Restaurant Patrons Go Digital

Many small businesses are wondering how they can participate in social media to help grow their business. The one industry that can easily jump into the mix is the restaurant industry. Many small businesses are grappling with the challenge of not having enough staff to manage social media. Restaurants have a great advantage here, they can let their patrons do the work. With so many web-enabled phones on the market restaurants can take advantage of buzz that is created by their patrons in a few simple steps. Here are 3 simple tips for restaurants to capitalize on social media.

1) Reward your patrons for online reviews

Promote discounts to patrons who post reviews of your establishment while dining. From Zagat to Urban Spoon there are many review sites that consumers look at before deciding where to go for their next meal or happy hour. Offer a reasonable discount if  patron can show you their review before they close out their tab. This allows you to immediately know whether or not they are satisfied, and if they weren’t you still have a chance to make the customer happy before they leave your restaurant. An opportunity that is priceless if you want them to return again. Further, you will increase the number of reviews of your restaurant on these highly trafficked sites making it a great opportunity to generate more future business.

Tip: Be prepared with how you will handle negative feedback. Sometimes it is difficult to hear, but it is the only way you will know how people really feel so that you can fix it.

2) Offer Tweet Up specials

A Tweet Up is when a group of local Twitter users decides to get together and meet in person for a few drinks. Many times these social media junkies will tweet about their experience and upload photos of themselves and others at the event. Because they surely mention where the event is being held, this is great publicity for you. You probably already have a list of happy hour specials that you regularly cycle through take it a step further by offering a Tweet Up special. The key is to make sure that your Tweet Up special is exclusive to those who are actually attending the Tweet Up and not anyone there for happy hour.

Tip: Those who are actually attending will be more than willing to show you a tweet they have sent about the event as proof for a good deal, if so desired.

3) Create a FREE check-in shot

Have you heard of FourSquare or GoWalla? Well your patrons might have and there is a little competition happening to check in at businesses you frequent so that you can get points, badges, and rewards. After you check in patrons can add tips for others who check in after they do. The reason this is great for the restaurant is that when someone checks in they can share their location on Twitter and FaceBook letting all of their friends know where they are. Personally, I’m a FourSquare fan and within our group there is a friendly competition to become Mayor at our local hot spots something that can only be achieved by checking in more than anyone else.   What does that mean for the business owner? A competition for repeat business…Sweet.

Tip: Create a shot that you give to people who can show their check in for free. You could call it the GoSquare, the FourWalla, or some other creative name you come up with.

If you really want to join in on the fun create a Twitter account and FaceBook fan page for the restaurant. Post your specials and events for the day and upload photos of all the fun people are having. There is no better way to become the local hot spot than to give patrons lots of ways to tell their friends how awesome you are.

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I recently returned from the Inbound Marketing Summit (IMS09) in Boston and had the chance to meet several social media junkies; many of them already had the support of their management teams. However, I know that we are in the minority and many of you are still trying to get positive support to use social media in your business.  It’s kind of like putting together the pieces to a puzzle that looks complicated at first, but afterwards it seems far simpler.

 Here are my thoughts on a couple of the objections I heard from you in regards to return on investment (ROI).

 You can’t show ROI in social media – While it is true that tracking ROI in social media is not as clear cut as other channels, you can absolutely track ROI. It does require an engaged IT team to connect your social media monitoring tool (I like Radian6) with your CRM, making it not only possible, but realistic.  And trust me, ROI is extremely important; you’ll never hear me say otherwise.  However, there are some misnomers that you need to be aware of if you are getting ready to fight this battle.

Prospecting – First, the sales cycle is likely to be longer if your first engagement with a prospect is through social media. Why? First, because you aren’t out their pimping your services to everyone who will listen. Instead you are building relationships hoping that if your products and services fit your new “friends” needs they will consider you. Also, you might be engaging them long before they’ve searched for a solution or even know they need one. This part of the research phase typically doesn’t include any involvement by your company and is handled solely in the minds of your consumers. At some point they will decide they need a solution and likely do some sort of search and you hope that they think of or remember you. Direct intervention in the pre-research stage of the sales cycle has always been out of reach for businesses. Because of this millions get spent for “branding” campaigns, all aimed at trying to increase recall of your brand. Now you have a chance to engage people and be on their minds while they are in the “thought” stage.  To me, not participating in the discussion at this stage is nuts. The ROI will be there if you do your job well in social media, but the close rate and time to buy may be different. So what do you say to that disbeliever?

Well, I liken this to a sales executive telling you not to make that phone call or sales call to a prospect unless you know for sure you are going to get the sale. Could you imagine having to prove out the ROI before you could make the call? That’s ridiculous, and so is not participating in discussions about your industry and your brand within social media channels.

Customer Service – Second, when looking at the benefits of using social media to provide better customer service it can get really dicey. Many times, the revenue is already in the door, but you are looking to build relationships for future purchases. If you were to put the customer service provided in conjunction with social media, up against your traditional customer service channels I believe you would see that it increases efficiency within your service team. I believe the ROI will be the same as with any customer service channel that provides superior service. I won’t go into what would happen if you were providing cruddy service before. If you were to measure the incremental lift in future business when comparing both channels of service, that would be your ROI for social media. If you also showed the value of a more efficient service model, you’d be golden. But you haven’t sold your executive yet. So what can you say to that skeptic?

If our phones in customer service were ringing off the hook, would you tell our agents not to answer them unless they could prove they would lead to future sales? Of course not. So why can’t we answer the phone? It’s ringing…it just happens to be in cyberspace.

The bottom line is that if you can put social media into the perspective of the current things you are doing within the organization, you may have an easier time selling social media through. And if you can talk of social media with stories related to the first time your company tried another new selling method such as a telesales force or even their first e-commerce site, hopefully they’ll remember that the beginning was slow but the ROI came. It might be a different volume of ROI and it might be a different conversion rate, but it’s there. And it will be for social media too. Good luck! Please share your story in the comments section.

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As web 2.0 is just starting to take hold I’m envisioning what’s next.  We have more information than we ever have about our customers and prospects.  How are we going to use it to make each experience unique? Get ready for web 3.0, it’s coming faster than you may think.

As a marketer who likes to push the envelope on creativity and innovation in the field, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what is going to be the next “big thing” in the industry.  I’ve also worked on many extensive web projects and have been watching the latest trends with web 2.0 and social media integration.  Well, MLK Jr. put it best, “I have a dream.”  I envision that my website experiences will be customized to me and provide me with the information I want – when I want it, the information I need – when I need it, and the information I don’t know I need or want – when I don’t realize I need or want it. I want every web experience to have an “A-ha” moment for me and extend that to my customers and prospects.

Today, we all pretty much start our web search at Google.  We type in a search term and review the organic listings which are comprised of a few things: Business listings with relevant content, Individual blog listings will relevant content, and Business sponsored content provided by individuals, think reviews etc, and then we might move over to peruse the paid search options.  If your company comes up anywhere in the organic listings(first) or paid results (second) then we’ll take a look at you.  If not, we quickly determine that you aren’t swimming with the big dogs and aren’t worth our time or the risk of our professional reputation to investigate further. Once we get to your site, you have either pointed us to a page that provides content based on our search term and/or we find ourselves needing more information. So our typical web experience may start by checking out the navigation on the page and see if we can find what we are looking for. If I’m really interested I may resort to the little search box on your site.  We type in a word that we think will deliver the result we are seeking. Depending on the sophistication of the website it either delivers a relevant result and we take a look or it doesn’t and we leave. I could get into an even lengthier discussion on what stage I am in the buying process and how it changes this, but I’ll leave that to another day.

With the advent of marketing automation we can now track every action a prospect and/or customer takes on our website and respond based on their real activities rather than information provided on a form or what they tell us they want.  This is the first step towards being able to provide relevant and actionable content.  The days of site visitors being lost in the black hole of the “unknown” are dwindling.  Through progressive customer profiles we can now collect information in little bits and reconcile it back to who you are and act accordingly.  As a marketer it truly is a beautiful thing!  Now, I have the ability to truly test, monitor, and refine campaigns and content based on your activity in ways that were impossible as little as 5 years ago.  Even more beautiful is that I can measure the results in terms of action/inaction and ultimately the Return on Marketing Investment, put simply the revenue that is returned to the organization over the investment that was required to generate that revenue.

These are huge steps forward for marketers, steps I honestly never even considered a few years ago.  At the same time, it opens new doors and new avenues to truly be able to satiate the known and unknown desires of people who WANT and NEED what my company has to offer. But as my husband would tease, like any woman I am never satisfied! I want more…I want to take it to another level…I want to drive us into a web 3.0 world now!

Why?  Because we are on the cusp and with today’s technologies it is possible.  So why wait? As Marketers we are all shifting to become content producers for our companies as we are learning that content is king, so why not take it to a new level?

Imagine producing content in bits, chunks, and larger heaps but giving it to people in the serving size that suits them best? To put it into context, perhaps you would produce an excerpt that leads to a blog post then to a mini e-book then to a technical white paper. Okay, so maybe you do it backwards and start with the  most extensive and build backwards, whatever suits your fancy.  The next question is, “What do I do with this progressively expanded content?”

Remember, those progressive customer and prospect profiles that marketing automation is allowing us to create and all the previous web activity that we are reacting to? What if we could turn that into a concept similar to a tag cloud so that we understood what truly drives THAT customer? Sure we can look at an entire segment, but the actions of the whole do not tell the story of the individual.  And web 3.0, well I’m hoping it will focus on one-to-one marketing. What does that mean? It means that the real estate  of your website can be divided into dynamically generated sections of content based on the profile of the individual and the activities you have logged for him or her. It’s Amazon’s personalized recommendations concept flipped upside down, spun around and thrown at you in a website that changes based on what you say you want, distilled by who you say you are, and refined by the actions you take over time.

What a web 3.0 site might look like

Hard to picture? (Well, don’t knock me for my lacking graphic design skills but look at this in terms of dynamically generated content buckets that would obviously look a heck of a lot better with a web designers touch.)

As you can see, the concept is that each bucket has content that changes based on what I know about you.  I allow you to tell me if you like the content either through rating or by watching your activities and if not I try something else until I find content that you are responding to and clicking to take a deeper look.  If I find out that you really like e-books, I may show all e-books on the left side, etc.  If I find that you like 3rd party blog posts and product reviews, I may focus on showing you those.  Every time you answer the customer profile question, the next question appears.  Bits, pieces, chunks, of your “Digital Body Language,” as Steven Woods coined, add up to deliver a custom one-to-one web experience.

Now, I’m not a techie so I don’t know how to tell you to do this.  I certainly have some ideas from my web experience.  But I know it isn’t as hard as it sounds.

I certainly could be wrong, but I’m hoping that this is the direction web development starts moving and I’ll certainly be pushing it that way.  And if it finally catches,  I’ll be a customer for sure!

Where does your company stand on Web 2.0 adoption? [polldaddy poll=1657249]

Well, yes!  But there is some real validity to the concept.  It may be defined in many ways but this is how I look at it.

Marketing Integration means that you must take activities that are currently being executed individually and work to do them in tandem ultimately with the goal of making them support one another.

Now that’s just my spin on it and I’m sure others have their own.  But why is this really important?  Well, take a minute and think about the activities that you do today within your own sales and marketing department.  Here’s my list from marketing: Brand Strategy, Brand Awareness, PR, Advertising, Lead Generation Campaigns, Lead Nurturing Campaigns, SEO, SEM, Social Media, Product Marketing, Customer Retention Programs/Campaigns, Events, and Product Demonstrations.  From the sales side of the house there’s: outbound telesales, inbound telesales, field sales visits, and relationship-building contacts. I’m sure I missed a few, but you get the point.

Pretty much every company likely does these activities regardless of the role of the person doing them or which side of the house they fall.  What I find really interesting is how many companies do NOT align these activities so they achieve a common goal. Further, how many times I’ve seen individuals steaming ahead down a path and how the other side of the house has absolutely no idea the project is even going on!  I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of this in the past.  Sometimes, you get so busy that stopping to put together yet another death by power point presentation seems daunting.  I’ll get into my thoughts on how I feel about power point presentations in another post, I suppose!

I truly believe the perception at many companies is that the entire marketing mix does in fact work together because it is the sum of all the inputs that delivers the expected output, right? Sure, but do you want to deliver the sales results you had yesterday for the next 5 years?  Or do you want to exceed projections and deliver unprecedented profitability?

Well, I sure as heck do.  And here’s how I think it can be done.  Now, I’ll admit I’ve never been allowed to actually do all of these things in tandem because someone who doesn’t get it always cuts something out.  But it’s my theory and if you want to prove it for me, AWESOME! Let me know, I’ll watch you and cheer every step of the way.  So you wanna be a rockstar?  Well I don’t know what business you’re in, so I’m just gonna call whatever you do…well, IT.

Theme It

In order for your audience to get it, and for you to be able to keep it straight internally you need to have relevant themes of what you are trying to accomplish so everyone can align themselves to support it.  Now don’t go all crazy here and drink from the cup of stupid. You need to pick no more than 4 or 5 common themes or it will get confusing.  Ideally, you could keep it to 2 or 3.  And it doesn’t really even matter what your themes are, think of them almost like secret mission code names.  Now, that could be fun couldn’t it!  So my favorite three themes are Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention, and Brand Awareness. Why?  Because they are simple and I don’t know a single company who isn’t trying to accomplish all three at any given moment in time.  If you get really good at those things, then you can get all fancy schmancy and expand.  But quite frankly, I have yet to work for a company that had mastered all three.  So, if I was going to be clever and come up with some codes names for that..hmmm…let’s see…bear with me…YES!…Here you go…I would call it…Operation Kidnap the Baby, Operation Friends in Low Places, and OperationPerez Hilton.  Now the deal is, EVERYTHING you do has to fall under one of those operations.  Now it is possible you’ll have some that straddle the fence and support multiple operations. And for some people that just sends them for a loop, they can’t throw it into a bucket and therefore it is wrong.  Well I say, I wish everything I did supported multiple objectives.  Why?  Because that is freaking integration and you can truly peg like 1,000 birds with one stone if you play your cards right.  I say peg because I’m an animal supporter, but I’m not all nutso fanatic about it and couldn’t find a cooler way to say it.  No really, it is all about the cool.  So here we go.

Promote It

How do you promote yourself today.  Yeah, that.  Do that.  Tie it into your direct mail campaigns, your web campaigns, your social media activities, your PR activities.  Everything.  See what fits together and push the issue to make them work together.  Gasp…did you say align PR with sales campaigns???  Yup, sure did.  And here’s how.  Stop using campaigns that are about your product to open the door, unless your like mega-huge and everyone wants your product.  I’ll admit, Sherwin-Williams could get away with this effectively and so can Apple and every other mega-brand out there.  But you know what, chances are…YOU can’t.  So do something that the customer finds value in and promote that. Capture their information, and then Kidnap the Baby!  Use something people care about whether it’s a free training class, e-book, chotzky or something else, and then give it to them.  Yes, give it to them FREE.  Why because we all walk around still believing that you can really get things for free.  Now, us marketers, all know that NOTHING is ever really FREE!  Because you are going to give us your information to get it, and then we are going to use it to Kidnap the Baby and afterward we’re going to tell everyone you are one of our Friends in Low Places.

Socialize It

One of my brilliant co-workers who taught me everything I know about social media, whether she knew it or not, coined that term and I totally just stole it!  You know who you are, @JessieX! So, if you are using social media then you know it’s a two-way street as I’ve mentioned before.  And as long as you haven’t upchucked your marketing messaging all over your followers then you still have followers, right!  And since they are still following you then you have done something to provide value to them.  And no, tweeting freaking article links all day doesn’t count. So tell your network what you are doing and start a conversation around it.  Do they like it, hate it, jump up and down on it, or what?  You need the feedback to do better next time, so you might as well get it from your loyal followers.

PR IT

Yeah, I know press releases are pretty much worthless pieces of space but you have to do them.  All companies have to do them.  So if you have to waste your worthless piece of space on some corporate crafted puppet-speak then make it work for you.  Don’t just send out the press release and check it off your list.  Create an optimized version of the release for your website. What does optimized mean?  Well first it means you started with a list of keywords that are relevant to your announcement and you have interwoven them in, and second it means you include links and make it easy for others to link to the page using those cool little web 2.0 linky icons.

Community IT

Do you have a community?  Yeah, I think most companies have invested a couple of dollars in some kind of community board at least.  And some have really set the standard for what community is all about.  My two cents on that starts like this.  A real community offers ways for people to connect, draw value, and find other like-minded individuals to be “friends” with and then use that opportunity to suck the information I need out of them like a Hoover. Because unless you are Mary Theresa, you’re probably a little narcissistic like the rest of us and mostly care about your own needs.  I found a great one in my research.  www.intronetworks.com The level of information they collect in their profile is truly astounding, and they do it in the coolest way I’ve ever seen.  Did I mention, it is all about the cool.  And back to the Hoover, you can use that information to profile groups of your customers into nice little common categories so you can address their needs in one fell swoop.  Now, hold on a minute.  I’m trying to see how many useless catch phrases I can throw into one post.  So count ‘em with me and throw a comment with your guess.  At some point I’ll go back and count them myself.

Rave It

Do you have people who don’t respond?  Sure all of us do.  Well make sure you tell them what they missed and then if you can turn around and give them whatever they missed it’s even better. For example, if you’re holding a webcast record it and send a link to the people who missed it, then turn around and put the video on YouTube so people who don’t come to your site have a chance of seeing it.

Support It

I read a really great two-part e-book called funnelnomics that really drove this home to me. http://is.gd/vXOC You’ve just got to stop doing things one time, or even twice and expecting some phenomenal results.  The key is to keep doing it and measuring it when you have some true data to work with.  Some of the best ideas don’t pay off the first time they are tried.

Don’t Forget About It

Make sure you put every single person into a lead funnel.  If you’re talking about your Friends in Low Places then there is a retention funnel that should exist for them.  You’re still working on Kidnapping the Baby?  Okay well you probably have some funnels for that to.  I personally, like the slow, medium and fast track. Oh, but what about Perez Hilton? We haven’t talked much about him?  Well, all of his friends go into a track to.  You should have a communication plan for all of your press outlets, your advertisers, your tradeshow associations and anyone else.  We get caught into the trap of viewing these as activities or projects that we execute.  But you have to remember that on the other end there are people.  And anytime there is a person you have an opportunity to build a relationship. And when you truly have “friends” in both high and low places who you work to equally support, the rest is history!

I’ve spent some time looking at what is happening in the economy and how companies are adjusting.  In my career I have seen many different corporate cultures.  They have ranged from being nimble and quick to respond to market conditions to bureaucratic and unable to adjust in time.  Interestingly, the company’s size did not make this determination but rather it is fueled by the culture that is found within the organization.  And mainly that culture is derived from the leaders of the organization.  That’s really not rocket science. However, in today’s economy it is imperative that companies are able to quickly react to what’s happening and adjust their actions accordingly.  In marketing this is truer than ever before.

What I see happening around us in mid-size companies with conservative cultures:

In Sales Departments- Sales people are struggling to make their numbers and are using aggressive tactics to close the deal that they never would consider in an up economy.  But the market is tough and they have to fight, really fight, for every sale.  They have become quick to blame marketing for not giving them enough leads but haven’t realized that there aren’t as many leads out there and they are killing off the ones that do come in.  In the meantime, they keep turning over the same rocks hoping that a pile of money will be under them.

In Marketing Departments- Marketing teams are trying to balance long-term lead generation with generating short-term sales.  Budgets that focus on long-term lead generation are being slashed and everything is going into the short-term win.  For companies that did not have strategies to manage this before their marketers are rushing around trying to come up with a game plan.  Once they do, the game plan gets trapped in the approval process and either gets approved too late or the items that carry the most risk and likely largest payoff are stripped out of the plan before it is executed.

Here’s the reality.  What used to work ain’t gonna work anymore!  And what you’re probably finding is that some of the people who seemed totally competent two or three years ago are really total idiots who were able to ride the wave of others success! It’s easy to be successful in an up market because pretty much anything you do will work.  It takes really strong leaders who are willing to take risks and innovative marketers prepared to break out of the pack when the market is tough.  Do you see the ability for that to happen in a conservative company?  The ability to see the payoff in the long-run while capitalizing in the short-term?   The ability to trust your experts and have faith that they know what they are doing? The ability to make quick decisions on something you might not fully understand? In the conservative companies I’ve worked for there is zippy chance that they are going to take a leap of faith while their asses are being held to the fire. They want to be in the comfort zone, the place they know and can explain in three words or less.  I’ll go back to my previous statement.  What used to work ain’t gonna work anymore!  If you can’t get out of your comfort zone and try something new and don’t have a ton of cash in the bank to see you through low or no-profitability for a couple of years, you will fail.

Here is what companies can do to break out of the pack and capture market-share from their competitors.  Because let’s face it.  That’s the only way you are going to grow in the short-term.

Be Bold! Don’t be scared to take risks on ideas that seem a little crazy at the time.  Do you think anyone besides Jack Dorsey and a few investors ever thought that telling a bunch of people that you’re eating lunch at your desk on Twitter would ever be a business model that would work?  Probably not.  If you want to break out of the pack you need to have a group of like-minded creative individuals at the helm who are willing to do the same old, same old while taking risks on a few “seemingly” crazy ideas to the old bureaucratic cranky folk. That doesn’t mean take on any idea that comes you way.  Check it against reality, but if you can do something with minimal investment that doesn’t risk the company but could be huge then try it!

Integrate, Integrate, Integrate! Take all those things you’ve been doing for years in little silos and look for synergies.  Look for ways they can support each other and do it.  Make them work together or don’t do them anymore. This is especially crucial when it comes to sales and marketing teams.  Sales can’t offer a discount to every person who calls and undervalue the value proposition for your product that marketing has worked so hard to establish.  Marketing can’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars running brand awareness campaigns when sales are in the tank.  Create a supportive environment, on both sides of the house.

Get Rid of Pet Projects! Every company has at least one.  Some project a member of the executive team came up with that is totally stupid but no one has the chutzpah to stand up and say it. So a limited number of people are assigned to work on the idea and it stays under the radar enough that people forget about it.  Stop the project!  NOW!  And if you have a hard time knowing what people are working on look for a web-based project management system.  There are many out there but I’ve had a lot of success with Marketing Central in managing small and large complex projects.

Get on the Social Media Bandwagon! This is one of the most cost-effective tools you can start using TODAY to connect with your customers and prospect.  Please notice, I said connect.  I didn’t say vomit your marketing message on the world. When you get involved with social media remember that if you want to be relevant to your customer and prospect base you need to have two-way conversations.  You need to talk about things they care about and let them know you care about their perspective if you want them to listen to your marketing speak when you deliver it.  Make sure you have a person behind the tool who engages with people and doesn’t talk like a corporate puppet.  You need to have a blog and Twitter account, not some corporate BS blog or Twitter account, but corporate accounts run by individuals that provide value and lets people know that you actually have human beings who work for you. If you don’t trust anyone let your CEO be your spearhead, but if you do let your training team give out tips and tricks, let your marketing team share their expertise with other marketers, let your sales team talk about what they are hearing is happening with other customers (no names unless you get permission.)  Let your company’s real personality shine and you won’t be sorry!  At least not too often.  Eventually, someone will say something you don’t want to be said, or say it in a way you wouldn’t have said it.  But you know what.  GET OVER YOURSELF. You aren’t perfect either.  Choose people you trust.  That is the key.  This allows you to truly be in relationship with your customers, rather just casual acquaintances who exchange money every once in a while.

Stop Doing What You’ve Always Done And Expecting the Same Result

That really doesn’t need a lot of explanation.  But if you think you can be successful today by doing what you did yesterday, you are sadly mistaken and unfortunately tomorrow you might be out of business.

But there is some good news.  This is an opportunity for the small and the mid-size company to aggressively take market-share from their large competitors while they try to break through the own bureaucracy and correct course.  Progressive, forward-thinking companies that are able to quickly adapt will come out ahead!

In summary, if you aren’t already, you’ve got to start Thinking Big and Acting Small.