Restaurant Job Board Blog

It used to take hours, a day or even a few days before a customer’s experience was shared with his/her friends and family. A bad meal or a great experience might have been discussed that evening or at work the next day. That was before the mobile phone which meant that customers could text their experience to one or two friends. Maybe even take a picture of a great dish with their camera phone.

But this limited and delayed communication is nothing compared to the speed at which hundreds or thousands of people can be updated about your experience thanks to the arrival of Facebook and Twitter.

Web-enabled Mobile Phones and PDAs have made it extremely easy to install these social media applications.

Think about what this means for your business for a second and think why every touch counts:

A customer waiting for attention from the waiter instead decides to update his Facebook Status with the message that “I’m in The Mill Pub and can’t get service. Hate that”. This message then becomes visible to the customer’s network of hundreds or thousands of friends. Could this have a negative effect on perception and even on bookings? Potentially.

A similar incident became widely publicized in the US recently when the high profile wine blogger and internet celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk when he attended a recent conference in Miami. His poor experience in a high profile hotel affected him so much he video blogged about it, as did a few other high profile internet folks with the result that hundreds of thousands of people learned of their experience within 24 hours. The results were huge and the hotel went into fire-fighting mode to try and offset the negative publicity.

The effects will be felt for a while because two of the bloggers posts are on the first page of Google for anyone searching for Mondrian Miami. Can you afford an impact like this? Could you survive it?

So the next time you sit down with your staff or plan your training schedule, don’t forget that every touch counts. Every time.

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Barry Chandler is Managing Director of http://www.manageyourbar.com , the complete online resource for independent bar and club owners and operators, designed to assist bar owners manage their business more effectively and provide all the tools/downloads/templates/articles for prospective bar owners to research and plan their new bar.

For any bar, restaurant or nightclub owner that thinks social media is a passing fad not worthy of their time, the numbers coming out of a recent study (2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study published by Opinion Research Corporation) should come as a wake-up call.

For starters, almost 60% of Americans currently interact on social media web sites and 25% interact more than once per week (2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study).

Also, you would think that the last thing people would want is to have businesses invading the platforms they use for communicating and socializing with their friends and colleagues. As it turns out, the exact opposite is true.

According to that study, 85% of Americans using social media think businesses should have an active presence in the social media environment. What’s even more interesting is that those users actually want the companies to interact with them while there.

It seems that users are actually receptive to the idea of your bar getting involved on social media platforms and interacting with them while there.

Out of the 85% of users who want companies to have a presence in social media, 34% want companies to actively interact with them and 51% want companies to interact with them as needed or by request.

So, what do your customers want your business to do on the social media sites?

• 41% would like companies to solicit feedback
• 37% would like companies to provide new ways to interact with the brand via social media.

These numbers could not be clearer: your bar’s customers are practically begging for bars like yours to get involved in social media…they actually WANT YOU TO MARKET TO THEM in this new medium.

Here are 5 things you need to know to market your bar/restaurant with social media marketing.

1. You want to stand out…be interesting and full of personality.
2. You want to build more credibility than your competitors.
3. You want to learn to promote…without it sounding like a sales pitch.
4. You want to learn how to grow your network fast…and without spending hours a day to do it.
5. You want to give your ideal target prospect the highest number of and most compelling reasons to think of you when they need a business like yours.

It’s a lot to learn, but with time and the right tools, you can really use this new medium to make your bar stand out from your competition.
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Brian Horn is an internet marketing consultant specializing in several niche industries. He is also the creator of the newly released “Promoting Your Bar with Social Media” system SocialMedia4Bars.com that walks bar and nightclub owners through the process of creating a social media marketing campaign.

I have a great pizza place by my office SpotPizza. Being from Philadelphia, I’m kind of a pizza snob, but Spot is pretty good, plus the owner is a really nice guy that remembers me when I come in and has the staff make white cheese pizza exactly the way that I like it. He has a huge fan in me.

What he doesn’t have, or it least as it appears to me when I’m there or walk by each night, is a lot of business. SpotPizza needs 1,000 fans of the place just like me. It is a shame, that with so many social networking companies being literally blocks away, that they aren’t taking advantage of some of these tools. Maybe they are, I just haven’t seen it.

The great part about social media is that you can build your local presence with only a little bit of elbow grease, not a huge marketing budget. More importantly, social media offers much more of a personal touch. If I ran a restaurant, especially in a hip area, here are some of the tools that I’d leverage in order to drive more traffic and sell more high margin products.

Search Marketing – When I was at Yahoo, I had a huge vision for local search marketing. When we announced that we would be able to target to a zip, I thought local restaurants would be crazy not to sign up for the service. It just seemed like the most no-brainer effort you could imagine. It’s lunch-time, someone does a search for ‘lunch 94089′, I want my restaurant to be at the top of the list. In fact, since you only pay per click, I’d want my name to come up every time a food related search is performed in the zip codes that are within a 10-mile radius of my restaurant.

I’d leverage cookies to identify how frequently a person hits my site from this search and serve up different offers. First time here, come on down for ‘kids eat free’. Second time ‘Bring this coupon for free appetizers’ and so on. I’d work to be so pervasive that the person wouldn’t think of anywhere else to go eat.

Facebook – Your town has a group in Facebook. It has to. The little town that I grew up in has a bunch of groups, so your town must have a group. Join it. Post to it. Post special offers just for people who are part of this Facebook group. The reason rock stars say things like “Nobody rocks harder than Springfield” is because people love to hear that stuff and they go crazy. Nobody gets a free desert except people who are part of the Facebook group. Wooooo, queue lighters.

Make sure that people know that they can be your fan on Facebook too. If someone within 5 miles of your place becomes your fan, you can easily get them to come to your restaurant once a month with a group of people and drop $20 each. $80 for a party of 4. Do that with 100 of your fans and you’ve made eight grand. Should be enough to at least cover your rent.

Neighborsville – My friend Ryan is about to launch a new social network called Neighborsville. This is going to be huge and restaurants are going to be all over it. In short, Neighborsville is the social network for your neighborhood. Who comes to your restaurant? People in your neighborhood. Get involved in your community, reach out to people, comment on issues. In general, make yourself well known to everyone within a 5 mile radius of your restaurant.

LinkedIn – Are you open for lunch? Do you depend on a lot of business traffic to fill your store at lunch-time? Find the companies that are nearby and infiltrate their groups. Let employees or these businesses know that you exist. You want everyone at every business to think of you the next time that they have a meeting and need catering done.

Yelp – Yelp has your most vocal customers. These are people who have actually taken 15 – 20 minutes to complain or exclaim how lousy or great your service is. Not only that, but you, as an owner, have a chance to communicate directly with this most rabid fan base. Reach out to them, find out what they loved or what they hated. If they hated something, get them to come back and make it right. If they loved something, get them to come back and replicate it.

Twitter – What a great way to have a real conversation with people that come to your place. Here is a chance, to send a message to people that like your restaurant every day, an hour before lunch or an hour before dinner. Remind them that you are there. Remind them that they are getting hungry. Remind them that if they come by and mention Twitter, the first round of drinks is on the house.

Text Messages – I’ve noticed that some restaurants are doing this now, but I haven’t seen any type of consistency or noticed the technology. However, at some of the restaurants in busy shopping districts, I’ve been offered the ability to get a text message when my table is up. It is a great way to keep me close, but not force me to sit in some waiting area.

Blogging – If Wolfgang Puck can make an amazing living selling his recipes and frozen foods you can too. Do you have some amazing dish that you serve? Put the recipe in your blog. Trust me, if I have an opportunity to make something and spend $20 on ingredients and probably screw it up or spend $30 to come to your place to enjoy it perfectly over a glass of wine and some friends, I’m spending the extra $10. If your place is good enough, and gets enough buzz, go Rachel Ray and just publish your best dishes in a book. Keep your place, license your name and enjoy the fruits of your labor on a beach in the Caribbean.

Hustle Your Face Off – This is something that Gary Vaynerchuk always says. Social media is not a magic bullet. Just because you have a Twitter ID, doesn’t mean that business will some how just show up. You probably will need to spend at least a couple of hours a day monitoring these services and keep the conversation going. Engage with new people, set goals to add at least one new fan a day.

Don’t be a Jerk – If you are just setting up these services to spam people that aren’t that interested in what you have to say, you will fail. Set up these services to have a conversation with your customers. The conversation should be no different than one you’d have with your customers if you saw them on the street or if they were at your bar.

In the spirit of Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans, you may not need 1,000 or even 500, but if you can get a couple of hundred, fiercely loyal people to show up at your place just once per month, you’ll have a great business.

Here is a link to 20 free books about social media to get you started.

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/20-free-ebooks-about-social-media/

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Bio & Photo
Scott Schnaars is a 15 year enterprise collaboration sales veteran with a penchant for writing. He is currently a sales executive with Socialtext, the leading provider of enterprise social networking services. He also blogs at Knuckle Sandwich, periodically does a sales video blog at Beyond Snake Oil and can be found on Twitter under his moniker: Schnaars.