Off the Pass: week of January 31, 2011

This was a week of Facebook news. I’ll start with the most exciting announcement as it happened this morning. Facebook Deals are now live in Europe! Restaurants throughout the US and EU can now, once they have claimed their Facebook Place page, set up a coupon that Facebook users “unlock” by “checking in” to the restaurant’s Place while in the venue.

Watch a clip from this morning’s press conference at TechCrunch.

If you are not familiar with the concept of location based services and “check ins”, do a quick google for “foursquare” and “gowalla” for articles on the topic. Facebook Places and their take on the “check in” game is described here.

Businesses can create a few different types of deals:

• Individual deals, where the person checking in is given a reward for entering the premises, a good way to attract passers by, looking for nearby deals using the Facebook Places function in their iPhone app for example.
• Friend deals, where the setup of the deal requires the person checking in to also tag one or more friends to unlock the deal, which means they need to bring a friend or two with them.
• Loyalty deals, like a stamp card, where rewards are handed out after a number of visits (“check ins”).
• Charity deals, where the business donates something when a user checks in.

For a full overview and great tips, check out this article from Inside Facebook and the new Facebook Deals micro site.

There is nothing new about this type of service, but what of course makes the Facebook Deals so exciting are the hundreds of millions of users worldwide already using Facebook on their mobiles. As someone checks in at your restaurant and unlocks a coupon, a message is posted to that person’s Facebook Wall where it can be seen by their friends, liked, commented on and spread throughout the friend network. Here an example from my Wall, as I went to YO! Sushi for lunch today on a great deal using this new functionality:

Yes, that’s right. One of the first restaurants using this new “social coupon” functionality was YO! Sushi who just after the press conference went live with a “friend deal” on Facebook. From this morning they are giving away 2,000 free meals to the first people to check in and tag one of their friends there with them (up to 5 plates each, in total a value of about £60,000, quite generous!).

While the deal of course is set up and published on their Facebook Place pages (here is the one for County Hall, also see the screenshot below where you see the Facebook Deal in the upper right corner) and of course talked about on their Facebook Page, YO! Sushi made sure to spread it in other channels as well.

Adding information about it to their website, tweeting about it several times throughout the day, and engaging people taking advantage of the deal in conversation helped supporting their efforts to spread the rings on the social pond that is London as far and wide as possible.

As a Facebook user, redeeming the coupon is very straight forward.

You rock up at the restaurant, whip out your iPhone, go to the Places function and search for the restaurant name. You then tap the name to access the mobile Place page where you see the coupon in its full glory with brief instructions. You check in (and add a comment for your friends to see should you wish to gloat about what a great deal you are getting), add in your meal companion if that’s a requirement, and then the coupon changes to reveal a button with the label “Claim this deal”.

You tap it, you are shown a message to show it to the waiter who also will inform you of any additional T&Cs and you are done.

Very simple. When I did it this lunch time, we were #64 of the 1,000 coupons available. As I tried it now, doing a fake check in at Royal Festival Hall and claimed the coupon, I got #487. So during the afternoon they have redeemed about 420 coupons for free food…

Will this be a hit with the dining community? Well, the main drawback is the sharing of your location, which still freaks a lot of people out. If the deal is good enough though, I am certain a lot of people will overcome that fear. Besides, only your friends can see your check ins in Facebook, and there are various privacy settings available (if people take the time to look…).

This announcement tops the other releases Facebook did last week, but they are still worth mentioning:

• Facebook released a new ad format, “Sponsored Stories”, to make ads more appealing. Activities of friends, related to a brand, will be used to illustrate ads from that brand. This approach will certainly work on me, every time I see a friend’s face in an unexpected place I look extra carefully. Almost as if it is based on some underlying tribal reflex…
• Facebook launched a group buying prototype, in the spirit of now infamous Groupon, for purchasing virtual goods with friends at a discount. Is the next step to roll it out for physical products?

In other online marketing, technology and restaurant related news:

A lot of restaurants are still not making use of the benefits of online marketing to bring in business. Up to 39% don’t even have a website shows a report made by us at Livebookings recently. What’s worse, in my opinion, is that 25% of the 100 restaurants surveyed that have a website don’t do anything to promote it in other channels online. Build it and they will come? Nah. Think again.

There is so much opportunity online today for the creative tech savvy restaurateur. Ben & Jerry’s show us how to make people talk. Check out The Wacky Ice-Cream Graveyard of Vermont, that @Browners on Twitter tipped me off about last week. Genius. Kill of faltering products, but give true fans a chance to “resurrect” them. Literally.

What do you take with you when you leave a restaurant? Short of a doggie bag, mainly intangible things like a feeling of pleasure and relaxation. Oisin Rogers at The Ship blogs about the importance of retail excellence in the restaurant business.

Does social media bring value to your business? Ask Gary Vaynerchuk, he built a large part of his 60 million dollar wine business using social media. In this interview he explains what he does and how, and just how much time he spends doing it. Offputting? Doing business in hospitality is all about building relationships. Social media done well is all about that.

I don’t know anyone who likes the word “upselling”, nor being subjected to such attempts. Done right though, I shouldn’t even notice it being done to me. This hotel industry article talks about the art of upselling from a hotelier perspective.

Technology and restaurants

New innovative services, leveraging existing technology to do old things in a new way, always get me excited. Here is what looks like a great example of just that: Textaurant.com. Textaurant do for waiting for a table at restaurants what RunKeeper did to Garmin for tracking your running. £350 to £2.99… That’s disruptive.

The biggest competitor to online reservations is still the phone. OpenTable just joined forces with Tablebook.me to provide call center services to restaurants.

While not even a reality yet, the next big evolution in mobile phones will be Near Field Communication (NFC) chips for payments. Think Oyster Card, but paying for your bill at a restaurant. Google are putting these chips in their Android phones, and now Apple follows suit with NFC chips in mobiles. Having the most registered credit card numbers in the world (short of the credit card companies themselves) thanks to the success of iTunes and the App Store makes this an inevitable reality.

Social media

Facebook is getting a lot of limelight right now, and for good reason. Here are some great examples of restaurants making good use of Facebook Pages, and how they grew their fan base.

The trick to traction in social media is frequent updates and constant customer interaction. A conversation requires at least two participants… It can take a lot of time though. Perhaps that’s why Expedia now hands over the moderation of their Facebook Page to their fans! With a lot of your brand reputation already defined by your customers anyway, this is an exciting move.

Speaking of which (traction in social media), there are a lot of pitfalls and simple mistakes that can be made. Try to avoid these 5 common reasons your Facebook Page is not getting any fan love.

Social media today is getting more and more about social shopping and group buying. At the moment Groupon is the King (and Queen…) of that space, sometimes also called “performance marketing”. Here is a good summary of Groupon pros and cons. Have you tried Groupon for your restaurant? Or a similar service (there are a few…)?

Twitter to (finally) roll out self serve ad platform in February. A lot of questions surrounding this, not like AdWords where mechanisms are well understood. And how exciting are “promoted tweets” really? I can remember one that I have seen. Red Bull around the time of the World Cup last year. Only reason I remember it is because I used a screenshot of it in my How To Twitter workshop presentation which I did about 9 times for various restaurants last year… Lately I have also seen promoted tweets in my HootSuite columns, so they are placed in the API. They are very easy to ignore though. Well, I do like that they make advertisers create copy in the form of a tweet. Would you try promoted tweets for your restaurant?

Reputation Management / Online Customer Service

The shout fest between dragon Duncan Bannatyne and TripAdvisor flared up last week when TripAdvisor accused Me Bannatyne of intimidating customers. Kevin May of tnooz immediately got on Twitter to get some facts out of Mr Bannatyne about the accusations.

Restaurant diner discussions online around poor experiences can sometimes get heated. When sitting comfortably behind a screen and keyboard, throwing an invective or two out there is far too easy and seemingly free of real consequence. Hey, the recipient is a faceless brand anyway, so what does it matter, right? Most people would know that behind online brands are real people though, and stay civil. But you know what? As scary as they can seem, online bullies are ordinary people too. Here is a really interesting column about what happens when you track down your detractors and talk to them.

Last week the London Twitterverse was shown a good example of how quickly bad reviews can spread these days as Marina O’Loughlin posted her review of Kyashii in the Metro. No need to link to the review itself, a link to part of the conversation quickly leads on to it. How can you not get interested when one of the well known critics posts a sentence like “Was properly crap”?

Location Based / Local Marketing

With Facebook Places and Deals now live in Europe, and adoption of the “check in” concept spreading, will 2011 be the year when LBS marketing went mainstream? GigaOM reviews the rapidly increasing usage based on new research from Microsoft.

Who said location based services and check ins weren’t useful? How about being told via SMS if the restaurant you are in has any health complaints? DontEat.At uses your Foursquare checkins to text you if the restaurant you just walked in to has health warnings… Only in the US for now though. Will some clever developer build the same for London? I can imagine the data is spread out among several councils making it tricky to mash up with the Foursquare API.

FohBoh reviews Whrrl, a location app that focuses on personalised recommendations and deals.

Mobile

Yours truly is quoted in Restaurant Briefing about mobile restaurant websites: Weaving the mobile web. Personally I would recommend prioritising a mobile accessible website over a smartphone app. Increasingly important area to get right, at Livebookings we have seen mobile restaurant reservations go large the past year. Right now I love the Hawksmoor approach (try their site on your mobile) and the Pocket Diner solution from Engage Interactive (pocketdiner.co.uk), very clever.

This link isn’t technically about mobile, but it is about the company that finally managed to make the promises of the mobile revolution that I have been told since 1998 become reality. Apple, of course. Via my favourite Swedish online technology rebel @Jocke I was brought back to this diamond. Ad copy that makes your eyes well up and your heart swell. Think Different. Here’s to the crazy ones. Is it this mentality that ultimately made adoption of the iPhone such a success?

Search Engine Optimisation

Having amazing SEO is fairly pointless if your website doesn’t convert your search traffic to paying customers. Here are some great tips on optimising your website for conversion. Focus on the benefit, hide all distracting clutter, make page scannable, strong calls to action before AND after the point of conversion.

Food / Restaurant Blogging

Do you post videos on your restaurant blog? Ever wondered how videos go viral? This infographic, while quite US centric, gives some interesting clues on important parameters to get right when producing and publishing your video clips.

For fun

Dealing with awkward moments in restaurants is never easy, but here are ten top tips from Eater.com. Thanks @PolpoSoho for the link!

This is the most amazing restaurant menu I have ever seen. Not only does it appeal to me as a science geek, it is also perfectly on brand for a restaurant called “Miracle of Science”…!

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 food and restaurant gems around Peckham to current events) or on Google Buzz (news links only).

By Magnus Hultberg in Blog, Off the Pass: Week in online marketing