OPEN

Ian Delaney is rightly suspicious of a story about Waitrose starting a “Facebook for Food”.

My initial thought was that this sounded like a blunder into social media imitations by a big brand. But on closer examination there’s some interesting stuff going on at waitrose.com.

As a rule  much better tack than starting social networks, I always think, would be to look at all the ways the brand could be useful to existing foodie communities and even to foodies on Facebook. What about giving access to its recipe database, building a seasonal  vegetables recipe widget, a food miles calculator, a…. well, you get the idea. 

I also thought it looked like the Times, which carried the story last week had got the wrong and of the stick. But a press release from the brand (on a press release service called PR Leap, as press releases are curiously protected by a subscription / password thingie on the Waitrose press centre) says that Waitrose will become the UK’s  “premier food networking site, with the launch of a new ‘open to all’ Food Forum.”

But the forum‘s up and running now and it’s looking pretty good – there’s a good number of postings there so far and it could clearly benefit from a few more features to help people establish profiles… but it’s early days, I guess. There’s clearly (from the sound of the feedback in the forum) a pre-existing community around the website that Waitrose is building out more features for with a forum and a scrapbook. 

It may not be to the taste of seasoned social media types, it’s not technically a social network, it’s an over-claim that it’s the “premier food networking site”, but it’s heading in the right direction.   

: : Ian also notes that it is interesting that Facebook’s become a synonym for social network. Just a few months ago it would have been “MySpace for foodies” but now that Facebook’s assimilated most of media and professional London it’s taking over as the generic term for online community.