Aspen came alive today with the kick off to the Food & Wine Classic. It was a pretty good showing. Although the Grand Tasting Tents get lots of buzz, 
the real gems are the seminars and cooking demos. A highlight today was the panel discussion “Tech Talk: Marketing to Todays Diner” with industry stars Danny Meyer, Jose Andres, Rick Bayless & Bernardo Hernandez. It was interesting to note that they manage their twitter accounts as Jose Andres put it “You can tell it’s me because of my trouble spelling in english”. The advantage they see is the immediacy of feedback, from when someone mentions a portion change of a dish that was not meant to be or anything else, they are able to address that concern immediately and bring a negative to a positive. Rick Bayless mentioned that it was a learning process to accommodate and learn to work with the new media landscape but once he learned how to work with bloggers and give them a “headline” story, it’s easier to direct the conversation. Jose Andres stated that now that everyone is media you need to give proper attention to everyone. Overall they all saw positive aspects of working with twitter & new media, it was just a learning curve for them, even accepting Opentable. The irony was as I saw a local Aspen restauranteur on the way out, I mentioned the panel discussion and his opinion was that online reviews & twitter were bad for the industry, the complete opposite of the take away from the seminar that he didn’t attend but obviously should have.
Bring your establishment into the current century, watch the seminar video below (1 hour 15 min)