The Next Generation of Social Mobile Apps for the Restaurant Industry

By Eric Randazzo

Does your restaurant serve the best Chicken Parmesan in town? People can’t stop talking about your gelato? Well there’s a good chance your dishes are on Foodspotting, Oink, and Instagram. If you pair that natural publicity with an irresistible social strategy, the customers will come to you.

You’ve seen Facebook and Twitter blow up over the last few years. Social dining is the next trend in restaurant marketing, and these two are just the beginning. Mobile applications and networks have recently taken off in the restaurant and hospitality industry, so here is a run-down on these social mobile applications, and how they can leverage word-of-mouth recommendations for your potential customers.

Take for instance the magnitude of these apps. Foodspotting had over 650,000 users on the iPhone alone at the beginning of 2011. It has since been released to the Android platform, more than doubling its potential.  Oink hit 150,000 downloads in a little more than a month and is just getting started – it’s backed by Kevin Rose, whose track record for founding Digg precedes him. Not to be outdone, Instagram’s user base grew from 100,000 to 12 million over the course of the last year.

So while you may be on Facebook and Twitter, there are a number of other targeted social networks and mobile applications that can grow your business right now.

Foodspotting

Foodspotting is a location-based dish discovery app. What does that mean? For example, Ann lives in Orlando, and she’s in the mood for pizza. She can pull up Foodspotting on her phone and search for pizza. Since the app is location-based, it automatically knows her proximity to local restaurants. Her search will bring back delicious pictures of nearby pizza submitted by other Foodspotters in the area. Once clicked, each picture entry gives Ann the location of the restaurant and other recommendations for that restaurant.

The app also has a social aspect. Each user can create a profile with a picture that tracks their Foodspottings, lets other users follow them and their food finds, and ranks them by ‘Reputation.’ A particular user boosts their reputation by posting dishes and getting people to click “Want it!” or “Recommend It” when viewing their posts. The ‘Reputation’ ranking helps establish users as credible food critics in their community, and thus have more users following them.

Encouraging Influential Foodspotters to Post Your Delicious Dishes:

1. Encourage patrons to photograph dishes and drinks with Foodspotting and share the photos on social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Flickr).
2. Offer incentives to encourage customer sharing, such as half-off dessert or a coupon for a next visit.
3. Post photos of your most popular or newest dishes to attract prospective customers.
4. Create an online Foodspotting menu guide featuring top menu options, and offer a reward to loyal customers who order featured selections. Alternatively, your restaurant could end up on someone else’s guide.

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You Can't Expect What You Don't Train

By Michael Bumby

The resurgence and the revitalization of the cocktail is well documented and undisputable. “Fresh”, “Herbal”, “Hand-Crafted”, “Artisan”, “Classic”, and “House-Made” are just a few of the descriptors we see on drink menus these days.

It seems the days of asking bartenders to be bottle flippers and to blow fire balls across the bar has somewhat passed. Now bartenders are being asked to be more of a “liquid chef”.  They are being asked to bring back the art of making true cocktails, to bring back the purity, the romance, and the mystique of cocktails that are being developed by renowned mixologists from all over the country.

The question is…. are you expecting too much from your bartenders? Let’s face it, most of them were hired because of their ability to wait tables or tell jokes. Maybe it was their dedication, or their tenure, or that they helped out with inventory, perhaps it was their gender. Is it fair that you continually change their job description, expect them to adapt to all your new programming and then are shocked when / or if the drinks are not being made properly?  Is it his or her fault?

I can tell you, as a consultant and a person that has opened well over 50 restaurants, including casinos, cruise lines, hotels, etc… that a bartender will be as good as the training that she or he has received.

Recently I did a training seminar for an upscale restaurant group who has enjoyed much success and has received much recognition. We were rolling out a new beverage program.  The inconsistencies and differentials in bartending styles between the bartenders were frightening. Something as simple as a rum and coke was being debated. One bartender had his own idea on how it should be made as the bartender sitting next to him had totally different thoughts (we’re talking about a rum and coke!). During the same seminar there was a debate on how to muddle a mojito… again, each bartender had different thoughts on how it should be made.

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Beyond the Basics Pay Per Click Advertising

by Conrad Saam

Pay per click, or PPC, is a common method of paying for advertising impressions. People who advertise via PPC only pay when someone clicks on their ad. Google AdWords is the largest PPC provider due to their massive reach.  The other major players are Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo.

The Quality Score
In the early days of PPC advertising, the advertiser who appeared the highest was the one with the highest per-click bid. But now your ad ranking is determined by both your per-click bid and your Quality Score. For each keyword you bid on, you’ll get a Quality Score (QS) between 1 and 10. Your ad ranking for each keyword is based on factors that include both the pay-per-click bid and the quality score for that keyword.
The QS is the search engines’ way of favoring ads that have a high click-through rate. Those ads are favored, both because people click on them (which makes them money) and because they’re likely to be the most relevant ads (which also makes them money). They also want to avoid favoring ads that nobody clicks on or that turn out to be misleading, because that harms the AdWords brand. The QS helps Google to make sure that ads are both relevant and high-quality – that is, so that visitors who click on an ad get to a landing page that satisfies them.

How is QS Calculated?
As with the engines’ methods of determining which pages rank for given queries, the search engines deliberately keep the inner workings of the quality score secret as proprietary information. But Google has released the following list of factors that affect the QS:
• The click-through rate for the keyword and the ad on Google.
• The click-through rate of the ads and keywords in your account.
• The click-through rate for display URLS in that ad group.
• The quality of the landing page that your ad leads to.

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Social Media Trifecta for Restaurants and Hotels Generate More Revenue, Builds Brand Loyalty

By Scott Lambert

Social media may be one of the newer kids on the Internet marketing block but it has rapidly taken off over the last year. Just about everyone, from your neighbor to your parents, has a social media profile.
But social media is not just for individuals who want to share pictures of their pets or post random comments. Businesses are using it to their advantage too.

According to the latest research by StrongMail, 57% of businesses plan to increase their spending in Social Media in 2011, second only to Email marketing (65%) and ahead of Search Marketing (41%).

Hotels, Restaurants Benefit Greatly from Social Media If Done Right
Hotels and restaurants are some of those businesses realizing that they too can use social media to market like never before. But most are unsure how to best utilize the different social media networks and how to focus on the ones that will work for them.

If that’s you, you’re not alone. But first things first – let’s talk about the three social media platforms that are ideal for hotels and restaurants and how you can use them to generate revenue to your place of business.

So what is the Social Media Trifecta?
There are several types of social media platforms on the market but the key is finding the right mix for the hotel and restaurant industry. We’ve done the leg work for you upfront and determined the following three to be ideal for the food and lodging industry:

1.    Facebook
2.    Twitter
3.    Foursquare

Each one of these social media sites can stand alone or be integrated to work together for a more powerful marketing punch. They will help you brand your company, provide a platform for meaningful dialogue between you and your audience, and set your business apart from the competition that may have yet to harness the full potential of an effective social media campaign.

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Filling Empty Seats Cheap!

Mobile Marketing is a Proven, Cost-Effective Means to Increase Store Traffic and Profits
By Conrad Carney II

A customer and her family visit a restaurant on an otherwise slow night.  She shows her cell phone to her server and shares that she had received a mobile promotion on her phone that day from the restaurant offering free kids meals with each adult entree purchase.  “With three kids that’ll save us over $10, which is great,” the customer says, adding that her family had planned on going to another restaurant until receiving the mobile promotion.  The manager and owner are happy to hear about this exchange as they were able to reach this customer for just a few cents compared to the significantly higher per-customer cost of traditional advertising.

Many restaurateurs hear of mobile text marketing and wonder, “How can I get started?  What do I need to do?”  Relax!  It’s not rocket science and you don’t have to be a “Techie” to have a mobile media presence for your restaurant.  

The decision to add mobile to your advertising and marketing mix is an easy one.  Nearly all of your customers, and potential customers, carry a mobile phone.  As an ad medium, over 95% of text messages are read by the consumer within 4 minutes of being received. 

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