Over the years Blue Sky PR has helped launch many new restaurants. We’ve also been asked for help with promoting existing eateries that for one reason or another have needed a bit of a push.

Here are seven things that restaurant owners should be doing when launching their new venture.

1. Location, location, location: No, not Phil and Kirstie this is more Gordon Fu**ing Ramsay – and there’ll be more of him later.

Location is paramount, unless you are a well-renowned restaurant with a top chef. When a restaurateur comes to us for help with his existing eatery it’s usually because there is an issue, a very serious one like being in the wrong street.

It makes sense to be near other restaurants, that’s where the crowds go, if you’re in the next street there’s a good chance you’ll miss out on the passing traffic; and don’t be tempted by cheap rent!

2.    Marketing money: Make sure you set aside funds in your business plan for marketing, better still, speak to PR and design agencies before you finalise it to get an idea of costs.

Once you finance is secured, and you have a chosen location get the marketing people in early so they can start planning a launch campaign and hit the ground running.

3.    Hold a launch event: Restaurant launches are about creating a buzz, one that will not be forgotten by your diners so that they keep coming back and, importantly, tell their friends about what a great place it is. This word of mouth marketing is of paramount importance because customers are your greatest asset.

Events work best when aligned to a local charity because it bring with it local press coverage, and it’s a great excuse to invite sport clubs and associations, plus business owners and local dignitaries from the surrounding areas – all of which generally come in big numbers.

And, they’re also likely to bear you in mind for events of their own such as someone’s birthday or a Christmas celebration.

4.    Your offering: This is where Gordon makes another appearance. We’ve been to see prospective clients only to be confronted by restaurants that don’t look like restaurants, bland 1990’s decor, a confused menu, badly laid out dining rooms.

It makes you want to fu**king swear, because the problems are so obvious. It’s then that we have to shatter the owner’s bubble by being honest and telling them what the problem is. And it’s then that they usually say they’ve spent a fortune on advertising in the local paper or leafleting the town.

Here’s another freebie; look at what your rivals are doing and watch Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

5.    Get online: Make sure you have a website ahead of your launch, that way you can direct any pre-publicity to it where your potential customers can read more about what to expect – and even book a table, or ask to be invited to the opening; and get them to sign up to your news so you can email them with special offers or remind them of particular occasions.

Get your social networking going early, and make sure there are links on your website and menus, and advertise it in the window – but, please no A4 printed signs with Blu-Tack.

6.    Public relations: Try to generate some news or a stunt once a month, not only, for the local press but for your social networking a well.

Here’s a few ides to help generate some news:

•    Why not host cooking classes on a quiet night, you could get a group of, say, 10 people for a series of four, two hours lessons, after which they all get a certificate and discount vouchers. You could even invite someone from the local paper to one of the classes

•    In the build up to Christmas hand deliver trays of food to the management of the larger businesses in the area

•    Invite members of the local allotment association along for a free meal – they bring the food, you do the cooking.

7.    And finally, smile: Make sure your staff are well trained; they are attentive but not intrusive and are able to build a rapport with the customers.

The luncheon takes place at Hazelwood Castle, near Tadcaster, on Wednesday 21 July, between noon and 2.30pm.

Christine Armstrong, managing director of the Met Club, said: “We are really honoured that Dr Sentamu has agreed to join us for our July lunch, and he really is someone that doesn’t need any introduction.”

She added: “Since arriving in Yorkshire nearly five years ago to take up the post of Archbishop of York he has been an incredibly high-profile figure, fighting for many causes and being a fantastic advocate for this great county.

“He joins the growing list of high-profile speakers that have joined us for lunch over the past few months that includes Tony Hallwood from Leeds Bradford International Airport and Jonathan Wild from Bettys & Taylors of Harrogate.”

The luncheon is £35.00 + vat for members or £45.00 + vat for non-members. Further details are available at www.themetclub.co.uk or telephone 01423 525622.

Users of the site will now be able to report any unwanted or suspicious behaviour directly to child protection groups.

And while these measures are all well and good, we are still trying to get a Facebook site taken down that is openly libellous and abusive about one of our clients and, obviously, we are not going to say who it is.

Since December we have tried four times to have it removed, all done through Facebook’s Report Page button, but to no avail.

So what’s to be done? Well it seems the only way forward is for the client to consult their solicitor; which is likely to be expensive and who knows how long the process will take?

Unfortunately those behind the page are known by the client, and are the subject of police investigation over unpaid monies, but in the meantime the damage being done to the business carries on.

What’s really annoying about it is the companies and organisations that get an account add a few pics then forget about it, or don’t bother connecting and making friends.

Welcome to Yorkshire has had a Flickr account since March 2009, it currently has 131 images, no contacts or description of what WtY does (it promotes tourism across within the county), although its images are tagged.

And if you go to their website, there’s no link to Flickr. Tut tut.

If you want to see a great example of a social media strategy, look at Everards, the Leicester-based brewery – sadly not a Blue Sky PR client – but it’s all there on their home page; Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and all there so the company can engage with its customers.

If you want to know more about Flickr or other social media tools then email us at info@wearebluesky.com or call us on +44 (0)113 815 1828.

It’s now beginning to emerge that in the days leading up to the recall back in January (there had been others in September 2009 for a similar problem), Toyota executives debated when they should let the public know about the safety problems.

At the time group vice president for environment and public affairs Irv Miller – who has now retired from the company – said in a email to colleagues: “We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet. The time to hide on this one is over. We need to come clean.”

Since then Toyota has gone on record as saying: “We have publicly acknowledged on several occasions that the company did a poor job of communicating during the period preceding our recent recalls.”

Interestingly, here in the UK over the past month the company has undertaken a couple of ad campaigns, the first telling customers that their cars are now safe to drive; and the more recent letting everyone know that Toyota cars now come with a five-year warranty or three-years’ free servicing. And all with a soft Scottish burr to give the ads a warm, trusting feel.

Toyota has used a classic crisis management tactic; let the dust settle, and then come out with all guns blazing.

Remember Bernard Matthews and the outbreak of bird flu in 2007? The Norfolk-based turkey farmer co-operated fully with the subsequent Defra investigation, while keeping as low a profile as possible for a few weeks before emerging with a huge ad campaign.

Although the outbreak lost the company around £20 million in sales and costs, by keeping up its marketing it has since returned to profit. Surely evidence that marketing and PR works?

And here’s a few other not-too-distant PR gaffs:

BT chairman Sir Michael Rake received a 1Mbps broadband connection to his home after moving to a “not spot” in Oxfordshire a year previously. However, his neighbours were not afforded the same privilege because he was helping trial it.

BT did offer one resident an alternative, though, except they’d have to pay £68,000 to have their home hooked up.

Prince Harry is pictured in The Sun newspaper wearing a swastika armband at a friend’s colonial and native party.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the picture of the 20-year-old also showed him not only holding a drink but a cigarette as well.

Former RBS chairman Sir Fred Goodwin hangs on to his taxpayer-funded £693,000 a year pension.

Eventually he was persuaded to accept a smaller pension, but only after he’d been given a £2.7 million tax-free lump sum from the pension fund.

All came via email, which is fine, but only one person had actually bothered to carry out some research to find out who to get in touch with. I’m awfully sorry, but anything addressed to “Dear sir/madam” gets instantly deleted.

A large part of what public relations is all about is carrying out research, and having said that, a great part of all of our everyday lives involves some kind of investigation.

If you’ve gone to the trouble of finding our email address then why not look at the rest of the website while you’re at it? There’s only six sections, and what’s more it all free.

He brings up some very interesting points all of which, as a former journalist myself, I agree with.

If could have been so easy to have gone off on one and had a good old rant – with lots of swearing for an effective punch – but I thought it’d be wiser to step back, compose myself and chose my words wisely but to not let the moment pass.

Design and brand guru Brian Minards told me via LinkedIn: “You want to swear; then effing well swear.” So here goes, and blame him.

What made my blood boil was the programme the Many Faces of June Whitfield, on BBC2 yesterday. I only caught a couple of minutes of it, and the bit I did see was about her starring in Absolutely Fabulous, which the narrator said was about the superficial and fickle world of PR. The tosser. (There, I swore in my own blog.)

Sometimes it can be a real bind working in PR when the industry is constantly dismissed as being worthless, yet pick up any newspaper, watch any news on television and most of the content is generated by PR people.

Sure there are plenty of people in the industry that join it for the wrong reasons (“because it’s glamorous”, is something I’ve heard said many times), and there are plenty that do give it a bad name usually by promising too much to the client and/or treating accounts as box ticking exercises, but I don’t think it’s any worse than other industries.

The marketing sector (of which PR is a part of) came under the microscope of the GeekUp LinkedIn group earlier this month with Mick Greer stating that the industry was made up of those who know what they are doing and those that don’t.

I last mentioned the PR industry being an easy target around a year ago and it seems nothing has changed and I doubt it ever will; may be 2010 is the year to run the charlatans out of town.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still relevant to so many businesses, although it’s more effective in certain sectors than other; and it’s certainly not THE answer.

However, it’s just one of many social media tools all of which are growing in importance but to be effective need to be, not only, managed correctly but used in conjunction with the rest of the marketing mix; and by that I mean online and offline because they both feed off each other.

I’d really have liked to have written this article, Twitter faux pas: 20 dreadful types of tweet, but the Daily Telegraph did it first. Enjoy it.