Off the Pass: week of August 31, 2010
The one piece of news last week that made me go “ooooh!” was a gushing piece on a pretty new app in the location based marketing space called “Shopkick” (not sure how that name is supposed to be interpreted…).
Basically, similar to Foursquare, Shopkick is an app you use when physically at a shop to show you are there and collect points. You can browse specials, earn loyalty points and get real money gift certificates for various actions.
While the name is distinctly strange sounding, the idea is quite genius. As much as location based marketing is all the rage right now, a lot of people feel it is tedious to have to manually “check in” to the venue they are in. Shopkick solve this by placing a piece of hardware in the store emitting a signal, and when a phone with the app installed “hears” the signal things can immediately happen.
Not only does this make the system fairly tamper proof (cheating becomes a lot more difficult than for example with Gowalla or Foursquare), it also makes it possible to “remind” people as they enter a location that they are in a Shopkick-enabled store increasing the chance that people check their phone for information.
I would love to see a restaurant using this. Handing out loyalty points, “Kickbucks”, for repeat visits and then putting barcodes to redeem the “Kickbucks” for their daily specials on the menus…
Check out this overview with step by step photos for a detailed explanation of how it works.
In other online marketing, technology and restaurant related news:
The discussion on Facebook Places continues. So far I have seen very little about actual usage, or interesting campaigns being done. I guess people are still thinking about how best to leverage this. Here a post with interesting perspectives from a few seasoned veterans in the online marketing world.
With the addition of Facebook Places you may have a Place for your brand created by someone else, as well as a Page that you maintain and build “fans” around. You can merge the two, see a good explanation of the process here. It is NOT recommended to do this if you are a restaurant chain with venues in different locations.
In light of all these location based social websites that have launched lately National Restaurant Association ask “Is it time to get geosocial?”
For an exciting example of how your location can be used to bring you relevant recommendations on restaurants, bars, spas and so on, take the local collective intelligence engine Hunch for a spin.
Recent changes in the way Google deals with “brand name searches” , they now list more than two pages from the brand domain if it is clear which brand the search pertains to. This makes it easier to “tidy up” a search result from negative reviews and mentions on other websites than your own.
Google also made some updates and changes to their real time search, showing how important they find searching Twitter and other social media sites is. You can now narrow real time searches geographically, focus in on a specific conversation and more. To me Google Realtime is without a doubt the best way to go and find not only what’s going on right now on Twitter, but also what was said a week or even a month ago.
Last week the layout format for Facebook Pages changed. Perhaps that triggered you to think about what your Facebook Page looks like, and how you can get more use out of it? Econsultancy has a list of 25 inspirational Facebook Page implementations.
And if hacking FBML code in Facebook tabs is not something that gets you excited, here is a list of 12 tools that help you customizeyour Facebook presence. (Reminder: you can use Livebookings to take restaurant reservations on your Facebook Page.)
On the inspirational note, check out this post with examples of how you can use videos to promote your restaurant. Making nice quality videos and publishing them through social services like YouTube or Vimeo can help you reach new web visitors.
New statistics from “ShareThis”; the well known service to add social sharing links to your blog, website or newsletters; shows that email and Facebook are better ways to spread links than Twitter.
Carlo Platia reminds us, clear and to the point, of the importance of maintaining a guest database. It is a long term strategy that may make or break your business.
Interesting development in the field of social gaming (think “Farmville“…): reaching new customers through games where gamers earn virtual cash by buying deals while playing. Rather than battling for attention in crowded email inboxes, peddle your wares in a context that gets the attention…
Lastly, a reminder about the Grapevine Consulting series on blogger outreach where a new post has been published. Follow the series and take the real life advice to heart to make your blogger communication better for everyone involved.
For fun:
The Bon Appetit Foodists ate their way across America to find the 10 best new restaurants. Check out their list for some fresh concepts.
An infographic mapping the check-in data from London’s FourSquare community has been created by PhD student Anil Bawa-Cavia. Are you in a “hot” area?
If you are into Bollywood and really old, crap horror flicks, you might rejoice over the recent addition of full length movies to YouTube. With titles like “Invasion of the bee girls” (Not Safe For Work!) and “Wheels on meals” (Jackie Chan!) this is surely a site for B-movie lovers everywhere!
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 the best steaks in London to current events) or on Google Buzz (news links only).
