If I was a Restaurant...How Would I Use Social Media?

A Social Service

One of the industries that was expected to be hit the hardest by the recession was the eating out/restaurant sector. There were fears that consumers would cut out eating out altogether, however although they failed to materialise the industry has been through some tough times.

• US Restaurant industry trends


• Brits choosing pubs over restaurants

There is a change in consumer behavior that has and will continue to affect how people communicate with brands, what they spend money on, who they trust and what they value. Ogilvy produced a great report which makes for some interesting reading called Eyes Wide Open, Wallet Half Shut (pdf). One of the underlying themes that fits to eating out is how important family and community have become.

Restaurants are local and have an opportunity to facilitate peoples social experiences and by doing this develop a loayl customer following.

It is about being passionate about creating a difference, being an experience and building a community around the business

The Balancing Act

Restaurants have had to balance offering value for money without falling into the trap of over-discounting. Generally restaurants are having to work harder to capture customers spend and that means gettting smarter at marketing.

Restaurants have to create a clear and distinct experience and use innovative ways to create customer experiences: marketing, menus, branding...and of course menus to excite them. Our recent blog focused on the idea of value: value = benefit - cost and the need to tip the balance by focusing on customer benefits rather than cost.

Restaurants can now use new and exciting  technologies as well as social networks to interact with and engage customers. By building a community they can develop more sustainable and loyal customer base - a tribe.

Some Case Studies

In the US restaurants have recognized the importance of social media and are now focusing on utlising in their marketing.

• Infographic - how social are US restaurants on Facebook


• 2011 Most Influential Restaurants in the US
  

Notable case studies:

• Flimé – The Cannibal Restaurant Case Study


• AJ Bombers and Foursquare


• How Social Media Drives New Business: Six Case Studies (4 are restaurant / food related)


• Why Buffalo Wild Wings Takes Geo-Social Seriously


• Restaurant using ipads as menus (MenuPad)

If I was a Restaurant How I Would Use Social Media

Learn

• Review how successful restaurants use social media and understand what Social Media ‘Tools they use and how


• Have a look at successful chefs/restaurants actively engage with their community with advice and resources e.g. Celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito, Rick Bayless , La Casa , UnoChicagoGrill

I would listen to my customers/community

Look and listen first: who is talking about you and what is being said?

• 9 reasons why hotels and restaurants should monitor social media and customer reviews


• The Best Free Tools For Making A Social Monitoring Dashboard


• Best Social Media Monitoring Tools to Enhance Business

Match my brand to my target audience 

• I would develop my brand and understand what experience I was offering to my customers.


• Here is an excellent review of how restaurants need to focus their websites on simplicity of design (pdf).

Get my menu into high quality digital pictures

• use high quality for show on website


• Put menu items on Flickr to share easily

Setup my social sites

• Develop a Facebook page


• I could have a Gallery of recipes and get a table booking app used directly within your Facebook  page – why because it is easy for people to connect, book a table and develop word of mouth marketing (interested in this then contact us)


• Twitter – use some tantalizing photos of your menu as background. Tweet regularly but about trends in the community, other people, new menu items, seasonal changes, get feedback…not just about the restaurant. I would also use Twitter to engage with other influencers in the community and ask them questions listen to conversations (you can use Twellow for this)


• Integrate the social network sites with my website e.g. Facebook/Twitter


• Have an email capture on your website for people to subscribe to a newsletter. Create a monthly email-Newsletter with the latest happenings, announcements, new menu items, entertainment news, recipe of the month etc.

Blog

• I would develop a blog. As a start point I would identify a series of articles I could write about e.g. ideas on menus for my target client audience - e.g. I could focus on quick healthy and convenient ideas for moms.


• I would hold an event and invite some people in for lessons on new menu items/recipes. Take photos and blog about the experience, people locally will share and join in creating great word of mouth marketing.


• I would have an RSS feed on my blog that people could subscribe to

Local Guides

• Make sure your restaurant can be searched and reviewed through local business guides such as Yelp.com, Urbanspoon.com, TripAdvisor.com and FoodSpotting.

Be Mobile

• Increasingly people are using their mobiles to find out information and contact restaurants. If they come across a difficult to navigate website then the chances are they will click away. Remember that Google takes into account locality on mobile searches. Get a mobile website.


• Pizza Express recently launched a mobile app that allows customers to pay directly from their phone


• Capture peoples mobile numbers for mobile marketing campaigns by using competitions and prize draws

Location apps

• How diners are using smartphones


• Foursquare - run a promotion based on Foursquare that offers discounts for checking in. For example, any bill over £25 receives an automatic £5 discount if the customer checks into Foursquare.


• Facebook deals - Facebook deals allows users to check-in to receive special offers/promotions

Build relationships with your audience/followers:

• Respond promptly to people


• Ask questions


• Develop conversations


• Host Tweetups for your Twitter community and Meetups for those that gather around topics via meetup.com

• Use Video…build a story
  
  
  
  • Video is the most natural and friendly way to promote the personality of your business. People like to connect with the thoughts and ideas that are part of how you create your meals – it becomes a story and a narrative that they tell to others
  
  
  • Use video to show people some freshly made dishes but don't stop their get some footage of people taking their first taste - that can tell people so much more than a static picture
  
  
  
  

Make your menu sharable or even liked

• Blend offline and online
  
  
  
  • Use tools like Facebook events to promote any specials/promotional events you have. Write a short piece on launch of a new menu people might like to come/ and try it. Twitter the event. Key is to make it sharable.
  
  
  • Invite local bloggers to your events
  
  
  
  


• Keywords and Hashtags
  
  
  
  • Identify keywords relvant to your target customer and restaurant
  
  
  • Use hashtags in Tweets
  
  
  
  

The Personality

Food is a social experience and the more you help and facilitate others experiences the more you will be remembered by your customers. There is a lot more I could cover but I hope this gives your a flavour (pun intended!) for what can be achieved. Of course it is important to tie it together and ensure that you do not attempt too much, spread yourself too thinly and miss out on building the relationships. Co-ordinating and developing your strategy first is time well spent.

 

Social Media - The Story of the Three Little Pigs

The Story So Far

We have all grown up with the famous story of the three little pigs (although I like the alternative 3 little wolfs variation as well). The moral of the story is obvious people who work hard, work smart, save money, think ahead, and help other people, will come out on top.

In marketing you wouldn't recommend a business to build their marketing solely on social media - it is just not good advice. Social media is just one part of the marketing mix.

Likewise the idea of solely being digital is not right for every business, it is important to recognise and use offline marketing (if it fits to your target customers). Again as a stand alone focus it will deliver results but be limited. Like the 3 little pigs using the right materials are vital to a solid marketing strategy.

Jeff Bullas wrote a good piece Social Media Marketing’s Biggest Myth that quite rightly argues the need to focus on being relevant and informative:

"The reality is that “social media” is based on self-interest. People on social sites are looking for materials which are useful to them.

Content defines the value to your customer - why people will either ignore it or share it. Content strategy is then a defining part of any online strategy. Here is a great presentation that drums home the importance of content for online marketing.

Content Strategy: The Future of Marketing

Mixing the Bricks and Mortar and Working Together

So if we return to the three little pigs story - our marketing should consist of mixing our marketing to produce a solid foundation and the people we invite to help us are our customers; because if they help you (and more importantly want to) you may develop a community.

We can't cover everything so I have focused on email - some people see email as an enemy of social media i.e. email vs. social media. The truth is, done well they should compliment each other (but it also depends on market/customers...).

Email Facts

• 72% of companies rate email as 'excellent' or 'good' for return on investment (EConsultancy)


• Email adoption high but lacking in best practice - the relevance, context and targetting (download pdf - Forrester) also support by MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report (download here)

Email is getting Social

• 6 Smart & Effective Email Marketing Tactics (Mashable)


• 7 Steps to Improve Your Email Marketing (Practical Commerce)


• Integrating the Facebook like Button into Mailchimp campaigns (Mailchimp)

Both Constant Contact and ExactTarget acquired businesses in the social arena, namely, NutshellMail and CoTweet. Why - well they recognise the value of social data and are looking to use this to build more precise targeting methods based on social data.

Putting the Story back into Marketing

So what is the role of social media within the marketing mix? Again this is big subject but here are a few reasons why it is an important part of any business now:

• people trust people (Source Nielsen) and therefore we look for what are friends or others say about brands/products and services


• brand communities can provide an ongoing development of a relationship with brand as opposed to a start stop approach (see blog post by Olivier Blanchard)


• brands can understand (and quickly) what their customers are saying - a dynamic feedback loop providing ways to improve your product or service


• researching customers (you can understand their online/offline behaviours and refine your marketing and provide value to them (this comes back then, to your content strategy)


• using tools to linkin with Facebooks open graph you can use the data to understand your 'followers'


• it is where you customers are spending their time online and hence where you can help them e.g. customer service

This is by no means an exhaustive list, it just meant to illustrate the opportunities and relevance of being social. In todays world we want the human connection as well. We can never underestimate the power of the human story, the connection we feel with it and the emotions that they evoke. Look at some of the highest ranked video's onYouTube and you will understand what I mean. When done well, social media builds as the brands facilitate the story of others as well as solving problems, communicating relevant messages and adding value it can also tell the stories of its people.

Social Business - Where do we start?

Where to start

For many organisations we talk to the question of how to use social technologies to benefit their business beyond the use of marketing has finally arrived at the board room table. Many have made taken their first steps in using social tools and started to listen, learn and integrate their marketing. The broader issues of where and who is responsible for the social business plan brings into focus the many different areas of the business impacted by the use of social business tools.

Different people will have different views on where to start. Some may argue that the focus needs to be on an integrating strategy while others may work on a priority basis and use pilot projects to prove the business case. There is of course the complexity of knitting social into the often siloed activities of an organisational structure. So where and how can organisations start to tackle some of these problems?

Looking at the Business of Being Social

There is both the opportunity to internally and externally harness the social capabilities to help organizations solve business problems. But it is context of how culture and technology need to be integrated that we understand the implications on strategy and how important it is to embrace change management.

Initially organisations need to understand their own capabilities and audit there current position:

• understand who in their business is currently using social media in relation to the business e.g. active in Linkedin forums...


• understand employee activities on social media - this is often useful and helpful to determine who could be recruited to help on projects


• benchmark you brands/products and services on social networks


• benchmark your competitors

In much the same way as you would put together your information sets to build a business plan and strategy you need to understand your current position for developing a social business capability.

Set clear goals and measures e.g.

• % increase in coverage of PR per £XX spend


• Sales could be a % Increase in Sales Leads


• Customer Service could be % reduction in response times or % reduction in number of customer service queries

Moving Quickly

We often see that many organisations end up with analysis paralysis. As we talked about in our last blog prioritizing how you intend to use social business is critical.

In today's fast paced world it is about being agile:

• Flexible and responsive resources (internal and through partner network)


• Rapidly assimilating changes in your business environment


• Focusing on information that can quickly be acted upon


• Harnessing influencers for change (internal and external)

The changes in technology and business are not incremental they are a major shift to a new form of technology and operations orientation. It is how the organisation responds to a new internal employee engagement model and also respond to a social customer across multiple channels. As consumer adoption of new technologies and behaviours change, the challenge is for organisations to reconfigure resources and capabilities to meet those changes.

 

Key Take Outs

• Benchmark your business and capabilities


• Research and benchmark your competitors


• Understand your customers/listen to where they are/what is being said/channels


• Research your network and find out who are influencers and potential social champions


• Aim to develop a centre of excellence for social business that is cross divisional/departmental


• Recognize that mistakes are going to be made - that is why we call it learning


• Remember to be adaptive/respond top changes


• Build pilots that can be scaled quickly

3 Types of Video for Facebook Engagement | Social Business

Is Video is becoming more relevant?

Is video now less about advertising and more about sharing stories and experiences? Are brands now exploiting emotions or changing to more relevant experiences?  Here are some examples from Coca Cola and Nike.

Coca Cola



Nike



Entertainment and experiences will become a necessary part of marketing a brand, available where, when and how we want it e.g. mobile. But we are not yet there and still there are hurdles and barriers yet to cross.

John Winsor’s recently wrote a blog post in which he said:

"Sometimes you have to destroy something you love"




John's point is that the model and the business of marketing needs to change, must change. If the people within the industry embraced change the shift to being social and collaborative, it would be a catalyst for greater things. His agency, Victors and Spoils, is one of many (e.g. Blur) that’s applying crowdsourcing models to creativity.

As Clay Shirkey mentioned at SXSW:

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution"

Brands now need to be in the experience industry, creating experience media that is innovative, inimitable and is sharable.

The future of video

As we have moved to a high speed world our love of video as a media both as creators and as consumers is astounding:

• As of Feb. 2011, YouTube has 490 million unique users worldwide that searched about 92 billion pages per month. It means that we spend around 2.9 billion hours (over 325,000 years) on YouTube in a month.


• Video accounts in 2011 will account for 60% of mobile web traffic (source HubSpot)

This is part of the reason for the predicted growth in online video advertising.



Engagement is equally a part of being of being relevant (a key point made by Brian Solis) as it is to do with quality content. The creative concept therefore has an equal part to play in making it relevant to the audience, interesting and hopefully shared.

One of the most effective media is video; why because we can convey so much using it...but it is the many new and interesting forms of video that now make this media simply amazing. This year we will start to see many of these new forms of video become more mainstream: animation, augmented video's and motion graphics.

As Facebook continues to change and evolve video will play an increasingly important role in how brands use Facebook; we will see more Facebook pages with video embedded on the landing pages. It is already easy to integrate it video into pages; imagine the powerful combination of video and Facebook stores (f-commerce).

But what makes a video engaging, here are some examples that we think work in these formats:

What do you think?

1. Animation

Animators vary both in style and methods but one thing they have in common is the ability to engage and entertain often putting over complex ideas in a simple way.

Here are two amazing examples:

a. Commoncraft label themselves quite rightly as being in the explanation business


Another great company is RSA - here is an example of their work


The costs have lowered for animation, driven in part by lower costs of software but also due to machines more able to cope with production.

2. Augmented Reality overlaid

As in our last blog the use of augmented reality in video will take off. The idea of augmented reality videos in Facebook takes it to a whole new level.

The best example is Youtique:


3. Motion graphics

Similar to animation but with real world video and graphics blended there are limitles possibilities in how this can be used. A partner of ours Fraser Davidson in his show reel demonstrates the superb possibilities in his showreel.



So How are you going to use video to engage your customers - for businesses now it is imagination that is the limiting factor not technology. How do you imagine your future business?

Social CRM or Social CEM - What makes a Social Business?

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?


Paul Greenberg who blogs on CRM at ZDNet and is author of CRM at the Speed of Light (great read) has been instrumental in sharing knowledge on the rapidly changing and evolving world of CRM. CRM is a business strategy designed to optimise profitability, revenue and customer satisfaction. As social channels have developed so too has the complexity of dealing with the associated volumes of conversations around brands and products. Consumers now have power to voice their opinions openly.

Organisations are now rapidly trying to integrate information into their CRM systems (many of which are old legacy systems such as SAP/Siebel). Kate Leggett provides some practical views on this and the need for organisations to take control. So what is the main debate about?

Many people are frustrated with the many current practices of CRM that fail to deliver a good customer experience. Many can relate to long waits on phone lines, multiple interactive voice response lines, lack of consistency with information...and the list goes on. Despite masses of investment in Siebel/SAP and Business Process Mapping organisations seem to have removed not complimented the customer experience. The drive to reduce costs not enhance the customer experience was the main driver behind many CRM initiatives and outsourcing programmes.

The main problem is that CRM platforms measure customer interactions solely upon product purchase history and preferences. These measures are product centric and historical and don't consider or take into account experience or forward looking trends & preferences.

Is CRM as simple as this sometimes (watch the video)?

Enter the Social Customer?

One of the classic cases of bad customer service and the use of social media was the management by United Airlines of Dave Carroll's guitar which was badly handled both in terms of customer service and PR. The power of the social customer to influence and amplify their voice is here. But let's not forget that companies should tread a careful line between service and rewarding those that shout loudest. While traditional is still available, many organizations are often responding to customers faster when the complaint comes in via a social media site.

As a result, are we teaching customers to use social media as their customer service escalation path? Are we instilling bad behaviours of immediacy? Whether we like it or not real time is approaching just as a generation have changed to the timeliness and expectation associated with different communication methods: from letters to faxes to emails (initially by PC and then the move to mobile) and now Twitter. We are moving to closer to real-time.

Paul Greenberg defines social CRM (SCRM) as: "the company's programmatic response to the customer's control of the conversation." Its about the company taking hold of the reins of the conversation, not the other way round.

Brian Solis: SCRM affects the whole organization and is transformational. According to Solis, 'the ability to identify active communities of relevance', tracing influential people and channels, and the dissection of all phases of the process of decision making, all in real-time, are crucial aspects of social media marketing.

Involving these ‘influencers’ and communities, and the linking of CRM to interactive marketing actions are some of the core elements of an integrated, social CRM. As Brian intimates we are moving to an experience economy.

So What is Customer Experience Management (CEM) ?

Customer experience is one of the great challenges for innovation. It is interactions between an organization and a Customer. Of course this involves the customer relationship management, however this is only one element of the service delivery. It is the blend of an organization’s performance, the thoughts and feelings that customers have. As the customer moves from through the touch-points of its association with the organisation - it is the experience.

But where is this heading?

The struggle that organisations face is not purely at the operational level of integrating systems, processes and adopting these tools. The fundamental shift is on how organisations transform their structures, cultures and values to reflect a more customer focused approach to evolve to this new focus on customer experience. This is also a necessity to adapt and be agile in rapidly changing environment. Organisations will need to focus on the perspective of their customers and empower their employees to deliver it well; they need to become a social business. Happy customers become advocates and bring along their friends.

What of the future?



Brands and organisations are having to face a point where the consumer and organisation are converging in the relative role of 'real time' experiences. Supplying goods and services will be associated with facilitating unique consumer experiences on demand and these may be off-line and on-line or augmented These experiences may be facilitated by a brand community or a new experience environment to interact with and co-create value.  Since experiences are not easily replicated or copied these will be the value and uniqueness where brands will battle for consumer attention.