BY Jeff Houck

The Stew

Social media guru Peter Shankman was sitting at Tampa International Airport two weeks ago waiting for a flight to Newark and a return trip home to New York City.

He had just finished a lunch meeting in Clearwater and was about to take off on a 5 p.m. flight.

Peter follows a strict diet and is a bit of a freak about steak. He eats at steak houses all over the world. He's what you might call a protein connoisseur. The Morton's steak house chain is among his favorites.

"I knew that by the time I got home, I wouldn't have time to stop for dinner anywhere, and certainly didn't want to grab fast food at either airport," Shankman says. "When I got on the plane, my stomach was rumbling a bit, and I had visions of a steak in my head."

What unfolded next was The Greatest Customer Service Story Ever Told -- at least the way Shankman sees it.

Being a social media guru, Peter has 110,000 followers on Twitter and 51,000 Facebook friends. Not exactly Ashton "@aplusk" Kutcher territory but miles ahead of, say, @jeffhouck. With that kind of audience, he is never far from any mobile device.

As he was about to take off from Tampa, he tweeted the following to his legion:

"Hey @mortons. Can you meet me at newark airport with a porterhouse when I land in two hours? K, thanks : )"

"I had absolutely no expectations of anything from that tweet," Shankman says. He wrote it in the same vein as saying, "Dear summer, please stop. Love, Peter."

He shut off his phone. The plane took off.

Two and a half hours later, he landed in Newark. Waiting for him was his assistant, a driver and a guy in a tuxedo carrying a Morton's bag.

Shankman was stunned, which is considerable for a dot-com millionaire who grabs life by the throat. When I met Peter this year, he was buying drinks for new friends and old at the Bellagio hotel in Vegas. Last month, he tried to arrange a sky dive in Florida so he could watch the last Space Shuttle launch while plummeting toward the ground. He doesn't surprise easily.

Nestled in the Morton's paper bag was a 24-ounce Porterhouse steak, an order of Colossal Shrimp, a side of potatoes, bread, two napkins and silverware.

Consider that the steakhouse that delivered was 23.5 miles away from the airport. In less than three hours, someone at Morton's saw the tweet, got authorization to deliver, contacted the Hackensack restaurant, cooked it, boxed it and got a server to drive to Newark and find Shankman's flight.

He posted the photo to Twitter, ate the steak and then wrote the tale for his blog.

That legion of followers? They retweeted it to their own throngs. It went like wildfire on Facebook.

The New York Times and the New York Daily News then wrote about it. So did Forbes. "Today" did a spot. It just keeps rolling and rolling.

The story is already attracting naysayers who say that it was either a publicity stunt or a ploy to cater to a well-known and highly public fan.

Shankman doesn't buy that. He's seen plenty of instances where Morton's responded to customers online who had nowhere near the celebrity he does. And now because Morton's was tech-savvy, the company has shaken a bit of the image that it's a traditional, old-fashioned business.

What he wants businesses to understand is that although not everyone is a Peter Shankman, everyone has access to the same microphone he has.

"Think of all your friends, all your colleagues," he wrote on his blog. "Do you know anyone anymore who doesn't have a camera in their phone, or anyone who doesn't have a Facebook or Twitter account?

"Customer service is about producing amazing moments in time, and letting those moments become the focal point of how amazing you are, told not by you, but by the customer who you thrilled."

His advice to businesses: Keep your ear to the ground. Stay on top of what people are saying about you. Respond accordingly. Do amazing things. Perhaps most importantly, have a chain of command that lets you react in real time.

"This isn't only about Morton's," Shankman told me. "This is something any business can do."

Peter will be back in Tampa in the next few months. A lot of his friends are already here. They're shopping in your stores. They're eating at your restaurants. They have a lot to say and many ways to say it.

Are you listening?

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Photo Credit: PETER SHANKMAN

Photo: Peter Shankman at the Newark airport after being met with a porterhouse steak delivered by a server

from Morton's steak house in Hackensack, N.J.

Copyright © 2011, The Tampa Tribune and may not be republished without permission. E-mail [email protected]