The Tendo View

In our social media, share everything world, secrecy is out and transparency is in. No secret there, right? But even the marketers of the famously hush-hush Michelin guides are striving to find the right balance between communicating to their audience and maintaining their editorial integrity.

The company that doesn’t let its restaurant reviewers participate in interviews, and even tries to keep them from telling friends and family what they do (is this the CIA??), will start posting to Twitter about “where reviewers are dining, advance critiques of chefs and complaints about service,” according to a recent New York Times article. They’ve also launched Famously Anonymous to share more information about the whole Michelin process—without giving too much away, of course.

As the article explains, secrecy wasn’t working for Michelin: “One of the things we realized when we started to question people in New York, they realized what Michelin was about, but they didn’t realize this was about a team of professionals,” said Jean-Luc Naret, director of the Michelin guides. “We’re trying, really, to make sure people understand they are on the road, they are out there and maybe they could spot them.”

In other words, Michelin isn’t Yelp and it isn’t Zagat, but readers didn’t understand that. Now the company is trying an interesting experiment of using social media and the Web to generate excitement, share more information and facilitate better reader understanding of the intensive Michelin process. My compliments to the chef—I can’t wait to see how the meal turns out.