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.

With the web going social over the last few years how does a Restaurant business know where to spend their efforts online…? How do you get your restaurant to be involved in these online ‘cafe-shaped conversations‘? Where do you find what real restaurant connoisseurs are discussing about your local dinning scene?

Obviously, there are acres and acres of people who are living and moving around locally in proximity to your business. They use the internet to search for credible word of mouth opinions of restaurants. (Who has time to try every fad business that springs up?) With the modern convenience of search engines accessed from handheld phones and Wi-Fi available in establishments that invite any laptop users in makes your online presence even more important (as print media takes a nosedive). The new tool used by millions of consumers are the plethora of restaurant reviews sites.

There is no doubt that when used wisely by a business, online restaurant review sites bring 3rd party credibility which translates to CONVERSATION, which usually will bring in new customers. Isn’t that really the goal? To bring new customers, right? So how does a restaurant biz use these online reviews sites to their advantage?

The first thing you need to do is determine which ones are showing up in the first few pages of the SERP’s. With so many review sites now business can handle monitoring them all, but you want to be sure to know which ones are being found by searchers online.

So we did a little research. Hopefully this will point you in the right direction and save you a little time or at least get your “marketing/brand management” creative juices moving.

What I’m about to share with you is just the result of a little poking around and putting everything in a spreadsheet to make connections and see relevance. You can decide what you want to do with this info.

I used Google (there’s no arguing why right?), and typed in “Top Restaurant Review Sites”, and then “Top 10 Restaurant Review Sites” and took notes on all 1st page search results. Then using these two keyword phrases added modifiers to the end like: “New York”, “Miami”, “San Francisco”, “Los Angeles”, “Montreal”, “Toronto” and “Vancouver”. Noted all results in a spreadsheet to see which ones root url’s kept showing up on the first page results. Then went to alexa.com and quancast.com for traffic statistics of each site in this final list.

Here are the TOP 11 RESTAURANT REVIEW SITES in North America. (Why 11? Because I am tired of “Top 10” Lists They are listed in the order of how frequent they showed up on all search results for my searches.

SIDENOTE: This could be totally different for your searches – especially since many localize search results today are showing different results depending on your IP address.

Beside each website, I’ve noted their approximate monthly unique visitors in the United States – No pity party against Alexa and Quantcast for missing Canadian stats. We Canadians are always forgotten

Anyways, DRUM ROLL PLEEEZE…

1. Gayot.com (115 000/mth)
2. TripAdvisor.com (4.7 million/mth)
3. Yelp.com (4.8 million/mth)
4. Zagat.com (217 000/mth)
5. Epicurious.com (2.1 million/mth)
6. Chowhound.Chow.com (1.1 million/mth)
7. About.com (43.3million/mth)
8. 10Best.com (368 000/mth)
9. SanDiegoRestaurants.com
10. RestaurantSpy.com
11. RealEats.com

What I suggest you do is the same for your local area using your local modifiers (location) and even (type of restaurant). Find what review sites keep showing up in the first page results and then make a plan of action to get your business involved in those online conversations.

One business I know invested in a laptop and Wi-Fi for their restaurant and had their servers at the end of the service ask how their table found everything…? If they seemed like they enjoyed themselves they let them know that if they were willing to add a review to a “such and such” site on the laptop before they left that the restaurant that they would give them a $25 gift card which they could use during their next visit.

Huge win-win! This idea contains Robert Cialdini’s “reciprocal agreement” strategy and gives the customer an ethical bribe, secures future business…all I can say is “Wow!”.

The customer is most likely going to give it a great review. They will secure a return visit through the gift card. What a brilliant way to make getting tons of positive online reviews from your customers before even leaving the premises. Totally awesome idea!

At minimum you want to monitor these review sites and whenever someone reviews your business (good or bad) be sure to add a comment, thanking them for their review. This alone can swing many new customers to your restaurant over others. Also, learn how to handle yourself if you happen to get a negative review by reading “How NOT to Handle an Online Reputation Management Crisis“.

That’s my 2cents for today!

Let us know what you think below…? How do you manage your brand online? How are you dealing with local online reviews of your restaurant? Do have any tips that are working for you that could help another restaurant…? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

A friend of mine recently sent me a news link about a certain restaurant with a rat problem in Chinatown (Spadina & Dundas St. W. area in Toronto, Canada) near a few favourite places of ours, Rol San, Swatow and Pho 88. My point is not to denounce this particular restaurant, but to point out that these days with the technology that is available to any 10yr old and above, such as cellphones with excellent camera and video capabilities… you, your employees and your business are always potentially being watched. You can make sure that is a good thing, or not.

Think of how fast a cellphone video of something negative can get sent to dozens of friends and how that can multiply to hundreds of people bouncing from sphere of influence to sphere of influence. What if a few dozen people who found out were avid bloggers, or involved with social media sites like Facebook or Twitter? How much damage can be done? The reach could be thousands within hours.

If you are in business, then you are in the public fishbowl for all to watch- like it or not. Why do you think there are different telemarketing laws for residential homes compared to businesses? When you set up shop, you are telling everyone that you are ready to be tested, to compete, to earn people’s hard earned cash to spend at your establishment instead of another competitor’s. These are the unspoken rules of the free market.

“Look at us! Look at us!” is the business owner’s battle cry.

How many times in your life did you try out a restaurant on a recommendation of a friend, or someone who was excited about the place? How many times did you avoid a place like the plague when people you know trashed it? Even if you didn’t believe it, you still didn’t take the chance did you? Bad news sells, doesn’t it?

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Ad Age and NY Times on the Power of Twitter to Make or Break a Brand Advertising Age weighed in on the #motrinmoms incident from this weekend “[It was] amazing to have that happen over 48 hours, on a weekend in the blogosphere,” she said. “People are now spreading around the apology; it’s such an immediate time frame.” Indeed, seven of the top 10 search returns today for “Motrin” and “headache”…