By B.L. Ochman
Amy’s Baking Company Boutique & Bistro is in the midst of one of the most epic social media fails ever.
Their insane tirade has gone viral in under 24 hours and you can bet you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Samy and Amy Bouzaglo, owners of the restaurant, were recently featured on an episode of Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. They were dumped by Ramsey after being too difficult to work with.
Last night, they took to the restaurant’s Facebook page to “defend themselves” against nasty comments from users.
One Yelp review, for example, called them “bat shit crazy.” Which seems to just about sum it up.
You do have to wonder: why couldn’t they shut up?
I never watch that show, but I saw that episode. Anyone who thinks they are God’s gift to mankind and are beyond reproach shouldn’t subject the public to themselves in any form. Bat crap crazy people…
BL, it appears they believe they are being persecuted and therefore need to defend themselves. They do seem to be delusional imho. As one of the FB commenters said, I hope they don’t own guns.
If you want to watch the related Kitchen Nightmares episode, it is currently available on Hulu.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/487616
While there is clearly a social media failure here, both in the current response and in the 2010 response to the Yelp review that started the whole ball rolling, this is well beyond a social media failure – or even a media (television) failure.
I’ve already looked at the organizational centralization issues with this company. Now many family-owned businesses are centralized, but this company takes it to extremes – and even when you allow for the lack of reality in reality television, the business has suffered as a result.
Next – a look at how this company responds to negative feedback. (Not well.)
John – if they’d ever watched the show, they’d know that criticism comes with the territory. And since cameras were present, anyone with half a brain would know not to tell a customer to “fuck off”, so there’s a lot more than an organizational issue here. They appear to be certifiably nuts. No amount of damage control is going to fix that.
My favorite part was after their nuclear meltdown they posted that their page was obviously hacked, they posted none of it, etc… obvious lies. It goes to show that in some small business the bar isn’t very high. Can you imagine being a part of their crisis management PR team. Come in to work and handed the Amy’s bakery file, “AWWWW, HELL. NOO!”, then it would become the biggest chalenge of my young career. : P
I have to wonder how long it will take them to hire someone like Burson to handle their crisis control.