Local businessmen face new threat from online mafia

Food, books, movies — everyone has an opinion on them, and wants to voice it too. Social media is a great outlet for this as it offers a relative anonymity and a certain strength in numbers. Popular Facebook groups, some even commanding over 50,000 members, can exercise a clout that borders on bullying or plain unreasonableness. And writing on food or restaurants can involve a subtle form of arm-twisting or blackmail. 

A few days ago, a ‘food blogger’ contacted Mathangi Kumar, who runs the trendy restaurant, That Madras Place, in Adyar. She was rather surprised when he demanded money for a ‘review’. “This man claimed that he was a food blogger with a decent following and offered to gather 10 reviewers to write an unbiased food review if I paid him Rs 5,000. My restaurant had been getting decent ratings on popular restaurant rating sites and forums.  I refused. When I did a background check on the so-called blogger I found that he had reviewed only two restaurants,” says Mathangi. She has some genuine food bloggers who come when she puts out a new menu, pay for their food and write what’s fair. 

Many restaurateurs complain that there are several of those who eat and refuse to pay their bills, their reason being that they are food bloggers or critics, and were not happy with the food. 

Balaji Vijayaraghavan, a social media expert says that these ‘reviews’ can make or break businesses. “Sometime ago, two people on social media reviewed that they felt sick after having seafood pizza that they got home-delivered from a popular pizza joint. When the owners of the place investigated, they realised that no orders for that pizza were made from that particular outlet,” he says. 

Those who run these pages say, that they do not encourage such behaviour at all. M Mohamed Ali, Founder, Chennai Food Guide, says, “We do hear from  restaurateurs about people claiming to be from our group demanding freebies. We are well connected with those in the business and most of the times, we get to know about it immediately and we ask them not to entertain them. We report such people, block them and even write about them in the very same social media, so that they know.” 

The idea behind creating these groups was to participate and promote community-centric initiatives, predominantly used for internal conversations within a set of people. Some niche groups on social media like Chennai Shopping, Where Chennai Eats or Awesome Machi have more than 1 lakh followers, making some of them important platforms even for marketers. “We were a small group when we started. Now we have more than 1,00,000 followers. We have come a long way and have learnt from our mistakes,” says Sarah Natasha, the founder of Chennai Shopping. “We have had incidents of people taking the money and not delivering on time. We have warned them and even blocked the spams as soon as they are reported,” she adds. 

Cyberspace is an open platform and all kinds of sellers may promote their products. There are teams allotted to keep a keen eye on the conversations in these groups. “A member wrote about how she found worms in a ready-to-eat food mix and posted some pictures too. A representative from the brand immediately approached us. We couldn’t delete it because it was a legitimate case. We suggested that the brand use this as an opportunity to create goodwill with the customer and they sorted it out. However, we are often approached by brands to place their event or product logo as our cover photo, which we decline to do,” Sarah says. 

The admins of these groups, who started these pages to connect people, have stepped up their vigilance and now practice a strict screening process to avoid spammers.  Hemanth Kumar L’s Put me in Touch, Chennai, serves as a citizens’ resource about the city. “This forum was primarily started to help those new to the city.  But we get all sorts of questions: from ‘Where do I find cute girls in Anna Nagar’ to ‘how much is a kidney sold for’. I don’t allow that sort of content. Before admitting anyone new to the group, I do a thorough background check by going through their posts,” Hemanth says.