If you’re like me, you’re probably trying to figure out what to do with AI to help your restaurant business. And if your social media feed looks anything like mine, you’re constantly being served content promising AI hacks, shortcuts and “super prompts” that will supposedly get you exactly what you’re looking for.
I’m telling you right now, a lot of it is engagement bait with a hollow bottom.
The problem centers around how people perceive AI. It’s easy to think there’s some sort of magic button where you type the right combination of words and suddenly ChatGPT becomes your social media manager, marketing strategist or business consultant.
And look, AI definitely is a magic button. It can make an incredible amount of work easier and faster. But the quality of what comes out is still going to reflect the thinking, information and instructions that go in.
Put in a lazy, half-baked prompt like you’re casually interviewing a new social media manager from a skeptical state, and you’re going to get exactly the kind of generic answer you’d expect from that interaction.
The truth is that getting great results from an LLM like ChatGPT requires structured thinking, strategy, good prompts and the right data. That doesn’t make AI less powerful. It’s actually the reason learning how to use it properly is so powerful.
I got a pretty great demonstration of this completely by accident the other day.
I saw this post promising a series of prompts that could essentially turn ChatGPT into your $2000 a month social media manager. As someone who guides marketing execution for hundreds of restaurants and is also a daily content creator, it immediately caught my attention.
But I was skeptical. Were these actually good prompts that would produce the results being promised, or did they just sound like good prompts?
So I did the obvious thing.
I asked ChatGPT!
The Verdict
I uploaded the screenshots and asked ChatGPT to shoot me straight: "Are these legitimately strong prompts that will generate the results somebody is looking for, and are they giving the LLM enough information to actually do the job they’re suggesting?"
The answer was basically: The ideas are mostly right. The prompts aren’t.
ChatGPT graded them:
Overall concept: 7/10. Most of what they’re suggesting AI can help you accomplish is legitimate.
Actual prompts: 5/10. They’ll produce answers, but several don’t provide enough information to produce particularly good answers.
The idea that this is a $2,000/month social media system: 2/10. There’s a big difference between generating social media content and actually functioning like a good social media manager.
The biggest problem was pretty simple. Several of the prompts were asking the LLM to make decisions without giving it the information or evidence needed to make those decisions well.
Take the first prompt. It tells ChatGPT:
“Before creating anything, understand my niche, audience, goals, brand voice, content style and available time.”
Sounds smart.
Except how exactly is ChatGPT supposed to understand any of those things if you haven’t given it that information?
That’s like putting a new employee in front of your POS system and saying, “This helps us take money from guests. Good luck!”
Technically, you’ve told them what it does. You definitely haven’t trained them how to use it.
Another prompt asks ChatGPT to analyze your social profile and identify what’s helping or hurting your growth. That could actually be a great use of AI, but your profile alone doesn’t tell the whole story.
If you really want it to understand what’s driving performance, you’d want to give it the actual posts along with things like views, reach, shares, saves, watch time, retention, follows generated and other performance data. Otherwise, you’re asking it to look at the content and make an educated guess about why it worked instead of giving it the evidence to actually find patterns.
These next two have essentially the same problem. ChatGPT can absolutely give you a 30-day calendar or a seemingly endless list of content ideas. But without enough information about your business objectives, audience, positioning, previous performance and what you can realistically produce, you’re mostly getting plausible ideas rather than a strategy built specifically for you.
One of the five prompts was actually pretty good! It asked ChatGPT to review your winners and losers and identify patterns that could be replicated. That’s exactly the kind of pattern recognition an LLM can be useful for, provided you give it the posts and the performance data to go along with them.
And that was the common thread through almost every prompt. The problem wasn’t necessarily what they were asking ChatGPT to do. The problem was what they were giving ChatGPT to do it with.
That made me curious...
If these prompts weren’t enough, what would it actually take to accomplish what they were promising?
So What Does It Actually Take?
Instead of asking ChatGPT to rewrite the prompts, I asked a different question:
“Let’s say we were gonna come up with a framework to accomplish exactly what these prompts are suggesting. What would that step-by-step process look like, including the prompts and the exact data or inputs needed?”
And this is where things got interesting.
ChatGPT didn’t give me a better “super prompt.” It gave me an entire process:
Establish the business objective
Build the audience model
Teach it the creator’s voice
Audit the account
Find the content DNA
Establish the content strategy
Build the idea engine
Score ideas before producing them
Build the calendar
Create each piece
Close the loop by measuring performance
Feed what you learned back into the process
And every one of those steps required its own inputs.
This is where another big misconception about AI gets exposed. ChatGPT may know an incredible amount about the world, and you may have used it 1,000 times, but that doesn’t mean it understands your restaurant, your customers or your brand voice. If you haven’t taken the time to give it that context and establish some guardrails, don’t be surprised when it gives you the same generic results everyone else is getting.
For example, before asking AI to analyze what content is working, you’d ideally give it 90 days of actual content along with the format, topic, hook, views, reach, likes, comments, shares, saves, watch time, retention, completion rate, follows generated and other available performance data.
That’s a hell of a lot different than:
“Analyze my social profile and tell me what’s working.”
And that was the lightbulb moment for me. The problem wasn’t that those viral prompts needed better wording. The problem was treating AI like the prompt was the work.
The prompt is only one part of the process.
I took the complete 12-step process, including the information you need to provide and the prompts to use at each stage, and put it into a PDF. If you want to actually work through this yourself, I’m happy to share it with you.
Design by ChatGPT in the same thread!
Just send me an email at [email protected] and I’ll send it over.
Did your brain just deflate a little looking at that 12-step process?
Mine did too.
But this is the part I think people need to understand about AI. It actually is a magic button. The mistake is thinking that because the button is easy to push, getting great results from it should be just as easy.
A rocket can bring astronauts to the moon. A microscope can allow scientists to see things that would otherwise be invisible. An assembly line can build an automobile. Those technologies accomplish things that would have seemed like magic at one point, but none of them work particularly well without careful planning, the right inputs and someone who knows how to operate them.
AI isn’t all that different.
The incredible part is how much work it can do for you and how quickly it can do it. But somebody still needs to understand the objective, give it the right information, establish the guardrails, evaluate what comes back and improve the process when the results aren’t good enough.
And here’s the part I really want restaurant operators and marketers to take away from this: You don’t have to know how to build the perfect AI process before you start.
I didn’t know what the proper 12-step social media framework should look like either. So instead of asking ChatGPT to magically do the work, I asked it what information and process it would need to do the work properly.
That’s a very different way of using AI.
Before you ask ChatGPT to solve something for your restaurant, try asking it what it needs to know about your restaurant to solve that problem well.
Ask me how this relates to spicy chicken sandwiches ..
You Can Learn This. You Don’t Have To.
If this feels overwhelming, that’s because setting yourself up for the best results takes more than copying and pasting a prompt. You can absolutely learn how to do this yourself, but if you’re not going to dedicate the time to getting good at it, work with somebody who has.
AI can make your marketing stronger and faster. You still need to know how to use it.
Do you need help with your restaurant marketing or maximizing how you use AI to make it stronger and faster?
Send me an email at [email protected].
- Rev Ciancio
WHAT DOES REV DO?
I help restaurants to build guest marketing programs.
I help hospitality tech companies with lead generation and content marketing.
