Off the Pass: week of August 16, 2010
Last week a lot of time at Livebookings HQ was spent with Facebook, making an interesting development come together. For a long while we have been getting requests from restaurants to be able to take reservations through their Facebook Pages, and we have experimented with various models as a result.
There are a few compelling reasons why Livebookings need to support this, the biggest of which simply is because so many of potential guests today clearly are using Facebook. More and more people turn to Facebook to share experiences, get trusted opinions on places to go to from their friends, and even follow brands for the latest news and offers.
Another good reason is that OpenTable also do this, and then of course we have to follow suit. 
I have to hand it to them, they make an excellent job at being where people are: mobile platforms and social networks like Facebook are clearly important business channels for restaurants today.
In the case of OpenTable, they have built a Facebook application that can be added to your Page (provided you are an OpenTable customer of course). We have decided to take a slightly different route, and while it may be a bit more technical in implementation, it allows for far more customisation and even allows you to publish any information or design elements you want next to our incredibly easy to use booking tool, supplying the same great experience as on your website.
Even if you are a restaurant group, using the same Facebook Page shared between several restaurants, you can design your Facebook Page reservations tab to allow for easy selection of a restaurant, and then the diner can book their table direct through Facebook.
Are you on Facebook? Check out the instructions on how to add Livebookings to your restaurant’s Facebook Page right here on theblackboard.net. If you try, leave your questions and experiences in the comments of that post!
Before moving on to this week’s news round up, I recently read an article on Groupon (“Growing with Groupon may be tricky for businesses“) that made me realize the potential dangers of doing massive discount offers in an online space. While it can bring tremendous volumes of new business it can also bring a business completely to its knees, trying to cope. It is a bit like the real world equivalent of being “slashdotted“, a tech geek term referring to what happens when a web site with lots of visitors links to a smaller website, flooding their web server with unexpected traffic making it impossible to access it.
If you can’t accommodate for the upsurge in customer demand, not only may you miss out on the effect of your promotion, it may even lead to very negative comments as a bad experience spreads so quickly over Twitter, Facebook, review sites and other social networks today.
Randomly the article also made me think of some of the insights from the great post “Understanding the Digital Natives“, about people growing up breathing and thinking social networks, viral like spread of interesting ideas and online games. To a lot of young people, everything is a game. Spend an inordinate amount of time finding the best deal, then make sure to really get as much as possible out of it. Quoting from the Groupon experiences article:
Greg Gibbs, owner of Chicago Bagel Authority in Lincoln Park, felt this pain firsthand when he signed on with Groupon for a deal-of-the-day in January. His promotion, which cost $3 for an $8 voucher good for any menu item, sold nearly 10,000 Groupons, 10 times more than the top end of Gibbs’ expectations. …
“We just don’t get the kind of customer that we want to come back,” said Gibbs, who saw patrons put items back if their total exceeded $8. “It’s a lot of people that come once for the discount, nobody tips, and they’re all trying to squeeze it into the exact dollar amount.”
Good advice in the article is to make sure you have thought through your goals around the promotion before you take the plunge, and made sure that you collect details from the guests so you can work towards getting repeat business once the voucher campaign is over.
In other online marketing, technology and restaurant related news:
Speaking of Groupon, there has been a bit of buzz about OpenTable’s foray into the voucher world with their new scheme “Spotlight”. While OpenTable is considered uniquely positioned to offer up deals based on real time restaurant availability (we of course would like to point out that there is at least one other company in that position…), the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
Twitter, as always, featured heavily in last week’s online marketing news. New feature: “fast follow“, get updates via text messages from Twitter users without being a Twitter user yourself. Would drive me mad, but maybe makes sense as a way to follow news and deal tweets from brands?
Twitter recruits heavy hitter advertising sales people from Facebook and Yelp, time to really ramp up the sales efforts in their schemes to monetize the fast growing social network?
Larry Edger writes a good restaurant perspective on the use of Facebook and Twitter, the advantages and differences between the two. He also emphasizes the fact that with a strong and thought through social media strategy, you get a good chunk of “mobile marketing” as a bonus as social media often is consumed while on the go and has excellent support for location based publishing.
And if that isn’t a great segue to this post from Econsultancy on the importance of having a social media strategy and not a Facebook fumble, I don’t know what is. Using social media to drive business is a long term game, which requires you to be in it for the long haul with a thought through and consistent effort. Taking the easy route and just being on the most talked about social networks du jour may not at all be the right thing to do.
Foursquare is definitely the most talked about social network right now, and Zagat just hit 50,000 followers begging the question if Foursquare now is mainstream. I would respond a clear “no” to that question, but I still do think that the location based marketing trend is one of the most important ones for restaurants to keep a close watch on.
To get started with that, check out this post on how restaurant brands get value out of location based networks like Gowalla, My Town, SCVNGR and Foursquare.
Discussions on social media and privacy issues continue, and rightly so. Does Foursquare have a “stalker problem”? Well, if anything, social media is a “stalker playground”, but it is important to keep in mind that for most of the time publishing of personal information is willingly made in order to stay in touch with friends and relatives. But yes, there probably will be many more occasions of people unwittingly sharing a little bit too much.
When it comes to trust online, a recent study shows the importance of being honest in your brand communications. Quality content and stellar customer service isn’t enough, apparently, you have to *gasp* be honest and fess up to the fact that there are negative as well as positive sides to your business. Nobody is perfect, and we automatically get suspicious of a too polished surface.
Restaurant marketing isn’t the only discipline evolving as a result of social media, search may also be changing. With the amazing spread of the Facebook “Like” button, could “Like” replace the “link” as the best bet on what content really is most relevant to people? Don’t hold your breath though, while Facebook search is growing rapidly, it is still but a fraction of Google. I also think it is important to keep in mind what intent is behind a search, in order to consider it of potential value to a business.
With that in mind, check out this great overview of how to increase your organic search traffic through getting the right keywords into your content. If you find that topic interesting, I’d like to remind you about one of the most popular posts here on theblackboard.net: “Get more restaurant reservations by writing great content“.
It is easy to forget about the old work horse the email newsletter in all this social media hype, but don’t disregard it yet. A few weeks ago there was much talk about Ben & Jerry’s, the world’s coolest ice cream brand (pun intended), ditching email completely for social media. Turns out it wasn’t entirely correct. Kate O’Brien, Ben & Jerry’s Global Marketing Manager, sets the record straight and shares some valuable experiences in this Econsultancy interview.
If you do run a newsletter as part of your online marketing strategy, make sure you get the details right. Copyblogger shares 5 reasons why no one reads your email newsletters, and what to do about it.
For fun:
Spitalfields Life interview Fergus Henderson, of St John fame. Excellent post on the virtues of being a bookworm, and living out your restaurant management strategy through books.
Most interesting restaurant review I have read in a very long time was posted by Anthony Silverbrow (@Silverbrow) last week as a result of a lovely visit to the River Cafe. It starts “Am I a tosser?”, and only gets better from there.
Finally, a fantastic example of a viral social media marketing campaign. Perhaps you saw the HOPA girl, who quit her job through a series of photographs… Well, turns out it was a hoax, and a masterfully executed one at that. Made me laugh, and made her famous.
That’s it for this week. Come back Monday next week for a new set of news in restaurant online marketing you shouldn’t miss out on. If you want to get updates of links and comments throughout the week, follow @manne on Twitter (news and blog links mixed with random chit chat ranging from my love of pork to current events) or on Google Buzz (news links only).
