Food for Thought

I spotted this on netimperative this morning:

Waitrose to embrace social networking with ‘Facebook’ for food

According to reports, supermarket chain Waitrose is planning to add social networking functions to its web site to allow shoppers to swap recipes and chat on message boards.

The retailer wants to encourage the one million people that visit its web site each month to debate topics such as organic food and to trade culinary tips. Users will also be able to upload recipes and pictures with their homemade dishes as part of the £1m revamp of the web site.

The company has an archive of 4,500 recipes on its web site and plans to add 20 new ones each month. Users will be able to create their own e-scrapbook of recipes, complete with notes.

My first thought was that it’s interesting that ‘facebook’ has become an abbreviation for all social network sites. MySpace and bebo still have more users, don’t they? But I guess that Facebook has ripped through the media industry to such an extent that it’s become viewed as the social network.

Second, I also had a look at waitrose.com, to find all of these “planned” features are already there. Oops. I think someone mis-read the press release. Still, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God, etc. Happens to us all.

But I do also wonder about the wisdom of all this, and this is a little idle speculation. If you shop for groceries on the Internet, doesn’t that tend to mean that you’re rather pushed for time? You can’t spare the hour or so to pop into the shops for your food, so you alt-tab out of Excel (I expect) and into Explorer to procure the delivery of the necessary carbohydrates to keep going. Is that person going to be trading culinary tips and family recipes while they’re at it?

Also, there are very good existing social networks for foodies. There’s Group Recipes – which is excellent, btw, Yahoo Food (also good but US-centric) and the Daily Plate (a bit diety). How about if they’d used the million pounds to make a ‘buy the ingredients’ widget on one of those sites? Or a brand channel? Or just some adverts? The residents of those networks are the antithesis of the too-busy-to-shop-properly types that are likely to end up on Waitrose.com. They are really interested in food and trying new things, plus they’ve got time to spend on websites reading and talking about it.

They might also have thought about spending the cash on having a little brand consistency – half the pages on their site have johnlewis.com addresses, for goodness’ sake. And what’s the point of partnering with Ocado for deliveries? There’s already a WaitroseDeliver site up and running, incidently, that I’d never heard of till today.

Lastly, I think everyone who follows this space will be aware that there are already far too many social networks, and that yet another one starts to seem painful. I recently begged an invite for Pownce – but you know what? Having logged in and played with the settings, I simply can’t be bothered to even begin to recreate my friends network from Facebook/Twitter/Blogging. I’m far more likely to join the recipes group on one of my existing networks, or add some food blogs to my reading list, than I ever am to join a supermarket’s social network.

Still, I expect they’ve done their homework rather than just take the blithe advice of some hotshot social media consultant… obviously.

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