An LA influencer tried to solicit $100 of food from Corner 17 in St. Louis and they turned him down. He subsequently gave a bad and ignorant review, doubled down with private messages. The restaurant outed him and he’s getting backlash, as he should. He’s taken his social media to private.
Screenshots of dms, posts and comments supporting the restaurant
Has anyone ever heard of this guy or his blog?
He has 200K+ followers. That’s a large enough number to drive business to a restaurant. Account is now on private. Coward and liar.
Ugh. I can’t stand these people.
Unfortunately this happens all too often with entitled bloggers and self called influencers. Most just don’t go to the restaurant once turned down and no one ever hears of it. But ask any restaurant and they’ll tell you they get requests like this all the time. So I’m glad this guy got exposed…
There’s always a two way street. Restaurant PR routinely invite Food bloggers and social media influencers to free meals. Back in the hey day early 2010’s I remember so many invites, often 3-5 dinners a week. Of course I went to some, but got sick of it quickly. However, I would routinely see the same foodbloggers and influencers posting about these free meals daily. Back then the disclosure rules weren’t around so no one disclosed anything but it was pretty obvious as the same group of bloggers would post same PR meals.
Here’s this “ influencers” credibility score. No expert on social media but For someone with over 200k followers, low engagement. Prob lots of fake bought followers and bots.
^^^ This right here.
Oh no doubt. This guy was just so blatantly stupid about it.
When I managed the SM accounts for a restaurant, the amount of collab requests from out of town “influencers” with less than 5K followers were ridiculous. And often a review of their followers revealed a majority were tourism and hospitality boards, overseas followers, etc.
Most food savvy people, customers and non professional reviewers know how the game is played. It’s just ridiculous how bad this guy was about it and now he’s trying to clean up his mess with his “I’ll do better” post. But he’s still trying to spin it as he just needs to use more respectful language when criticizing and how the narrative was spun against him.
His own texts show him asking for money, soliciting with a follow up, still being turned down and followed up by a bad review with inaccurate dish descriptions. Not sure how using more respectful language would have changed that.
Curious as to how/where that kind of data is available. TIA
There’s a lot of different sites that you can check Instagram account analytics
Are a few. Most will just give u basic details and then you have to pay or be member for in-depth analysis
“Credibility” means how confident the rating service is that an account’s followers are real people rather than paid or bots.
