it got to. Because ultimately it wasn’t necessarily what your intention was, but you had unintended consequences that turned into some interesting learnings.
Why Online Information Moves Differently Than Offline (6:04)
JD Miller: Sure. So I graduated college in the 90s with a PhD in social networks. And back then the internet was brand new. I launched into a dot-com career with it. And so I spent a lot of time really thinking about how do groups of people share information in the offline world and then in the online world. And really I’ve been doing that research now for twenty-five years almost.
JD Miller: And in the offline world, information gets passed around through gatekeepers who really have to put their credibility at the forefront. When I give you a recommendation to a great restaurant or a great person you should hire, you trust that because we have a history of engagement and you say, JD always has good things. And so that’s how information gets passed along. And as soon as I deliver you bad information, I start losing some of that credibility. Pretty soon I say, you should go hire my neighbor’s kid, he’s great. And you’re like, yeah, every time JD recommends people, it’s terrible. And so you discount it and you cut that off right away.
JD Miller: Well, when we go online, it’s actually not a person who’s sending those messages to you. Yes, there’s a person’s name on it, but it’s actually the algorithm that runs Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or TikTok or whatever else that’s deciding what shows up in your feed. And the algorithm doesn’t really have any reputation at stake. It’s just figuring out what is the content that is going to make you pause and think. Because at the end of the day, all of those sites are trying to sell you ads on the side of whatever you’re reading. And so they’re really optimized — they look at every message and they don’t ask, is there truth in this, they just ask, when I put this on the page, does it make you slow the scroll?
JD Miller: Because if you do, there’s more ads on the side for a little bit longer. And so it’s optimizing for this speed and velocity, while people are thinking about truth and veracity. And so that’s how these things start getting going.
The Cracker Barrel Logo and the 50% Bot Problem (7:48)
JD Miller: And so, some great examples. We think back about a year ago in ’25, Cracker Barrel launched this brand new logo, this new streamlined logo. And all of a sudden all of the bots on Twitter are talking about — well, we didn’t know they were bots at the time. All of a sudden Twitter just lit up with all of these discussions about this woke new logo and what happened to dear old Uncle Herschel, and we’ve got to have a boycott. And in two days, news is talking about it, their stock price dropped 14%, and all of a sudden Cracker Barrel says, we’re going to reverse course and we’re going to go back to the old logo.
JD Miller: Now, the social media researchers discovered that actually about 50% of those boycott calls came from bots, and it was just completely fabricated and made up. I can buy a bot to do that for a couple hundred dollars. But the algorithm that disseminated it didn’t really care about that. It just said, when we put this really inflammatory thing about Cracker Barrel out there, it makes everyone stop and read our ads. And so it’s fundamentally a different kind of mechanism that’s happening there.
Jeremy Julian: Well, and I think all too often there’s, how do you know if it’s a bot? How do you know if it’s real? We know that the social construct that we have as humans is, you need to be able to trust me so we can stay alive so we’re not going to get eaten by a lion. We’ve all evolved to being in that place. We know that I’ve got to trust the guy to my right and the guy to my left, because if he’s on night watch and we’re sleeping out in the prairie, we can’t get killed by the lions. And so we’ve gotten to that place where we start to trust and have those conversations. That doesn’t always happen online. And so you get a lot of these things that might not necessarily even have a human behind them.
What a Bot Farm Is and What It Costs (10:34)
Jeremy Julian: Talking about bots — for those that might not even believe that these bots exist, give me a little bit of a how can you go buy them for a couple hundred dollars? Is it this dark web? I know the answer, but there’s a lot of listeners out there that are like, really? Facebook is listening to me to give me ads? I’m like, come on, really? Do you really think they’re giving this to you for free? And I’ve had people say this to me. Or they see my shopping habits on Amazon and they send me more of that stuff. I’m like, yes, these things happen every day. So why don’t you just boil it down? What is a bot? Define a bot. How do you get a bot? Where does that come from? What do they even do, and how can you turn them on? Because there’s a lot of listeners out there that are probably like, dude, I don’t know about this JD guy. He’s talking about these robots that don’t exist out there. And I just make burgers, and I make vegan burgers out of my patio. Leave me alone.
JD Miller: Yeah. Well, so probably ten years ago, someone online realized that the vanity metrics of how many people clicked like on your video or on your post was something really important. And so the tech people went off and sort of monetized a business on this. I personally have a couple of different email addresses. I’ve got one I use for professional life. I’ve got some I use for personal life. I have a couple of email addresses I’ve set up just to sign up for one-time purchases that I don’t want to be on those mailing lists — I never want to see that anymore.
JD Miller: And a bunch of tech folks realized, we can have a whole farm of tons and tons of email addresses that we all control. And I can go create a million Instagram accounts for it or a million Facebook accounts for it. We call them sock puppet accounts — all of these little fake accounts that can go log into these sites and do things. And then there’s a little bit of code, and now AI has made this much better, that, Jeremy, if you write something and you say I want a hundred people to like it on Facebook, I can go unleash a hundred of my little sock puppet accounts and say, go give it a thumbs up, or go comment on it and say that was a great video.
JD Miller: And so there’s been this whole little niche industry — you can kind of search for like buy YouTube likes or buy Facebook likes, and you can find different providers that will do this for very, very cheap. So I can get a thousand people to view my YouTube video for like nine dollars.
JD Miller: Now, we can have an argument about is it important or not. Certainly none of those people who liked your video are ever going to walk into your restaurant. They’re never going to recommend it to anyone else. And so it’s kind of a lot of meaninglessness there. But part of the reason that people will buy it is they like that vanity metric that says I posted something and 10,000 people liked it. And increasingly, the algorithm that is trying to decide when I serve my next ad to you, what’s the content that’s getting the most eyeballs on it — it sometimes weighs in, here’s a post that has 10,000 views, and it got 10,000 views in the first 20 minutes. That’s getting some more traction and velocity behind it than something else. And so a lot of that is behind the algorithms that make things like the Cracker Barrel boycott gain momentum, even if there aren’t a lot of people who have that deep-seated feeling about the logo.
When a 30-Table Restaurant Gets Caught in the Algorithm (14:09)
Jeremy Julian: Cracker Barrel is probably the most widely recognized, and the amount of text messages, emails, phone calls I got during that Cracker Barrel two or three days was pretty insane, to your point. I actually know some people at Cracker Barrel, know former Cracker Barrel employees, and talking with them about it, it’s like, yes, this whole thing went crazy. To your point, come to find out only half or maybe even less of what was actually being said about it online was from real people. And it’s hard to separate that. Give me another story where this hurt a brand, and why you thought it was important for people to understand the power. Because there is positive out there, but there’s a lot of opportunity for some negative pushback on it if you don’t understand it.
JD Miller: Well, I wanted to talk about this because recently we just saw another big online restaurant outrage with a small brunch spot in Atlanta — like 30 tables. They’re a Black-owned business, and they had someone in the restaurant come and have brunch and say, this is great, and grabbed the co-owner and asked, could we take a picture together? I loved your brunch, and can we post it online? And they did. And that’s of course what you would expect any restaurant owner or hospitality person to do with one of their guests. It’s like, let’s go do that.
JD Miller: Well, she didn’t know this was a gubernatorial candidate in Georgia who has a lot of controversy behind him and maybe doesn’t have the same politics or opinions that the restaurant owner does or her other clients. But all of a sudden the same sorts of algorithms that decide what gets put in your feed and pushed all the Cracker Barrel stuff out started to push this photo out. A couple of people say, hey, isn’t this at odds with your mission as a restaurant? And then all of a sudden the algorithms that run the website start to see that this is a real moment that’s causing people to slow the scroll.
JD Miller: Now in this case, it was discussions from real people — probably not a lot of people, but enough people that had something to say, that got enough more people to slow down the scroll, take a look at the picture, do a little bit of research, and the algorithms go wild. And so now all of a sudden Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and everything says, anyone who writes about this, we’re going to blast this farther and farther and farther, because it’s an opportunity for us to sell more ads.
JD Miller: And so I really wanted to talk with you about what can your listeners do? Because most of them are not running Cracker Barrel. Most of them probably are running 30-top locations and can get caught up in this sort of online outrage or wave of stuff happening that has real implications for their business when they haven’t thought about it. And so I’ve had a career in sales and marketing and want to talk a little bit about what can we do with crisis communication to get our own restaurants ready to, one, be protected against it, and two, respond if we suddenly are put in that place in the future.
What to Post Before Anything Goes Wrong (16:38)
Jeremy Julian: I want to talk first about posting in general. We’ve had lots of people come on and go, you’ve got to be out there, because your front door is no longer your website. Your front door is your social sites. So to this lady that posted about this gubernatorial candidate, you would want that, right? You would want to be able to be with your guests, be with your team members doing these interviews. But to your point, there’s opportunity. So for those that are finally at a place where, hey, I’m going to start posting — what are some things that they should be thinking about before they start posting? Because we live in our own worldview. She had no idea this was somebody that was going to be controversial. Many of our listeners are like, dude, I don’t even have enough time to order chicken for tomorrow’s dinner, nonetheless go post on social media, because they are running a 30-top restaurant or they’ve got three or four restaurants.
JD Miller: Sure. Well, I do think that every business should have some sort of online presence. You don’t have to be on all of them, but a lot of restaurants are very visual. Instagram is a place that we might want to see lots of pictures of beautiful meals and moments of hospitality and loveliness. And I think about that as an extension of the store, or as an extension of your living room. And so in the same way when I come into your 30-top place and I see you as the owner and you greet me in a nice way and we have nice banter, those are the kinds of conversations that we should be having online. They don’t need to be huge, but they should be genuine and authentic.
JD Miller: And so I think there are a lot of easy ways that you can dip your toe in the water with some photos of your meals, or maybe a little video of how did you make this dish, or conversations with your servers or your staff or your guests and things like that. And I think part of the reason it’s important is not that you’re going to have some post that’s going to go viral and 900 people are going to come book brunch tomorrow. But it is sort of building up this online presence, so that when something pops up that’s a little bit off the mark, it’s not the only message online about you.
JD Miller: It’s like the solution to poison is kind of dilution and lots of water. I think I learned that in my sanitation classes. If I have one misstep in a sea of — I posted every day for two years, 600 posts — we’re in a better place already.
JD Miller: But then how do we do it? We want to say the same things we would say to someone in our restaurant. We want to say them authentically. You want to make it someone’s job. And then you can also use technology to kind of assist you down that path. So if I want to post every day, I don’t actually have to walk into the restaurant with my phone every day and take a picture. Personally, I have a whole lot of things queued up. There are a lot of inexpensive technology tools, social media management tools, where I can sit down for half an hour, I can write ten posts about ten pictures, and then just hand them to a tool and say, now just kind of drip these stories out for the next two weeks, and I don’t have to think about it again.
JD Miller: And then if you’ve got millennials or any of those folks in your restaurant, make sure you trust their voice, make sure that you trust what they’re going to say — but they love to do it. You can give it to someone to do as sidework one day instead of rolling the silverware, and take some pictures and get some things queued up. It’s a great way to get started.
Jeremy Julian: Yeah, and I love the idea. I’ve got a friend in the restaurant industry who’s talked about you being the story. I mean, it is about your food, but it really is about the story behind the food. You’ve got to talk about where did the dish come from, because that typically is safe. When I say typically is safe — as long as the algorithm doesn’t do what it does from time to time, where every once in a while you’ll get PETA standing at your front door because you’ve got something on your menu that they’re not real happy about. Those things can happen, but in general they’re typically pretty safe. What would you talk to your guest about? What would you talk to your staff member about? Be authentic. But you don’t also necessarily need to let somebody behind the curtain to everything that’s going on in the restaurant, because that’s something that you probably wouldn’t let somebody go into — you know, into the basement at your home. You’re going to let them go into the living room where you’ve cleaned it up and made sure that it’s in good working order, right?
Finding the Audience That Actually Belongs to You (21:59)
JD Miller: Right. But you’re going to find your audience there. I was just listening to a Chicago restaurateur talking about their menu — they have this thing about food waste, and they’re like, we have made a whole menu out of the low-cost cuts that can be served really, really well. So our fritto misto, it’s only prawn heads, it’s not the rest of it. It’s only the skate cheeks. All of this kind of stuff.
JD Miller: Now, is there a huge audience for that? I don’t know. But the people in Chicago who really care about that kind of sustainability are definitely going to resonate with all of that. And that’s going to be their online community that’s really going to participate. They’re going to come into the restaurant and have those conversations. They’re going to be drawn to that content and they’ll become their own kind of echo chamber that’s reinforcing what the restaurant is all about in the first place. So they become kind of symbiotic for each other.
The Crisis Playbook, Step by Step (22:56)
Jeremy Julian: Love that. Now let’s flip over to the negative side of it, JD. You’re going to potentially have the circumstance where something’s going to come up. I know you’ve got a bit of a blueprint on what people need to do once they start to see things going south. At the Restaurant Technology Guys and in my day job, we talk about if you’re going to have a credit card breach, we have a playbook that says go do these 10 things, because you know how to make sure that you mitigate the risk. So I’d love for you to talk through — if you get into those circumstances, what would the playbook be? Had you been running marketing for this brunch spot in Atlanta, or had you been running marketing for Cracker Barrel, what would you have done, in order of importance?
JD Miller: Yeah, great question. And I’m going to put out a downloadable toolkit too. I’ll send the link, it’ll take you to my website, JD Miller PhD, and we’ll have a downloadable toolkit as well. But actually, just like getting ready for a credit card breach, the best thing you can do is actually have a plan for it beforehand. So hopefully if you’re listening today — if you’re in the middle of some firestorm now and you Googled and you found this podcast, keep listening, we’ll have some ideas — but hopefully we’re talking about it a little bit earlier.
JD Miller: And the first is to really understand who are the players in your restaurant that are going to be consulted when that moment comes. Because I think a lot of times you get in the heat of the moment of a crisis and it’s like, well, now what do I do? And you’re running this way and you’re running this way. Let’s figure out who is our crisis management team before we have one. So it’s probably the owner, the GM, maybe you know someone in your network who’s some kind of marketing PR media person that should be consulted. Figure out who that board of advisors is that you’re going to convene to deal with the crisis. And then make sure you’ve got their phone numbers, their contact information, and you have them ready to go.
JD Miller: If you’re not in the middle of a crisis right now, some other great pre-work is to start a list of your advocates. Who are the regulars who come to your restaurant who are going to say great things about you all the time? Who are your staff members that have been with you for a long time, have great stories? Who are your friends in the neighborhood that like you and are always going to be willing to have something good to say? And start keeping a list of those five or ten folks with their email addresses and phone numbers too, so that if the moment comes, you’ve got a whole set of people that you can turn to.
JD Miller: Now, once we’ve done that pre-work — you’ve just had a big crisis, someone said something terrible about you online, what are you going to do right in this moment? The first thing we want to do is press pause. Nothing is so urgent that you need to send off an email response or a competing tweet in the next 30 seconds. And actually, when we think about those algorithms that are looking for engagement and looking for the things that make people react — if you’re going to jump into the fray right away with that negative comment, you’re feeding the fire. So put in a cooling off period. At least two hours, ideally 24 hours if you can help it. A lot of it is just going to go away.
JD Miller: And then for the things that aren’t, use that cooling off period to convene that board of advisors and say, here’s the thing, and let’s talk about how do we want to respond. Let’s plan our response. It’s great if you can have a single point of contact — the one person who’s going to own the media engagement, if the news is calling, if the reporters are at your front door, who is the person who’s going to step in front of the cameras, so that it’s not just any old random person. And same thing for the online response.
JD Miller: And then you want to start bringing your good stuff to the table. So when you respond, talk to the advisors about what the message is. It’s great if you can respond in a way that’s not online and make your primary response be somewhere else. So is there a trusted local news anchor that you would talk to about it? Is there an email that you would send to your own real-life customers who are in your store all the time? Because they’re the people whose opinions you really care about — not the masses online, but the people who are really in that store. So what are you going to put on your email list? What are you going to send to the news? Is there a mailer you’re going to do? And then online you can start referring to all of those kinds of things.
JD Miller: And then as you’re sending those messages out, go tap on that trusted group of people who have good things to say. So you can tell the reporter, it’s not only me — you want to talk to some customers? Here’s three customers, go give them a phone call. Here’s a little video that I recorded that I can drop on my Facebook page now. Put the email of the diner who was here last week who loved the meal, or said we were inclusive, or whatever the thing was. And then hold on, because these things do ultimately pass.
Who Is Allowed to Talk to the Media (28:07)
Jeremy Julian: Well, and one of the other things that I would encourage our listeners — and we just did this recently at our own business as part of our employee handbook — is here are the only people that are allowed to speak to the media. So when you’re onboarding people, it’s like, hey, JD, you’re not allowed to talk to the media. And the media includes the TikToker, the YouTube star that came in asking about where we source our beef, or just whatever it is that’s going on. Because then again, you’re controlling the message, and the more you can control that message, the easier it is to control what goes out there. Is that something you would also encourage?
JD Miller: Absolutely. Because I think a lot of times we see these things go viral when it’s someone who is not the official spokesperson. Maybe it is the temporary server that you just hired yesterday who frankly is wrong about where you source your beef, or doesn’t know the larger picture. And so yeah, if you can train people that whenever these questions come, refer them to the GM, refer them to the owner, refer them to whoever it is, and have that single voice.
JD Miller: And then finally, I’m always reminded that restaurants — we call it the hospitality industry because we’re actually, I don’t think at the end of the day, it’s about selling burgers or fries or whatever. It actually is about selling hospitality and experience.
Jeremy Julian: Creating an experience.
JD Miller: The same way if you showed up at my front doorstep — how would you want to be treated? How would you want to be engaged with? These media firestorms are more opportunities to show our true selves, to show our true hospitality, create those one-to-one human relationships. And then those are the things that are ultimately going to carry the day and get you in a better place.
How to Evaluate Influencer and TikToker Pitches (29:57)
Jeremy Julian: I appreciate you sharing that, because I think it’s really critical. Let me twist it just a little bit, because there’s more and more people — it got into my feed recently of these TikTokers that are calling restaurants and trying to force their way in, get them to pay them for these reviews. And again, this is a risk that we have. Oftentimes these people that are out there have a bigger brand, have a bigger following than many restaurants. Part of why you said it early on — you’ve got to make sure you’re creating content that’s good and positive and nurturing, so that the only thing you have out there is not, let me argue with you about what you didn’t see or didn’t happen. But how would you recommend our listeners out there, the 30-top, address those people that are trying to force their way in, whether it’s to get paid or not get paid, to be able to tweak the algorithm for what they would say is your benefit? You’re going to give me a free meal, you’re going to pay me all this money, and I’m going to drive all this business to you. All of our listeners that own restaurants are getting these phone calls day in and day out. And I don’t know that I’ve seen a guide out there that says here’s how you deal with it.
JD Miller: Yeah. Well, I think it begins with a conversation to really understand who they are as a person. And if we can drive the conversation past the metrics and get back to the human connection, that’s a great place to start. Because remember that first conversation we had about bots — I could be a TikToker who has half a million followers. I could be a TikToker who has half a million thumbs-up likes. And I may have purchased them all from the bot farm. But really, I don’t have the influence that I’m claiming to. So if you’re just looking at the follower count, buyer beware.
JD Miller: I think the second thing is, if those 500,000 followers are authentic, great connections, it still may not translate to revenue for your restaurant if there’s a fundamental mismatch with who you are and who their audience is. And so if I’m that Chicago seafood place that’s serving the prawn heads, if you’re a TikToker who has 500,000 followers who don’t care about that — even if I pay you whatever the money is to post, or to come in and eat the risotto and say it was great, it’s not going to resonate authentically with your audience. And so it’s not going to translate over.
JD Miller: And so I really think there’s a great play in the world for authentic advocacy — someone who genuinely likes your restaurant and genuinely has a following of people who resonate with you and your values and what you’re all about. Maybe you do want to pay them or give them a comp to do it. But hopefully they’re promoting something that they authentically like anyway, and would appreciate if the money wasn’t on the table.
What Actually Went Wrong in the Sales Algorithm (33:07)
Jeremy Julian: So JD, you’ve given us how it comes about. Did you ever figure out how you ended up getting fifty pounds of kimchi dropped off at your door? What got turned on within your feed that caused you to go viral unexpectedly?
JD Miller: Yeah, well, so this is again where that AI is coming into play. And it’s part of my work as just a salesperson in general. A lot of companies are trying to automate the sales process. And the hardest part about sales is prospecting and figuring out who should I be calling. And so there are a lot of tools now that say, JD, instead of you having to call all of the restaurants in Chicago and figuring out what they’re all about, we’ll go scroll the internet and we’ll scrape it and we’ll create a directory of what are all the new restaurants that have been opened in the last month, and we’ll package it up for you.
JD Miller: And that seems to have been what happened with this vegan bacon cheeseburger that I created. At the right moment when their technology was listening, I posted something that said Chicago Bell Garden restaurant, now proudly serving vegan burgers, right in the moment when vegan was a big thing. And so it was a signal that a bot picked up, and it threw my name, address and email into a database.
JD Miller: And then I think what went wrong for the salespeople is the people who sold those plant-based burgers, the people who sold the kimchi and everything else, didn’t have a real salesperson sit down and look at my website. If you went to ChicagoBellGarden.com, which now we’ve built a whole kind of parody site out of, you would see it’s just me and four little chairs and a little baby Q grill. You would see this burger is full of bacon and cheese on it. It was definitely not vegan.
JD Miller: But instead, the salesperson kind of left their humanity at the door and just said, let’s let the bots run. You found 10 new restaurants in Chicago? Great, just go send the samples and off it goes, and hopefully something’s going to happen for them. And kind of like a restaurant trying to buy a TikTok review where they don’t know who the followers are — that salesperson wasted whatever money to ship me 120 pounds of steak rub, stacked up here. I’m never going to place another order. I am never going to need to order any more steak rub. We’ve got it under control.
Jeremy Julian: Yeah, you’re giving out Christmas gifts for years off your hundred twenty pounds of steak rub.
Put a Human Back in the Loop (35:35)
JD Miller: AI is great at automating some tasks, but we always have to keep the human judgment — whether it’s something we’re reading, and definitely when it’s something we’re making a business decision on. We also have to put a real human in the loop and say, take a look, does it pass the smell test? Is this something that I would do in the real world? And if so, then continue on.
Jeremy Julian: Yeah, and I think that’s just a reminder for all of those people, because these same restaurants that are getting these calls are also getting marketing companies calling and saying, automate all your social. Be really careful. There is a lot to be learned from some of this AI, and you’ve got to make sure it resonates with your guests. You’ve got to make sure it resonates with you as a brand. It’s got to be authentic, because if it’s not, people are going to see through the slop. I’ve got three teenagers living at home and a ten-year-old, and all of them to a T look at something and can immediately recognize whether it’s AI slop or not. And they turn it off the minute that they do.
JD Miller: Yeah. Well, and I’ll tell you another story. So here in Chicago, there’s a small business that does accounting. And he is clearly trying to find businesses that have like five employees and sell accounting services to them. And so now that I’ve been talking a lot about this TED Talk and the Chicago Bell Garden restaurant, I’m getting a little resurgence of being a very small business somewhere in Chicago. And all of a sudden I noticed every day on LinkedIn I had a post from this guy that was kind of insulting and always ended with, and you’ve got to get your accounting in order.
JD Miller: As I started to look at all the other things he was posting out on LinkedIn — there was someone who announced, after five years, I finally got it together and launched my yoga studio. And his post says, nothing says I’m a procrastinator like waiting three years to get your thing off the ground, but now that you’re there, you need some accounting services.
JD Miller: And so finally I was like, I’ve got to just meet this guy. So I picked up the phone and I called him and I’m like, do you sell accounting services to small businesses? And he was like, yes, I do. And I was like, great — you’ve been engaging with me online, it’s clearly not you, right? And he’s like, no, I bought this really cool technology and it’s searching for people and it’s writing posts for me, and I don’t touch it at all.
JD Miller: And I’m like, I’m glad it’s getting you efficiency. But you need to put a human back in the loop. It should go find all the people. Go find the yoga studio. Go find the Chicago Bell Garden — we don’t have any accounting to be done, but go find that little yoga studio. But every morning have it queue up for you: here’s the yoga studio, here’s what I’m saying. And you be the one to press send. Because the bot will drift. It probably started with something that was really cool and funny, but over time it adapted this personality that really isn’t representing you very well. And so, same thing with all of these things — outsource your social media to someone, but make sure you have a checkpoint in there.
Closing Advice for Operators (39:01)
Jeremy Julian: Yeah, and I appreciate that insight. And then you’ll get people like, we’re never going to do any of that stuff, which is fine if that’s what you decide to do. I think there are some opportunities for some efficiencies there to make it better. JD, thank you for writing the book. Thank you for the TED Talk. Thank you for reaching out, because I think it’s one of those things that restaurants don’t think about until it’s too late. So the fact that you’re out there proselytizing that says, hey, we’ve got to be thinking about these things before they become a problem — one, from an awareness perspective, two, giving people a playbook that says here’s what you do when this does happen. Is there anything that we missed in today’s conversation that you would want our listeners to walk away with, other than go buy the book, go download the ebook, go download the playbook, go watch the TED Talk?
JD Miller: You know, I would say don’t be afraid and just keep trying. It is hard to be a small business owner. But I also think that the restaurants and bars that your listeners are running are really important to the communities that we’re in. And they are essential gathering places where groups of people come together and make human connections. So don’t be afraid to step out there, get online, let your community be a little bit online too. Because you’ll learn your lessons, but it is important. And as long as you’re kind of coming back to those authentic roots, you’re going to be in a great place.
JD Miller: I’m going to drop on my website a little toolkit about getting ready for PR. I have a little place with podcasts, you’ll find those podcasts, and I’ll have a toolkit there for you. And yeah, go listen to the TED Talk. It’s JD Miller’s Reclaiming Our Humanity in the Age of the Algorithm.
Jeremy Julian: Yeah, it was very, very insightful. And I’m not saying that because you’re on — when I listened, I was sitting at the same desk on Saturday morning. I’m like, I’m going to listen to this thing. And there’s some things that after you say it, I’m like, yes, he’s so right, and I just missed it. But I love how you were able to discern that. So thank you for putting that together as well.
JD Miller: I appreciate it. And next time you’re in Chicago, let’s meet in person. There’s a great restaurant right outside my window. It’s the Chicago Bell Garden. They’ve got some really good vegan burgers.
Jeremy Julian: I love it. I love it. JD, thank you so much for your time. To our listeners, guys, as I like to say, I know you guys got lots of choices, so thanks for hanging out. If you have not already done so, please subscribe and make it a great day.
Back to the episode: Restaurant Online Outrage: A Crisis Playbook — JD Miller, RTG Ep. 361, with show notes, the full crisis playbook and all three players.
